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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?
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!!!
too excessive?
nah, i'd say adding a warm mister to simulate giblets flying in your face after a nice frag would be a little too much.
after using it for a while, of course.
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"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
yeah, s/T&L/hardware T&L/ I thougt that was clear
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.
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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
ATI's biggest problem is (and has always been) drivers. They are slow to release updated drivers, so their cards never perform up to their potential. Eventually, after a year or two, they finally get their drivers right, but by then, the card is the slowest thing around.
Well, the review in Thresh's FiringSquad says that indeed the geforce does perform better in many situations, particularly with a slower processor.
But they're very different cards, and they each have different strengths. The GeForce (nVidia's card for those who have had a cardboard box over their head lately) will certainly outperform a Voodoo5 in rendering high-poly-count scenes, while the Voodoo5 MAY be capable of a higher fill-rate, and will deliver full-screen antialiasing.
Ironically, the scenes that need fullscreen antialiasing the most are scenes with lots of polygon boundaries, eg, those with a high poly count. Hopefully the next generation of Voodoos will accelerate geometry, and the next generation of nVidia cards will do FSAA.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
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?
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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...
--
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!