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NVIDIA Geforce 2 Review
maniack writes: "NVIDIA lifted the ban on Geforce 2 benchmarks and specs at midnight, and Anandtech right away posted an article on the card. They put it up against all of its competitors, including the Viper 2, the Rage Fury MAXX, the Voodoo 4 and 5, and several flavors of the old Geforce including a 64 MB DDR card. The 32 MB DDR Geforce 2 GTS ripped the competition apart in almost every benchmark including the texture heavy Q3 Quaver. The Geforce 2 was the top performer in both high-end and low-end systems. The article also explores the performance hit cause by full scene anti-aliasing. Sharkyextreme also has a review, as does Hot Hardware. "
i wouldn't be surprised if now the average Joe PC Buyer had absolutely no idea which video card to buy. wow-the Radeon, the voodoo5, and the geforce 2 all in one week. i'm kind of overwhelmed with the power. hopefully someday the video card market slows down...but who am i kidding? i'm not even sure if i want it to slow down.
does anyone know if the geforce 2 will have the same linux support the geforce does? if so, i'm a little wary. but you have to give them points for performance...
Now seriously, I do believe our obsession with video cards has been a bit extreme lately. Is it great that there are cards that blow the socks off anything out even a year before? Sure. Is it worth 300 dollars a year for an extra few FPS in Quake 3?
:)
I'm just not sure.
Furthermore, we've come to the point that the extra rates only support more on the screen, rather than an incredible clarity. I've seen some nice pictures, but it's still light years away from anything I would call beautiful.
Yet the biggest delimiter isn't the card anymore, but the artistry. There just aren't enough artists, and it's not possible to put enough great artists on most teams to make something spectacular. That might be the next frontier. Even if we can get life-like quality, the game will still only be as good as the artist behind it.
(I wonder if I gave up the first post by now.
Gamepsot has a review also, for the less technically inclined.
--sugarman--
Fortunately nVIDIA has moved to a unified driver architecture, which is going to find the right driver, and release drivers much easier. Hopefully this will help in getting drivers for other OSes out faster.
But keep in mind GeForce owners, that you can download the new drivers and get a considerable performance boost for your current GeForce card! =)
So Nvidia will be king of the hill again for now, at least until the next announcement cycle. Maybe it's me, but I think that video cards have gotten so fast that at this point even the lowest-end cards (anything more potent than the integrated video in the i810 chipset) have more than enough horesepower to handle any users' typical 3D needs (including very enjoyable gaming). Right now the money for a supreme video card is arguably better spent on tons o' RAM and an ATA-66 drive/controller combo for faster performance in everyday apps.
As for picking a video card, I'd just look for the best possible support for your OS of choice - though Nvidia's performance and support under Windows is terrific, their Linux support is awful so no matter how swank the GeForce is it's out of the running to go into my systems. I still dual-boot, but I'd rather not.
ATI and 3Dfx do a better job of supporting Windows/Linux/Mac, so I buy mainly their cards. I'm willing to trade off a few FPS playing Quake III under Windows for that Linux and Mac support. But hey, if you don't mind Windows and you live to frag, then this GeForce 2 sounds pretty darned sweet.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
This stuff is really getting out of hand. Regardless of what performance these companies are claiming for their new cards the fact remains that there is a bottleneck in getting all that graphical data to the screen. AGP 2X,4X has proven worthless. Developers haven't even started addressing advances in graphics cards that are two years old. As graphics chipset manufacturers continually leapfrog each other on new features there are very few real tangible benefits for consumers. Personally I use a TNT. It offers excellent 2D and 3D performance and I see little improvemetn from newer cards. For business apps the Matrox Millenium2 still leads on crystal clear resolution and color. I just wish these video chipset manufacturers would start producing their own games so we consumers could actually start taking advantage of all these new features. Beyond that I think consumers interests are best served by getting a good deal on the card that was hottest two years ago. For a fraction of the price you get as good or better performance and better stabilty.
but what about trident?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
They're still not playing nice. They didn't release source and the drivers don't use DRI in Xfree86 4.0
While it's nice they released drivers, they could at least follow standards.
And of course, with closed source drivers, if it crashes you can't tell why, nor can you possibly fix it.
For a while it looked like you'd be able to run out and get any good 3D video card for $79 and that would be that. Now with these newer cards we're back to the $250 and up range. Seeing as how even cards from two generations back haven't been pushed to the limit yet, this is mostly an outlet for people who want bragging rights.
The other disturbing trend is the power consumption is getting much worse. Whatever happened to the "faster, smaller, less power" mantra? The Voodoo 5, for example, needs to have a hard drive power cable plugged into it. The GeForce 2 is in the same ballpark, if not worse. Yes folks, hardware engineers can do whatever they want without limits on power consumption or price. Now how about getting back on track?
Sharky Extreme has a great review up too, also technical in nature. I read it, and as I recall, it was about 30 pages, pretty in depth.
One of the biggest points is that current x86 cpus are not fast enough to outrun the graphics card in low res. When tested with a 1 GHZ Athlon, and an 866Mhz P3, the graphics card doesnt fare much better in low res than does the original GeForce. It is essentially a barrier for games, created by realease dates :-)
Also of note, the business practices of NVIDIA are scrutinized, such as their 6 month release intervals, which seem to be resulting in their being king of the hill rather freqently.
Supposedly, the ATI Radeon MAXX will be the only thing remotely close to the nv15 (GeForce2 GTS). However, the only thing expected to defeat the GeForce2 (NV15) will be the NV20.
For those of you who haven't had the time to read the reviews, they're going to come out with the NV15 VERY soon. Oh, and the 1 ghz athlon cant keep up with it, as mentioned. At the same time there will be 128MB versions of the original GeForce, geared towards workstations. Soon after, there will be 64mb versions of the GeForce2. Shortly after that, we will see the mobile gforce, NV11, a 3d card for laptops. 6 months from now, nvidia will introduce us to the nv20.
IMO things are shaping up very nicely in the graphics arena. We are not just seeing more frames in our games, but many additional features, thus letting people from hardcore gamers running at 640x480 in low detail, to those that desire 32bit quality and large detail wanting to realize all that our technology can bring us, be satisfied with one card, regardless of the company producing it
Now seriously, I do believe our obsession with video cards has been a bit extreme lately
I had this problem a few months back. I used to have an ATI Rage Fury w/ 32RAM. It did the job pretty well, though I never bothered to benchmark it or check my FPS.
Anyway, I kept reading how hot the TNT2 cards were, and everyone was telling me that they blew everything away. So, being hardware geek I am, I went out and dropped $250 for one. Did it make a difference? Not an appreciable one that I could see. HL Team Fortress Classic seemed to run a little smoother, but for the most part, I couldn't tell any difference.
I managed to hold off on the Geforce cards, but now that the new voodoo's and geforces are coming out, the temptation will be pretty great. Still, it seems to me that the gaming industry needs to be careful not to sacrifice substance for style. Take Q3 and Unreal:Tournament, for example. Two of the best looking games ever, but is the gameplay really that impressive? Yeah, the single-player mode is not the focus of these games, as they're built for on-line play, but it's mostly just the "run and frag" variety, with a little Capture the Flag thrown in for good measure. I played the demo's for both of these, and by the time the actual games came out, I was back to playing Starcraft and Alpha Centauri. Let's hope that game designers don't forget to make good games in their quest for the most impressive looking environment.
I don't see how a 6-month release interval can be considered a dishonest business practice in any way at all, as long as the released products aren't of shoddy quality. It's simply called keeping ahead of your competition. If they can't keep up technically, then too bad for them.
The driver issue - That's a different story. There's no reason not to go open-source. Maybe their hardware does some really neat stuff that might be revealed by open-source drivers. Well, that's what hardware patents are for. If they haven't patented whatever is so damn revolutionary about their card that they can't release source, then they're stupid.
Whatever secrets they have, they'll become obsolete soon anyway. In this market, the value of IP degrades pretty quickly.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
They're all faster than you currently will ever need.
Today, that might be true. But as another poster pointed out, faster cards allow less 'optimization experienced' coders to make their ideas workable.
Maybe with built in T&L, explicit support for 3D, and the slew of 'overkill' functionality, we will see some truly remarkable new ideas develop.
Sure, the human eye can't see much difference in the ultra-high frame rates. But, when you have a whole lot of 3D shapes moving independently on the screen, mutating as they go, the lower end cards will start to chop, while the top-dogs will run smooth.
I certainly don't want my Lawnmower Man experience screwed up by BitBlt redraws. And that's exactly what such high-end hardware will make possible (or at least more likely). Fully immersive VR with complete freedom of motion - granted, on a screen it will always look crappy. The VR goggles (or whatever) is just the other side of the coin to the very shinny graphics cards first side.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
A few months back when I was looking at upgrading my system, I had a choice between several different cards. I decided that Matrox was the most clued-in company with respect to open source and Linux drivers and I voted with my wallet. The G400 Max is plenty fast for the assorted OpenGL games and apps on Linux, and I have the source to the drivers.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
> That might be the next frontier. Even if we can get life-like quality.
:)
2 points.
A) We will continue to need fast 3D for quite a while. What you said, all in the name of realism. I want my perspective-correct shadows, I want my realistic fog, my bezier and NURB surfaces, etc.
The world is just too complex, and today we don't have the horsepower to accurately model it, so we approximate it: badly.
B) Thankfully photo-realism isn't the end-all and be-all. Real-time Cartoon rendering is starting to pick. Check out some the latest issues of Game Developer.
Cheers
> Agreed, Quake is already running at 110 fps on my PC (and don't tell me 30 fps is good enough... that has been discussed in the past)
Yes, it's curve of decreasing returns...
The jump from 10 fps to 30 fps is much more eye pleasing then a jump from 60 fps to 80 fps.
Anything over 60 (to 72) and you won't be able to tell the difference.
HOWEVER, we do need obscene frame rates, so we can apply full scene anti-aliasing.
Think of difference the texture filtering makes: linear (usually software), or bi-linear filtering.
Basically instead of needing 4x the resolution with linear filtering, we can achieve a look of a MUCH higher resolution via the bi-linear filtering.
Cheers
Compare this to about a year and a half ago, when the TNT came out. "Sure, they support 32-bit color and higher texture sizes, but we have more FPS! No true gamer cares about how good their games look, they just want more FPS!"
The sad thing is, I think 3dfx knew this would happen--that's why they've been pulling away from emphasizing the performance of the Voodoo 5, and instead hyping the full-screen anti-aliasing.
On a side note, it now seems that the Voodoo 4 (the single VSA-100 chip) has no hope of seeing the light of the retail market. Some OEMs _might_ pick it up, but considering that the Voodoo 5 5500, it might be a bit of an embarrassment to release the Voodoo 4.
~=Keelor
In essence, this boils down to a matter of taste. You seem to be saying that all of the games which really require that level of graphic support aren't really your cup of tea, but for tens of thousands of people, it is precisely their cup of tea.
On the RTS front, while it was certainly a playable-as-hell game, I heard plenty of people complain that their brand new, whopping fast machine was limited to 800x600 in Starcraft, just because Starcraft couldn't go any higher. Myth was the first (fairly) recent game to really start to reverse that trend: Homeworld tried to completely stand it on its ear.
As magnificent a game as I thought Homeworld was, I really did feel that it was limited to some degree by the constraints of the technology: many strike craft + many ion cannons = big framerate losses.
So, in other words, pay attention: I'm predicting that newer RTS games will will benefit from better tech more than their predecessors did.
The drivers are beta, but they work just fine?
Beta drivers are beta because they haven't been qualified, certified, tested, whatever. Heck, even non-beta drivers have bugs and problems! So I'd think if NVIDIA had beta drivers for Linux, that by the very definition of beta, they haven't tested it thoroughly enough to guarantee anything under Linux.
Which goes back to poor Linux support, given how many generations of cards have come and gone under Linux now...
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Actually, from what I understand, they can't release the code due to NDAs with other companies whose technology they use. Or something along those lines. Wonder if that'll change anytime soon. Prolly not.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Linux is more then just the x86 chips. As far as I know the Nvidia cards won't work on PPC flavor or on the Alpha flavor of Linux. I don't want to leave out our *BSD friends either. It can easily be argued though, that the games that are available for Linux right now are pretty much all x86 closed source. The fact remains though that if any of the other platforms that Linux runs on or the *BSD people want to do anything with these cards they are SOL. Would it really give competitors and advantage to release the register programming interface for their cards?
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
The biggest problem, of which no-one has actually mentioned, is that nVidia is working so hard on getting new silicon out the door every six months that they just don't have the people to work on the drivers. This leaves the people with current GeForce cards a little annoyed after shelling out over 200 quid for the card. Agreed, the card performs well and I am happy with it, but the card has functionality that isn't even implemented in the drivers yet! Why do hardware houses insist on releasing their products before their driver has the capability to exploit the hardware built into the card?
My next card will probably not be another nVidia, unless, of course, they're support and drivers are improved drastically. This is exactely the problem ATI faced, luckily they had a large OEM base that supported them.
To make my point more valid, I used to work for the company behind the SuperFX chip for the Super Nintendo (used of Starfox and a few others), which progressed onto a core for the old Cyrix chip (the one with the graphics built into the chip). I know that when the silicon is being designed, the old drivers are nowhere near as supported due to the fact that people are working on the software for the new silicon.
c0rarc
"Compare this to about a year and a half ago, when the TNT came out. "Sure, they support 32-bit color and higher texture sizes, but we have more FPS! No true gamer cares about how good their games look, they just want more FPS!"
And at the same time nVidia PR was saying, "Sure, the V3 has more FPS than the TNT, but we have 32-bit color and higher texture sizes!". When nVidia T&L was announced, 3dfx it would be a while before T&L was properly supported. When 3dfx announced the T-buffer, nVidia claimed that gamers would prefer the T&L speed boost to the prettier FSAA (Quote nVidia PR rep, who asked if 3dfx's VSA-100 stood for "Very Slow Architecture" in a public interview).
These two companies have been bashing each other constantly. 3dfx uses their "PR specialist" Bubba (His real name) Wolford (sp?), while nVidia 's attack dog is Derek Perez. Open your eyes, *all* corporate PR divisions are full of it, some are just a little better at convincing you of the contrary (As nVidia seems to have done to you).
The reason that 30fps (or lower for movies) looks acceptable is that the filming process produces motion blur. The motion blurred image is much closer to what our eyes get from reality than an every-single-frame-is-crystal-clear rendering from a video card. To produce a similar effect from a typical 3D card, you need enough more frames that your eyes can't see them all and produce the blurring on their own. (Like real life) It seems obvious that you need at least 2x the frames to get a blurring effect between them, since you have to have 2 frames to blur between.
Newer video cards ARE beginning to incorporate motion blur, which will help enormously. But it is cheaper to simply up the framerate, at least up to a certain point. (Which I don't think we have really reached) Motion blurring sounds like a very computationally intensive thing to do.
So there are reasons to go to 100fps-- if the frames are clear, it will take many more of them to approximate the effect that motion-blurred TV or film produce at 30fps.
I'm a 3D Animator/Programmer and a student so I find myself looking at the game cards to find which one is the best solution for my work. I can't afford the top of the line GL card that just gives me the raw crunching power I need. Therefore, fill rates and all the other bells and whistles don't phase me at all.
The one thing that is most important to me, however, is support. I don't mean telephone, but platform. I recently got burnt on buying a Viper 2000 because they refuse to make NT drivers with any sort of hardware acceleration. Then Linux runs into the same problem. I was sold by their web site when I was deciding on the card for my new computer. Their web site turns out to be a flat out lie. And if there's one S3 developer out there reading this, I have a size 12 boot that has your name all over it.
So now I'm incredibly leary of these game cards coming out with all these whiz bang features but will probably only develop for WinBlows 2000. I need drivers for NT4 because that's where the software is these days, and I need Linux drivers because that is where the graphics software is going and where I create most of my custom software. So when a company now comes out saying they're going to support this and that, but don't have the drivers to back it up, I'm just going to wait.
This summer, I will probably just buy a GeForce I. Because now they have released the drivers for it under Linux (it isn't open source but I don't really care) and they've always had stellar NT support. I know people here like their drivers open source and their cards to be screaming fast, but I just want one that works as advertised and fits into my meager budget.
Taos
Once every videocard has some form of 3d in it with driver support for all OS's (like what happened when all cards had 2d acceleration and drivers for everyone), which should happen in what, 18 months?, do we expect to see some killer app for 3d Web or VRML 3 or something? i would think so.
i know there are tons of arguments against a 3d interface, but so were there against 3d games when Ultima Underworld came out! if i can move around with absolutely no effort under Q3A or UT, why can't a Q3A level be a web site?? sure it's faster to see all in one page, but if slashdot looked like a Q3A level (with news posted in floating billboards and sections looking like houses, buildings, huts and spaceships) would you log on? i would...
ah, but there's the matter of download speed. well if evey other person has downloaded flash plugins, and realplayer, and are now actually using it, couldn't they download a set of very compressed textures so that when you log on all you download is the wireframe file and changing images, wouldn't this be comparable with downloading html and changing images???? c'mon programming gods, it can't be that hard right? besides, if all you have to download is a 3d browser, which already amount to many megs, you could send all basic textures there couldn't you?
whatdoyouthink people?
========================
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
At least, that's what Nick Triantos of nVidia, the guy responsible for the Linux drivers, just told me. Apparently, the drivers released yesterday have full support for the GF2. For once, we appear to have drivers for a new product before the Windoze people! :)
If that thing really is in stores on friday... hell yeah...
------
I have a Leadtek GeForce DDR in my dual P2 450 machine. I upgraded it to two processors in February at which time Win NT started locking up several times a day. I recently upgraded the graphics drivers to version 3.72, and that seems to have saved NT. However, Quake 3 (when played in SMP mode) crashes (and sometimes locks up my machine) - I would guess the MTBF (mean time between failure) is about five minutes for Q3 with "r_smp 1".
On top of that, Leadtek won't supply the Control Panel display settings stuff for NT that they have under Win98, so my gamma settings are too low (better than under Linux though where 3D games are unusable due to the darkness).
Come on guys, fix the drivers. The fastest card in the world isn't much good if I can't use it.
I'm going to want a Voodoo5 for just this reason- I have a voodoo2 too! ;) PCI version will be available, and it will allow me to stick with my old machine (a Powermac, btw) and enjoy FSAA which I really like the idea of. I'm not a FPS guy, I'm an 'X-Plane' fan ;) plus, even with FSAA it should give a moderate speed increase on the voodoo2 which has only (*sigh* 'only') 12 megs :)
Yeah we all know nVidia's chips can crank out the fps. What is more important to me as a customer of theirs is support, if I buy their card I would really like continued support even after the chip is a few months old. nVidia has this balls out release schedule that makes them pump out new silicon every six months, I can't think of many people that upgrade that often. I've been waiting for three months for decent drivers for my TNT2 Viper v770 (which I bought in August) under Win2k. From 3dfx's website it looks like the V3 has Win2k and Mac OS drivers for their cards. That brings up the issue that nVidia is neglecting a market they could really cash in on, Macs. With the Sawtooth chipset Macs have come alot closer to being really kickass gaming machines, especially combined with the G4 processor.
The chip itself looks impressive but then again so do the Radeon256 and VSA-100. ATi and nVidia have bump mapping which is a really rad looking effect if it's used in a game while the VSA-100 had the T-buffer that lets you do all sorts of video effects. I'm not sure yet which card is going to get my money. It will probably be the one that supports the platforms I'm cruising around on.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
All my original statement was that beta drivers is not fine.
Supported drivers are the goal, though some take that to mean binary, some take that to mean source, some take that to mean phone call support. Whatever.
So being satisfied with beta is pointless. Beta is only temporary, transitory, towards final release.
We, as consumers, should not be expecting beta stuff, in general, yet that is what we have with Windows, Netscape, and a whole raft of other software and products.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*