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3dfx Voodoo5 vs NVIDIA GeForce Preview
JellyBeans writes: "There's a hands-on preview of 3dfx' Napalm chip (the Voodoo5 5500), where it's compared to a GeForce 256 from NVIDIA. It seems that two chips are NOT better than one in this case (SLI of the Voodoo5 doesn't beat the GeForce)." Okay, these cards can be used for more than games, but who do I think I'm kidding?
Completely Agree. I haven't been able to get XFree86 4.0 to work at all with my brand new GeForce. This site might hold some promise: snafu.wgz.org/chromatic/nvidia/nvid ia.html ... if you have any luck please let me know...
_MO
mglynn@tufts.edu
The card makers don't see it until it's too late.
A good portion of hardcore game player do know what Linux is and usually have friends that are Linux proponents.
Piss off the Linux users, and when the gamers and linuxers are talking, the offensive card is unlikely to be discussed, as it will result in an importance of linux support discussion.
OTOH, If the card maker is nice to linux users, then when the card comes up, both the gamer and linuxer reaffirm the goodness of the card with eachother.
Of course Nvidia may get some short term benefit from some G' marketing, but sooner or later the bad press will come down from either linux aware gamers or linuxers. Marketing is nice, but respect is better.
What was I saying? Oh, I have TNT2 because nvidia conned me. It's worth my mach64 in Linux.
This message is likely obsolete now, as I started it ago, and got talking to someone.
And it is incoherent. Bye.
It's locked away in a vault at Nvidia. :/
I'll wait for the RAGE 6 from ATI. It's going to blow both nVidia and 3dfx out of the water.
It does boost frame rates a little, but what it really allows you to do is crank up the quality without losing any framerate. Carmack had some codes to type in that would "optimize" Q3A for the Geforce... I tried it, it basically made all the curves _really_ smooth and round, and I lost 1 FPS. Darn. :) Check 3dgpu or some other gaming sites, I'm sure they'll have the lines to type in.
It's a few years out of date, but at my last job we purchased around 100 identical Acer workstations. After carefully selecting the parts to be used and such (everything was reasonable. not good, but i was on a *very* tight budget) the order was placed and received. The computers were *not* identical. They came with parts that weren't requested (sound cards and modems to be specific) which had to be removed, and the cd-rom was an even lesser model than the one previously agreed upon. These machines, after a year, had five power supply failures and two cd-rom drive failures.
As for the company acknowledging my claims, all parts were replaced at their expense, so I guess they do acknowledge them. I'd provide documentation, but as noted, this happened at a previous job.
----------------------------
Bump mapping, anti-aliasing, fog, motion-blur etc...
I wonder when we'll see "The first video card with full OpenGL support!" ie. with all the fancy 3D effects in real time. Maybe then we can concentrate on the gameplay instead of ooh's and aah's of 3D graphics?
J.
Where the hell did you get that information?
According to Intel, motherboards are supposed to last 6 months, until the next stepping and socket/slot revision of the PIII comes out.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It fits so well with this article.
:-)
(BTW- Shame on you. You got me laughing up here at work!
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
So 3DFX it is, unless NVidea responds to this consumer demand. Frankly, I would prefer to buy the best hardware. NVidea? Are you listening?
wow! me wipes drule off the chin...
___
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Because ATI sucks. Next time you spend big bucks on a piece of hardware, you'd better check out reviews first. ATI Rage Fury MAXX costs almost as much as GeForce DDR, yet GeForce beats the crap out of it. (Who the hell came up with the name "Rage Fury" anyway???). The only thing ATI has that NVidia doesn't (AFAIK) is hardware DVD. But who cares? Even Celeron 300 is fast enough to play software DVD. OTOH, GeForce has hardware transform & lightning -- *that* is a very useful feature.
The chip also boosts the best support for DirectX and D3D.
What is that supposed to mean?
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
The V3 is fully capable of displaying 2D in True Color. Fix your XF86config.
kabloie
... Where's the GLX driver for XFree4?
And where's the one for GeForce?
This is the determining factor of my next upgrade: performance under XFree4.
Just thought I'd share.
Your Working Boy,
pffft. Heard it all before... I used to defend Nvidia, but I'm fed up. "Show me the money," as they say...
---
--
--
Yeah.. what none of the graphics card manufacturers seem to want to tell you is that these things put out INCREDIBLE amounts of heat - moreso than your CPU. *muttering* This is why the damn things crash your system so much... I had to put a heatsink designed for a socket7 CPU on mine to cool it sufficiently....
Should I upgrade? No, not yet...
The performance of the Voodoo5 is not that outstanding.
The Voodoo5 is also missing some features which I currently use.
1. Hardware Motion compensation (For DVD Playback).
2. Video capture (Not used as much as I thought)
3. T&L (Have to wait and see how often developers use this.)
Thou when 3dfx comes out with 4+ VSA-100 chips boards, I might just upgrade.
-IronWolve
Is it just me or isn't it getting a little two excessive?
64MB ram?
2 processors?
seems a little extreme doesn't it?
You only touch on the biggest reason that the GeForce scores so much lower at high resolutions in these benchmarks. Because of NDAs, they are not allowed to use the newest (beta) GeForce drivers which support texture compression until they go final. All the GeForce vs V5 benchmarks we are seeing now are using old (crappy?) 3.68 Detonator drivers. Once the new drivers go final (within a few days), you will see benchmarks that show the GeForce catching up to the V5 even at the highest resolutions.
And soon enough, we'll have NV15 benchmarks to drool over. Now if only Nvidia would release good Open Source drivers...
PS- My next card will be a 3dfx or Matrox model if things continue.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
I did a little more research and found this:
The NV15 will be called the GeForce2 GTS a 200Mhz GPU (166 Mhz DDR memory) and the NDAs lift tomorrow. Rumor has it it will hit the shelves April 28th (four days!!!).
ATI's new product, the Charisma Engine-based Rage 6 supports hardware T&L, Environment Mapped Bump Mapping, Vertex Skinning, Keyframe Interpolation, a Priority Buffer, Range Based Fog, and will be unveiled tonight at 10:30pm EST.
The Voodoo 5 is not going to be available for a while (a month or so?).
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
And don't get me started on the lack of cool grappling hooks...
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
QIII doesn't take advatage of the 'T' int T&L because it uses low polygon counts to support the older cards
Oh, I beg to differ. I'm sorry, but though you make a good case for your opinions, I must object to your main point of view - We, as the purchasers of NVIDIA cards, have every right to "DEMAND" drivers. Though I know you probably will disagree on principle, hear me out...
Back last summer or so when I was in CompUSA looking at video cards, I was thinking about what I would use it for. I was upgrading from an AGP 3dLabs FireGL 1000 Pro, and I wanted to get a card that would both be a good 2d/3d performer and would work well under Linux. Obviously therefore, my options were relatively limited, but I did have two competitors... the Voodoo3 and the up-and-coming TNT2. I chose the TNT2, because I was under the impression that soon, there would be Linux support. NVIDIA gave the impression that there would be such support, and they dragged this farce along for quite a long time, even releasing drivers which would allow for passable 2d in X, though the 3d support was always a farce. And as 3dfx and Matrox joyfully released drivers to our operating system (I love to say that in reference to Linux) the fact remained that they did not follow through with their promises - late is not always better than never, when I lose $200 of my hard-earned money for the simple fact that I trusted a company to come through for me.
Though I wanted nothing more than to play Quake3, the actions of NVIDIA were totally unacceptable in this respect. We, as the consumers, should not have to deal with companies that string us along like this. I am ashamed to be using a TNT2 card now, and rest assured, I will upgrade to a card from another company that has acceptable Linux support when I can. I am also ashamed to have been duped like this, but that doesn't mean I have to like it, and neither does it mean that I can't do something about it. NVIDIA will have no more of my money, and given my opinions, that is how it should be.
Finally, please understand something... I do not in any way mean to say that NVIDIA cards aren't good Windows cards, nor am I claiming that all of you should buy 3dfx or anything else. But I believe that as a consumer, I do and always will have the right to demand a company to do what I pay it to do. My views may be old-fashioned, but I will always claim the right to be disgusted at the poor use of my money by a company I trusted.
Know ye not that ye are Gods???
Hehe, yeah, Falcon 4.0 is truly the ultimate in graphics card stress test. What other game has users struggling to get something more than a slideshow in campaign mode? Who cares if a card gets 60fps in Quake 3 or whatever? Let me know if it gets 20fps in F4 or F18!
What *are* you talking about? my V3 can easily handle 32 bit color in 2D mode (Win32 or X)...
Umm... did I mention anything about going below 100? or say that FPS was not important?
no... I said it's pointless once you get past a certain speed and that once you got that far, it didn't matter which card you were using... didn't I?
What in gods' name does this have to do with what I said?
There are still two CPUs, that's all I'm saying...
As I said... it is *not* segmented. They are using doubling techniques for the textures only, that means any other memory usage is not doubled. i.e. Program sends 4MB of texture memory, 8 megs get used, the rest remains fully usable by the multiple processors... my only personal remaining question is what the heck is that intel chip on there?
Slashdot didn't do the review, they pointed to a review on the 'net... relax man.
wasn't the GeForce 256 just a twin 128 bit chip? (i.e. 2 chips on one die or 2 seperate dice)... doesn't that make the topic of this a bit... incorrect?
Do you have any clue what TBuffer has aside from FSAA?
That would be segmented SDRAM... they reported that it would *not* be segmented nor doubled.
I'm curious... does Quake3 support hardware T&L? I thought only a short list of games did, and that Q3A wasn't one of them. Thresh's review mentioned that GeForce's hardware T&L was boosting framerates in Q3A...
where can I get one of those indonesian wonders?
one word: ebay
--Shoeboy
Ugh ... gonna have to hope i get a chance to knock down that moderation ... informative isn't informative if it's false information.
30 fps is only reasonably smooth motion if you have motion blur. Most people can see individual frames in movie theatres if they concentrate (at 24fps). A lot of people can see individual frames in TV (30 fps). Some people can consistently identify the difference between 60 and 75 fps in double blind tests. A fairly small number of people can differentiate 80 and 120 fps in double blind tests. Almost no one can differentiate between 120 fps and anything higher.
To satisfy almost everyone, around 90 fps is enough. To satisfy everyone uncategorically, we should be shooting for 120fps.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You know something you're not telling? For all we know the linux driver team has been sitting around picking their asses this whole time. Besides the extremely-crappy obfuscated early driver release we haven't gotten any feedback from nvidia at all, much less a driver. Doesn't this company have a PR team? I know every time a video card story gets posted on slashdot 1000 rabid geeks email nvidia all pissed off, and they still can't even issue a damn press release giving us the state of the drivers?
Oh, and btw, we absolutely have a right to demand drivers. We are their CUSTOMERS for christs sake. We pay them money to do what we want. That's how it works. The sad fact is that they claimed linux support early on, which caused a whole bunch of people to buy their hardware, then they promptly shafted us.
Also, don't give me this "programming is hard" bullshit. Thats why we pay them money, to do the hard stuff. Don't tell me they can fully design and produce the most cutting-edge video hardware on the market in a 6 month period, yet programming the software to run that hardware for any OS besides windows is just beyond them. 3dFX seems to be very capably handling linux support.
So basically, I have a $300 2D card in my machine right now. But I'm not complaining one bit.
Um, you're a tool then. Sorry.
-kms1
Of course, NVidia's gonna kick their GeForce 2 out the door sometime in the next couple weeks; if 3dfx is struggling against the GeForce, it'll be even stickier going against it's more refined successor.
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Besides the fact that your analogy stinks to high heaven (Come on, do you mean that there is some sort of chip on the GeForce that prohibits use under Linux?) I'd have to say that I can't see why you protect Nivida although they have ripped you off.
They said they were developing Linux drivers because they didn't want to miss out on that market. Apparently the next gen of cards will be out before they've gotten their asses in gear. So basically, you were screwed.
Personally I got myself a Matrox G400Max. Sure, lot's of other cards beat it at 3d. But for Linux it's great. And for me that was important.
If Nivida hadn't made any claims about supporting Linux then I recon you couldn't really demand it from them. But they did, and you should. If for no other reason than to stop other companies from doing the same.
3dfx seems to have a slightly slower card, but I'd buy it in a second over the NVidia card. My system (in Linux AND Windows, that is) came to life when I put a new 3dfx card in. It was great. If you do anything in Linux forget about buying an NVidia card. It's a joke. If you live in Windows-land all the time, you may think differently.
Monty
What's funny is that some of the reviews indicate that the VSA-100 chip used for Voodoo4/5/6 is capable of 32 processor configurations. So, the 23-way Voodoo here doesn't even come close to the maximum configuration. Still a pretty nicely done photo. :)
-- themenace
Why should emmett get a free graphics card? when clearly I am much more deserving.
:P
not that I really would want a 3dfcrap card. nVidia all the way! wooo!
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
It doesn't matter how slow (or fast) light moves. Everything else has to go slower than that.
I guess I just don't understand the point you're trying to make.
The company has a good rep.*
Personally I think that's the best reason to support a company. Of course, that "rep" should not be based on their commercials, but on your personal experience and first hand accounts of others about their products.
This is what they have always bought
is a bad reason, unless of course they have delivered exactly what you wanted. Case in point for me, 3dfx. I've now bought two of their cards, the original voodoo and the v3000. They gave me what I wanted, compatibility and good speed at a good price (relatively). Does anyone do FP$ comparisons?
Of course last night (isn't that how it seems to work) my v3 blew up, so maybe it's time to switch teams
--
+&x
-jcl
There was a review on the MAXX a while back...
h tml
/. consensus seemed to be that 'wow, that's neat, but I'd rather have a GeForce DDR or a G400 MAX'...
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/01/05/0836237.s
The
ATI doesn't get a whole lot of good press because, from what I've seen and used (I haven't used the MAXX), they don't deserve it. It's as simple as that.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I would go out and by this, but there is no evidence that it will improve my experience on the Internet. I refuse to buy either until they are fully optimized to work with my modem and immerse me in the Internet, accelerate java, and get instant downloads over a telephone line. Both cards are a definite no-buy without good solid marketing and a brain-washing ad campaign.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
Leseee ... how long would it take for 120VAC to fry the mobo ...
A few nanoseconds is my guess. Myabe even milliseconds. That is, if you survive it.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
I think the point these (p)reviews are trying to make, rather than show how crappy 3dfx products may or may not have become, is to show exactly what is in store for users that are considering a purchase of one of the new cards. Most people who read these reviews have a clue as to the current state of the product vs. the possible future state of the drivers/production board/etc.
Anybody who's taken a serious look at these reviews knows that the Voodoo 5 is gonna kick some serious butt.
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
I mean, they don't give you a default password for root, they shouldn't give you one for piranha.
Now, the most important question is... was it Q (the password^H^H^H^Hletter is Q) from Star Trek: The Next Generation or Q from James Bond?
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Pfffft!
The TBuffer is just an accumulation buffer, something cards with decent OGL implementions have had for years. As for anti-aliasing --- at 1280x1024, does it really matter much?
Don't forget that we have yet to reach the level of immersive 180 degree environments yet. While 1600x1200 with nice AA might be adequate for a 19" monitor taking up 40 degrees of your vision, it is decidedly inadequate for a 180 degree image. That is why real (e.g., NASA) flight simulators use several screens at once, each rendering a different scene. Now, when we have real-time anti-aliased raytracing of an immersive environment, then we can stop. And realistically, that'll be in ten years or less. Then I don't know what will happen.
Walt
New driver interface for 95, NT 3.5, NT 4.0, Win2k. I hear that with Win2k they actually got around to specifying a 32 bit aware interface between drivers and the kernel.
Oh, the progress!
Regards, your friendly neighbourhood cranq
Regards, your friendly neighbourhood cranq
There are a large number of only vaguely standard text modes (like 132x43 or something) which are supported by SOME video cards. There never was a whole lot of software support for these modes, and were not included in the original VGA specification.
I believe that ATI's cards DO support a fairly large number of text modes, if you're after that kind of thing.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
While OpenGL does provide an API by which programmers can take advantage of hardware accelerated geometry calculations, many games are not written to use this aspect of OpenGL, they implemented the matrix maths themselves, perhaps hoping to squeeze a few more optimisations in, or maybe to get performance less reliant on your GL implementation being good, or whatever.
As for DirectX, version 7 added stuff to the API by which these new features could be taken advantage of, but just because a programme use directx7 doesn't mean that it uses it right, obviously.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
I've had two Acer Monitors blow up on me.
One was repaired under waranty three times
before dying out of waranty
The other lasted one month longer than the waranty
I've never had a problem with any other brand of monitor
>>Hmm... And did you read that article that said >>that scientists have reduced light speed to >>aroung 50 miles per hour - yes photons traveled >>there abouts (I think that it was either 40 >>something or 60 something, but her...) the >>point is, that most of the time that people are >>exposed to light, it is not in a vacume and so >>is slowed, as you put it "by the friction >>encountered by passing atoms"
>Yes, but that means that everything else moves >slower than that (even an electron).
>It doesn't matter how slow (or fast) light >moves. Everything else has to go slower than >that.
>I guess I just don't understand the point you're >trying to make.
Not quite true, massive matter can be propelled to velocities exceeding the local speed of light. When they do so they give off chernov radiation.
Anandtech & your conclusion is wrong.
There is a very sound technical reason for the difference at various resolutions. The GeForce has hardware T&L which outperforms the CPU T&L of the voodoo. The voodoo on the other hand has more raw textured fill performance. This means that the voodoo can beat the GeForce on an application which is fill limited, but a GeForce can beat the voodoo on an application which is geometry (T&L) limited. In very simple terms the higher resolution applications tend to be fill limited and reducing the resolution places a greater emphasis on T&L performance. So, the results you see are not likely to change greatly with newer drivers because 3Dfx have highly optimized software SSE & 3DNow! T&L code after years of development.
If you go here (which is an official preorder site, so it's probably pretty accurate) it states that the date is 5/12/2000.
while (1) malloc (1);
They were using an old nvidia driver with compression off, turning that back on would certainly have helped the GeForce out.
You also have to consider how much newer the Voodoo5 is, its not going to be competiting against current video cards in four months, its going to be competiting against all the *new* cards being put out by Nvidia, ATI, and everybody else. Considering they just managed to catch up now, what do you think will happen when all the new cards come out?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Obviously without ever having learnt to read. How does:
"NVIDIA(TM) Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) today announced that it has received $200 million from Microsoft® Corporation, which is a contractual advance payment against NVIDIA's future supply of its graphics processing units (GPUs) that will be included in Microsoft's X-Box. The X-Box is a new videogame console that is currently under development by Microsoft. In early March, NVIDIA agreed to develop and sell custom-designed GPUs for the X-Box and to license certain technology to Microsoft and its licensees for use in X-Box."
translate as:
"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"
except in the mind of a paranoid delusional?
Have a nice day...
--
Cheers
Cheers
Jon
To answer the original poster's question:
The reason people care about fps is that when playing a fast-action game, you want as clear a view of the motion as possible. If you turn around really fast and there is another player standing there getting ready to kill you, it's much easier to notice him if there are 7 or 8 intervening frames instead of just 1 or 2. Having lots of frames can give a player an advantage in fast action games. I seem to recall a discussion about this on Tom's Hardware Guide a few months back, but I can't find it. Anybody remember the article I am talking about?
Free Hans!
This card seems to have a whooping amount of power in it. At point, they describe that it has a "Windows GUI" accelerator. How can you optimize for a particular GUI, and is it possible to do the same with X?
Eh? Did I miss the insight?
Come on. You cannot tell me that you do not have a pair of Levi jeans, Nike/Reebok/etc. sneakers, or some sort of namebrand anything in your possession. People get attached to corporate name brands for a variety of reasons:
- This is what they have always bought
- The company has a good rep.*
- They own stock in the company
- ...
*Yeah, this is not the best reason, but sometimes it is all you have to go on. For instance. I will NOT use Acer parts in my computers. I have had enough bad experiences with them to avoid using them. I wouldn't call that being emotionally attached. I would call that being smart about what I want to put in my system. Maybe I want to spend a couple extra dollars on a good modem, instead of going with the bottom-of-the-pile-cheap-as-you-can-get. Most of the time, these better modems are made by "name-brand" companies. Thanks.The interest generated by this article just proves that most /. readers are closet Windows users.
ÕÕ
Sorry, not true. The human eye can easily tell the difference between 30 and 60--this is why IMAX movies are shot at 60fps instead of 30. The difference between 30 and 60 is night and day. Above 60 there is still a difference, but not as much, and above 85 or so is essentially no difference.
Dude, that made my day.
ROFL.
I thought Moore's Law simply referred to transistor density, which does not necessarily convert straight to power.
--Scott
Really??? so it will work just as good for windows as it will under linux? And where is this "correct" driver? I sure hope its not the one NVIDIA released, becuase that one is a P.O.S. Unless you are an 31337 H4x0r d00d and you h4x0r3d
the NVIDIA'S development team for Linux drivers computers I doubt that you can actually say that your Viper 770 TNT2 works perfectly under Linux.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
Your logic is flawed. What about all the people who only have one eye and can only see in 2D? HUH?
what about the people who cannot see at all? HUH?
Well, the real point in having 3D accelerators (for home use anyways) is to play games where people can act superhuman or have an adventure without leaving their homes. You could argue that you only need books to have an adventure in your home. But I have one and a half words for you: 3D PORN!
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
Yes, it is a security hole, and since we give the guys from Redmond flack for their default install being patently insecure, we should ALSO give RedHat the same flack for installing piranha by default... sorry, but that was a really stupid move, RedHat, and we expect better than that from you.
Also, kudos to MSNBC for having a suprisingly unbiased description of the problem.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
You know this is the funniest shit all night moderate it up.
nVidia TNT series work well what?? Have you actually tried one? Why even ask...you obviously haven't. 550P3, 128MB, Ultra TNT2 under linux...around 12 fps...on a good day...
DirectX 6 lacks support for hardware accelerated T&L but DirectX 7 has support for hardware accelerated T&L.
Here's another short preview at GameFan.
I say this because most of the 3D goggles that are out use a shutter technology to divide the frames between lenses. Your right eye gets 1/2 the frames, and your left eye gets 1/2 the frames.
Therefore 120 fps=60 fps/eye, barely acceptable images for this kind of application!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right, nobody uses goggles....
yet. =P
Free music from Jack Merlot.
I've always been curious what kind of horsepower you need to render OpenGL stuff quickly; I love the screenshots but the frame rates been really slow for me.
I'd love to see OpenGL kick Direct3d's ass, so hopefully it will be more commonly used now that the machines are getting good enough!
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
3dfx is trying to stop Creative from making a Glide wrapper, i.e. the Unified drivers, which allow non-3dfx hardware to use the Glide API? And they claim that Creative illegally used source code developed at 3dfx, lent to Creative Labs, back when Creative actually made Voodoo-based cards, to create their Glide wrappers?
And that 3dfx deduced this from the fact that header information in the Creative wrapper was identical to information in their Glide source code, which most likely indicated that Creative infringed on the patents 3dfx has relating to Glide?
Whew, well all this is way over MY head... I have no idea whether the case has merit or not. I know Glide wrappers have been available for quite some time, at least since UltraHLE (Nintendo 64 emulator) was released, but I was under the impression that these were reverse-engineered, not compiled from stolen or unlicensed source code. The Glide API is Open Source now, but I would imagine you still have to follow the GPL license hopefully, which may prohibit using the source to drive non-3dfx hardware.
As far as I'm concerned, if 3dfx wants to protect their only real remaining advantages over nVidia, (e.g. Glide and fill rate), they have every right to do so. I'm not saying this case has merit, because IANASENAIAL(I am not a software engineer, nor am I a lawyer), but I won't stop buying 3dfx just because they filed a lawsuit. If consumers did that every time a lawsuit was filed, nobody would ever buy anything from anybody.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
It would be hypocritical for someone to be angry with 3dfx over wanting to protect the Glide API and Voodoo drivers, when nVidia is guilty of wanting to protect their own code, by not releasing the source. (Why else would they not release the source code?) Just because 3dfx used the legal system to do this, and nVidia has (so far at least) just used bad P.R. to do this, doesn't make one company any more evil than the other.
I hardly notice any "jaggies" on my screen in Tribes, which I run at 800X600 (oops, almost typed 8000X600!) on a 17" monitor. My little ole Voodoo2 looks *fantastic* at this resolution, couldn't be happier (for Tribes at least) unless I was getting an even higher fill/frame rate at higher resolution... which I bet the Voodoo5 could do... hmmm. Tribes is written for Glide though, and it's a dying breed, from what I understand.
However, the textures are nice, no particularly noticeable aliasing, great frame rate, and it doesn't seem to suffer much for lack of 32-bit color. I'll check out the GeForce2, though, when it comes out. Could be a tough call...
P.S. DSL does help, a great deal, in Tribes (and probably any other online realtime multiplayer game). If you have the choice between upgrading your video card and upgrading your bandwidth this year, take the bandwidth. Unless you're Slashdot-Terminal of course, in which case you should buy an AGP-ISA converter.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
I don't know if I'd call 3dfx "evil", per se; I've seen many companies that behaved like little schoolchildren recently... =P
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Instead of buying a Voodoo5 (I'm guessing $199 here, although that may be a bit high), why don't you just go ahead and buy a used Pentium/K6-2 system? You'd be waaaaaay happier with the performance increase than you'd be trying to upgrade an ISA video card. There's only so much you can do with ISA video... and the graphics card technologies passed that point about five years ago.
Just a suggestion.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
A new CPU runs older programs as much (or more) faster than the increase in MHz:s indicates. A new graphics board doesn't necessarily run old programs faster at all, as they don't support the new features.
"The Internet, of course, is more than just a place to find pictures of people having sex with dogs." - Time Magazine
Most of the ratings do a Win 3D, Quake 3 Arena and an Unreal benchmark. The Voodoos seem to do great at unreal, and if anyone has ever compared the GeForce and a Voodoo 3 on Unreal, they would see that the Voodoos has a couple of extra features.
(Such as the fractal-like texturing....)
It seems that that is the only thing the Voodoo is good at... so If you like unreal, go for a Voodoo... otherwise for things like OpenGL the NVidia GeForce is much better.
And most games don't even really use the GPU of the GeForce to half capacity even!
I also just like the stability and no-nonsense of the Nvidia drivers as compared to the Voodoo package. Not being able to run high colour on the old Voodoos (as opposed to the TNT2).
In a group of my friends we always run the Quake server on a NVidia... the Voodoos seem to crash a bit much... (once in every 2 hours about?)
Anyway... just my experience.
fps IS important, as described by an article here:
REACTORCRITICAL LINK
I have a card that can do 100 fps... and believe me... I cannot play well below 60
(One needs 60 to rail propperly in Q3A - apart from your ping)
"The Voodoo 4 4500 card has one processor, and will only perform like existing Voodoo 3 cards. "
The Voodoo 4 4500 will be a good bit faster than Voodoo 3 3000. The Mtexel fillrate is the same, but the pixel fillrate is double. Even in games that use multitexturing, my understanding is that there are parts of the scene (sky) that may not use multitexturing. So a card that can do two pixels per clock (Voodoo 4, not a Voodoo 3) will render that part of the scene more quickly. Also, I read in one of the 3dfx interviews that other parts of the chip have been tweaked out to give the V4 double the fps as the V3. Take it for what's it's worth, but I think the V4 will be a bit faster than a V3.
I meant it more in the ironic way:
A good reason to choose win2k(meant to be great for servers and so on) is that it's good for games(a much more "non-serious" area).
As a matter of fact I can't even get win2k to start on my computer(k6-2 with tnt2 and no "odd" hardware).
--
If noone rtfa, then what's the slashdot effect?
PCI stands for Personal Compenent Interface
-Foxxz
As Anand put it best, the Voodoo5 5500 is literally just weeks away from release. It's highly unlikely that 3dfx is going to manufacture a card much different from their preview samples in such an amount of time. The only thing that can vary the Voodoo5's performance at this point, pretty much, are the drivers (which can make a big difference; just look at the difference between the 3.x and 5.x beta nVidia reference drivers).
Also, besides the technicalities of what the human eye can distinguish, all these FPS ratings are an average of how fast a graphics card can display a level demo. This means that in certain scenes with relatively little going on, you'll get greater FPS, and with busy scenes with lots of explosions and monsters running around the FPS will decrease. The minimum FPS your graphics card can pump out can be a factor in how playable the game is. Can you still manage to keep control of a situation after a bunch of rocket explosions with pretty little smoke trails (and subsequent blood splatter and trails) suddenly occur in front of you? That all depends on your card. If you've got at least a 70 FPS average, probably. If your average is around the magical 30 FPS, probably not.
Point being, especially in the multi-player first-person-shooting world, FPS is king. If your card can get you through lots of sudden animation effects without flinching, then you'll be better off (assuming that you're reasonably skilled at this sort of game).
--Alain
As for advocacy, I try to avoid that since it's quite pointless. Unfortunately for my wallet my solution in the long term is to end up with both sides' cards.
I'm not an expert, but consider this conjecture as a possibility: fps numbers in film don't mean the same thing as they do in video. In video, you're watching the combination of a horizontal and vertical refresh which proceeds in a uniform pattern across the screen (which is also backlit).
In film, you're dealing with an analogue medium - you see a certain number of frames per second, true - but there's no redraw. The individual images appear almost instantaneously, according to perception. That, combined with a visual style that is not controlled (and therefore foreseen) by the user, will allow a lower frame rate to be perceived as realistic. And there is no visible bit-depth... really smooth texture, color, everything: if nothing else, the psychological impact is enough to disguise the frame rate.
[|]
hahaha ;) nice one.
.sig
But as you can see, it still is not enough for them... They have better eyes than me. 'cause i never saw the difference between 89fps and 113fps... but i can see one between 640x480 and 1600x1200... anyways... next time 3dfx will know what to do. Just remove visual features and give them 600fps 640x480... Maybe they also should slack on their Linux support too.
(the usual flaimbait here, i have to do it:
seems that it doesn't work quite right with Athlons... and i just read an article about incompatibilities between Athlons and GeForces... and Athlons and memory, motherboards, etc...
If I overclocked my coppermine and my voodoo, i swear i would do better in stability, compatibility and speed than you all with your "factory overclocked" Athlons+nVidea...;)
phobos% cat
phobos% cat
cat:
http://www.nvidia.com/Marketing/NewsAndEvents/Page s.nsf/pages/pr_041800
Microsoft gave nvidia an advance payment to withold register level specs or even high performance binary xservers from the open source community.
And MicroSoft wonders why they are getting sued...
Lars -
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.
Lars -
You should see the color of my face.
It is so hard to hold your breath for this long, good thing I'm getting IV transfusions of oxygenated blood, or I would be dead.
Lars -
Try pissing directly on the cpu or in the power supply to really get some active cooling.
Lars -
Gates' Law - Every 6 months the speed of software halves
Lars -
A genuinely funny link.
The advance payment is for the development NVidia is doing for the (shudder) X-Box. The press release is dated April 18, whereas NVidia has been withholding register-level info on their cards for at least 6 months-1 year.
-W.W.
"Well it should be obvious to even the most dim-witted individual who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology...
30 FPS is crap on a PC. There is no motion blur like you see on TV or recorded video.
Every frame is distinct and unassociated with the frames around it. the FPS must be at least 60 in order to fully mimick the "motion blur" effect. also, if your game runs 60 FPS, it will likely slow down during peak activity in the game. thus, 100FPS is a good bet for a truly consistent liquid gameplay.
it's about time. The Voodoo3 can only display 16-bit color, even in 2D graphics. All other graphic cards had this years ago, it is so utterly ridiculous that the voodoo3 did not support at least 24-bit 2D color. I'm tired of looking at X in 16-bit color. Had I known this, I wouldn't have bought the Voodoo3. It's about time 3dfx did something right.
In life, each photon is processed by a different CPU :-) Hard to simulate on a lowly 1-GHz Athlon PC.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sure, 30 fps is probably decent most of the time, but every game has certain moments where the framerate varies heavily. Therefore, a 100 fps card is better than a 45 fps card because when you get into a serious firefight or a hardware-intensive level, the 100 fps card will not deteriorate nearly as badly. Even software usually gets over 30 fps on a fast computer; the problem is when it doesn't (and it doesn't look as good either.)
Now, if I could get a card that was 30 fps ALL of the time, I'd take that any day.
The Edge3D came with 4Mb of Vram and Nvidia's NV1 chip that could do some fantastic graphics, including curved surfaces. The support was terrible, and many problems were never addressed. This is the same chip that was in the Sega Saturn systems.
Video Card refused to work with most Dos games. a special driver was required just to use standard VGA.
Complicated install routine to prevent windows from crashing
DirectX drivers never available
OpenGL Drivers never available
No NT or Win98 support (I hear that XFree86 works tho!)
Only games with hi res/framerate were the *4* titles that were coded for the card (and only worked with a sega joystick..)
10 fps was the best framerate for Quake on a P150.
Diamond and Nvidia kept promising new drivers to fix bugs, but none ever eventuated.
A whole bunch of sound and joystick related problems also.
The Card was very expensive, yet as soon as the Voodoo was released you couldn't give them away
This is why you'll find some gamers out there who will never touch an Nvidia product again.
Well...this review doesn't look too rah-rah...pretty critical actually. But this is not the only review/preview I've seen mentioning flightsim utility. Personally, I'm craving the opportunity to use the V5 on my re-patched and re-superpatched versions of Falcon 4.0. Let the graphics wars continue. I'll still be buying an Athlon, a V5 AND the new GeForce iteration this summer. Woohoo! I did it all for the linux...brwarrrmm....the linux.... Now if someone would get all these damn games away from the rot from Redmond....
Not necesarilly- when the vidcard *needs* more power than your mainboard. If you use the machine for Office, mail and browsing, you don't need that much horsepower. If you use games (esp. Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, etc.) you need *a lot* of horsepower- mostly in graphics. I've got an old Pentium-S (No MMX!) 200 with a Voodoo 2 , and it runs Half-Life better than my brother's Pentium 3 with geegaws.
Sorry, my girlfriend's making me soft...
kwsNI
NVIDIA has released their long-awaited drivers for XFree86 4.0. These drivers
promise performance far beyond previous drivers for NVIDIA cards. Finally, Linux
users with TNT, TNT2, and GeForce cards should be able to take full advantage of
their hardware. Among other features, these drivers support full 32-bit rendering,
S3 texture compression, and the GPU on the GeForce cards.
You can grab them at www.nvidia.com/drivers/xfree86_40.html
I think someone is writing Mac nVida drivers, but don't hold your breath. My advice is to wait for the V5.
- RakeYohn
Actually, you are incorrect. Electrons do not and cannot travel at the speed of light. They never have. Electrons, being particles, are restricted to sub-light speeds not only by their mass but by the friction encountered by passing atoms.
Think before you leap.
Taddeusz
-- Ignorance is the pinnacle of religion - Me
Since the movie theater is dark and the film is relatively dark, there is no noticable flicker in the picture. Generally a monitor is brighter than a TV, which is why you can notice a flicker if your monitor is set to 60 Hz.
The moral of the story: if you notice your monitor flickering, turn off all the lights in your office/home/computer lab and work in the dark. To help prevent nagging coworkers from trying to disrupt you, play James Brown nonstop and nickname yourself "Venus".
A choice of masters is not freedom
--
Well, back to hacking code.
-------------------------------
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And it still wont have working linux drivers!
Go you Huskies.
ATI has, and always will, suck. They said the same crap about the MAXX....
The All-In-Wonder line of products are a complete joke.
Performance about as good as under Windows?
If half the frame rate means "about", then you are right on this point.
---
guillaume
give me all your garmonbozia
here is the website http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1229&p=2 it is the VOODOO5 6000 it is 599$
Yeh I've seen ethernet cards that had a ISA edge connector on one side & a PCI conector on the other side. So all you would have to do if you upgraded to a board without ISA connectors, would be to turn it upside down & unscew tthe backing plate & rescrew it the otherway arround. I've also seen Videocards - the Jazz 'Bonnie & Clyde', it was a i740 card - that had a AGP edge connector on one side, & a PCI connector on the other side. So all you would have to, if you were upgrading from a PCI only board to a board with an AGP slot, would be to turn the board arround (as there was a VGA plug on each end) & unscrew the end plate & screw it back on at the other end. I don't know why all the manufacturers don't do this. Because with economies of scale & all, surelly this would be cheaper that having 2 seperate lines going for each product. Plus ordering/shipping/storage /stockage would be easier.
Yeh I've seen ethernet cards that had a ISA edge connector on one side & a PCI conector on the other side. So all you would have to do if you upgraded to a board without ISA connectors, would be to turn it upside down & unscrew tthe backing plate & rescrew it the otherway arround. I've also seen Videocards - the Jazz 'Bonnie & Clyde', it was a i740 card - that had a AGP edge connector on one side, & a PCI connector on the other side. So all you would have to, if you were upgrading from a PCI only board to a board with an AGP slot, would be to turn the board arround (as there was a VGA plug on each end) & unscrew the end plate & screw it back on at the other end. I don't know why all the manufacturers don't do this. Because with economies of scale & all, surelly this would be cheaper that having 2 seperate lines going for each product. Plus ordering/shipping/storage /stockage would be easier.
ISA runs at 8Mhz, PCI (Portable C++ Interpreter) at 33Mhz, AGP at 66Mhz
FYI, PCI stands for Peripheral Component Interconnect and not Portable C++ Interpreter.
=================================
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Seeing as how the fastest ram you can currently get (excluding RDRAM) is 133 mhz, could someone with a money-is-no-object computer take the memory out of the card and plug it into their Athlon motherboard?
-sneakyian, President, Lamer Euthanization Services, Inc. "Putting you out of our misery since 1973"
Almost all linux programs will RUN on a 386 (might need more ram, oh well). The problem is the amount of time the person using the computer has while alive.. they tend to go insane sitting there waiting for something to happen for 5 years and kill themselves.. many have been lost to this phenomenon.. thank [insert holy being(s) here] that AMD and Intel are actively working against people such as Microsoft and whoever else produces bloat to counteract these mass suicides..
Choose the graphic card that is supported by the
OS you use...
It is pitiful when your vidcard has more mem/power than your mainboard..
What the h*ll is that supposed to mean? T&L offloads some of the geometry workload from the CPU to the graphics card. Quake3 does exactly that which, is why it was equally as playable on my Celeron 300a as it is on my P3 750E.
How much T&L will help is a function of CPU power and geometry complexity. Slower CPUs will benifit more than fast ones, but to say Q3 doesn't use T&L because a fast processor isn't geometry bound, is just plain wrong.
A penny for your thoughts.
A witty
On Wednesday, I am having a machine delivered with the ATI Rage Fury MAXX.
Two processors and 64mb of ram. DVD hardware and TV Out to boot.
The chip also boosts the best support for DirectX and D3D.
So why does ATI never get any good press?
Soldier(R)
Soldier(R)
Looks like you'll have to scan the classifieds and auctions looking for someone throwing out an old workstation... even the computer trade catalogues I get to flick through at work stopped stocking ISA graphics cards a long while back.... it's PCI or nowt!
-MT.
How about an evil corporation that sues a single programmer and then later Creative Labs for attempting to bring Glide support to non-3dfx hardware, instead of releasing video accelerators that people would buy?
Matrox seems to be the moral company to buy from, but I still get plenty of mileage out of my TNT. nVidia makes some good video cards, but their enthusiasm about embracing non-Microsoft operating systems is rather lackluster.
***
*!*!*
/\/\/\
Whaddaya mean, "duplicate"?
...
Indeed, ATI's upcoming announcement will be very interesting for two reasons.
1) They have in the past half year or so announced many commitments to provide support for their cards in Linux, not just in terms of video drivers but also things like DVD playback.
2) This is their first entry in a long time into the really high end of graphics. They are positioning this to be THE fastest card out their, not an also-ran like the MAXX. If they can succeed in getting a toehold, this will really help their profit margins and make their investors happy!
A lot has been said about XBox and NVidia, but ATI is getting ready to make a huge move...Rage 6, STBs, Nintendo's upcoming Dolphin....
I think the Geforce rules, not because I say so, but because it brought me (Geforce 256) to read more about graphic cards. Before I didn't care what kind of graphic card I had...I just played the game, but the Geforce changed my perception on this. So the Geforce rules more than a monkey smoking a cigar doing backflips off the wall..while coding!
When Win2K sees my linux partition, it freaks out and starts polling all of my disk drives in an infinite loop. Someone at MS is on crack.
That would be Win2K's automatic virus protection. If it detects Linux, it will bring down the system in a valiant attempt to prevent future contamination. Make sure to backup before installing Win2K.
In future games, which will use far more detailed geometry, the GeForce will beat the V5 at ALL resolutions.
In future games, there will be better graphics cards. I think that the point was that this was to help you decide what you want to play Quake3 on. (Does Q3 support T&L?)
Of course last night (isn't that how it seems to work) my v3 blew up, so maybe it's time to switch teams
That's actually a feature. You see, at the design meeting for the v3, it was decided that it was impossible to convince software manufacturers to make backware compatible graphics in their software. The team thought night and day about this, and how to reach the forward compatibility spec that marketing wanted, and finally decided on an ingenious plan. They implanted a nitrate charge in the circuit board for the card, linked to a timer. At random times over the next three years, all v3 cards will self-destruct, thus ensuring that customers will upgrade. This ensured that forward compatibility was achieved.
If you are surprised by this, don't be. Microsoft took a similar tactic during the development of DOS. Somewhere hidden inside the DOS kernal is a bit of code that causes BSODs, system crashes, etc to occur if there is a one year difference than the year of that version DOS' release and the current date. Unfortunately, the Microsoft programmer who wrote this left to work on Linux, and nobody at Microsoft could take it out. Instead, they released a 'new version' of DOS/Windows every two years, and tried to migrate users to a NT system, which had a rewritten kernal. Many other companies have done this. It's the true definition of the term 'bit rot'.
You've done this a lot lately, declaring that something is or isn't "logical" according to some unfathomable criterion of your own. Did you learn logic from Star Trek? I hate to break this to you, but Spock's "logic" was often BS.
Taken from the 3dfx website, 4/24/00: "Is the memory on the Voodoo5 boards unified or segmented? For example, on the Voodoo5 5500 AGP with two VSA-100 chips with 32MB of memory per chip, is the video memory 64MB or is it really just 32MB? The video memory is unified, only texture data has to be repeated for each VSA-100 chip. "
Do you know what a texel is? 2 texel's are equal to 1 mutitextured pixel. That means the Geforce2 only pumps out 800 MILLION PIXELS per second as compared to 733 million pixels from the V5 5500 and 1.47 Gigapixel's a second from the V5 6000. What this means is that Nvidia used a different representation of fillrate to sound better than they actually are. Nvidia is good at making things look better that they actually are check this page out http://www.nvidia.com/GeForce256.nsf/htmlmedia/gpu .html. This page is very misleading about the way the geforce can improve your graphics. Don't get me wrong the geforce is a good chip. I just can't respect a company that will go out of there way to mislead there customers.
Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal t
Amen!!! Preach it Brother!!!!
So basically, I have a $300 2D card in my machine right now. But I'm not complaining one bit.
While many like to whine and complain that NVIDIA doesn't support them, they must realize that NVIDIA never issued any sort of definitive date for the release of their drivers. They still have a couple engineers working full time in porting their Windows driver architecture to Linux (no small task, mind you, which is why it's taking so long).
Many of the people are essentially saying, "Fuck NVIDIA. I bought a card because they said they would release drivers for Linux, and they didn't. I'm getting a card from a company that actually supports Linux." Well, if you purchase a card before you can use it, it's your own fault, not the company's.
NVIDIA is doing everything they can to get the new drivers out the door, and it will be really soon, but people have no right to DEMAND drivers from a company.
Think of this analogy. Say some automotive company has some really high-performance car. But to conform with some spec, it has a governor installed so it can only go so fast, which kinda takes a lot of the fun out of owning the car if you live in Germany and want to ride on the Autobahn. The company states that they have plans to release a description of a process for the removal of the device (assume it's controlled by some all-encompassing CPU in the vehicle, and you can't remove the CPU without causing the entire thing to fail, so the company needs to release a new chip).
So you purchase this vehicle, even though you live in Germany, because you LOVE fast cars, and the company stated that they WILL support you at a later date. The company works harder than ever to get the new CPU out to mechanics to remove the governor, but the car owners are never satisfied....they'd rather have a half-brewed process and have a faster car than the lackluster car they now own. So they do the only thing they can: complain. A lot. And the company starts questioning why they're supporting these people in the first place.
That pretty much sums up the whole NVIDIA-Linux thing. People are pissed because they underestimated how diffiicult it is to write a really awesome video driver, so they bought a new NVIDIA card on the assumption that they'd have Linux support "any day now." Well, it's a lot of work to port 10 man-years of windows drivers to Linux. Grow up and DEAL with it.
Still, all the same, I'm kinda glad NVIDIA is taking their time to do things right. I'll get a better driver for my GeForce DDR just in time for summer, when I'll actually have time to play games again. (I don't want a really fast video card right now...MIT is hard enough without games distracting me) Xavier M. Longfellow.
Uh, they did. nVidia is building the X-Box's graphics hardware.
Think of it as 40-60 banner ads that he's getting paid by doubleclick for!
;)
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I can see some screwball trying this.
"Well, it runs Q3 at just under quad-digit framerates, but I only get about 1 block a month from my Distributed.net client."
"Unreal Tourney runs great, but Word takes about an hour to open. Maybe we need a 3D word processor."
"DIE LITTLE CURSOR!" DIE! *BLAM!* *BLAM!*
"But WHY doesn't Windows support my ATI CPU?"
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
An old, and incorrect argument rears it's ugly head again.
Also, 30fps is roughly the threshold for fluid in computer graphic. 60fps is the generally accepted threshold for completely smooth movement.
FPS are important. Minimum or average FPS are most important. A card is nothing if it gets 200fps in an empty scene, but drops to 1fps when anything enters the scene. Also, due to limitations on current SOTA 3d technology, people ARE able to differentiate between framerates above 60fps. Mostly from visual artifacting due to large differentiations between frames (lack of smooth transitions).
Now not everyone can necessarily differentiate 60 and 70fps. But some can. Remember, everyone's eyes are different, as are the exact speeds of their neural connections, etc.
Now if you're not overly concerned about VQ, go ahead and get a card that maxes out at 60fps. I prefer a card that runs faster.
Also, current speed in the newest games is a way to roughly guage the lifespan of the card. If the card gets 60fps in current games at your desired resoloution, it stands to reason that upcoming games will hit it's performance down to undesireable levels.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
--
--
"Insert witty quote here."
The "theatrical effects" on the Voodoo5 are actually interesting. On any non-quake clones the effects would add alot to the game. Maybe even a game specifically using the effects would be even better. Now I actually have a tough choice this summer when I go to upgrade my video card, do I go with Nvidia or 3dfx? Oi, such decsions. Well I'll put my wishlist on here for any video card companies to think about.
I want hardware T&L
Hardware depth maps (a la the G400)
60 fps @ 1024x768
Cup holder
Full screen anti-aliasing
And finally, a sunroof
The V5 has enough of these features (the cup holder is rumoured to be included in the Voodoo5 6500) to make me think about buying one. I really like the FSAA idea, it's one of the things that makes up for some lack of quality in the N64's graphics.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I haven't seen any of these new video cards ray trace at film resolution yet (which is several thousand pixels by several thousand pixels). These cards easily do polygon rasterizing but have yet to enter the realm of true ray tracing. Until Intel can page more than 4 gigs of memory it isn't going to be a major player unless you do some serious rewiring when you get their chips. SGI's stuff can scale to several umptine processors and page oodles of ram right out of the box (crate), can Linux and Intel?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
After hitting 120FPS... the card it's on no longer matters... does it? ;) ;)
Only thing I've chosen 3Dfx for is legacy compatability (most old 3D games used the 3D API that could do some damage before OGL was capable of it - admit it, OGL 1.0 was not all that great)... And for the niffy Linux support (even though it was originally written by a 3rd party) and VSA100's full support... unfortunately, it's only support for XF4... ahh well, it'll still be fun
At Actomicro. It was there friday, but now they seem to have pulled it down due to nVidia's legal harrashment. It'll be up again tomorrow, when nVidia officially launches Geforce2. The nv15 feature list is up at Actumicro's page anyway, pretty interesting, that.
-- v --
3Dfx has definitely screwed up quite a bit in the last few years, though. They really have built up a reputation from their insistence that gamers only care about frame rates, and image quality is a secondary concern, which lead to all sorts of fun technical decisions like the 'not-quite-16bit' color in the Voodoos. The T-buffer is, IMO, a crime against humanity, and utterly worthless. The Voodoo6 needs a direct connection to your power source. I can't express how wrong that sounds.
Tribes is great; makes me wish I had DSL, though. I have a hard time believing that the Voodoo is responsible for that, however, beyond the little driver problem that plagued Tribes (i.e., nothing else worked). Unreal Tourney seems to take some getting used to, and Daikatana is...well, was what did you expect? (I'm a bit surprised UT runs on a G200 at all ;-)
As for getting caught up in the specs, I'm not. I'm caught up in games looking the best they can without running like a slide show. 3Dfx has been calling their cards are the ultimate pixel pushers, and the benchmarks tend to agree. But I don't care about frame rates when the screen is covered with jaggies and I'm only getting 16bit color. I'd happily settle for a GeForce2 if it was half the speed of a Voodoo, because at least there's a chance I'll get full scene AA, 32bit color and decent lighting without killing my performance. It's quality that I'm concerned about, and 3Dfx has stated very clearly that their priority is quantity.
-jcl
I actually don't object to 3Dfx or nVidia wanting to keep their {drivers,APIs} closed, or at least under their control. They're the best qualified to maintain their products, and being the BSD zealot I am I can't really wave the Free Software flag and declare them evil. I have to say, too, that I've been growing less enchanted with nVidia as time goes on. I still hate 3Dfx, for various silly reasons, but my next card is probably going to be a Matrox (the God of Quality ;-), if and when they add geometry accel.
It's been a while since I last played Tribes, but I do recall that it looked quite nice. Quake III, UT, and some of the other recent 3D games look terrible without AA, though. Part of this is that those games are dripping with polygons and textures. I have a 19" monitor and usually play at around 960x720 (sweet spot for framerate and gamma on my card) and I'll occasionally see jaggies as much as an eighth on an inch wide (each step) on half the objects on screen. And that's width the maximum TNT2 AA level. It's really irritating, but there are a lot of games coming out that are all but unplayable on anything less than the most cutting edge cards. (QIII, for example, actually has levels that need >32MB on card texture memory to run at best quality, and even at medium quality texture/medium geometry stutter along at ~25 fps.)
As for DLS...I'm living in telco hell. The local USWest office is actually being sued by the state because they're so incompetent/evil. No DSL, only single channel ISDN ($150/mo, and metered), and even the telephone switch--the simplest possible ocomponent--is so hopelessly underpowered that I'm lucky to get an hour at 33.6k. Then we have the little problem of ~30% of the phone traffic being dropped, massive line noise....
-jcl
The new chip is the VSA-100, it is basically infinitely SMP-able. The Voodoo 4 4500 card has one processor, and will only perform like existing Voodoo 3 cards. The Voodoo 5 5x00 cards have dual chips, with either 32 or 64 mb of ram (in pci and agp incarnations, respectively. Ram is divided between the chips, so the 64 meg version is basically 32 per chip, so it isn't exactly a quantum leap for sotring textures.
,etc.
Forthcoming is the Voodoo 5 6000 with 4 cpu, 128mb and an external power supply. MSRP 600 bucks. Ouch.
The big feature they are touting in full screen antialiasing, reducing jaggies on polygons and textures, etc. 3dfx, like Matrox, is holding off on hardware transform and lighting until MSFT releases DirectX 8, this fall. Hardware TnL is what nVidia claims will make your dick hard, your hair grow back
These cards can do 2x and 4x FSAA, 2x is rendering each frame twice, and displaying the blend, 4x is four times.. you get the picture. This kills fill rate, which is brutal on Quake 3 Arena frame rate.
So, on games that aren't dependent on raw brutal fill rate, like car and flying sims, the FSAA is probably a great feature for you. For a basically a Quake 3 only player like myself, its not the be all end all. For q3, the new Voodoos are an incremental advancement, not revolutionary.
Personally, I am goingto wait for the Matrox g450 (quicker g400 max) and nVidia's stuff to come out before purchasing. The nVidia NDA expire tomorrow on their new chip, the n15. The new Matrox stuff should be out this quarter, with their monstra g800 probablyh 6 months away.
matt
There is no surprise here.
The GeForce wins on geometry (T&L-transform & lighting), the Voodoo wins on textured fill. Bear in mind that this was an SLI version of the card with two VSA-100 parts.
If you want high resolution go for the 2 part 3Dfx card if you want all round performance go for the GeForce. A single part Voodoo card is going to be a poor performer.
One thing the article didn't touch on is the CPU speed dependency for the voodoo, this system had an 800 MHz processor, if you have a slower processor or one without SSE instructions you can expect the voodoo to be worse at some of the intermediate resolutions because it will be more T&L bound. The GeForce has much less dependency on the CPU because it offloads the T&L to the CPU, in addition the CPU is able to do other stuff while the card is busy in a well written application. The other point to note is that with a FASTER PIII the voodoo will begin to catch up to the GeForce, even at the lower resolutions, so a 1GHz PIII would work more to the voodoo's advantage at least in the benchmarks.
So, if you're upgrading your PIII 500 or any early Celeron system (the latest Celerons have SSE older ones don't) you should really go for the GeForce, if you are building the latest 1GHz power system then the voodoo looks like a good bet especially if you are running at high resolution. If you're CPU somewhere in between then decide what's more important to you, geometry or fill.
If they continue to keep their specs to themselves and to MS (expecially since they are on "Microsoft's d*ck now", as someone noted) , I have nothing to do with an Nvidia graphics chip. Matrox and 3dfx are much friendier to the "other" OSes.
Sigged!
Does anyone know? Thanks!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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FLAIMBAIT!?! WTF? It's true, damnit. Go to nVidia's web site. Watch the flash video. See the numbers fly by. Notice that the first one is "1600000000 texels/second".
How was that flaimbait? Who am I drawing flame from? Huh? I am just trying to let everyone know that they probably should not get excited over the V5 since something much better is going to be out so soon.
I would not be suprised if they were, say, holding off their Linux driver release until after the GF2 was ready so as to get Linux users to buy it rather than an older card...
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The V5 does better at high res because that is where performance depends less on geometry speed and more on fill rate. The GeForce has on-board geometry accelleration (aka T&L). In future games, which will use far more detailed geometry, the GeForce will beat the V5 at ALL resolutions.
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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:
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:
If my info is correct (it could be wrong), then as of this Friday 3dfx will be officially fscked.
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Also check out Anandtech which has previews of the V4 4500 and V5 V5500.
But the human eye can tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps. Look closely at movie with lots of action and you will notice the individual frames. That is at 24 fps but US television at 30 fps would appear just as choppy if the resolution were higher.
US television (NTSC) is actually 60 fields per second - with each successive field interlaced to provide a full resolution frame, but 60 Hz nonetheless. And movies are shown at 72 Hz, not 48 (which would still flicker too much).
It's quite easy to tell the difference between between 30 fps and 60 fps. It's also possible to tell the difference between 60 fps and 75 fps - have a look at a computer screen set to 60 Hz refresh rate, then set it to 75 Hz. 60 Hz is annoyingly flickery.
I believe video cards will continue to develop long past the point of 75 Hz @ 1600 x 1200, or even at higher resolutions. Once sufficient speed at the best res current monitors can do is attained, greater and greater speed will be needed for better full-screen antialiasing instead. But there are huge advances still needed in quality.
When you compare Q3A or UT against Toy Story, you can see what they're aiming at, and how far they have to go. Then compare Toy Story to The Matrix, The Mummy, or Episode 1. Finally, look around - reality itself is the ultimate target.
Recorded audio reproduction has already reached the point where realism is only an issue with purists. Dynamically generated audio isn't doing too badly either, though it doesn't have the dollars behind it that video does. Video has far more to live up to, to fool human eyes and brains. Believe me, we won't be seeing a slowdown there anytime soon.
Namarrgon
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
My favorite part of the review:
Think I could get a grant from the NSF if I wanted to conduct research featuring "scientific use of gibbed body bits"?
What about 3D on Mac computers or BeOS systems?
If you live in Windows-land all the time, you may think differently.
And if you're on a Mac box, you'll just Think different.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've got:
13.1GB 7200 RPM EIDE HD
AGP TNT2 w/ 32 MB RAM,
P2-350 bumped up to 400
192 MB RAM
Win98 (cringe)
I play religiously at 640*480. I am not in any clan, nor am I the best of the best. I just don't like getting disoriented. I don't aim for 120fps or anything. I aim for 30fps in a worst-case scenario. Period. When I'm playing a twitch game, the framerate should be above 30 as much as possible.
I don't CARE how high above 30 it is, but I do care how far below 30 it gets, and how often.
Generally right now I tend to get the texture detail up, and keep the resolution low. I just have more chance of keeping it above 30fps that way, while keeping things looking nice. Sure I like seeing those 1024*768 shots, but that's all I see with my setup.. shots, no movement.
Right now I have a setup that pretty much guarantees 30fps at 16-bit at 640*480. What I'm concerned with, is which of these cards is going to guarantee over 30 fps, at 32-bit color, at 1024*768? FSAA is an added bonus, and if the V5 can push 800*600 at that rate with it, I'll seriously look at it.
Now i can toss out that damn TNT2 P.O.S. and get a great card that will function under linux(when it is supported that is)
That was the only problem with the TNT/TNT2/GeFORCE series cards, no linux support!!
I know "linux isnt for games" but 8fps with a v770 is just damn annoying
Go you Huskies.
They will make an announce tonight at 10:30 PM EST on www.ati.com I guess it will be about the Rage 6. They seem pretty confident as you can read the following on their home page : "ATI is unmasking the new face of graphics, THE REAL POWER of graphics is within your reach"
The human eye really cannot tell the difference between 30 frames and 60 frames; 30 frames is the upper limit of seeing. Why do people really care about these high frame rates? The difference in image quality is where it really matters. No other card has the same quality anti-aliasing and T-Buffer as the new Voodoos do. It's all about image quality, or at least it should be. It can be argued that it is good to play games at resolutions such as 1600x1200, but really, how many people play at that resolution? It, in some cases, makes some games harder to play as individual objects are smaller. Plus, many older monitors/low quality monitors don't support that high a resolution. Vil
What I want to know is why they left out MGA graphics support? There's alot of good stuff that can use high res mode, such as ASCII Quake, but the Voodoo chips won't support it. I reccomend that we boycott 3dfx until they concede to our demands or send emmett a free graphics card.
Hmm...then why does Quake 3, Heavy Gear, Heretic 2, and Unreal Tournament run so well on my SuSE 6.3 with a Matrox G400?
Getting drivers for the latest and greatest hardware has traditionally been a weak point for Linux, but it's getting better. Right now, at least the Voodoo series, Matrox Gx00 series, Nvidia TNT series, and ATI Rage series work well. Performance is, in general, as good as under Windows.
-Dave
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
Nvidia will have to go a long long ways to sell me on their cards again. My first 3D card was the Intergraph Intense 3D Voodoo, a Voodoo Rush card. In case you don't know, they were a 2D/3D card that came out shortly after the original Voodoo cards (Voodoo 1 and 2 were only 3D cards, requiring a separate graphics card for 2D). It opened my eyes to the wonders of 3D Hardware assisted gaming.
Now, the Voodoo Rush was certainly a flawed card, it was actually slower than the original Voodoo card, and many games had problems with it, requiring some patching. I used the card for about a year and a half, then bought myself a shiny new STB Velocity 4400, based on Nvidia's TNT chipset, I got the first one that came to Ames, Iowa.
My experience with the TNT was very negative. I am a user with a clue, and I still had considerable troubles, and the problems were with getting the thing to work in games, without waiting six months for them to be patched to a playable state. Two games which I never got completely playable to my satisfaction were Final Fantasy 7 and Unreal.
Unreal was just plain slow via Direct3D, it ran much faster on my Voodoo Rush card than it ever did on my TNT, although it was like a new game every week as Tim Sweeney and crew gradually patched it from an unplayable slideshow into a marginally playable game.
Final Fantasy 7 required over ten calls and e-mails back and forth with Eidos/Squaresoft to finally get the game patched and working correctly. Just when you'd finally get it working, the newest drivers for the TNT would come out, and it'd break again.
I finally ditched my TNT last May for a Voodoo 3 3000. This is by far the best video card experience I've had to date. 3dfx has enourmous market share, and EVERYTHING is tested on their hardware before it ships, not afterwards. I, for one, also enjoy dusting off some of my older games from time to time, and watching them scream on new computers, Glide compatibility is great. Some new games, like Diablo II (I'm one of the lucky 1,000 beta testers) still use Glide for some of their rendering. I have not had one instance of "I can't play that because I have an X brand video card, and they haven't patched it yet" which is something I experienced too many times on the other boards.
That said, these benchmarks only reinforce my decision to get a Voodoo 5 5500. I play my games at 1024x768, which is precisely where the Voodoo5 scores are beating the GeForce, and the drivers still have plenty of room to mature, I'm sure. I'm generally not one to blindly follow a certain company, regardless of how their products actually are, but I'll have to see a bigger margin in performance before I think of ditching 3dfx.
No, I don't work for them, no I don't own any of their stock, but I do suggest their products to anyone who will listen to me, and who wants to buy the latest game on the shelves, and not have to wait two months for driver/patch issues to be resolved.
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When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
How long will the motherboard last for under the conditions that you suggest?
Wow, you really are ignorant of overclocking lore. Motherboards are designed to last ~ 10 years. That's a long time. Overclocking will reduce the life span by about 50%. So if your board was built in 1994 overclocking will cause it to fail in 1999. Since it's already 2000, that would entail a temporal anomaly. This may cause your motherboard to achieve infinite mass and destroy the earth. Proper cooling will prevent this. I suggest water cooling. After completing the upgrade take your computer and plunge it into a bathtub full of ice water. Be sure that a) the computer is still plugged in (it's amazing how many newbies forget this), b) that you are gripping it with both hands and c) that your feet are properly grounded. (wear a grounding strap around your ankle for best results). This will keep your system running fine until ~ 2004. (assuming you keep adding ice to the water)
Your pal,
--Shoeboy
Of course if the water isn't pure that would entail a massive ammount of electricity to move through the body killing the person.
Look sissy-boy, overclocking isn't for everyone. If you aren't willing to pay the ultimate price for ultimate performance, why don't you go roll in the grass with the rest of your tree hugging luddite hippie friends. Real men will do anything for a few extra frames in Q3 (Quicken 3.0). Kyle Bennet over at HardOCP.com even has a computer powered by indonesian schoolchildren he bought from Nike. If you can't handle a little thing like death by electrocution I suggest you haul your pansy ass outta here.
Hugs and kisses,
--Shoeboy
I'm still waiting for nvidia to release their drivers for XFree86 4.0. Their support for linux in the past few months has been pathetic. You can say what you want about 3dfx, I at one point was a avid hater of their company. I still don't like their cards as much as other companies (which is the original reason I bought my tnt2), but 3dfx has stepped up and provided more linux support than most other card manufacturers. I'm not gonna rush out and buy a voodoo5 because I'm still really mad that I have a $200 card in my system that has no support for 3d acceleration. BUT -- give 3dfx respect where they deserve it. They make decent cards, they support linux, and they are much less sketchy than nvidia. Oh nvidia, if you're reading this, I'm still waiting for my drivers.
Does anyone have a graph to show how these cards apply to Moore's law? It seems like they are always coming out with something new which is faster and more amazing.
-Kris
I believe that framebuffer is not duplicated between the two chips, but textures are. So if each chip is using 8 megs of frame buffer + 24 megs of textures, the effective memory used is 40 megabytes.
Just because textures are duplicated doesn't mean that the memory is just wasted. Memory bandwidth is doubled, as each chip can access the textures it needs independently and then use an sli technique to integrate both chips into one output.
I believe the GeForce 2, whose specs are rumored, is bandwidth limitted. Basically the chip itself is incredibly fast, but will be severely hampered until faster (and more expensive) memory technology appears on the market.
why even bother with a graphics "co-processor" when it's kicking the ^@%$^ out of my so-called CPU? I mean, my wintel box is already just a dedicated QuakeX-playing machine...
Can your IM do this?
I prefer Thresh's [site] over Sharky's [site] since Sharky's started to split their reviews into 20 pages or so...
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Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
I have the luxury of playing with computer systems while I work on them for my job, so over the years I've looked at some nice 3Dfx, Nvidia, Matrox, and ATI cards.
It's weird, and I know I'm biased because I have a Voodoo2 paired with a Matrox Millenium G200 in my current computer, but I really like the "look" I get from a good game programmed in Glide. I hate proprietary APIs in theory, but I have to admit that Tribes, for instance, is just damn fun on a Voodoo card. More fun than Unreal Tourney or the Daikatana demo on the Matrox, at least...
I think that sometimes it's easy to get caught up in the specs of different cards, frame rates, hardware T&L, full screen anti-aliasing, blah blah blah fricking blah, when the entire point is to sit down and play a game, and maybe (in the case of multiplayer) meet some people who play games to have fun and blow some stuff up.
I don't care whether the Voodoo5 is the fastest card around, I guess. I just hope it's a good, solid gaming card, as good as 3dfx can make. They pioneered the conusmer market for 3d accelerators, and I will always respect that.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Yup, it's nice that Microsoft has released such a good gaming platform.
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If noone rtfa, then what's the slashdot effect?
Who needs those when you can get THIS
ROFL ROFL ROFL
(I wish)
Gazateer
--- We all brains, why not use them?
"3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP beta board running 4.12.01.0532 drivers"
Most previews have stated that the 3dfx board they are reviewing is an alpha or beta board with alpha or beta drivers, yet most people don't seem to pay attention to that fact and begin drawing conclusions now. "3dfx is in trouble." "The Voodoo 5 sucks, look how slow it is!"
Why doesn't everybody just calm down and wait until the retail cards arrive, and THEN start comparing to the GeForce and/or any other card that's available on the market?
--
If a tree fell on a florist, and nobody was around to hear it, would he make a noise?
Anandtech also has a Voodoo 4/5 preview up today. What's interesting is that, yes, at low resolutions, nVidia's GeForce beats it; however, at high resolution (1024x768 and higher) the Voodoo5 catches up and passes the GeForce for a good margin.
High resolution benchmarks often give a good indication of the raw power of the hardware itself. Anand believes the poor perform at low resolution is due to poor drivers, and I'm inclined to agree. As nVidia has shown with the Detonator drivers, it's quite possible that updated versions (like the final ones when it actually comes out) will give the V5 a boost. The important part is all the low resolutions, while slower, are certainly _PLENTY_ of FPS to play with, and, what's more, the V5 makes some of the higher resolutions playable as well.
And the last factor that matters more for Slashdotters... Like 'em or hate 'em, 3dfx has provided traditionally provided very good Linux driver support, unlike some companies (rhymes with binaryonlynoDRIvidia)...
Not exactly overclock savvy are we, here's the deal.
ISA runs at 8Mhz, PCI (Portable C++ Interpreter) at 33Mhz, AGP at 66Mhz. What does this mean? It means that you need to run your ISA bus at ~33Mhz to get it to run correctly with a PCI device. So what I'm gonna tell you is simple. You've only got ISA slots, right? So you've probably got a 386. What you'll need to do is take a soldering iron and replace the clock signal generating crystal and replace it with one that's faster. How do you do that? Simple, go buy an intel 44BX based motherboard. These motherboards run at either 66Mhz or 100Mhz. Find the northbridge chip (should be under a green heatsink) and remove it. Now find a chip of roughly the same size on the 386 motherboard and replace it with the northbrige chip. This should speed your system from 20 Mhz to 100 Mhz. Now your ISA bus is running at 40Mhz!!!! Nearly agp speed. Now to go the rest of the way. Flash your computer with the lateset bios. This will let you get the FSB (fourier series broadside) up to 133Mhz!!!! NOW YOUR ISA SLOTS ARE RUNNING AT a stomping 54Mhz. Well withing the AGP spec! Now insert your agp card into the ISA slot. Doesn't fit does it? Of course not. Remember the BX board? It has an agp slot. Remove it and solder it onto the 386 board in place of one of the ISA slots (which you just removed with a pair of pliers and a claw hammer) Now fire up your computer. Doesn't work does it. Of course not, AGP cards draw too much power for your power supply. You'll need to take your power cord and stip the end to expose the 3 wires. Now throw away your cheap P.S. and drop 120 volts of AC current dirrectly onto the motherboards power connectors. I guarantee you'll be shocked with the performance of your computer.
With love,
--Shoeboy
here (4/21/00)
Lesson? Stop arguing over which one is better, one size does not fit all, each person will different results from the next person, go do something better with your life.
Like post on slashdot...
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
[o]_O
This might be slightly off topic but I believe that it has relevence to the issues between the cards (and ultimately the companies). In late 1997 I purchased a Riva 128 because I didn't want to buy a video card, then a Voodoo 2 when it finally came out, and the Riva 128 was supposed to be better than a Voodoo Graphics card. Although 3dfx dominated with the Voodoo series, many early Nvidia fans like myself saw promise in this little company. With the release of the TNT, TNT 2, and GeForce, they have seemed to surpass their longtime rival 3dfx.
However, Nvidia has done some things recently that pissed me off. Also in 1997 I found this cool little program (rather distro) called Debian 1.3. Almost two and a half years later I'm running Red Hat 6.2 while patiently awaiting Potato to be released as stable, sometime in the next millenium. For as long as I can remember, Nvidia and 3dfx both were commited to supporting, or eventually supporting Linux. Long before DRI showed up 3dfx released open source Linux drivers. Nvidia, however, has only released two hacked up drivers that run Quake 3 worse on my TNT 2 Ultra then a Voodoo Graphics would run it. Also, since then XFree86 4.0 has been released, 2.4 is in now 2.3.99-pre stage with DRI support, and 3dfx has continued to release drivers that take advantage of this support. However, not even a word (or updated drivers for XFree 3.3.6 or 4.0) has came from Nvidia about their driver situation. I'm also under the impression that when XFree 4.0 gets "more stable", or is included in distributions, and the 2.4 kernel is released, they will release their own closed source driver that will use a rendering interface similar to DRI, but not DRI. I remember having a discussion about Nvidia drivers back in December, but it has been four months and I think my Loki Quake 3 tin has recieved more use from me than the game itself. Does anyone know what's going on with the drivers?
-- BLarg!