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Actually Radeon 9700/9800 supports only 24bit floating point precision in the pixel shader and thus is unable to produce same quality as the software renderers which use 32bit floating point precision.

GeForceFX supports 32bit floats and QuadroFX can be up to 20 times faster than the fastest CPU in the Maya5 which supports hardware rendering.

Render monkey isn't really anything like CG

No need to imagine. Check out UT2k3. Does "the way it's meant to be played" count as 'NVidia' recommended?

"Or is there something in the nVidia drivers that needs to exist in kernelspace?"

o A kernel module (/lib/modules/`uname -r`/video/nvidia.o
or /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.o). This
kernel module provides low-level access to your NVIDIA hardware
for all of the above components. It is generally loaded into the
kernel when the X server is started, and is used by the XFree86
driver and OpenGL. nvidia.o consists of two pieces: the binary-only
core, and a kernel interface that must be compiled specifically
for your kernel version. Note that the linux kernel does not have
a consistent binary interface like XFree86, so it is important that
this kernel interface be matched with the version of the kernel that
you are using. This can either be accomplished by compiling yourself,
or using precompiled binaries provided for the kernels shipped with
some of the more common linux distributions.

are there Nvidia drivers for the BSDs?

Yes. For one of them, at least.

are there Nvidia drivers for the BSDs?

http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=freebsd_1.0-3203

An older version, but its there. I'm guessing it'll be updated soon.

I have an A7N8X Deluxe and I have Mandrake 9 running just fine on it.

It took a few minutes of searching the web, but the sound fix is on Mandrake's site.

Oh! after a little googling, I found NVidia has mandrake specific drivers that apparently work like a rested engineer.

http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_nforce_1.0 -0248

Anyway, here's the patch that worked on my system incase the new NVidia drivers work like a monkey on acid:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/errata.php3#nforc e

Hope this helps.

From the NVIDIA Linux update.

"NVIDIA Linux Update automatically detects the Linux operating system, kernel type, and CPU on a system and sets up the system for optimal performance and stability."

Sounds like the kind of easy driver setup windows users enjoy. I hope Creative follows this format and I can get my sound card working without hours of pain.

"If you already have an XF86Config file working with a different driver (such as the 'nv' or 'vesa' driver), then all you need to do is find the relevant Device section and replace the line:..."

Er, silly question here, but why doesn't the NVIDIA installer do all this ? The NVIDIA installer on Windows certainly doesn't expect the end-user to hand-hack a config file afterwards, so why do Linux users have to ?

Real time volumetric fur rendering

8 blended fur layers

61 bones, 4 bones/vertex

You know there's a reason things don't start when you only click them once in Windows. It's made so if you accidentally click it, it won't start itself (sometimes this takes a while, making you wait 30sec or however long till you can close the programm and start using your computer again). Also, you have to click and drag to select a single item, which takes longer than simply clicking on something and having it selected. Also it's always a hasle if you click and drag and select something you don't want to, then you need to deselect them, and then start over. (Note: sometimes programs start even when you right-click them).

One last thing, you can have multiple destops on Windows with NVidia's nView display dirvers. Which you can switch with a keyboard combo of your choice.

nForce 2 has a 333 MHz bus (166 MHz DDR)... But it can use up to 400 MHz memory (200 MHz DDR).
Memory speed != FSB speed. I'm running a old Athlon with a 266 FSB and using 333 MHz memory.
Read this

Go to Nvidia's website: They have a new line up of GeForce FX-based GPUs!!! The lowest one, the FX 5200, is as low as 79 dollars, with DX9 and full shader support. Dang, now is the time to buy...

What you are referring to is what Nvidia has planned for the current and future lines of GPU's... beginning with the GeForce FX.

Have you tried Final Fantasy X? This game is about as close to an interactive movie as you can get in a console... imagine a game WITH a story! Essentially, an adventure game (in the oldest D&D form) combined with beautiful eye candy. Truly fun to play!

And, you know, the FPS games are very cool and becoming progressively more technologically advanced and laced with eye candy, but I miss games where the story is the most important component... "Strategy" games and online community games don't fill this need. It was those witty games where you were participating in the story that were super fun to play.

I agree with you 6d, it'd be cool to play more games that are dynamic movies! Nothing against a good blood-bath and frag-fest from time to time, but where's the storyline in those? People fighting at (insert location here).

Yeah, there are no goto's, but there is every other kind of structured branch statement: for/while/do-while/continue/break/return. Most C programmers get by with only these (although a do-while-repeat loop would be helpful), and some don't even know that C has a goto.

Pointers aren't supported (just like in java and Fortran), and I suspect the reason for that is that pointer aliasing can only be detected at runtime, so a lot of very useful compiler optimizations can't be done. In fact, that's why a lot of super-computer applications still use fortran (besides the large existing math library base). Graphics rendering is speed-oriented, and in a special-purpose language like this, it's a good tradeoff.

For comparison, (and for the same reasons) nvidia's cg doesn't have goto's or pointers, either.

GLSlang has a lot of functions built-in (like texture lookups, vectors, and matricies) for things you may want to use pointers for. The benefit of supporting them natively is that they can be hardware-optimized extremely well. One cool thing that Cg does (and it appears that GLSlang does, too) is allow floating point indicies into texture-maps -- the inbetween position is automatically interpolated.

Also, for the record, C doesn't have strings, either. The only string support is in libraries; not natively.

We're both right... There were seperate products named Geforce II GTS and Geforce II Pro. Putting both suffixes on the card may have been Hercules' idea; the core chipset was sold in a wide range of sub-configurations.

STAY AWAY FROM nVIDIA!!!

Next to no support (as in Docs / FAQs / HOWTOs / Pixie Dust) on their site and because the drivers are proprietary the best Linux has is generic drivers that never allow the card to reach it's full potential out of the box.

Now, if going through the list to find the correct kernel driver and matching GLX driver doesn't bother you have at it, but an ATI card would probably be a better / easier bet.

Since when have games pushed innovation?

Oh, you mean like this and this?

Nvidia rules. I just wish someone had "borrowed" (re: pirated) that technology demo, I'd love to try and run it on my PC..

There are also some videos of the demos online.

You can see 2 videos of outpout of the FX card here:The Dawn Fairy demo and the Toys demo. Click the Video links on the left side of each page. Real and WMP. Looks darn cool.

You can see 2 videos of outpout of the FX card here:The Dawn Fairy demo and the Toys demo. Click the Video links on the left side of each page. Real and WMP. Looks darn cool.

Same here, but I'm really wishing they'd just have gone ahead and dropped the not-so-new Ti 4200 for notebooks. They'll probably impliment a new version with it in the next 3 monthes, but it's a real shame they didn't put it in this time round.

The whole point of the FX is not for high FPS on older games(which you can't even tell the diff after 100 fps). It is about the multiple pixel shader fx and cg support. This chip is made to bring cinematic "FX" to the desktop. When newer games start supporting this, ATI will be far far behind when FX owners are able to play games that look as good as the Final Fantasy movie did. Just look on Nvidia's site to see what this means.

Though now it seems AMD is taking it easy for awhile, so that benefit may have been short-lived.

Hell yeah I wish I could have such a relaxed time, hanging around all day doing litle more the designing an entire new x86 chip with new instructions and a totall new platform design, getting test silicon out, squashing bugs in that, working with vendors like via which couldn`t survive if it wasn`t for you being easy on CPU bus IP issue compared to others and other chipset designers which need loads of help becouse they are new to the chipset arena or just wanna scale your platform way beond what you was thinking of when you started your "lets add 32 bits, how hard can that be" adventure while you are short on cash.

This just when your main competitor has just done the imposible (rather then updating the same boring pentium2 design, design a chip that makes no sense whatsoever except for one thing, upping clock speeds just as fast as consumers can afford and marketing can market).

And all of this while you try to inovate on "normall chips" to (pxa and memory) that all of a sudden noone wants anymore becouse just while you where bussy negotiating you way trough cross licensing agreements with intel then there is an "economic downturn" (hired all these bright people that think up intergrated memory controlers and stuff but none of them can think of such a simple thing).

Then there is the small issue of having to get rid of 10-20% of your staff just after you milion dollar production line was at risk of getting washed away with the rest of dresden, but overall quite relaxed.

Is the MSI KT4V-L the original nVidia nForce? If it is, I have that too, and am also running Win2k (SP3) on it. I have the onboard NIC running at between 2.5 and 3.5MB/s. Not great, but good enough for my purposes.

BTW, did you download the unified driver package from nVidia? That's what I have installed, so you might try that. URL is http://download.nvidia.com/Windows/nForce/2.00/nFo rce_win2k_2.00.exe

I think you're underestimating ATI's and nVidia's latest generations. If you go and read this technical document (PDF, ~4 MB) on the nVidia GeForce FX, you'll see that it does, in fact, support full 128-bit floating point all the way up to, and including, the frame buffer. I'm not certain why 12 bits of integer should be better than 32 bits of floating point, per component, maybe you could educate me a bit there? Also, I don't know what the actual analog output quality of the FX chipset is, maybe SGI has a (small) lead there, still.

Geforce 3 supports DX 8.1, and of course the GF4 does as well.

Im confused, I thought thier Linux Drivers were free? Theyre part of the Debian distro, and if they weren't free, we couldn't just apt-get them, right? I can go to thier site and download them free as well.

Check em out here

I guess Nvidia was on to something with the term "Cinematic Gaming."
My friend once asked something that made me laugh and then think. He asked, while I was watching Jerry Springer and he was playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein, "When did television get so bad, and video games get so good?"
I mean look at this!
I don't know about you, but I don't want to just WATCH Tom Hanks in saving private ryan, I want to BE Tom Hanks in saving private ryan - only without the dying part.

I had no problem with kernel 2.4.19 and Intel's 845G chipset.

(snip from dmesg...)
Linux version 2.4.19 (root@tux) (gcc version 2.95.3 20010315 (release)) #5 Fri Nov 29 19:45:26 PST 2002
Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=slack8-1 ro
Initializing CPU#0
Detected 2524.974 MHz processor.
Console: colour VGA+ 80x25
Calibrating delay loop... 5033.16 BogoMIPS
Memory: 256852k/261588k available
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.53GHz stepping 07
Linux agpgart interface v0.99 (c) Jeff Hartmann
agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 203M
agpgart: Detected Intel i845G chipset
agpgart: AGP aperture is 128M @ 0xe8000000

As far as your nForce2 board goes, you can
download the linux drivers from nvidia.
Linux nForce driver.

You have _GOT_ to be kidding...... First off nVidia is Microsoft's bitch, they dont do SHIT from within Linux,

Actually, modern hardware can be made to render dots only (ie vertices of polygons/triangles) as opposed to rendering the whole shaded surfaces. It's not a hack by making a small enough surface that looks like a dot, it's just actually rendered as dots. For those interested to see, there's a demo for nVidia cards where you can tell it to render dots only...

I haven't read too much detail about this, but if IEEE says it's the best paper, they must be doing something different than normal cards are doing, ie probably bypassing normal rendering methods which use matrix multiplications heavily, and instead making some small assumptions - like maybe no perspective correction - and going with faster smaller transform equations...

If that's not the case, I give them a *yawn*.

I started using gentoo about a month ago because FreeBSD didnt have GLX drivers for nVidia cards. I changed back to FreeBSD as soon as this happened.

I find it kind of bothersome that 'gentoolkit' is not mentioned in the Portage User Guide, but there are about sixty words that discuss it at the end of the Portage Manual which is over 6000 words. I would think that there should be a good argument that this should be in the base system, if gentoo had one. And why has 'etc-update' been moved out of the 'base system' and into portage?

Maybe im just too used to the way that FreeBSD does stuff. I would hate it if FreeBSD used the ports tree for the base system. But that would be impossible because there is a lot of code that wouldnt exist if it wasnt in the FreeBSD CVS tree.

Everything that I ever wanted to know is either in the FreeBSD Handbook or the mailing list archives.

The screenshots have been replaced since this article was posted. The original screenshots were on a white background with a much higher quality rendering.

(original fairy head seen here)

Also of note:
this screenshot vs this screenshot

i like this one. Can render >100 Jurassic Park dinosaurs at 100 frames per second.

powerful, yeah.

NVidia has a list of "Lauch Games" for the GeforceFX. Command & Conquer: Generals, Unreal II, Rallisport Challenge, Sea Dogs II & Splinter Cell. Screen shots and some movies are included.

Theres no reason to think that it won't work. Nvidia has been very forthcoming about releasing linux drivers. You can find the page here

You won't see the GeforceFX in stores until next February, and then it will probably be around $360 according to NVidia. The Radeon 9700 came out a couple of months ago at about $400, and the mid-range version won't be out until next month at under $200. So the mid-range GeforceFX will probably be out some time next summer.

I'm telling people who are prone to buying me gifts to go for the Geforce 4 Ti4200 128MB, which is about $150 right now. The Radeon 8500 is nearly as good if you're not stuck on NVidia like I am, and the 128MB version is under $100.

And for those of you who haven't seen it yet, here's the NVidia promo video, which has taken a lot of criticism.

Time to buy a Ti4600 :)

Not necessarily...

nVidia like to announce things well in advance of shipment in order to convince people to wait. This is perfect timing to keep those gamers from scooping up the 9700s for the Christmas season.

Make note that nVidia announced the nForce 2 way back in July and you still can't buy them.

With business practices like that, I like to take my dollar to the competition. ATI is very good about keeping products hush-hush until they are close to shipment. I wouldn't expect the FX anytime soon.

So the prices of the 4600s won't be dropping as a result of nVidia announcing something that won't be on shelves until next spring.

NVIDIA has a few more shots of that Fairy:
1
2
3

NVIDIA has a few more shots of that Fairy:
1
2
3

NVIDIA has a few more shots of that Fairy:
1
2
3

NVidia's official Geforce FX site

NVNews has a large group of links to previews(scroll down to the "Geforce FX Preview" article)

Some impressive images from the release demos

NVidia's official Geforce FX site

NVNews has a large group of links to previews(scroll down to the "Geforce FX Preview" article)

Some impressive images from the release demos

Funnily, non-Java developer and former tennis-pro Stefan Edberg speaks out about Doom3 here!

"Digital Domain is transitioning all of its 2D and 3D production workstations to include NVIDIA Quadro4 XGL professional graphics solutions, NVIDIA's Unified Driver Architecture (UDA), and the Linux operating system. The company is also deploying NVIDIA Quadro4 graphics hardware and Linux software drivers in its software development, digital content creation studio and systems administration departments."

Try Nvidia's site. Goto the demos page and look at the pcitures there. If you have one of the cards that are spoorted by the demos download them and see for yourself.
Shaders are used to make textures look more realistic, models look more 3d and the sceene overall more true to life. Untill Carmack gets bored and starts coding a realtime photon mapper (got Beowulf clusters?) special effects like this are going to enhance 3d engines.
About knowing when you are seeing a shader, thats pretty hard to explain although if you don't have an Nvidea Ti card of some sort its pretty safe to say you arn't seeing them. I'm pretty sure neverwinter used a pixal and vertex shader to enhance the water but that may have been morrowind.
What do shaders offer? I havn't done a huge amount of research but I know that shaders are quite usefull when it comes to things like adding bumps and shines you normaly wouldn't see. Fur and cloth are another pair of shaders that arn't in as much use at the moment but are on the rise.

Strange, it seems they have some mpg format stuff. I wonder what the _big_ problem is with having this particular movie availiable as an mpg??
See here

Check out Nvidia's data centers. Beware... windows media format warning.

Notice how many times the word linux is used...