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Odd... I submitted this hours ago, yet my writeup was rejected...

Anyway, the ATI Radeon can do 1.5 gigatexels per second. The Voodoo 5 can only do 667 megatexels. So, the Radeon will far outperform a V5. And it has T&L! What a deal! The funny thing is that 3dfx is hyping the V5 based on its fill rate...

Now, on Wednesday, nVidia is going to announce the GeForce 2. It will have a fill rate of 1.6 gigatexels, just a bit higher than ATI's offering. On the geometry side, the GF2 will do 250 million triangles per second. I don't know how fast the Radeon is as far as geometry, but if anyone else knows, please share! It is also rumored that the GF2 will be in stores on Friday. As in, THIS Friday. Whoah.

Back on ATI's side, the Radeon looks like it will have more features that the GF2. As a game coder, I like that. :) Also, ATI is likely to have better Linux support. I also like that.

It looks like choosing between these two cards will be tough, but I'm leaning towards ATI right now. One thing that I know for sure, however, is that 3dfx is not in the running. Their only hope right now is to drop their prices very low. I would not like to be working at 3dfx right now.

Oh, here's some links:

• Sharky Extreme's Radeon review
• Computer Games Magazine's Radeon review
• Acto Micro's GeForce 2 review (no one else has reviews up because nVidia has not announced the thing yet)
• nVidia - They have a flash movie up which mentions the 1.6 GigaTexels thing.

Again, nVidia will be announcing the GF2 on Wednesday. Check their site then for details.

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I too have a TNT card and the glx acceleration in X-3.3.6, while being a noble job well done, isn't good enough. When a big gorilla (Microsoft) pays the company to NOT help the opensource community by releasing register level specs or a binary only high performance driver (like they said they would), it makes me want to go buy a Voodoo X or Matrox card. I repair, build, and upgrade PC's as a living, and I recommend Voodoo and Matrox to everyone, even if they are only going to use windows where the Nvidia chipsets shine, because I feel its immoral to support Nvidia in this situation, and because I can.

Poor 3dfx. In two days, nVidia will announce the GeForce 2 (they have a nifty flash movie on their home page now). Apparently, in four days (Friday) you will be able to go pick one up at your local computer store. From what I've heard, the GF2 will have:

• 1.6 Gtexel/sec fill rate. (up from 480M in the GF1, or 667M in the V5)
• 30% faster T&L.
• fast FSAA (full screen anti-aliasing, like the 3dfx T-buffer)
• possibly mpeg2 encoding/decoding on board.

The bottleneck is no longer in the fill rate. The GF2 is limited only by the bandwidth to its on-board RAM banks. That's not one that they can fix easily.

References:

• actu micro
• nVidia (go back on Wednesday to see the official announcement)

If my info is correct (it could be wrong), then as of this Friday 3dfx will be officially fscked.

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hmmm...the nvidia drivers page for some reason has drivers for BeOS, Linux and OS/2 warp. how strange, considering everything in this universe declared by anonymous cowards is completely true.

Well, yes you can. From Nvidia's web site

But this new machine is actually using Tao drivers. The kernel is simply running on top of Linux.

I'm having enough trouble trying to get my TNT2 to work with Linux. :(

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From http://www.nvidia.com/Products.nsf/htmlmedia/softw are_drivers.html:

and

I have been using the beta version for a while. Extremely nice. We actualy started ordering a linux render farm before we knew when it was going to be released for linux.
As with NT, the images will differ slightly due to floats and rounding and all that jazz. The images will be similar enough to mix shots but not individual frames.

Also, along the SGI and Linux front, I will post a tad of what I had tried to post as a story... no hard feelings here, just infot I thought you all would like to know.

This is from my review of SGI's Spring Linux University.

"Linux OpenGL
The presentation on Linux/OpenGL discussed the opening of OpenGL and the release of IRIS Performer for Linux. The current Mesa/OpenGL hardware
model was presented, with and without GLX (also opened by SGI). The statement was made that SGI was working with NVIDIA on video cards for 3D
graphics workstation level quality. It was also implied that the card would work with other Intel motherboards as well, but in an SGI Linux system one
would see an improvement.
SGI has been working on the direct interface for OpenGL to hardware for a while and has had to go through kernel modules to achieve the results that they
are looking for. No mention of DRI or XFree86 4.0.
"

and

"
Final Thoughts:

All in all, this was a good experience and I would suggest it to anybody. I learned about where SGI stood and where they were going with Linux. SGI is
not taking Linux lightly. We were assured that IRIX for MIPS was going to be continued to at least 2010, but that SGI was going to go into Linux without
looking back. Several mentions of open sourcing parts of IRIX for Linux were made.
I would say that SGI might become a Linux powerhouse in the near future and that what they have learned from previous business ventures has not been
wasted."

*Note: If anyone is working on migrating their render farm to support both SGI's and Linux boxes, I would love to get in contact with you. We use LSF on both platforms with a heavy perl backbone.

and

Precision Insight has expressed its intent to release source. I think we should give them a chance to make good on their promise.

Wrong. The Utah-GLX project have (more or less working) drivers for Matrox (G200, G400), ATI (Rage Pro), Intel (i810 I think), NVIDIA Riva series and some S3 support. Then there's 3dfx's DRI implementation, and of course NVIDIA's X server + GLX combo. So that's at least five...

As explained on NVidia's driver download readme, you can read it at NVidia's driver page, their drivers are a work in progress. They put their necks on the line to provide a tentative solution for hardware acceleration until other frameworks which they are built upon (GLX, Mesa 3.1, XFree86 release 4, etc) become stable.

The fundamental beauty of open source software is that one does not have to wait until a product's near completion before being able to take benefit. As one piece of the puzzle falls into place you can snatch it up and make us of it. As more pieces become available you gain more and more capabilities.

Criticizing open source software in early stages of development is akin to mocking an artist's work after (s)he has only merely laid down a pencil sketch on the canvas.

--trout

if that link actually works. look at what VA linux is claiming to represent.

To me, this makes the current press release even more mysterious -- but perhaps I should take the advice "never attribute to malice what could be accounted for by stupidity" and assume that the press release isn't the full story.

In any case, I thank chauser for his comment above and take my hat off to NVidia.

thad

What makes you so certain the nVidia drivers will be closed? Their current set of drivers are available free for download, even in source form. And they claim that they are working with Precision Insight, DRI, and integrating with XFree86.

Doesn't sound too terribly closed to me.

--Chouser

Oh, I *think* the latest X server and OpenGL drivers available from NVIDIA (right here, for the surf-impaired or license-ignoring), do indeed work with the GeForce 256. Then again, I don't think they actually benefits from the T&L hardware etc...

Hello,

It seems like they released accelereated 3d drivers not onl gor GeFORCE 256, but also for the rest of their product line. Including Riva 128, Riva 128ZX, TNT/2.

You can fetch these drivers from this link.
--

Although still not using the DRI interface it now supports hardware 3d rendering in 32 bit and, wait for it, the GeForce!

Get it here: click me

Score -1: Off topic, Score +1: Informative..

thank you and goodnight

Okay, here's what I did to get it working. First, install the GLX package from nvidia at http://www.n vidia.com/Marketing/Products/Pages.nsf/pages/linux download. Make sure you put the 'Load "glx.so"' stuff in XF86Config as per NVidia's instructions. Copy the libGL.so that comes with GLX into the q3demoTEST directory. Then, start X in 16bpp mode. Once X starts, cd q3demoTEST ; ./linuxquake3 and frag away.

Quake 2 looks good (in a window) and q3test looks great (full screen) with my TNT2 and XFree86 3.3.5. You'll probably also want to update your Mesa library. (I think I had to make a symbolic link to a slightly-modified libMesa, too.)

--
QDMerge 0.4!

> Are these open ala Nvidia and Sblive, "Here's some code but no specs"

Dammit, I'm real tired of people saying this about nVidia. Try these on for size.

Actually, if you check nvidia's homepage you will find an X-server for their card - atleast I found Riva TNT there.
=-kiOwA

I've had only little problems running quake2 with ref_glx on my TNT. Just had to get the N vidia drivers, and make sure I was using their X server that had their implimentation of glx.

You basically replace your X-SVGA with theirs and statically link X to it instead.

Then you replace your libMesa.so and link them to the libGL.so.1.0 that Nvidia provides.

Then ya run quake2 on the command line like this:

./quake2 +set vid_ref glx +set gl_driver [PATH FOR LIBRARY]/libGL.so.1.0

That will open up quake in a window on your machine. It's not the stablest thing (resizing the window when your mouse is captured messes things up) but I've been able to play with few problems.

nVidia has a common driver, Detonator, for its TNT, TNT2, and GeForce chips. As you can see from the link, there are drivers for Windows, BeOS, Linux, and even OS/2.

Theoretically, you could do that but you would need a mighty powerful CPU to achieve the level of performance of the GeForce since CPUs aren't optimized for graphics processing (note: GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit not Geometry Processing Unit as someone earlier posted.) The GeForce is a much more cost effective solution for graphics processing than getting another CPU.

According to Nvidia web page about the GPU, their technical definition of a GPU is:

"a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second."

The review of the GeForce 256 at Ace's Hardware has good info on comparing CPUs to GPUs. As another poster mentioned, graphics processing exists in a limited form in CPUs (3DNow!,etc.). Possibily in the future CPUs will integrate more advanced graphic processing functions. But, even if you had a CPU with complex graphic processing functions you still need some sort of display adapter. Personally, I think that it makes more sense to have the display adapter and graphics processing integrated on one unit.

NT 4 has DirectX 3 only. Which isn't much. No direct sound support, which makes it suck as a gaming platform. I doubt NT4 will ever a newer version of DirectX.

Win 2000 has a beta of DirectX 7 in it. I tried to run Half-Life using Direct3D under win2k and got 1 frame a sec. And I could not get get the Unreal Tournament demo to to run fullscreen using Direct3D.

Using OpenGL in win2k, i could get all of these games to run perfectly: Quake, Quake2, Q3test, Half-Life. Epic needs to work on the OpenGL support in UT. This is all on a TNT.

Well, I don't think the hardware acceleration was part of x.3.3. I remember downloading my drivers from www.nvidia.com in order to get the acceleration. I believe XFree86 4 will have acceleration built in, but not in the current ones. Go check Nvidia's web site and try to apply their drivers. It's pretty easy (from what I remember).

You can play Q3A on nVidia. Check out nvidia's linux FAQ. It's got links to the drivers, and instructions for Q2/Q3. Yes, they all say it can't be done, etc etc, but believe me, I run Q3test on a TNT2 all the time, it works fine. It's just not officially supported. Have fun! :-)

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We all take pink lemonade for granted.

This will be true when nVidia releases their next chipset code named NV10, which has full hardware transform and lighting acceleration...This is really going to piss Intel off...

"Ah well, someday I may buy a new system but I haven't found ample justification to spend $700 to get something like a Celeron 433 with 128 megs of ram, Abit BX6v2 motherboard, etc."

You can upgrade your system for far less; approximately $450 now that's assuming you need a new case (AT -> ATX) plus 128 megs rams. Now you dont have to take my word it, you can go to www.computernerd.com for MBoard/CPU/Case bundle and to www.mwave.com for memory and see for your self. You can also checkout www.killerapp.com for computer hardware prices.

Now me personally I plan to purchase Abit's new dual slot 370 motherboard with two 366Mhz celerons guaranteed to overclock to 550Mhz for $412....

For those who didn't know, nVidia has already released an OS-neutral driver suite for the RIVA 128, TNT, and TNT2 series of chips. Fully compilable source for the entire suite is provided under a BSD-ish license. (The source isn't very educational, however, as it's been run through 'cpp'.) Sample driver implementations and example code for Linux and Windoze-NT also accompany the distribution.

The suite is designed to function as low-level support for all rendering and display functions. These functions are exposed in an object-oriented-like fashion at a hardware level. Whatever the hardware doesn't support directly is thunked over to software. Thus, the public API for the NVidia chips is the hardware channels.

This has been out for several weeks now, but every time I've submitted it to Slashdot, it hasn't been approved. Oh, well...

Schwab

Although it is legally correct that 3dfx is taking action to defend their copyright, their stance is in stark contrast to nVidia and Creative Labs, among others, who seem to have recognised the benefits of working with the open-source community rather than against it. In nVidia's case they release and support Xservers optimised for their graphics cards. In Creative Labs' case, in January 1999 they announced plans to release Linux drivers for most of their hardware.

I agree 100%; he deserves a lot of credit for this work!

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I agree 100%; he deserves a lot of credit for this work!

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You can report this "problem" here. Hit the "continue" link. Choose "other" for the operating system (of course). And remember to be polite.

ATI - email: sales@atitech.ca
phone: (905)882-2600 - Sales and Marketing

nVidia - email: info@nvidia.com
phone: (408) 615-2500

Please add to this list. Personally, I'm amazed these companies don't have 800 numbers (they probably do and just don't list them). That does not speak well for their desire to hear feedback from customers.