Posted by
emmett
on from the go-do-that-voodoo-that-you-do-so-well dept.
Ant writes: "Yahoo
posted the press release that 3dfx Interactive® Inc. has temporarily delayed the release of its Voodoo5(TM) 5500 AGP. The press release states that the company is taking this action to ensure that it meets its own high standards for product quality."
There are actually already Linux DRI drivers out on an (unstable) cvs branch, that are supposed to work pretty well in 16 bit mode already, although 32 bit mode reportedly crashes the machine. It's the tdfx-0-0-2 branch I believe...see The DRI Page at Sourceforge for more details.
One Microsoft Way
--
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
Back Order This product is not currently in stock. We have orders placed with our supplier but have not received a date yet as to when we will receive this product. We will make every effort to fill your order as quickly as possible and to keep you updated on our progress.
3dfx's performance even with DRI is abysmal to the best (when compared to Windows - see linuxgames.com). nVidia is much closer - and bests 3dfx's framerate by a good margin.
Sure, Closed source has its disadvantage: it crashes on my MVP3 machine, AGP isn't supported on these motherboards, but get over it, Closed source != end of the world..
I think you are talking very subtle shades of "truly commited to Open Source."
I disagree. There are people at 3dfx who are working hard to get Open Source in the door. (Joseph & Kieth). Maybe management isn't 100% on board, but neither is Matrox.
It's a shame that the ONLY company that has released all specs and driver code is being slamed here. Matrox always has to be cajouled into releasing their specs.. just usable specs even).
In all of my talking with 3dfx people, never have they held back on the technical details of the glide driver or the hardware. (I am working on the h3 branch of glide to the alpha platform).
Please read this message and tell me they arn't working. I just can't agree with your assment that they are so much the better kind of folks.!
> Thanks for the detailed response. However, simply because we haven't > released info yet doesn't mean we aren't working on it as we speak and that > we don't intend to. Most of the data was never meant for public > consumption and much of it needs to be reformatted, completed, etc. for > release. Our culture is very engineering driven and so, as you might > expect, there are many radical linux heads running around the company saying > we should make all of our IP public including our our vlsi chip designs... > =) > > Anyway, everything you said is well understood here. Well understood. > We've been working with Precision Insight to enable fast 3D on linux for > quite some time. You will continue to see lots of action in the open > source/linux community soon from 3dfx. We intend to be a primary > contributor. To date, we've released our 2D specs, our new compression > algorithm (fxt1), and more WILL follow. =) > > > Keith
I'll take a 3dfx or a Matrox to a nVidia or a Yamaha (Which I have spent alot of time talking to about OSS). 3dfx seems to have followed up on their promises of open source drivers and specs, and has done really well.. please explain exactly what they have failed at provinding to developers of open source code since they provided the documentation and source code last December.
Wrong. The V5-5500 (the card that this news post is about) uses an internal Molex connector for power. The V5-6000 uses an external "Voodoo Volts(tm)" power supply.
Possible technical reasons
by
Bouncings
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· Score: 1
I would like to know what the likely technical reasons are. Lately, we've seen a lot of video cards dealing with heat issues.
Interestingly enough, this coorisponds pretty closely with rumors of Nintendo delaying Dolphin (their new game system). Although they are not confirmed, it could be that Nintendo and 3dfx are facing similar technical challanges that they are running to kinks with. Hrm.
Just speculation...
-- --
Ken Kinder
ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com
http://kenkinder.com/
Re:Possible technical reasons
by
aclaudet
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· Score: 1
If it is a heat dissipation problem then I can see the modifications already:
1. Seat your VooDoo5 in the AGP slot 2. Connect the monitor to the DB15 socket 3. Connect your garden hose to the 1/2" NPT nozzle next to the DB15. Note: Operator is responsible for providing adequate drainage.
Re:Possible technical reasons
by
Devil_Dog
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· Score: 1
How do you figure MS has dropped all future plans for DirectX, they still support it very much. Also, your Windows 2000 example is just plan wrong, Win2k has MORE DirectX support than NT4 did, Win2k SHIPPED with DirectX 7, the same version Win95/98 use, while NT4 only had support for DirectX 3, and that wasn't even until Service Pack 3. Check out http://www.microsof t.com/DirectX/homeuser/information/dx4nt.asp for the real deal.
Does anyone have a game that actually maxes out any of the current generation of video card, or the previous generation for that matter? QA3 at 170fps is meaningless.
Q3A does max out these cards, simply don't run them at 640x480. I have a GeForce and Celeron 450 and only manage 45fps average at 1024x768x16 with all the bells and whistles turned on.
The latest Ultima, "Ultima CXVII - Lord British Teleports Away", will max out just about anything available if you set the clipping planes way back and run at the highest LOD.
Hahaha... seems like the V5 is just 4 Voodoo2s on one board. What have 3dfx been doing since Voodoo2 was released?
This is sad. Is nVidia going to be the dominant graphix board maker now like Intel is the dominant CPU maker. Is this what it will become? A world dominated by nVidia, Intel, and Microsoft products?
Uhm, silly, Glide is 3dfx's proprietary product. Considering the point that it's a dead API (do new games even offer support for it?), and that 3dfx has turned it into AbandonWare (is that the term now?) and opensourced it, I don't see why any video card company would be interested in supporting it.
Although it runs super fast on 3dfx cards since it apparently almost matches the register level opcodes, if you bothered going down the feature lists and comparing it with the latest Direct3D or OpenGL implementation, it has about half the features of either (since Direct3d has essentially cloned every openGL feature). If you're worried about legacy game support, there are already a number of glide->openGL wrappers out, and now that 3dfx has opensourced everything someone will probably have glide drivers for all the different cards out eventually. For instance, Creative was working on a glide driver for TNT's/2's called "Unified," but I'm not sure if they're still developing that.
I think you're forgetting about AMD. They have managed to create a cheap, viable and *faster* alternative to Intel processors which put the frighteners on Intel (have a look at the 1Ghz battle).
nVidia may be the dominant graphics card manufacturers - for a while. Right now though it's great, lots of competition and lots of rapid developments, with new mega powerful cards being churned out every 6 months. Can't wait to see what they'll come up with next...
Does anyone know if 3dfx will be producing any more 3d add on cards. The voodoo2 kicked much ass and i've heard rumors of another. 3dfx, if emailed, changes thier answer about every month.
-- ..which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably designed for cooling the blood-T P
I think that a delay is a pleasant slowdown to the current pace of new graphics cards, seems like only yesterday that voodoo3's and GeForce's where new...
I doubt that there will be any real reason to upgrade to one of these new cards for some time tho'.
It *was* almost yesterday that the GeForce was new. It was like a year and a half ago (or longer, I think) that the voodoo3 was new. It really shows, too, because the voodoo3 really sucks compared to a lot of todays top graphics cards.
One Microsoft Way
--
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
They are taking preorders..
by
Dman33
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· Score: 1
You may have overlooked it, but Buy.com is listing the card as a backordered item. This way you can buy the card now, and it will ship when it is available.
Shouldn't this be termed...
by
subtraho
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· Score: 3
Shouldn't this be termed "pulling a Blizzard" by now? They've honed it to a fine art.
-- -subtraho
Re:Shouldn't this be termed...
by
subtraho
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· Score: 1
Well, maybe, but Blizzard (as with 3Dfx) doesn't usually release utter crap like IS has.
-- -subtraho
Re:Shouldn't this be termed...
by
bughunter
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· Score: 1
"pulling a Blizzard"
You suggest they blend chunks of the Voodoo5 into tall cups of soft-serve ice cream before shipping? Sounds yummy, but I think it needs a more robust cooling system.
Why are all the people on slashdot so worried about Nvidia opening the drivers when they dont care about the source to the games that they run?
I mean I've been setting back watching the 3dfx vs Nvidia bitchfest for a while now, but I guess I'm a cheat because I have a TNT2 with closed drivers for q2/3 and 2 V2's SLI for all my wine/3dfx games.
Why are all the people on slashdot so worried about Nvidia opening the drivers when they dont care about the source to the games that they run?
There's a difference between infrastructure and applications. I'm quite content to run binary only word processors, or binary only games. But I don't approve of binary only operating systems or binary only drivers.
A web browser I would count as infrastructure as well, as it is effectively a windowing system and application programming interface in its own right.
Windows drivers much Linux?
by
FORTYoz
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· Score: 2
3DFX may support Linux, but it seems as though it is half-ass support. If you look at the recent benchmarks on linuxgames.com, the 3DFX cards have the largest gap between the Window and Linux drivers.. says you will only get like 75% of the performance you will get under Windows. Is this going to change in the future or will we continue to see half-ass support?
Re:Windows drivers much Linux?
by
cronio
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· Score: 3
I asked Daryll about this recently on the dri-devel mailing list...here is was he said:
3dfx does have a high-performance OpenGL implementation. They put a reasonable amount of manpower into it. I think this is showing you the performance improvement you can get by putting real resources behind the project.
The nVidia situation is interesting. In that case, they are using essentially the same code base between Linux and Windows. The question to ask is why the Linux version is then slower? It could be an OS issue, a compiler issue, a driver issue, or something else entirely. If we close that gap, whatever it is, all the implementations get better. By the way, 2.3 kernels have been signficantly faster, so the 2.4 release may help with the difference.
The argument is that Open Source efforts can do it better, but you have to qualify that a bit. What defines better? In some cases we're not concentrating on the same focus. For example, Mesa tries very hard to be a complete and conforming version of OpenGL. In some cases that may mean losing some performance compared to tweaking of Q3A at the expense of everything else. Some of the security and stability fixes in the MGA DRI code mean we lose a bit of performance. The 3dfx in-a-window implementation under Windows is quite a bit slower than their full screen mode.
You also have to compare manpower efforts. 3dfx and ATI put a lot of people on working on their drivers. They are each paying PI for one engineer. That limits not only how fast the drivers can be produced but how good they will be. We're also really not seeing much help from the community. We'd love to have more people contribute.
The 3dfx driver has remained mostly unchanged (except for bug fixes) for the last year. That's because I've been payed to get it running on different boards (V3/V4/V5), to fix some bugs, and improve the infrastructure (DRI). We really haven't had the resources to spend doing optimizations and to rewrite some of the really ugly parts in the code.
The bottom line is that there is room to improve. I have no doubt that with the right attention all the drivers would be very close to their windows counterparts. We just need some good people to do the work.
One Microsoft Way
--
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
Re:Windows drivers much Linux?
by
cronio
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· Score: 1
the DRI drivers aren't as fast as the 3.3.6 ones yet tho.
One Microsoft Way
--
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
Re:Windows drivers much Linux?
by
FORTYoz
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· Score: 1
Yeah, I second the statement that the DRI drvers ARE *slower* then the NON-DRI 3.3.6 ones. DRI is just more overhead.
it would be nice to think that the company is holding back the realease because of there own "high quality standards", but we all know that they probably found some hardware guru sniffing glue and decided that maybe they should hold back on release until they checked out his facts. IF they are holding it back because the product doesn't meet thier expectations, it certainly is a breath of fresh air. I really hate rushed projects, and I hate being involved in them, but hey s@^! happens.
Is it gonna work with AMD?
by
TopShelf
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· Score: 1
Just wondering if there's any word as to whether the Voodoo5 will work with AMD boxes any better than the Voodoo3. I (and apparently many, many others) had to go through a number of tricks to get the dang thing just to work...
who cares bout the 5500 ? the only card i'm gettin from 3dfx this season is the 6000.. i mean.. dual chips ? ati's been there.. QUAD CHIPS is where its at.. (the gigapixel gloating value helps too (hopefully they'll market it the same way apple marketed the "GIgaFLoP"))
I guess your ignoring the fact that the 6000 generates heat like a pig and draws power in the same realm as my entire laptop?
-- --
"So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Let's.... applaud them!!!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5
Yes, let's applaud them. I have to post this anonymously, because I still care about my job, but I just wanted to say how much I hate the practice that has become standard in software industry in general and at my company in particular - if you promise a release date, you HAVE to ship it, no matter what the quality is - who cares if marketing underestimated the time needed? And then every two weeks after that we ship "patches," everything gets fucked - who wins????? customers?! no way! developers? hardly! but hey, marketing promises got "delivered"!!!
I hope sooner or later more and more companies (and shareholders, analysts, etc.) will begin to realize that if you delay your product by two months, NOTHING bad is going to happen, but if you ship crap, it's not going to improve your customer relationships.
I suggest we write polite and GRATEFUL e-mails to 3dfx THANKING them for caring about quality and expressing support - who else if not/. crowd can "feel their pain"? I'm sending an e-mail right now...
Re:Let's.... applaud them!!!
by
Yamao
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· Score: 1
I just did. Anyone else?
-- Be nice to your friends. If it weren't for them, you'd be a complete stranger.
Re:Let's.... applaud them!!!
by
DrTomorrow
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· Score: 2
How do you download a hardware patch? You can't. That's why they are delaying the release date and recalling all the boards from the store.
If this had been raised a fortnight or so before launch then yes, this would be a valid point. However this announcement has come only a couple of days before (launch date was 26/5 was it not?) - only a showstopper would cause a company to delay at that sort of notice (remember Intel and the 820 fiasco with the memory corruption problem with 3 Rambus RIMMs?).
At the very least this suggests unrealistically tight testing schedules at 3DFX, at worst - well how does Voodoogate sound?
Re:Let's.... applaud them!!!
by
bughunter
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· Score: 2
How do you download a hardware patch?
You use this hoary old thing called "surface mail" to upload your bad hardware and download a replacement.
Case of Note: The companies making PowerPC accelerator cards, a market where there is a lot of competition, use this approach quite frequently with new models. Check any Mac Hardware discussion area, MacFixit, xlr8yourmac, or DealMac, and you will find that for every new release of an accelerator card, there are customers who find problems that eventually become "patched" at the factory, and customers who specifically wait until they feel a satisfactory number of patches have been implemented before downloading anything.
3dfx doesn't have any real competition for their Voodoo line (ATI? I said 'real.') so they can afford a brief delay to patch their hardware. For them, it's cheaper than customer support.
Re:Let's.... applaud them!!!
by
Guppy
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· Score: 2
"Did you forget Nvidia?"
Mr. Bughunter was talking about the Mac market, where nVidia does not currently have any options. nVidia has said they may offer Mac cards in the future, but nVidia has already stated that the NV15 (GeForce 2) will not be one of them -- so Apple users will probably have to wait until at least early 2001.
Re:Let's.... applaud them!!!
by
Eviltar
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· Score: 1
I agree, but just imagine what it's like for all of those people waiting for their VooDoo5 card on pre-order. Keep in mind this announcement came out just a couple of days before the cards were supposed to be delivered.
I know personally how it feels to wait for new tech to be shipped. It hurts... it hurts...:(
Oh well, not my problem. I already bought a wicked GeForce 2:)
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Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness. -- Bertrand Russell
Re:Let's.... applaud them!!!
by
Jebediah21
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· Score: 1
Maybe not. I think the general idea of don't ship till it's ready is a good idea. However, if a company does delay something by 2 months, something else will be better. If there are major issues with the product it makes sense to delay it. If it is just leaving a few things out of the driver I would rather see it shipped. Technology moves to fast to get everything perfect before something else bests it.
--
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
Their v5-6000 has four separate chips running in parallel... each with its own cooling fan. The board requires its own external power supply.
And if that isn't scary enough, Quantum 3D is building 8, 16, and 32 (THIRTY FRICKIN TWO) processor... well, "cards" isn't the right term: they are external rack mountable boxes. It uses 1600 WATTS.
And technically illegal (? not sure about this - I do think they can ask you to stop if you cause too much interference) to use in a residential neighborhood. Only FCC Class A approval. Class A=commercial only (too much interference for residential). B=residential allowed (of course you can use a Class B in a commercial area too).
With all the geeks running really ridiculous stuff in their residences, I think everything should be engineered to Class B standards (i.e. low interference).
-- Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Well those Quantum 3D things are meant only for commercial use anyway. You have to wonder though... a lot of people run their computers with the cover off their case (for different reasons)... so much for class B certification.
I forgot to mention that the v5-6000 (4 chips) is going to be $600 so it is questionable whether that could be considered for home use... no way in hell I am putting something putting off that much heat and noise (from the fans) in my computer. I can barely stand the noise coming from my computer from the one fan on my tnt2, celeron, two hard drives, and power supply (although the power supply I have is very quiet).
Time for us 15A/120V users to get 220V service... or more circuits. You aren't supposed to load a 15A line more than 1850 watts. Computer supply: 300W + 1600 watts = too much.:-)
-- If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I heard you could buy the optional Potato Powered Pack (P-3) that will the card for 3 days off 12 potatoes? Anyone confirm this rumor? Maybe Slashdot will post the story on the front page soon...
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Maybe it's not such a bad thing...
by
ProudestMonkey
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· Score: 1
I'm obviously disappointed to hear about this, but hopefully they'll be able to up the quality and be able to compete a little better with a late release. I'm getting sick of listening to the comparisons and sneers from Diamond fans. Voodoo forever...
What is a good video card to get if you don't want to spend a lot of money, don't play games, but still want decent graphics, and want it to work well with X.
It seems we focus so much on high end, game orientated cards, when I imagine a good many of us would be happy with a well supported mid range card.
Matrox is know for their excellent 2D. Some of their older cards, like the Millenium II, or even the mystique, are good cards, and being older would be fairly inexpensive.
ATI cards are nice (for 2d only), ATI Xpert types for example. Sure they are only and they suck for anytype of gaming, but they do have strong points. For example, this ATI Xpert 98 (8 megs) really kicks ass (for everything but games). It is well support under X (Have got it to work under both Linux and OpenBSD), works great under SVGA (Linux only), support under BEos and works well under Windows9* (haven't tested NT).
In it's day it ran about $80, you could probably pick one up now for about $50 I could bet. Nice cards, it has worked under all envoirments I have throwen at it (expect quake2, which sucks in anything over 640x480, but is playable at 640x480, doom and Age of the Empires looks nice under it, Herteric 2 is EXTREMELY slow even with all eye candy turned off).
--
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Re:steve woston forever
by
cvillopillil
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· Score: 1
This troll you're referring to (the one who claims to work for J J J J J ulius games), is NOT the REAL STEVE WOSTON.
... Ok, let's say they release crap. We'd go on and on badmouthing them for incompatibility, lax Quality Assurance Standards, and all the glitches because of "rushing the product to market too quickly".
So, for once, a company decides (for whatever reasons: technical, political, financial.. who knows) to withhold a product until it meets higher standards.
And yet, somehow, we find a way to bash them for this, claiming that they need to "pick up the pace" and that they're "already behind nVidia in the video card wars".
Let's cut them some slack, and not judge until we have a final product in our hands. I'm telling you, this is the only forum in the world where we can badmouth company's no matter WHICH choice they make. =)
So, for once, a company decides (for whatever reasons: technical, political, financial.. who knows) to withhold a product until it meets higher standards.
And yet, somehow, we find a way to bash them for this, claiming that they need to "pick up the pace" and that they're "already behind nVidia in the video card wars".
Well, you must believe everything you see on the TV, right?
When a company says it's delaying a launch "to meet higher standards", it does not mean that some engineers gathered together and decided that some parts needed additional polishing in order to be just right. What it means is that the company discovered a show-stopping bug, something so awful and horrible and bletcherous and unpatchable that even the marketing people agreed to postpone the launch. This, in turn, generally indicates that the product in question was rushed and suffers from the MOMOWFIL (Move On, Move On, We'll Fix It Later) syndrome which is not a good thing.
In any case, there are ample reasons to suspect that 3dFX is already dead and we are now witnessing the last covulsions of a corpse...
Kaa
--
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Since noone has read the news release here it is..... (I can tell by idiotitc comments made here that noone has) Media Advisory 3DFX DELAYS VOODOO5 SCHEDULE Date: May 24, 2000 What: 3dfx Interactive® Inc. (NASDAQ: TDFX) today announced that it has temporarily delayed the release of its Voodoo5(TM) 5500 AGP. The company is taking this action to ensure that it meets its own high standards for product quality. The company discovered that the Voodoo5 may be experiencing field failure rates at very low levels in certain configurations. The company is conducting further tests to determine whether a problem actually exists. 3dfx anticipates this action will delay product availability between seven and 14 days. "We believe that this affects only a small number of configurations, but we feel that this is the safest thing to do," said Randy Schussler, vice president of operations at 3dfx Interactive. "We're taking this action to ensure that our customers receive a high quality product that exceeds their expectations."
Doesn't 4 come after 3? Shouldn't it be the VooDoo4?
--
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
Re:I've always wonderred
by
pyronicide
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· Score: 1
There is a voodoo 4, it uses the same basic architecture that the voodoo 5 series will use, except that, instead of 2 vs-100 graphics processors, there will only be one, accompanied by either 16 or 32 megs of ram.
Yeah, but programmers and hw designers do not like the number four. Windows 4 = Win95. Palm Pilot 4 = Palm 5. etc.
Scratch that. Maybe Marketers do not link #4
Tom
-- Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots.
-Don DeLillo (Underworld)
I used to be a big 3Dfx fan...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 4
I mean, really. I wrote GLIDE-only games and everything. When the Voodoo cards first came out, they blew everything else completely out of the water: They kicked ass.
But times have changed. Voodoo 5 isn't much to get excited about. The guy that sits next to me at work, has one in his machine to check compatibility with our product. When the GeForces first arrived in the office, there was a bit of "Hey! I wan't that in my machine!" going on, but when the Voodoo 5 arrived, noone even really wanted to install the thing.
Actual quote from a coworker: "OK, I tell you what. You run up the demo, and I'll see how big my yawn is."(1)
Why the lack of interest? Well, what's to get excited about? Sure, it's fast, but, as someone else pointed out, no games max out on the card's speed because they need to still run on slow-ass machines without crawling, and as you start to add scaling functions, you start to add overhead -- remember, the CPU still has plenty of work to do.
Now, the GeForce (and IIRC ATI's new card, the Radeon) has hardware to take some of the geometry strain off the CPU. Plus, newer cards are adding sexy new stuff such as cute pixel-shader features. When you get down to it, these sorts of things are far more interesting than raw fill rate / card tri rate, which is all the 3Dfx cards actually offer.
This is because when you get down to it, texture-mapped triangles are not very interesting. Sure, they make a good building block, but there are things you just can't realistically represent that way, unless you generate textures, texture coordinates, and do interesting things with them, on the fly.
It's with tricks like these that we can improve lighting models, reflectivity effects, and volumetric effects, to bring the otherwise rather flat, plastic world nearer to the more realistic and impressive world of raytracing, but in real time. Sure, you use cheap hacks, but at 60fps, noone notices...;-) And then the gamers are happy, and us game developers are happy too:)
(1) the yawn was medium-sized, by the way. Their full-screen anti-aliasing is quite good quality. Nothing else startling to look at though.
Re:I used to be a big 3Dfx fan...
by
pyronicide
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· Score: 1
You say that 3dfx still holds the raw fill rate / card tri rate, but this is untrue. Only the Voodoo 6 will be able to compete with the GeForce II, and it seems that by the time that it gets released, Nvidia's next gen part is going to be released, and it is going to woop the buts of every other gpu out there. Take my word for it, NDA's do not allow me to go any farther..... The only thing that 3dfx has over the competition is their *special* features : t-buffer, fsaa.... Unfortunately, as said above, the fsaa is only ok, not on the killer ap level that would make people give up raw fill.
Re:I used to be a big 3Dfx fan...
by
Temporal
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· Score: 1
Hell, they don't even have FSAA over nVidia now. The GeForce and GeForce 2 can do FSAA with the 5.x drivers.
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Re:I used to be a big 3Dfx fan...
by
DrTomorrow
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· Score: 1
It's not a Voodoo 6, but a Voodoo 5 6000, with 4 processors.
--
Everything in this post is false.
Re:I used to be a big 3Dfx fan...
by
barleyguy
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· Score: 3
3DFX's FSAA is superior to the GeForce's. The way the G-Force does anti-aliasing is to render at a higher resolution and interpolate back down. It cuts your performance immensely, and only works with games that support the higher resolution.
The way 3DFx does FSAA is to render slight variations at the same resolution, and then average them. It is better quality, and works with more games. It is also faster, in the case of 2x. This also allows for 4x FSAA, which is even better quality.
I will probably go with 3dFX for my next video card, because I use a multimedia projector for gaming, which has the advantage of size, but the disadvantage of lower resolution (800x600). FSAA is great for this type of application.
If you use a high resolution monitor, though, you can just set your resolution to 1280x1024 and turn off FSAA. It's not noticable at high resolutions. In this case, I'd probably go for the GeForce 2.
-- ---
"So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
Re:I used to be a big 3Dfx fan...
by
LordNimon
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· Score: 4
Voodoo 5 isn't much to get excited about.
It is if you are a Macintosh user. The Voodoo 4 and 5 boards blow away anything else available for the Mac. Granted, some Macs can't take the boards because they don't have any free PCI slots (a big problem in the Mac world), but I have a PowerMac 8600/300 for which the Voodoo 5 5500 PCI is perfect. I'm more than happy to pay the $350 for that card.
-- And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Re:I used to be a big 3Dfx fan...
by
Temporal
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· Score: 2
Rendering at a higher resolution and interpolating down would be the same speed as 3dfx's 4xFSAA. 3dfx's implementation cuts performance quite a bit as well.
I find it sort of odd that nVidia's method, as you describe it, does not produce the exact same image. It is essentially the same operation. 3dfx renders the same frame 4 times, with pixel offsets of (0,0), (0,0.5), (0.5,0), and (0.5,0.5). After averaging, that should look the same as just rendering at a higher res and then averaging every 4 pixels into one, right? What am I missing here? Can you point me to a comparison, preferably with screenshots?
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Re:I used to be a big 3Dfx fan...
by
stripes
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· Score: 3
Rendering at a higher resolution and interpolating down would be the same speed as 3dfx's 4xFSAA.
That need not be the case. If you render the pixel four times and avg there is no need to store those four pixels to memory, and then read them back. Rendering at 2x (four intermediate pixels per one output pixel) you need to write pixel values five times, read them four times, and have memory dedicated to the intermediate image (and not textures, or on card virtex lists).
So if any portion of your performance is limited by memory bandwidth (or availability) on the 3D card, the 3Dfx method will be faster. If not, they should be as you suggested, pretty much the same (all else being equal)
That's not saying that's what actually happens, but it is quite possable.
3dfx's implementation cuts performance quite a bit as well.
Could be.
I find it sort of odd that nVidia's method, as you describe it, does not produce the exact same image. It is essentially the same operation. 3dfx renders the same frame 4 times, with pixel offsets of (0,0), (0,0.5), (0.5,0), and (0.5,0.5). After averaging, that should look the same as just rendering at a higher res and then averaging every 4 pixels into one, right? What am I missing here? Can you point me to a comparison, preferably with screenshots?
Beats me. Either could be taking shortcuts which change the result image. It is also possable, but unlikely that the FSAA actually takes more samples if the originals arn't "close enough" in color space. Many software 3D renderers (like POVRay) can do that. It can be fairly expensave in terms of runtime (depending on how you define "close enough", and how busy the image is), but can produce some stunning results.
If they don't do that, I expect some future 3D card will.
Re:I used to be a big 3Dfx fan...
by
LordNimon
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· Score: 4
My 8600 is an established system with lots of memory, several SCSI devices, and a huge SCSI hard drive. I couldn't just get a new G4, I'd have to spend $1000+ in upgrades to make it as capable. And even if I did get one, I'd still keep the 8600 as a backup computer (our business runs on Mac technology). Besides, I could always transfer the Voodoo 5 to my G4 and use it in a dual-monitor setup.
One thing I forgot to mention in my original post is that there is a petition that asks Apple to include AGP Voodoo 4/5 cards as a build-to-order (BTO) option for G4's. If you're a Mac user, I strongly suggest you sign the petition. We all know that ATI's monopoly on Mac video doesn't encourage them to make good drivers.
-- And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
The REAL reason for the delay...
by
TrevorB
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· Score: 2
A sad day at 3dfx today. The Voodoo 5 cards are so large and heavy, it appears that one of the primary engineers for the card was killed when the industrial strength crane used to lift the card out of the case accidentally failed and dropped the card over his head, crushing his body in the process.
Engineers were later heard to report that the card in question was stil functional and "played Quake 3 Arena 47% gorier than before".
I'm still holding out for the Voodoo5, because as far as I can tell it is the only PCI card to give good 3d performance. Are there any other feasible options?
Apparently, ELSA is making a PCI GeForce in Germany: http://www.zdnet.de/produkte/artikel/komp/200004 /erazorxpci-wc.html
I seem to remember NVidia making a statement that they wanted to get into the Mac market, so they'll have to get board manufacturers to make PCI versions for that.
Why do you need PCI? All the newer boards I know of have AGP, so you probably have a pretty slow processor. A faster processor would help you out a lot more than a faster video card. You can probably get an Athlon+motherboard for less $$ than a Voodoo5.
Ok, with the Red Wings out of it, who do you like?
This brings up a question I've always wanted to post on Ask Slashdot...what hockey team is the favorite among geeks? An argument could be made for any of the following:
Pittsburgh - mascot is the Penguin. 'nuff said.
Ottawa - play in the Corel Center. Possibly the only Linux ad you'll see in all of sports.
New Jersey - their logo brings to mind the BSD daemon.
San Jose - the Mecca of geekdom.
Anybody got any more?
-- Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
As to your first question, Colorado - they play the purest and most skilled style of hockey among the final four.
To your second (favorite team among geeks), a good candidate might be Washington. The owner there (a former AOL guy, I think) gave all the players lap tops, and everybody involved with the team participates in forums via their website. Their coach, Ron Wilson, is an admitted internet junkie.
My personal fave, of course, is the Red Wings. Been a fan since the early 80's, so it's been a great ride.
One of those two cards should do you well...the Matrox G200 has a better quality picture.
--
Re:a TNT1 or a Matrox G200
by
iCEBaLM
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· Score: 2
One of those two cards should do you well...the Matrox G200 has a better quality picture.
He said work WELL, not leak 5 megs of ram every time you open/close an XMMS OpenGL plugin.
The nVidia drivers are crap, and they're really slow comming up to speed. I own a TNT1 and I wouldn't recommend buying one if your main platform is X. Go with a Matrox/3Dfx card.
It's too bad that in my experience 3dfx has the same quality problem that MS has. They make some very sweet hardware at times, but software support? ha!
I got the Voodoo 3 3500AGP when it came out, and while it runs Glide games like it should, there's still no OpenGL support. (No, I mean FULL support... for Windows.) and maybe I'll get windowed Glide rendering one day... yeah right.
The video capture sucks royally too. My ($300+ CDN) 3500 on an AGP bus, in my P3-450 with 128MB of RAM (and AGP aperture set properly,) barely manages to get 20 frames per second at 320x240 truecolor, set it any higher and it chops like crazy.
Funny that an $80 CDN PCI Hauppauge WinTV tuner card in my... Cyrix 200MX with 32MB RAM (before the CPU wore out,) was able to capture 30fps at the same quality settings!
Also, I'm sure many of you have heard of the "DVD acceleration." This is... a hardware video overlay. That's it. Luckily I didn't trust them and got a full hardware decoder card anyhow.
Personally while you can count on game companies supporting 3dfx, I won't expect quality until I see it from them.
(BTW, when the card works for 3d, it's awesome, it just sorely lacks in some major points that you should expect from any decent manufacturer.)
Re:MS syndrome
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
Full OpenGL support? Try a Windows build of Voodoo Mesa. It's not nearly as fast as the Quake-optimized GL's, but my Quakehead friends all found it quite usable and it delivers superb image quality.
As we have seen in the past with such notable example as Microsoft and Intel lack of competition in the marketplace can be a bad thing and right now nvidia has far and away the best bang for the buck. Are we looking at another portion of the industry that is going to be dominated by a single industry or will ATI or Raedon step up to bat? Can 3dfx make a comeback at this point?
The difference between Microsoft and nVidia is that nVidia is tops because they're better than a wide range of other video card makers, while Microsoft is tops because Windows is (marginally) better than no operating system at all (don't argue that you can get Linux - Joe Shmoe couldn't install Linux if his life depended on it).
Don't mistake market dominance due to a quality product with market dominance due to monopolistic practices.
yes, but the Voodoo4 is so useless...
by
Tridus
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· Score: 1
It may never be released at all. If it has been released already, its simply a single cpu card (the V5 5500 is 2 of the cpus on the V4), and the card compares favorably to cards released a year ago, maybe. Compare it to something like the GeForce 2, and to say it gets crushed by the foot of god is an understatement.
-- --
"So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The upcoming Voodoo 5000 is a dual chip solution - effectively doing SLI. The 6000 will be a quad chip part (which is why it has that nasty $599 estimated retail price). The VSA 100 is the actual chip that 3dfx developed. It supposedly will scale to 32 processors...a third party manufacturer is already on board for an 8 chip card for professional 3D / CAD etc...
Seems nVidia will strengthen their lead with another 3dfx delay (cool, cuz I like nVidia, bad because competition drives prices down and performance up...though in many ways nVidia acts as competition to itself by releasing new products on a 6 month cycle.)
Matrox really makes the best stuff for normal everyday use. You should be able to pick up a G200 for fairly cheap now, and it'll do everything you want from it pretty happily.
-- --
"So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The v5 is crap, take a look at it head on vs a real card like the GeForce 2. Its a total joke.
So they get the Ion Storm award, not the Blizzard award.
-- --
"So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Re:umm, the v5 *is* crap.
by
subtraho
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· Score: 1
Ok, I get it now:) I really meant old voodoo and voodoo2 cards, but hey.. they prolly fit the IS model better anyway simply because they have just as much as an overinflated ego as Romero does.. I'm surprised 3Dfx hasn't offered to make me their bitch yet. *grin*
-- -subtraho
Re:umm, the v5 *is* crap.
by
startled
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· Score: 1
You read too much firingsquad.:) This discussion is totally off topic, but what the heck. Here goes: FSAA enabled, Voodoo 5 is a better implementation, and generally faster. No question. FSAA disabled, GeForce 2 is quite a bit faster than Voodoo 5 5500, no question. Voodoo 5 6000 hasn't been sufficiently tested. Not interesting to me, though, since I'm not going to drop 600 bucks on a vid card.
It draws more power, generates more heat, and does 32 bit color. Of course everybody else has been doing that for years, but its a brand new feature from 3dfx!
-- --
"So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
That Quantum 3D thing is a beast! I have to say it, but could you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things??
Girlfriend: Hey Dman33, what is that smell in the computer room? Dman33: Oh, the cat. Grilfriend: No, not that type of smell, this is like burnt toast. Dman33: Yeah, like I said, it is the cat. Girlfiend: ? Dman33: Damn thing crawled between my dual 1600W 32-processor video cards...must have made contact or something, little critter got fragged big-time!
Re:News Release...Field Failures!
by
Embedded
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· Score: 1
Obviously 3DFX has seen the Fiasco Intel has had over their RAMBUS(C) Chips and observed that Intel could pay out over $600 Million. Judging by user comments regarding AMD, PC133, Rambus and power supplies quite rightly they have decided to duck and cover. If I was their shareholders I would rather ship bad software than bad hardware and bad hardware is what they have seen in beta.
-- Vista, the single biggest argument for Desktop Linux! It doesn't "Just Work"(TM).
But now, the roles are reversed...
by
Sir_Winston
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· Score: 2
Yes, nVidia is now king of 3D performance--by a slim but tangible margin. But the really interesting, freaky fact is that 3Dfx is now king of 3D visual quality. Thanks to 3Dfx's superior hardware-assisted implementation of 4x anti-aliasing, their visual quality kicks the crap out of nVidia's inferior technique. All of the reviews I've read linked over at AnandTech which were done with the drivers 3Dfx will ship with, rather than the older immature drivers which came with pre-release factory samples which had been floating around the review sites, state that the Voodoo 5 5500's 4x anti-aliasing and arguably its 2x anti-aliasing really trounce the visual quality of the GeForce 2's anti-aliasing.
The weird thing is that 3Dfx used to be the king of performance, evangelizing fill rate and frame rate over visual quality, and nVidia argued that visual quality was more important than fill rates. That's the essence of the whole argument that broke out when the TNT and TNT2 had 32-bit color but the Voodoo 3's had only 16-bit color but more speed. Now the roles are reversed. I feel like Alice, through the looking glass...
But unfortunately I fear that 3Dfx's superior image quality is just a fluke, and that they're touting it now because it's 3Dfx's only advantage. Remember that the Voodoo 4 and 5 were supposed to be out by last Christmas, before their design and fab difficulties, so effectively they're now a product cycle behind nVidia. If 3Dfx fails to treat the current emerging lineup as an "interim" line of products, and doesn't bust its collective ass to get another and vastly superior product cycle out the door before this Christmas, it will go down faster than a freshman at a frat party. Goodbye, 3Dfx.
I hope this doesn't happen, because I have respect for what 3Dfx did to advance 3D on the PC, and I'd hate to see yet another graphics company go bust, but at this point it looks grim for 3Dfx. The top of their current emerging lineup has superior image quality, perhaps the best in 3D right now, but at framerates which can't be considered more than just "passable." Their Voodoo 5 6000 is an utter joke, if and when it finally gets released; it'll cost twice as much as a GeForce 2, but definitely won't double the performance, and will require 4 chips and an external power connector. Yes, the very thought of such a massive, impressive piece of hardware makes me want to jam my slot 1 into a tight little socket 370, so to speak [nudge-nudge, wink-wink], but the card isn't financially sound since we know nVidia's next product cycle will probably surpass it.
But, anyway, it is interesting how the roles have reversed, and 3Dfx's visual quality is now their selling point while nVidia's raw performance is now their selling point. My poor ATI A-i-W 128 feels so...inadequate... I need some video card Viagra...
--
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
First of all, 3dfx should be *commended* for delaying a product if they don't think its ready. This is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. This is exactly what we want from other companies.
Praise them, they are doing the right thing.
Unfortunately, the Voodoo 5 sucks badly. The GeForce 2 rips it up in the power consumption, heat, feature, and sheer power fields.
I don't really think its 3dfx's fault entirely, maybe they lost some good talent or something. I mean they haven't done *anything* that was top of the line since the Voodoo2. They ruled back in those days. Then there was the Banshee. Then the Voodoo3. Both of which were lame.
Now we have the V4 (which is a joke), and the V5 (which is a bigger more expensive joke).
So, lets applaud them for their policy, and slam them for their technology. At least then we are doing it right.
-- --
"So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Sorry, it's over. If 3dfx were a horse, we'd have to shoot it. They've lost a lot of key people, and they just can't compete with nVidia. The 5500 was supposed to compete with the GeForce, and now the GeForce2 has beat it to market, they're too far behind. Plus, the whole VSA multi-chip thing just doesn't work out too well. For one thing, you need 64MB to compete with a 32MB GeForce or other card, and the whole HD power cable thing is ridiculous. I hate to say it, but the company that created the consumer 3D market is done for.
The "low end" VooDoo5 was beating the GeForce2 at high res. If you play games at 640x480, I feel sorry for you... sniper fodder.
My "old" VooDoo3 3500 will pull 100+ fps in Glide (1024x768). I only expect the new card to let me do the same with Full screen AA, and probly at a higher res.
The GeForce2 is a nice card - there is no arguing that. But for the price of a DDR GeForce I can get a card that will out perform the GeForce, outperform the GeForce2 at high res, it'll support all my Glide games (Glide wrappers don't cut it), and I get open source Linux support. Case closed as far as I'm concerned.
I wonder how much of this was a quality concern, and how much was the sudden realization that the nVidia GeForce 2 is faster, cheaper, available NOW,and doesn't require a freeking AC adapter to be plugged into its rear-end?
From what I've read, the V5 6000 is the only card from 3dfx that has any chance of beating the GF2, but only in a few select situations, such as running older games at super-high-res with 4xFSAA. And then it is only a little bit faster. (yes, the GeForce 2 does FSAA.) Add to that the fact that the 6000 will cost US$600 (when it finally comes out) as opposed to the GF2's current price of $300, and you have a sorry situation indeed...
nVidia in the GeForce GTS at least uses a form of antialiasing similar to Photoshop's bicubic filtering which is computationally FAR more expensive than 3Dfx's pseudo-nearest-neighbor anti-aliasing approach. nVidia is sacrificing fillrate (of which the GeForce 2 GTS has marginially more than even the TOP of the line V5) for visual quality, same as always. Don't forget per-pixel shading, etc., either. Of course, in terms of overall 'value' of the cards there's the simple fillrate advantage of the GTS (1.6Gtexels/sec as opposted to the V5 6000's 1.3) and nVidia having T&L which 3Dfx STILL does not have.
don't forget other Windez versions!
by
Pope
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· Score: 2
nt 1 = "NT 3.51", nt 2 = "NT4", nt 3 = "W2000", so nt 4 = ?
Gee, nice 'lameass' filter, I had to make all those lower case. Thanks, Taco.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
-- It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Re:don't forget other Windez versions!
by
TheGreek
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· Score: 2
nt 1 = "NT 3.51", nt 2 = "NT4", nt 3 = "W2000", so nt 4 = ?
Nope.
The first version of Windows NT was released as Windows NT 3.1. Then came 3.5 and 3.51. Then we had NT 4.
Now we have Windows 2000.
Re:don't forget other Windez versions!
by
FauxPasIII
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· Score: 1
>> Now we have Windows 2000. And may god have mercy on your pitiful soul.
Some numbers to go with that.
by
Temporal
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· Score: 2
Here is an article which compares the raw power of the cards. As you can see, the V5 5500 has nothing over the GeForce 2, but the V5 6000 might have a chance, but only when T&L is not a factor.
BTW, "128MB" on a V5 6000 is no better than 32 on a GeForce 2 due to the multiprocessor design. But the GF2 can have up to 128MB, which would be like a V5 with 512MB on-board. heh.
-- Claiming that your operating system is the best in the world because more people use it is like saying
McDonalds makes
Problem does not affect Voodoo4 cards...
by
Guppy
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· Score: 2
According to an EBNews article, "...A board using a single VSA-100 chip -- branded under the Voodoo4 name -- is functioning normally."
The V4 (Which has not yet shipped), is basically meant to be a rival for the TNT-Ultra. According to Anandtech's 3dfx Voodoo4 4500 & Voodoo5 5500 Preview, the V4 (with Beta drivers) does pretty good against the TNT-Ultra. It's a little slower at 640x480, a little faster at higher resolutions. At the same time, it offers some extra goodies like 2x FSAA, improved 16-bit color quality, and (possibly) a lower price.
nt 1 = "NT 3.51", nt 2 = "NT4", nt 3 = "W2000", so nt 4 = ?
IIRC, the first version of Windows NT was called version 3.1. I'm not sure if there was an NT 3.11, but 3.50, 3.51, and 4.0 followed. And of course, 5.0 (the third major version of NT) is called Windows 2000.
Sorry for the off-topic post.
Speaking of 'big 3Dfx fans'...
by
taniwha
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· Score: 1
Have you seen this thing - it has 4 (yup count 'em 4) fans and an external power supply - I bet when you turn it on your tower takes off and hovers a few inches off the floor - and all the lights on the block dim. To be fair this seems to the the 6000 which I guess is the next-big-thing-TM after the just-recalled 5500:-)
The 6000 will probably be quite nice, but by the time it ships it may be beaten by cheaper, more cleverly designed cards. Right now it's a LOT of old technology crammed onto one massive board.
I'm somewhat happy with my voodoo 3500 (the fastest card that was around last year or so), but they could never get my TV to work. It might be Microsoft's fault, but I'm planning to buy a GeForce 2 next time I buy a computer.
(Anyway-- this is a good thing. The best thing about 3DFX products is their compatibility [my card notwithstanding] and quality. Too bad it's getting pushed back, but this is the Right Thing to do.)
3dfx may surivive and thrive in a different market
by
GauteL
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· Score: 2
.. than the NVidia-cards. Sure, you can get the NVidia Quadro's, but it still is pretty middle-range.
Think about a big 8x + CPU workstation from SUN with a rackmountet 3dfx graphics system from Quantum. It may not sell in large quantities, but the margins sure are enormous on these beasts.
Perhaps 3dfx should realize that their current offerings cannot compete with NVidias in the middle-range market, and keep the Voodoo4 and 5 as low-end, ditch the Voodoo6, and consentrate on really large grahical systems, with 10+ VSA-chips. That's Voodoo Scalable Arcitecture alright.
I hope 3dfx can regain some of their momentum, as I have a rather nostalgic feel about them. NVidia's offerings are _much_ better though, and ATI is looking good. If VSA had reach products 1/2 year ago, they might have been a success in the home and OEM-market. Now it'll probably still stay afloat in the low-end market, but get killed in the mid-end.
V5 vs. GeForce: The Coke vs. Pepsi Taste Test...
by
Guppy
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· Score: 2
"...nVidia in the GeForce GTS at least uses a form of antialiasing similar to Photoshop's bicubic filtering which is computationally FAR more expensive than 3Dfx's pseudo-nearest-neighbor anti-aliasing approach..."
Thresh's Firingsquad recently performed a side-by-side visual quality comparision of the V5 vs. GeForce GTS FSAA. According to the testers, the Voodoo5 had the best picture quality when in 4x mode, while the GeForce was better than the V5's 2x mode in some games. Both cards seemed to have a few glitches in FSAA mode--the V5 had a "bleeding" problem at 1600x1200, while the GeForce wouldn't work with D3D games.
From their conclusion: "The results from this set of tests were considerably different from that of last time. Seeing the games in motion side by side is truly the only way to compare the two cards. 2x FSAA comparisons yielded mixed results. The quality difference between the two cards was exceedingly close. We tended to like the GF2 FSAA when compared to the Voodoo 2x. However, if we take into account performance figures, the Voodoo is the clear choice. With 2x FSAA, the Voodoo performs considerably better than the GeForce2 FSAA. When it comes to 4x, the Voodoo has no competition in terms of FSAA quality."
Not the quality leaders, either
by
Temporal
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· Score: 1
Perhaps it is a matter of opinion, but I think that the high polygon counts provided by the GeForce and GF2's T&L engines look much better than FSAA. example
The GF2's pixel shaders are pretty nice as well.
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Re:Not the quality leaders, either
by
billybob+jr
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· Score: 1
Not to be argumentative, but to just present a counterpoint:
FSAA works out of the box. To me that is a huge feature. It will work on every single game you have, if I understand correctly. To me that is a huge benefit.
If I bought a GF or GF2 and brought it home tonight and plugged it in, I don't see the benefit I would get from T&L. I would get more fps in Quake3, but other than that... Maybe some games that support it have come out and I missed it.
I have to agree, those screenshots you linked to are quite impressive. They are breath taking. Although if the scene were antialiased it would look even better;-)
I think both cards are reasonable choices for gamers.
Are you sure? "nearest neighbor" doesn't make sense as an anti-aliasing routine: this is where you interpolate missing image pixels (or multiple image pixels landing within a screen pixel) by just choosing the nearest pixel and repeating it.
From what I understand, 3DFX's 2x AA is done by rendering an image twice as big, and averaging image pixels into screen pixels. 4x works similarly. This would be much more expensive than guessing using bilinear interpolation. Can you explain further or give a reference?
I've read that the voodoo 5 does not oversample images, but computes 4 times the same image, with 0.25 pixel shifts, and combines these 4 four image to obtain the antialiased one. People say that it produces a better antialias than oversampling. The GeForce use oversampling.
Not surprisingly, it's already up on Ebay too...
by
Guppy
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· Score: 1
As you can see here, it's already up on Ebay as well. The guy claims he's selling an OEM version -- I'm guessing it's either an engineering sample or a card that was given to a reviewer.
I'll risk a point to say this: The Trident 8900, while dead slow, is supported so well, it is nearly unbelieveable nowadays. Even a few DOS games had support directly for it, and the setup disks had enough Trident 8900 specific customizations that it puts any other card (including my G200) to shame.
So why was the above post (-1, redundant)?
-- If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Actually, the Voodoo5-6000 has a 1.2MPixel per second fill rate, as opposed to the 800MPixel per second fill rate of the Geforce 2 GTS. Also, because the memory bandwidth is double that of the Voodoo5-5500, it actually attains that speed, unlike the GF2, which has a huge memory bandwidth bottleneck despite using DDR RAM.
Also, you'll never see serious improvement in your game performance with a GF2 until games actually use T&L acceleration; even then, as HardOCP discovered, high-end (>700MHz) processors with SSE or 3dNow! are actually faster than the GeForce's T&L unit. So if you have a 750MHz Athlon, a GeForce with hardware T&L enabled will be a graphics decelerator.
800MPixel with two texels per pipeline. Since almost every game uses multitexturing, that means 1600MTexels per second, compared to the V5-6000 1200.
Quake 3 is a T&L game, and depending on the map you play, T&L can make a big difference. Many more T&L games will be out in a few months. And I'm a game developer, so I sure as hell am seeing serious improvement NOW on my GF2 with T&L. Thank you.
------
Trying to make me feel better
by
Ogre332
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· Score: 1
Personally, I think they're just trying to make me and everyone else who was dumb enough to buy the Voodoo3 3500 tv AGP feel better.
-- Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip. - Homer Simpson
Different methods of performing FSAA
by
Guppy
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· Score: 2
Thresh's Firingsquad has an excellent (and lengthy) article in which they test the visual quality of the Voodoo5 vs. the GeForce2 in FSAA mode. A quote from the article explains the basic difference between the two different ways the cards perform FSAA:
...3dfx uses a method called RGSS or JGSS (Rotated Grid Super Sampling, Jittered Grid Super Sampling). NVIDIA uses another method called OGSS (Ordered Grid Super Sampling).
The OG! OGSS is exactly what it sounds like. Ordered grid means that the image is processed in an ordered fashion. Cut the screen up into nice little blocks and you have an ordered grid. Now we have super-sampling. This means, in really dumb downed terms; that the picture is processed except with a bit more data in it. Mind you, this is all going on within a pixel, thus creating a much more detailed image. The image that is represented at 640x480 is actually processed with as much detail as would be present in something that has, as an arbitrary number, 1.5 times as much detail. So in order for the GeForce2 to display a scene with FSAA at 640x480 it must do the work required for displaying an image at 960x720 and then some. Other stuff like color blending goes on to smooth out the image also. So all in all a considerable amount is going on to create the effect that FSAA delivers.
Voodooss The 3dfx card does another variation of FSAA called jittered grid super-sampling. JGSS is a derivative of RGSS. RGSS, as opposed to OGSS, takes the image that is going to be represented and processes all data at a slight tilt. Jittered grid has the tilted data set, but it has a randomizing factor thrown in to make it seem more natural. If all the data was rotated at the same angle it wouldn't make too much of a difference in comparison to OGSS. This is because our eyes tend to pick up on patterns relatively easily. The random patterns make sure your eyes don't catch on to what is going on. Following this, all the other color blending and hoo-haa takes place to spruce up the image.
Why is it that ppl are commending 3dfx for delaying their product for better quality, but when an intel release gets delayed for the same thing, we laugh? ^_^
"Why is it that ppl are commending 3dfx for delaying their product for better quality, but when an intel release gets delayed for the same thing, we laugh?"
Probably because Intel screwed up while they were trying to shove Rambus down everybody's throats, and their attempt at backfired.
Voodoo 5 vs other things
by
Lord_Sloth
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· Score: 1
A year ago I bought a Voodoo3 2000 and while it was not the best card on the market at the time, and is becoming a bit obselete now. I have never had any serious driver issues with it, but I want to upgrade to another card to get access to various bonuses like 32 bit colour and a DVD controller thing, a TV-out would be an added bonus despite the fact I don't have a TV. What is the best Video card on the market at the moment, and how will it compare to the V5 6000? My main concerns are that it will work well immediatly, my V3 has never had any problems - ever, Q3, UT, Baldurs Gate, Ultima9, etc. Every game I have played with it has worked well and straight away, I have a friend who has a TNT2, he has had lots of problems with some games, when he gets them going they look really good, but it just seems that 3DFX works straight away. can enyone tell me what I would get instead of a V5, any why?
-- You are not me, therefore you are not important
Anybody worried about nvidia going Redmond?
by
MyAss
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· Score: 4
If someone doesn't produce a competitor to nvidia it just a matter of time before nvidia becomes the Microsoft the 3d card. Or maybe Intel would be a better example. Think about it... Because no one (until recently with the Athlon) could touch intel in the PC cpu market they thought they could force consumers to buy what they wanted at their price. Which is why they went with RDRAM (they have alot of money invested in RDRAM... so if you have to buy RDRAM to use intel chips they make even more money) It didn't matter the RDRAM wasn't as good as promised and that it cost tons of money you had to buy it because that was all that the newer Pentiums could use... Then came AMD and the Athlon, which forced intel to stop being lazy and lower prices create the MTH and push the coppermine cpu out earlier. So what is the moral of the story?
Competition is good dammit! I hate it when people who own nvidia chips get all happy when a competitor stumbles. Don't you understand that competion keeps prices down and increases inovation... Look at Microsoft, no competion is why they can charge rediculous prices for their shit OS. If 3dfx comes out with a card that is just as fast or faster than the Geforce2 then prices would be even better.
Moral? There is no reason to be happy that 3dfx is having trouble even if you are a stalwart nvidia fan. (unless of course you own stock in nvdia) Less competion just means higher prices and slower less inovating releases of hardware later.
--
They misunderestimated me. -- George W. Bush
Re:Anybody worried about nvidia going Redmond?
by
mallan
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· Score: 1
That is always a concern, but it's not a guaranteed outcome. 3dfx dug their own hole by being extremely proprietary for many years (why has everyone suddenly forgotten how aggressive they were at protecting their intellectual property now that they're open source?) and releasing several crappy products in a row.
There are a lot of talented people at NVidia doing a lot of interesting things. I think that, in this case, a nice lead in techical quality could give them the opportunity to do more research into different rendering methods, rather than just being in a "they have that feature, so we have to have it to!" mode.
For the last several years, consumer graphics card manufacturers have been trying to get to Infinite Reality level graphics. Now that they're almost there - what now? SGI doesn't have any new high end architectures to copy from, so what's the next step? Some large, well funded company needs to spend money and time on research to discover that next step. NVidia seems to be the best choice (especially given their relationship with SGI)
If the press release is to be believed, ATI will soon be nipping at NVidia's heels, so I'm not too worried about total market dominance. The Radeon chip will have support for 3D textures, which will have a lot of interesting uses. If the Radeon even comes close to GeForce2 quality, it will totally saturate the market thanks to ATI's distribution channels.
I have not used one of the new GeForce cards however I have used both a TNT2(current) and Voodoo Banshee(previous) in my system and 3D performance for games was definately superior with the Banshee. So the Nvidia cards may be capable of much more but what is the point when the Linux performance anyway is very much lacking. It is nice now to have Nvidia drivers that have some acceleration but compare them to the qualuty of 3Dfx Linux drivers and you soon see they have a long way to go.
--
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
Err, apparently you did not read yesterday's article on driver performance. The current drivers from nVidia perfrom at betweed 85% and 99% of the speed of their Windows counterparts, whereas the 3dfx drivers perform at 75% - 84%. Please go and download the XFree 4.0 drivers from nVidia.
The TNT2 is most definately faster than the banshee, especially in Linux.
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Competition is not always good.
by
Tridus
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· Score: 1
Nor is every dominant company a bad thing. nVidia got to be where it is now because they simply worked their asses off to make the best stuff on the market, why shouldn't they be rewarded with dominance? They have done nothing wrong thus far, indeed they are still cranking out higher quality stuff then everybody else and improving their products at a torrid pace. Granted they may not have the best Linux drivers in the world (so I hear), but no company is perfect.
There is pleanty of reason to be happy about 3dfx having problems, they dug themselves into this hole by releasing several crap cards in a row. They are not there because of FUD or unfair monopolies or lawyers or anything, they are there because they have been beaten on a technological level consistantly. Isn't that exactly what we want to happen, the company who makes the best technology wins? Instead of the company with the best marketing wins?
This is a Good Thing(TM). The market is such that if 3dfx goes out and makes a better board then nVidia again, they can reclaim their marketshare. Its not being run by marketing, and that is extremely good.
And I disagree that competition is always a good thing. Look at Domain Name registrations. What have we got with competition? Confusion, Names getting lost between registrars, registrars pulling all kinds of crap like saying they own your name, etc. You notice how these problems didn't exist when NSI had a government enforced monopoly.
You notice how they still don't exist in systems like CA*Net, which has a monopoly on the *.ca domain? Funny how things didn't get messed until competition started. But hey, prices did come down.
(of course I'd rather pay the extra money for a decent service, which hasn't existed in the domain name space since this competition crap started.)
The moral of the story? Competition in the 3d market is good, because its actually resulting in better stuff. But in competition, someone has to loose. At least they're losing for the right reasons.
-- --
"So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Re:Competition is not always good.
by
MyAss
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· Score: 1
There is pleanty of reason to be happy about 3dfx having problems, they dug themselves into this hole by releasing several crap cards in a row. They are not there because of FUD or unfair monopolies or lawyers or anything, they are there because they have been beaten on a technological level consistantly. Isn't that exactly what we want to happen, the company who makes the best technology wins? Instead of the company with the best marketing wins?
I agree 3dfx's cards should not sell as well if they are inferior technologicaly. I just think that people should hope that they produce one that isn't so as to give nvidia a run for its money. (and perhaps bring down the price on those shiny new Geforce2s) If 3dfx keeps putting out shitty cards they will go under, and that will be one less reason for nvidia to keep creating kickass cards.
If have a product that is a few generations ahead that the competition why bother pushing for the next generation?? Why not just wait a awhile and soak up the profits. If it wasn't for Linux hype I bet MS would have taken even longer with Win2000.
--
They misunderestimated me. -- George W. Bush
Re:Competition is not always good.
by
Tridus
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· Score: 1
re: 3dfx. Fair enough
So far as 2k goes, wouldn't it being delayed six more months to fix some of the more glaring bugs have been a good thing? If anything, the need for marketing didn't do anybody much good except for MS' competition.
-- --
"So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Re:Competition is not always good.
by
Temporal
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· Score: 1
Granted they may not have the best Linux drivers in the world (so I hear), but no company is perfect.
In fact, they DO have the best Linux drivers in the world. According to LinuxGames' benchmarks, nVidia's Linux drivers come closer to matching the performance of thier corresponding Windows drivers that any other 3D drivers available on Linux.
And 3dfx has launched plenty of FUD in the past. For instance, in the FAQ for the Bashee, one of the questions was "With your competitors supporting textures 2k x 2k in size, don't you think that your 256x256 limit will hurt your products?" The answer, "Because we are the market leaders in 3D graphics hardware, developers will write their games with our hardware in mind. So, they will not exceed the 256x256 texture limit anyway."
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3DFX vs. nVidia = Coke vs. Pepsi = Ford vs. Chevy
by
spack
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· Score: 2
I'm really getting sick of all this crap. Really I am. You are all posting like the foolish 16 to 18 year olds I LAN party with (I'm 26 myself). What am I talking about you ask?
"3DFX is dead! Long live nVidia!" "3DFX was once good." "3DFX sux!" etc...
I myself have bought 3DFX cards only in the past. I bought my Voodoo2 12MB for $300 just two years and three months ago the first week it was out. I bought my Voodoo3 3000 OEM just over a year ago for $125. I got that great price as part of a 20 pack that my friends all chipped in to order. Rember those were $175 and up when they were brand new, so $125 was a great deal. Just how often should you have to upgrade your freakin' graphics card? I cringe at once a year but I love games and want performance. I look at nVidia and see that they have this "aggressive" release schedule to try and get a new product out every 6 months. BFD!!! Who can afford that crap? Not many. You'll have to skip a generation or two between your upgrades. Then what. You suck, right? Because you don't have the very best card available you must suck. You don't think so? Sure you do.
Now I'm not saying that nVidia doesn't have a great card now. They do. But my Voodoo3 3000 is still a kick-ass card. It looks beautiful to me. Of course I don't get 120fps, but I like some eye candy. And speaking of eye-candy... yeah I know it's Glide... but... I've seen Unreal Tournament on a GeForce that had to run D3D. It looks like SHIT!!! I'll take my proprietary Glide over that crap anyday for Unreal Tournament.
Another thing that bugs me is that everything seems to revolve around the innovations of nVidia. I'm sorry, but last I checked 3DFX had some pretty serious new features. Oh, wait! That's more of that eye candy that prevents us from getting 600fps. And the nVidia has T&L. 3DFX doesn't. So... they said they didn't think it was that big of a deal. That's D3D thing if I remember correct. And you all dis on 3DFX for not being as OpenGL friendly as they should be. Then why even accept D3D as an option. D3D looks like shit. Back to the new features. I think that I'd like to see newer things added in like motion blur, focus on what's in view, soft reflections, etc. What's wrong with trying to be more cinematic in games? I'm not saying that these new features will be as good as they hope they'll be (games will have to incorporate them I think), but it's a goal. These guys I play Q3 with turn off all the eye candy on their GForce cards to get more fps. Looks like Q1 now. Funny.
And to all of you that think that nVidia is king of the hill and should crush the others, then get ready for lack of innovation and high prices. Competition is needed everywhere. Shall we get rid of AMD and just have Intel? And those damn long distance providers... let's just go back to AT&T. No, not at all... you need to be hoping that companies stay in place and keep trying to one-up each other.
And quit rooting for a damn card manufacturer like it's a commercial sports team! It's sick! It's pathetic! Go Broncos! Seattle Sucks! Indians Rule! Go Green Bay! I hate sports. I'm not playing. It makes no difference to me who beat who. I think that those who root for teams (especially those 1500 miles away) think they are part of the team or something. "We" won the game? Who the fuck is "we"? They won, not you. Same goes for graphics cards. So you've got a GeForce and nVidia is on top. What does that make you? King of the video card industry? Part of the team? Step off, fool!
The bottom line for me is a wait and see. I'll save my money for a while and wait and see how good these cards turn out to be. My money doesn't come easy. The next card I buy is going to have to push 2 years before the next upgrade. Does that seem unreasonable? I don't think that it is. I am fully open to buying any brand of card, but I want a good card. I don't buy into hype or even reviews because they are not all encompassing. And you would all do well to remember that.
Forgive my rant, but I am just tired of the whole thing.
-- For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the sheltered will never know.
nVidia already happens to be in Microsoft's pants
by
Guppy
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· Score: 2
"...If someone doesn't produce a competitor to nvidia it just a matter of time before nvidia becomes the Microsoft [of] 3d card."
nVidia's not going to become a Microsoft, they're going to join 'em. As one the stronger supporters of D3D in its earlier days, nVidia's been sucking up since Day 1. Just recently, Microsoft awarded nVidia a contract to develop the X-box graphics chip, together with a $200 million investment.
Also, please point me to the benchmarks for the low end 3dfx card beating out the GF2. Every artical i've read and bench mark i've seen has show that the Geforce is faster than everything except the voodoo5 6000 which is like 700 bucks and only wins due to brute force of 4 chips.
At least with Q3A, which is the only game that maters:-P
You might have a point with linux, but the Geforce drivers are very quick and stable, since they have been around a while.
OT: 3dfx tells nVidia to "F**k off and Die!"
by
Guppy
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· Score: 4
3DFX One-Ups nVidia: "Fuck Off and Die" San Francisco, CA - In a formal press release read to major gaming sites, 3DFX has "one upped" the video card war by telling nVidia to "fuck off and die".
3DFX, known for its revolutionary line of "Voodoo" based video cards, has been under fire recently for losing its competitive edge to nVidia, who's GeForce 2 line of cards is speculated to be slightly faster than the upcoming Voodoo 5.
"Quite frankly, I'm sick to death of sidestepping the issues and trying to be 'Mister Nice Guy'. I hate nVidia and every fucking asshole that works there," quipped Brian Burke, 3DFX's PR spokesperson. "I hate their engineers, distributors, advertisers, executives, and janitors. I especially despise Derek Perez, who I formally challenge to a knife fight in the parking lot after this meeting..."
Anybody who thinks the 3dfx vs. nVidia wars are getting increasingly ridiculous should go read the rest of this article, at SomethingAwful.
NVidia have been very strong supporters of OpenGL, and I would feel safe in saying that they have the best consumer-level OpenGL drivers for Windows.
On one hand, they are supplying chips for the X-Box. On the other, they are supplying chips for the Indrema box, which will be an X-Box competitor which runs Linux: http://www.indrema.com/servlet/site?page=Release _nvidia.html
I doubt that Indrema will face the XBox with any real competition, but it does run Linux, and it could be a cool thin client. The kind of Linux box you'd buy for your kids or your grandmother.
In addition to close ties to Microsoft, they have very close ties to SGI. SGI has been very active in the Linux arena recently, with contributions such as GLX, the OGL SI, XFS, in addition to kernel and compiler work. The NVidia Linux drivers have been developed in conjunction with SGI, and the drivers rock (with some caveats, but they're beta drivers)
Given Microsoft's history with 'collaborations' with companies, it's reasonable to assume the worst. But NVidia certainly has the balls to play this game, and they seem to be doing OK so far...
Cheers, Mark
-- "Good people drink good beer"
Voodoo 5 is worth the wait
by
ghost1911
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· Score: 1
Even if the card is delayed, I still believe that it is worth the wait. Voodoo will always be my practice primarily because I love the SDK for GLIDE. I pride in my bigotry towards 3DFX as they were the first big men on the playfield of true quality 3d graphics. Beyond their history as one of the first gamer's card manufactureres 3DFX has always had excellent support for their cards. I wouldn't be surprised if they released new banshee drivers. I'm more than willing to wait for a later release because I know that the card will first of all come with solid drivers, and secondly, if they take a long time to release, you know they won't dump the project like Sega did with all their systems. Power to the release team and 3DFX.
-- .: 2+2 = PI SQRT(1+N):. All together now, what is n?
they just dont make video cards like they used to
by
leiz
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· Score: 2
rock on! my trident 8900cl is still alive and kickin! the chip says (C) 1989 so it's been around for 11 years and it's still working just like the first day when i brought it home.
but now a days, video cards go obsolete so fast, my g200 is only 2 years old and it's already considered a piece of junk...
sigh, they just dont make video cards like they used to (=
Zetetic Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.
Elench A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.
Although I have an NVidia and am rooting for it wholeheartedly, I sometimes feel a bit uneasy about their success... they are so far ahead now that there is nearly no competition, and we all know what comes thereafter : stagnation.
I really hope the 3dfx people come up with something better than FSAA (even though it looks very cool on some games) and incredibly fast fill rates.
At this time the only game that rates Voodoo better than TNT is Unreal... and that only due to the fact that it was written solely for Unreal, and later ported... it prob. uses a lot of CPU as well... compared to other games that practically only use the GFX card.
Com-on Voodoo... I'm getting 160+ FPS on Q3A demo001 (800x600)!!! on my GeForce 1 / Athlon 700 machine...
Athlons are so cheap now, why don't you just strap one of those things on a board for your video card. Maybe I'm missing something, but that would work pretty well wouldn't it? And then when you weren't using alot of video power, you would have an extra proccesor for faster work.
3dfx was great when they launched the Voodoo. And maybe the Voodoo 2 (which has like two Voodoo chips on it). And now I hear stuff about the card being incredibly full, extra cooling, etc etc. Is 3dfx turning into intel (which does the same thing in my opinion)? It's like they stopped engineering and just put more and more on the board, which has the same effect (to them).
Intel/AMD is the same thing I think... The big 1Ghz race... If AMD would do the same thing what intel did to launch a 1Ghz cpu (that would be making pigs fly, messing with the internal cpu, putting everything closer together and stuff like that) then AMD would be able to launch a 1,4 Ghz cpu. Remember, intel is STILL using the pentium pro setup. I got this info from several sources, including objective technical reports...
that's my 2 cents worth...
byez
mindrage
"stop quoting me!"
What about PCI/AGP combo cards.
by
DABANSHEE
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· Score: 1
I remember seeing a PCI/AGP combo card, made by Jazz, it was a i740 card called the 'Bonnie & Clyde'. Well anyway it had a PCI edge connector on one side & a AGP edge connector on the other side, at each end there was a VGA 'D' connector. So all one would have to do, if they upgraded to a board with an AGP slot, would be to take backing plate of one end of the card & screw it on the other end & turn the card arround. I don't know why all Video card makers don't do this. As it would mean they would only need to have one line going, which would aid economies of scale. Plus the simplified, storage/shipping/sales of having just the one card for both PCI & AGP slots, would definitly outway any of the cost factors involved. Also a ISA/PCI combo NIC, would be a good idea to - you could have an ISA edge connector on one side & a PCI edge connector on the otherside, then when you upgraded to a all PCI board, all you would have to do is turn the card upside down, screw the backing plate on the other way arroung & finally switch over a jumper (if that was necessary).
I have a DDR GeForce card from ASUS in my computer. Yesterday I loaded up the Nvidia 5.22 drivers that allow you to enable FSAA. I fired up Q3 and just about shit my pants. It looks unbelievable. My framerate went to hell but I was able to lower the resolution to 8x6 and it without a doubt looked better than 10x7 with no FSAA, and I was still getting ~ 40fps. The best part about this is that I don't have a GeForce GTS, I have a regular GeForce DDR card. I love the fact that I've been hearing 3dfx hype FSAA for so long now and I download a leaked driver update for my old GeForce and BOOM I got FSAA too. Get the 5.22 drivers at http://www.reactorcritical.com , turn on FSAA in the driver properites, fire up an opengl game, and stand in awe. 3dfx may have a better FSAA, but that certainly doesn't out weigh T&L, AGP fast writes, and variety in card makers. Yet I still hear people yelling about how awesome the 6000 is, but for ~550$, and about a year life span, I can't see it becomming 3dfx's savior.
while i aint much to look at in person, i do look good on paper... ya know what i mean?
so until they get the horse out of the gate, they arent in the race.
hmmmm more silly cliches needed....
closed source or not, nvidia still retains the higher quality product, in both speed and actual picture quality. their gl implementation is much more mature and it shows it. BTW their linux drivers are a sight to behold, just as fast as windows...
now if we could only get my intellieye to work as smoothly q3 linux as it does in windows... i mean i cant sacrifice my rail for open source... call me shallow.... but its just not an option.
-- 3dlan.com --> Monthly lan parties in Western NY
no I was talking about nvidia
by
Tridus
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· Score: 1
nVidia didn't beat 3dfx by using FUD against them, nVidia beat 3dfx because their products are flat out better.
3dfx's FUD didn't really help them much, but they did do it as you point out. I was just trying to say that nVidia beat them by simply making better hardware and drivers (which apparently includes the Linux ones as you point out).
Sorry for not being clear about that right off the bat.:-)
-- --
"So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
i'm amazed to see how people who post in slashdot know so little... don't you people read and get informed ?.. i mean... 3dfx z'been braging about the phreaking cards for almost a year now and you still don't get it ?.. 600$ for the voodoo6... 128 megs / 4 processors 299$ for the voodoo5500 64 megs / 2 processors.. forget the shitty 32 megs / i processor voodoo4.. nywayz...i'm buying the card JUST FOR UNREAL TOURNAMENT since it IS a glide game... Quake 3 just looks so..BAD really after playing UT that it never hooked me up... Read all the reviews floatting around before saying things you can't possibly comprehend.. hehe... don't i look like a smart ass now;) and hey... Nvidia Phreaks... geforce 2 SUCKS!!
Well, if you hadn't noticed that's a 45fps *average*. That means that quite a lot of the time it's going to be slower than that. While a lot of the time I get around 40fps (going up to 60fps on easy to render areas) at 1024x768, when things start getting complex (for example very open levels like the space ones on Q3A) things slow down to the point it's easily noticable.
Having an average around 50-60fps is really at least what you want, to cover most eventualities.
Another point regarding the 140fps, all I do if I get very high fps is turn up those graphics settings and bump up the res! These figures are only used to show how powerful it is at this low res, to run at that res with that kind of power is silly, when it can look so much better and you can't tell the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Im glad voodoo is delaying their card to wait for higher quality. Maybe that means that the Linux drives will ship at the same time.
So why does buy.com already have it up for sale?
With this delay, and 3Dfx's obvious performance shortcommings, nVidia is going to continue gaining their lead.
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
NOOO!
Dammit, I WANT to believe in 3dfx. They support Linux. For a long time they were king-of-the-hill!
But now, even with the GEForce2 out, they have to delay a card that requires me to hook up a HD connector to power it?!?
Dammit, if nVidia would just open up their drivers a little bit more, I wouldn't mourn for these guys, but ARGH!
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
Interestingly enough, this coorisponds pretty closely with rumors of Nintendo delaying Dolphin (their new game system). Although they are not confirmed, it could be that Nintendo and 3dfx are facing similar technical challanges that they are running to kinks with. Hrm.
Just speculation...
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Does anyone have a game that actually maxes out any of the current generation of video card, or the previous generation for that matter?
QA3 at 170fps is meaningless.
Haha, they better get it up to its "High Standards" because the 6000 with 4 procs can't even beat the GeForce2 DDR ..
Does anyone know if 3dfx will be producing any more 3d add on cards. The voodoo2 kicked much ass and i've heard rumors of another. 3dfx, if emailed, changes thier answer about every month.
..which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably designed for cooling the blood-T P
I think that a delay is a pleasant slowdown to the current pace of new graphics cards, seems like only yesterday that voodoo3's and GeForce's where new...
I doubt that there will be any real reason to upgrade to one of these new cards for some time tho'.
A... last post (correct at time of posting)...
You may have overlooked it, but Buy.com is listing the card as a backordered item. This way you can buy the card now, and it will ship when it is available.
Shouldn't this be termed "pulling a Blizzard" by now? They've honed it to a fine art.
-subtraho
Why are all the people on slashdot so worried about Nvidia opening the drivers when they dont care about the source to the games that they run?
I mean I've been setting back watching the 3dfx vs Nvidia bitchfest for a while now, but I guess I'm a cheat because I have a TNT2 with closed drivers for q2/3 and 2 V2's SLI for all my wine/3dfx games.
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
3DFX may support Linux, but it seems as though it is half-ass support. If you look at the recent benchmarks on linuxgames.com, the 3DFX cards have the largest gap between the Window and Linux drivers.. says you will only get like 75% of the performance you will get under Windows. Is this going to change in the future or will we continue to see half-ass support?
it would be nice to think that the company is holding back the realease because of there own "high quality standards", but we all know that they probably found some hardware guru sniffing glue and decided that maybe they should hold back on release until they checked out his facts. IF they are holding it back because the product doesn't meet thier expectations, it certainly is a breath of fresh air. I really hate rushed projects, and I hate being involved in them, but hey s@^! happens.
Just wondering if there's any word as to whether the Voodoo5 will work with AMD boxes any better than the Voodoo3. I (and apparently many, many others) had to go through a number of tricks to get the dang thing just to work...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
who cares bout the 5500 ? the only card i'm gettin from 3dfx this season is the 6000.. i mean.. dual chips ? ati's been there .. QUAD CHIPS is where its at.. (the gigapixel gloating value helps too (hopefully they'll market it the same way apple marketed the "GIgaFLoP"))
Yes, let's applaud them. I have to post this anonymously, because I still care about my job, but I just wanted to say how much I hate the practice that has become standard in software industry in general and at my company in particular - if you promise a release date, you HAVE to ship it, no matter what the quality is - who cares if marketing underestimated the time needed? And then every two weeks after that we ship "patches," everything gets fucked - who wins????? customers?! no way! developers? hardly! but hey, marketing promises got "delivered"!!!
/. crowd can "feel their pain"? I'm sending an e-mail right now...
I hope sooner or later more and more companies (and shareholders, analysts, etc.) will begin to realize that if you delay your product by two months, NOTHING bad is going to happen, but if you ship crap, it's not going to improve your customer relationships.
I suggest we write polite and GRATEFUL e-mails to 3dfx THANKING them for caring about quality and expressing support - who else if not
Their v5-6000 has four separate chips running in parallel... each with its own cooling fan. The board requires its own external power supply.
3 .html
And if that isn't scary enough, Quantum 3D is building 8, 16, and 32 (THIRTY FRICKIN TWO) processor... well, "cards" isn't the right term: they are external rack mountable boxes. It uses 1600 WATTS.
URL: http://www.quantum3d.com/product%20pages/aalchemy
Thanks shugashack
I'm obviously disappointed to hear about this, but hopefully they'll be able to up the quality and be able to compete a little better with a late release. I'm getting sick of listening to the comparisons and sneers from Diamond fans. Voodoo forever...
What is a good video card to get if you don't want to spend a lot of money, don't play games, but still want decent graphics, and want it to work well with X.
It seems we focus so much on high end, game orientated cards, when I imagine a good many of us would be happy with a well supported mid range card.
Finkployd
The real Steve Woston's site is here.
Steve is genuinely upset that he's being impersonated on Slashdot.
no sig
You'd better read the fine print at buy.com! Looks like they will happily take yer money for vaporware. ;)
Geeky modern art T-shirts
I'd be concerned about a video card that consumes 200 W....think heat generation...and you have to have an extra power brick just for it.
--
... Ok, let's say they release crap. We'd go on and on badmouthing them for incompatibility, lax Quality Assurance Standards, and all the glitches because of "rushing the product to market too quickly".
.. who knows) to withhold a product until it meets higher standards.
So, for once, a company decides (for whatever reasons: technical, political, financial
And yet, somehow, we find a way to bash them for this, claiming that they need to "pick up the pace" and that they're "already behind nVidia in the video card wars".
Let's cut them some slack, and not judge until we have a final product in our hands. I'm telling you, this is the only forum in the world where we can badmouth company's no matter WHICH choice they make. =)
Since noone has read the news release here it is..... (I can tell by idiotitc comments made here that noone has) Media Advisory 3DFX DELAYS VOODOO5 SCHEDULE Date: May 24, 2000 What: 3dfx Interactive® Inc. (NASDAQ: TDFX) today announced that it has temporarily delayed the release of its Voodoo5(TM) 5500 AGP. The company is taking this action to ensure that it meets its own high standards for product quality. The company discovered that the Voodoo5 may be experiencing field failure rates at very low levels in certain configurations. The company is conducting further tests to determine whether a problem actually exists. 3dfx anticipates this action will delay product availability between seven and 14 days. "We believe that this affects only a small number of configurations, but we feel that this is the safest thing to do," said Randy Schussler, vice president of operations at 3dfx Interactive. "We're taking this action to ensure that our customers receive a high quality product that exceeds their expectations."
Doesn't 4 come after 3? Shouldn't it be the VooDoo4?
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
But times have changed. Voodoo 5 isn't much to get excited about. The guy that sits next to me at work, has one in his machine to check compatibility with our product. When the GeForces first arrived in the office, there was a bit of "Hey! I wan't that in my machine!" going on, but when the Voodoo 5 arrived, noone even really wanted to install the thing.
Actual quote from a coworker: "OK, I tell you what. You run up the demo, and I'll see how big my yawn is."(1)
Why the lack of interest? Well, what's to get excited about? Sure, it's fast, but, as someone else pointed out, no games max out on the card's speed because they need to still run on slow-ass machines without crawling, and as you start to add scaling functions, you start to add overhead -- remember, the CPU still has plenty of work to do.
Now, the GeForce (and IIRC ATI's new card, the Radeon) has hardware to take some of the geometry strain off the CPU. Plus, newer cards are adding sexy new stuff such as cute pixel-shader features. When you get down to it, these sorts of things are far more interesting than raw fill rate / card tri rate, which is all the 3Dfx cards actually offer.
This is because when you get down to it, texture-mapped triangles are not very interesting. Sure, they make a good building block, but there are things you just can't realistically represent that way, unless you generate textures, texture coordinates, and do interesting things with them, on the fly.
It's with tricks like these that we can improve lighting models, reflectivity effects, and volumetric effects, to bring the otherwise rather flat, plastic world nearer to the more realistic and impressive world of raytracing, but in real time. Sure, you use cheap hacks, but at 60fps, noone notices... ;-) And then the gamers are happy, and us game developers are happy too :)
(1) the yawn was medium-sized, by the way. Their full-screen anti-aliasing is quite good quality. Nothing else startling to look at though.
A sad day at 3dfx today. The Voodoo 5 cards are so large and heavy, it appears that one of the primary engineers for the card was killed when the industrial strength crane used to lift the card out of the case accidentally failed and dropped the card over his head, crushing his body in the process.
Engineers were later heard to report that the card in question was stil functional and "played Quake 3 Arena 47% gorier than before".
Boy it's a long day at work today...
I'm still holding out for the Voodoo5, because as far as I can tell it is the only PCI card to give good 3d performance.
Are there any other feasible options?
Ok, with the Red Wings out of it, who do you like?
This brings up a question I've always wanted to post on Ask Slashdot...what hockey team is the favorite among geeks? An argument could be made for any of the following:
Pittsburgh - mascot is the Penguin. 'nuff said.
Ottawa - play in the Corel Center. Possibly the only Linux ad you'll see in all of sports.
New Jersey - their logo brings to mind the BSD daemon.
San Jose - the Mecca of geekdom.
Anybody got any more?
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
One of those two cards should do you well...the Matrox G200 has a better quality picture.
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It's too bad that in my experience 3dfx has the same quality problem that MS has. They make some very sweet hardware at times, but software support? ha!
I got the Voodoo 3 3500AGP when it came out, and while it runs Glide games like it should, there's still no OpenGL support. (No, I mean FULL support... for Windows.) and maybe I'll get windowed Glide rendering one day... yeah right.
The video capture sucks royally too. My ($300+ CDN) 3500 on an AGP bus, in my P3-450 with 128MB of RAM (and AGP aperture set properly,) barely manages to get 20 frames per second at 320x240 truecolor, set it any higher and it chops like crazy.
Funny that an $80 CDN PCI Hauppauge WinTV tuner card in my... Cyrix 200MX with 32MB RAM (before the CPU wore out,) was able to capture 30fps at the same quality settings!
Also, I'm sure many of you have heard of the "DVD acceleration." This is... a hardware video overlay. That's it. Luckily I didn't trust them and got a full hardware decoder card anyhow.
Personally while you can count on game companies supporting 3dfx, I won't expect quality until I see it from them.
(BTW, when the card works for 3d, it's awesome, it just sorely lacks in some major points that you should expect from any decent manufacturer.)
As we have seen in the past with such notable example as Microsoft and Intel lack of competition in the marketplace can be a bad thing and right now nvidia has far and away the best bang for the buck. Are we looking at another portion of the industry that is going to be dominated by a single industry or will ATI or Raedon step up to bat? Can 3dfx make a comeback at this point?
It may never be released at all. If it has been released already, its simply a single cpu card (the V5 5500 is 2 of the cpus on the V4), and the card compares favorably to cards released a year ago, maybe. Compare it to something like the GeForce 2, and to say it gets crushed by the foot of god is an understatement.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The upcoming Voodoo 5000 is a dual chip solution - effectively doing SLI. The 6000 will be a quad chip part (which is why it has that nasty $599 estimated retail price). The VSA 100 is the actual chip that 3dfx developed. It supposedly will scale to 32 processors...a third party manufacturer is already on board for an 8 chip card for professional 3D / CAD etc...
Seems nVidia will strengthen their lead with another 3dfx delay (cool, cuz I like nVidia, bad because competition drives prices down and performance up...though in many ways nVidia acts as competition to itself by releasing new products on a 6 month cycle.)
Matrox really makes the best stuff for normal everyday use. You should be able to pick up a G200 for fairly cheap now, and it'll do everything you want from it pretty happily.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I knew it! Go ATI and Radeon!
Uh, more like go NVidia GeForce 2. Has anyone actually got their hands on a Radeon yet? GeForce2 is almost shipping AFAIK.
3dfx sucks. $700 for the top of the line Voodoo 5 which will just bearly beat out the Geforce 2? Give me a break.
http://overwhelmed.org
The v5 is crap, take a look at it head on vs a real card like the GeForce 2. Its a total joke.
So they get the Ion Storm award, not the Blizzard award.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
It draws more power, generates more heat, and does 32 bit color. Of course everybody else has been doing that for years, but its a brand new feature from 3dfx!
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
That Quantum 3D thing is a beast! I have to say it, but could you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things??
Girlfriend: Hey Dman33, what is that smell in the computer room?
Dman33: Oh, the cat.
Grilfriend: No, not that type of smell, this is like burnt toast.
Dman33: Yeah, like I said, it is the cat.
Girlfiend: ?
Dman33: Damn thing crawled between my dual 1600W 32-processor video cards...must have made contact or something, little critter got fragged big-time!
Obviously 3DFX has seen the Fiasco Intel has had over their RAMBUS(C) Chips and observed that Intel could pay out over $600 Million. Judging by user comments regarding AMD, PC133, Rambus and power supplies quite rightly they have decided to duck and cover. If I was their shareholders I would rather ship bad software than bad hardware and bad hardware is what they have seen in beta.
Vista, the single biggest argument for Desktop Linux! It doesn't "Just Work"(TM).
Yes, nVidia is now king of 3D performance--by a slim but tangible margin. But the really interesting, freaky fact is that 3Dfx is now king of 3D visual quality. Thanks to 3Dfx's superior hardware-assisted implementation of 4x anti-aliasing, their visual quality kicks the crap out of nVidia's inferior technique. All of the reviews I've read linked over at AnandTech which were done with the drivers 3Dfx will ship with, rather than the older immature drivers which came with pre-release factory samples which had been floating around the review sites, state that the Voodoo 5 5500's 4x anti-aliasing and arguably its 2x anti-aliasing really trounce the visual quality of the GeForce 2's anti-aliasing.
The weird thing is that 3Dfx used to be the king of performance, evangelizing fill rate and frame rate over visual quality, and nVidia argued that visual quality was more important than fill rates. That's the essence of the whole argument that broke out when the TNT and TNT2 had 32-bit color but the Voodoo 3's had only 16-bit color but more speed. Now the roles are reversed. I feel like Alice, through the looking glass...
But unfortunately I fear that 3Dfx's superior image quality is just a fluke, and that they're touting it now because it's 3Dfx's only advantage. Remember that the Voodoo 4 and 5 were supposed to be out by last Christmas, before their design and fab difficulties, so effectively they're now a product cycle behind nVidia. If 3Dfx fails to treat the current emerging lineup as an "interim" line of products, and doesn't bust its collective ass to get another and vastly superior product cycle out the door before this Christmas, it will go down faster than a freshman at a frat party. Goodbye, 3Dfx.
I hope this doesn't happen, because I have respect for what 3Dfx did to advance 3D on the PC, and I'd hate to see yet another graphics company go bust, but at this point it looks grim for 3Dfx. The top of their current emerging lineup has superior image quality, perhaps the best in 3D right now, but at framerates which can't be considered more than just "passable." Their Voodoo 5 6000 is an utter joke, if and when it finally gets released; it'll cost twice as much as a GeForce 2, but definitely won't double the performance, and will require 4 chips and an external power connector. Yes, the very thought of such a massive, impressive piece of hardware makes me want to jam my slot 1 into a tight little socket 370, so to speak [nudge-nudge, wink-wink], but the card isn't financially sound since we know nVidia's next product cycle will probably surpass it.
But, anyway, it is interesting how the roles have reversed, and 3Dfx's visual quality is now their selling point while nVidia's raw performance is now their selling point. My poor ATI A-i-W 128 feels so...inadequate... I need some video card Viagra...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
First of all, 3dfx should be *commended* for delaying a product if they don't think its ready. This is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. This is exactly what we want from other companies.
Praise them, they are doing the right thing.
Unfortunately, the Voodoo 5 sucks badly. The GeForce 2 rips it up in the power consumption, heat, feature, and sheer power fields.
I don't really think its 3dfx's fault entirely, maybe they lost some good talent or something. I mean they haven't done *anything* that was top of the line since the Voodoo2. They ruled back in those days. Then there was the Banshee. Then the Voodoo3. Both of which were lame.
Now we have the V4 (which is a joke), and the V5 (which is a bigger more expensive joke).
So, lets applaud them for their policy, and slam them for their technology. At least then we are doing it right.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Sorry, it's over. If 3dfx were a horse, we'd have to shoot it. They've lost a lot of key people, and they just can't compete with nVidia. The 5500 was supposed to compete with the GeForce, and now the GeForce2 has beat it to market, they're too far behind. Plus, the whole VSA multi-chip thing just doesn't work out too well. For one thing, you need 64MB to compete with a 32MB GeForce or other card, and the whole HD power cable thing is ridiculous. I hate to say it, but the company that created the consumer 3D market is done for.
The "low end" VooDoo5 was beating the GeForce2 at high res. If you play games at 640x480, I feel sorry for you... sniper fodder.
My "old" VooDoo3 3500 will pull 100+ fps in Glide (1024x768). I only expect the new card to let me do the same with Full screen AA, and probly at a higher res.
The GeForce2 is a nice card - there is no arguing that. But for the price of a DDR GeForce I can get a card that will out perform the GeForce, outperform the GeForce2 at high res, it'll support all my Glide games (Glide wrappers don't cut it), and I get open source Linux support. Case closed as far as I'm concerned.
SQ
I wonder how much of this was a quality concern, and how much was the sudden realization that the nVidia GeForce 2 is faster, cheaper, available NOW,and doesn't require a freeking AC adapter to be plugged into its rear-end?
From what I've read, the V5 6000 is the only card from 3dfx that has any chance of beating the GF2, but only in a few select situations, such as running older games at super-high-res with 4xFSAA. And then it is only a little bit faster. (yes, the GeForce 2 does FSAA.) Add to that the fact that the 6000 will cost US$600 (when it finally comes out) as opposed to the GF2's current price of $300, and you have a sorry situation indeed...
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nVidia in the GeForce GTS at least uses a form of antialiasing similar to Photoshop's bicubic filtering which is computationally FAR more expensive than 3Dfx's pseudo-nearest-neighbor anti-aliasing approach. nVidia is sacrificing fillrate (of which the GeForce 2 GTS has marginially more than even the TOP of the line V5) for visual quality, same as always. Don't forget per-pixel shading, etc., either. Of course, in terms of overall 'value' of the cards there's the simple fillrate advantage of the GTS (1.6Gtexels/sec as opposted to the V5 6000's 1.3) and nVidia having T&L which 3Dfx STILL does not have.
nt 1 = "NT 3.51", nt 2 = "NT4", nt 3 = "W2000", so nt 4 = ?
Gee, nice 'lameass' filter, I had to make all those lower case. Thanks, Taco.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
BTW, "128MB" on a V5 6000 is no better than 32 on a GeForce 2 due to the multiprocessor design. But the GF2 can have up to 128MB, which would be like a V5 with 512MB on-board. heh.
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Then explain the #8 on you post
Claiming that your operating system is the best in the world because more people use it is like saying McDonalds makes
According to an EBNews article, "...A board using a single VSA-100 chip -- branded under the Voodoo4 name -- is functioning normally."
The V4 (Which has not yet shipped), is basically meant to be a rival for the TNT-Ultra. According to Anandtech's 3dfx Voodoo4 4500 & Voodoo5 5500 Preview, the V4 (with Beta drivers) does pretty good against the TNT-Ultra. It's a little slower at 640x480, a little faster at higher resolutions. At the same time, it offers some extra goodies like 2x FSAA, improved 16-bit color quality, and (possibly) a lower price.
GeForce2 is almost shipping AFAIK.
:)
Almost? I got my 3D Prophet II GTS two weeks ago, on May 13.
Just FYI. Don't mean to troll
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Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness. -- Bertrand Russell
IIRC, the first version of Windows NT was called version 3.1. I'm not sure if there was an NT 3.11, but 3.50, 3.51, and 4.0 followed. And of course, 5.0 (the third major version of NT) is called Windows 2000.
Sorry for the off-topic post.
Have you seen this thing - it has 4 (yup count 'em 4) fans and an external power supply - I bet when you turn it on your tower takes off and hovers a few inches off the floor - and all the lights on the block dim. To be fair this seems to the the 6000 which I guess is the next-big-thing-TM after the just-recalled 5500 :-)
... it has an external power supply.
The 6000 will probably be quite nice, but by the time it ships it may be beaten by cheaper, more cleverly designed cards. Right now it's a LOT of old technology crammed onto one massive board.
I'm somewhat happy with my voodoo 3500 (the fastest card that was around last year or so), but they could never get my TV to work. It might be Microsoft's fault, but I'm planning to buy a GeForce 2 next time I buy a computer.
(Anyway-- this is a good thing. The best thing about 3DFX products is their compatibility [my card notwithstanding] and quality. Too bad it's getting pushed back, but this is the Right Thing to do.)
.. than the NVidia-cards.
Sure, you can get the NVidia Quadro's, but
it still is pretty middle-range.
Think about a big 8x + CPU workstation from SUN
with a rackmountet 3dfx graphics system from
Quantum.
It may not sell in large quantities, but the
margins sure are enormous on these beasts.
Perhaps 3dfx should realize that their current offerings cannot compete with NVidias in the middle-range market, and keep the Voodoo4 and 5
as low-end, ditch the Voodoo6, and consentrate
on really large grahical systems, with 10+ VSA-chips. That's Voodoo Scalable Arcitecture alright.
I hope 3dfx can regain some of their momentum, as
I have a rather nostalgic feel about them.
NVidia's offerings are _much_ better though, and
ATI is looking good.
If VSA had reach products 1/2 year ago, they might
have been a success in the home and OEM-market.
Now it'll probably still stay afloat in the low-end market, but get killed in the mid-end.
"...nVidia in the GeForce GTS at least uses a form of antialiasing similar to Photoshop's bicubic filtering which is computationally FAR more expensive than 3Dfx's pseudo-nearest-neighbor anti-aliasing approach..."
Thresh's Firingsquad recently performed a side-by-side visual quality comparision of the V5 vs. GeForce GTS FSAA. According to the testers, the Voodoo5 had the best picture quality when in 4x mode, while the GeForce was better than the V5's 2x mode in some games. Both cards seemed to have a few glitches in FSAA mode--the V5 had a "bleeding" problem at 1600x1200, while the GeForce wouldn't work with D3D games.
From their conclusion:
"The results from this set of tests were considerably different from that of last time. Seeing the games in motion side by side is truly the only way to compare the two cards. 2x FSAA comparisons yielded mixed results. The quality difference between the two cards was exceedingly close. We tended to like the GF2 FSAA when compared to the Voodoo 2x. However, if we take into account performance figures, the Voodoo is the clear choice. With 2x FSAA, the Voodoo performs considerably better than the GeForce2 FSAA. When it comes to 4x, the Voodoo has no competition in terms of FSAA quality."
Perhaps it is a matter of opinion, but I think that the high polygon counts provided by the GeForce and GF2's T&L engines look much better than FSAA. example
The GF2's pixel shaders are pretty nice as well.
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Are you sure? "nearest neighbor" doesn't make sense as an anti-aliasing routine: this is where you interpolate missing image pixels (or multiple image pixels landing within a screen pixel) by just choosing the nearest pixel and repeating it.
From what I understand, 3DFX's 2x AA is done by rendering an image twice as big, and averaging image pixels into screen pixels. 4x works similarly. This would be much more expensive than guessing using bilinear interpolation. Can you explain further or give a reference?
As you can see here, it's already up on Ebay as well. The guy claims he's selling an OEM version -- I'm guessing it's either an engineering sample or a card that was given to a reviewer.
I'll risk a point to say this: The Trident 8900, while dead slow, is supported so well, it is nearly unbelieveable nowadays. Even a few DOS games had support directly for it, and the setup disks had enough Trident 8900 specific customizations that it puts any other card (including my G200) to shame.
So why was the above post (-1, redundant)?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Also, you'll never see serious improvement in your game performance with a GF2 until games actually use T&L acceleration; even then, as HardOCP discovered, high-end (>700MHz) processors with SSE or 3dNow! are actually faster than the GeForce's T&L unit. So if you have a 750MHz Athlon, a GeForce with hardware T&L enabled will be a graphics decelerator.
Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip. - Homer Simpson
Thresh's Firingsquad has an excellent (and lengthy) article in which they test the visual quality of the Voodoo5 vs. the GeForce2 in FSAA mode. A quote from the article explains the basic difference between the two different ways the cards perform FSAA:
...3dfx uses a method called RGSS or JGSS (Rotated Grid Super Sampling, Jittered Grid Super Sampling). NVIDIA uses another method called OGSS (Ordered Grid Super Sampling).
The OG!
OGSS is exactly what it sounds like. Ordered grid means that the image is processed in an ordered fashion. Cut the screen up into nice little blocks and you have an ordered grid. Now we have super-sampling. This means, in really dumb downed terms; that the picture is processed except with a bit more data in it. Mind you, this is all going on within a pixel, thus creating a much more detailed image. The image that is represented at 640x480 is actually processed with as much detail as would be present in something that has, as an arbitrary number, 1.5 times as much detail. So in order for the GeForce2 to display a scene with FSAA at 640x480 it must do the work required for displaying an image at 960x720 and then some. Other stuff like color blending goes on to smooth out the image also. So all in all a considerable amount is going on to create the effect that FSAA delivers.
Voodooss
The 3dfx card does another variation of FSAA called jittered grid super-sampling. JGSS is a derivative of RGSS. RGSS, as opposed to OGSS, takes the image that is going to be represented and processes all data at a slight tilt. Jittered grid has the tilted data set, but it has a randomizing factor thrown in to make it seem more natural. If all the data was rotated at the same angle it wouldn't make too much of a difference in comparison to OGSS. This is because our eyes tend to pick up on patterns relatively easily. The random patterns make sure your eyes don't catch on to what is going on. Following this, all the other color blending and hoo-haa takes place to spruce up the image.
Why is it that ppl are commending 3dfx for delaying their product for better quality, but when an intel release gets delayed for the same thing, we laugh? ^_^
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From what I can tell, this is a full recall now..
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A year ago I bought a Voodoo3 2000 and while it was not the best card on the market at the time, and is becoming a bit obselete now. I have never had any serious driver issues with it, but I want to upgrade to another card to get access to various bonuses like 32 bit colour and a DVD controller thing, a TV-out would be an added bonus despite the fact I don't have a TV. What is the best Video card on the market at the moment, and how will it compare to the V5 6000? My main concerns are that it will work well immediatly, my V3 has never had any problems - ever, Q3, UT, Baldurs Gate, Ultima9, etc. Every game I have played with it has worked well and straight away, I have a friend who has a TNT2, he has had lots of problems with some games, when he gets them going they look really good, but it just seems that 3DFX works straight away. can enyone tell me what I would get instead of a V5, any why?
You are not me, therefore you are not important
If someone doesn't produce a competitor to nvidia it just a matter of time before nvidia becomes the Microsoft the 3d card. Or maybe Intel would be a better example.
Think about it... Because no one (until recently with the Athlon) could touch intel in the PC cpu market they thought they could force consumers to buy what they wanted at their price. Which is why they went with RDRAM (they have alot of money invested in RDRAM... so if you have to buy RDRAM to use intel chips they make even more money) It didn't matter the RDRAM wasn't as good as promised and that it cost tons of money you had to buy it because that was all that the newer Pentiums could use... Then came AMD and the Athlon, which forced intel to stop being lazy and lower prices create the MTH and push the coppermine cpu out earlier. So what is the moral of the story?
Competition is good dammit! I hate it when people who own nvidia chips get all happy when a competitor stumbles. Don't you understand that competion keeps prices down and increases inovation... Look at Microsoft, no competion is why they can charge rediculous prices for their shit OS. If 3dfx comes out with a card that is just as fast or faster than the Geforce2 then prices would be even better.
Moral? There is no reason to be happy that 3dfx is having trouble even if you are a stalwart nvidia fan. (unless of course you own stock in nvdia) Less competion just means higher prices and slower less inovating releases of hardware later.
They misunderestimated me. -- George W. Bush
I have not used one of the new GeForce cards however I have used both a TNT2(current) and Voodoo Banshee(previous) in my system and 3D performance for games was definately superior with the Banshee. So the Nvidia cards may be capable of much more but what is the point when the Linux performance anyway is very much lacking. It is nice now to have Nvidia drivers that have some acceleration but compare them to the qualuty of 3Dfx Linux drivers and you soon see they have a long way to go.
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
Nor is every dominant company a bad thing. nVidia got to be where it is now because they simply worked their asses off to make the best stuff on the market, why shouldn't they be rewarded with dominance? They have done nothing wrong thus far, indeed they are still cranking out higher quality stuff then everybody else and improving their products at a torrid pace. Granted they may not have the best Linux drivers in the world (so I hear), but no company is perfect.
There is pleanty of reason to be happy about 3dfx having problems, they dug themselves into this hole by releasing several crap cards in a row. They are not there because of FUD or unfair monopolies or lawyers or anything, they are there because they have been beaten on a technological level consistantly. Isn't that exactly what we want to happen, the company who makes the best technology wins? Instead of the company with the best marketing wins?
This is a Good Thing(TM). The market is such that if 3dfx goes out and makes a better board then nVidia again, they can reclaim their marketshare. Its not being run by marketing, and that is extremely good.
And I disagree that competition is always a good thing. Look at Domain Name registrations. What have we got with competition? Confusion, Names getting lost between registrars, registrars pulling all kinds of crap like saying they own your name, etc. You notice how these problems didn't exist when NSI had a government enforced monopoly.
You notice how they still don't exist in systems like CA*Net, which has a monopoly on the *.ca domain? Funny how things didn't get messed until competition started. But hey, prices did come down.
(of course I'd rather pay the extra money for a decent service, which hasn't existed in the domain name space since this competition crap started.)
The moral of the story? Competition in the 3d market is good, because its actually resulting in better stuff. But in competition, someone has to loose. At least they're losing for the right reasons.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I'm really getting sick of all this crap. Really I am. You are all posting like the foolish 16 to 18 year olds I LAN party with (I'm 26 myself). What am I talking about you ask?
"3DFX is dead! Long live nVidia!"
"3DFX was once good."
"3DFX sux!"
etc...
I myself have bought 3DFX cards only in the past. I bought my Voodoo2 12MB for $300 just two years and three months ago the first week it was out. I bought my Voodoo3 3000 OEM just over a year ago for $125. I got that great price as part of a 20 pack that my friends all chipped in to order. Rember those were $175 and up when they were brand new, so $125 was a great deal. Just how often should you have to upgrade your freakin' graphics card? I cringe at once a year but I love games and want performance. I look at nVidia and see that they have this "aggressive" release schedule to try and get a new product out every 6 months. BFD!!! Who can afford that crap? Not many. You'll have to skip a generation or two between your upgrades. Then what. You suck, right? Because you don't have the very best card available you must suck. You don't think so? Sure you do.
Now I'm not saying that nVidia doesn't have a great card now. They do. But my Voodoo3 3000 is still a kick-ass card. It looks beautiful to me. Of course I don't get 120fps, but I like some eye candy. And speaking of eye-candy... yeah I know it's Glide... but... I've seen Unreal Tournament on a GeForce that had to run D3D. It looks like SHIT!!! I'll take my proprietary Glide over that crap anyday for Unreal Tournament.
Another thing that bugs me is that everything seems to revolve around the innovations of nVidia. I'm sorry, but last I checked 3DFX had some pretty serious new features. Oh, wait! That's more of that eye candy that prevents us from getting 600fps. And the nVidia has T&L. 3DFX doesn't. So... they said they didn't think it was that big of a deal. That's D3D thing if I remember correct. And you all dis on 3DFX for not being as OpenGL friendly as they should be. Then why even accept D3D as an option. D3D looks like shit. Back to the new features. I think that I'd like to see newer things added in like motion blur, focus on what's in view, soft reflections, etc. What's wrong with trying to be more cinematic in games? I'm not saying that these new features will be as good as they hope they'll be (games will have to incorporate them I think), but it's a goal. These guys I play Q3 with turn off all the eye candy on their GForce cards to get more fps. Looks like Q1 now. Funny.
And to all of you that think that nVidia is king of the hill and should crush the others, then get ready for lack of innovation and high prices. Competition is needed everywhere. Shall we get rid of AMD and just have Intel? And those damn long distance providers... let's just go back to AT&T. No, not at all... you need to be hoping that companies stay in place and keep trying to one-up each other.
And quit rooting for a damn card manufacturer like it's a commercial sports team! It's sick! It's pathetic! Go Broncos! Seattle Sucks! Indians Rule! Go Green Bay! I hate sports. I'm not playing. It makes no difference to me who beat who. I think that those who root for teams (especially those 1500 miles away) think they are part of the team or something. "We" won the game? Who the fuck is "we"? They won, not you. Same goes for graphics cards. So you've got a GeForce and nVidia is on top. What does that make you? King of the video card industry? Part of the team? Step off, fool!
The bottom line for me is a wait and see. I'll save my money for a while and wait and see how good these cards turn out to be. My money doesn't come easy. The next card I buy is going to have to push 2 years before the next upgrade. Does that seem unreasonable? I don't think that it is. I am fully open to buying any brand of card, but I want a good card. I don't buy into hype or even reviews because they are not all encompassing. And you would all do well to remember that.
Forgive my rant, but I am just tired of the whole thing.
For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the sheltered will never know.
"...If someone doesn't produce a competitor to nvidia it just a matter of time before nvidia becomes the Microsoft [of] 3d card."
nVidia's not going to become a Microsoft, they're going to join 'em. As one the stronger supporters of D3D in its earlier days, nVidia's been sucking up since Day 1. Just recently, Microsoft awarded nVidia a contract to develop the X-box graphics chip, together with a $200 million investment.
Uh, Glide games? What year is it? :-)
:-P
Also, please point me to the benchmarks for the low end 3dfx card beating out the GF2. Every artical i've read and bench mark i've seen has show that the Geforce is faster than everything except the voodoo5 6000 which is like 700 bucks and only wins due to brute force of 4 chips.
At least with Q3A, which is the only game that maters
You might have a point with linux, but the Geforce drivers are very quick and stable, since they have been around a while.
http://overwhelmed.org
3DFX One-Ups nVidia: "Fuck Off and Die"
San Francisco, CA - In a formal press release read to major gaming sites, 3DFX has "one upped" the video card war by telling nVidia to "fuck off and die".
3DFX, known for its revolutionary line of "Voodoo" based video cards, has been under fire recently for losing its competitive edge to nVidia, who's GeForce 2 line of cards is speculated to be slightly faster than the upcoming Voodoo 5.
"Quite frankly, I'm sick to death of sidestepping the issues and trying to be 'Mister Nice Guy'. I hate nVidia and every fucking asshole that works there," quipped Brian Burke, 3DFX's PR spokesperson. "I hate their engineers, distributors, advertisers, executives, and janitors. I especially despise Derek Perez, who I formally challenge to a knife fight in the parking lot after this meeting..."
Anybody who thinks the 3dfx vs. nVidia wars are getting increasingly ridiculous should go read the rest of this article, at SomethingAwful.
They seem more like fence-sitters to me.
e _nvidia.html
NVidia have been very strong supporters of OpenGL, and I would feel safe in saying that they have the best consumer-level OpenGL drivers for Windows.
On one hand, they are supplying chips for the X-Box. On the other, they are supplying chips for the Indrema box, which will be an X-Box competitor which runs Linux:
http://www.indrema.com/servlet/site?page=Releas
I doubt that Indrema will face the XBox with any real competition, but it does run Linux, and it could be a cool thin client. The kind of Linux box you'd buy for your kids or your grandmother.
In addition to close ties to Microsoft, they have very close ties to SGI. SGI has been very active in the Linux arena recently, with contributions such as GLX, the OGL SI, XFS, in addition to kernel and compiler work. The NVidia Linux drivers have been developed in conjunction with SGI, and the drivers rock (with some caveats, but they're beta drivers)
Given Microsoft's history with 'collaborations' with companies, it's reasonable to assume the worst. But NVidia certainly has the balls to play this game, and they seem to be doing OK so far...
Cheers,
Mark
"Good people drink good beer"
Even if the card is delayed, I still believe that it is worth the wait. Voodoo will always be my practice primarily because I love the SDK for GLIDE. I pride in my bigotry towards 3DFX as they were the first big men on the playfield of true quality 3d graphics. Beyond their history as one of the first gamer's card manufactureres 3DFX has always had excellent support for their cards. I wouldn't be surprised if they released new banshee drivers. I'm more than willing to wait for a later release because I know that the card will first of all come with solid drivers, and secondly, if they take a long time to release, you know they won't dump the project like Sega did with all their systems. Power to the release team and 3DFX.
.: 2+2 = PI SQRT(1+N)
rock on! my trident 8900cl is still alive and kickin! the chip says (C) 1989 so it's been around for 11 years and it's still working just like the first day when i brought it home.
but now a days, video cards go obsolete so fast, my g200 is only 2 years old and it's already considered a piece of junk...
sigh, they just dont make video cards like they used to (=
Zetetic
Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.
Elench
A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.
Although I have an NVidia and am rooting for it wholeheartedly, I sometimes feel a bit uneasy about their success... they are so far ahead now that there is nearly no competition, and we all know what comes thereafter : stagnation.
I really hope the 3dfx people come up with something better than FSAA (even though it looks very cool on some games) and incredibly fast fill rates.
At this time the only game that rates Voodoo better than TNT is Unreal... and that only due to the fact that it was written solely for Unreal, and later ported... it prob. uses a lot of CPU as well... compared to other games that practically only use the GFX card.
Com-on Voodoo... I'm getting 160+ FPS on Q3A demo001 (800x600)!!! on my GeForce 1 / Athlon 700 machine...
:)
Athlons are so cheap now, why don't you just strap one of those things on a board for your video card. Maybe I'm missing something, but that would work pretty well wouldn't it? And then when you weren't using alot of video power, you would have an extra proccesor for faster work.
3dfx was great when they launched the Voodoo. And maybe the Voodoo 2 (which has like two Voodoo chips on it). And now I hear stuff about the card being incredibly full, extra cooling, etc etc. Is 3dfx turning into intel (which does the same thing in my opinion)? It's like they stopped engineering and just put more and more on the board, which has the same effect (to them).
Intel/AMD is the same thing I think... The big 1Ghz race... If AMD would do the same thing what intel did to launch a 1Ghz cpu (that would be making pigs fly, messing with the internal cpu, putting everything closer together and stuff like that) then AMD would be able to launch a 1,4 Ghz cpu. Remember, intel is STILL using the pentium pro setup. I got this info from several sources, including objective technical reports...
that's my 2 cents worth...
byez
mindrage
"stop quoting me!"
I remember seeing a PCI/AGP combo card, made by Jazz, it was a i740 card called the 'Bonnie & Clyde'. Well anyway it had a PCI edge connector on one side & a AGP edge connector on the other side, at each end there was a VGA 'D' connector. So all one would have to do, if they upgraded to a board with an AGP slot, would be to take backing plate of one end of the card & screw it on the other end & turn the card arround. I don't know why all Video card makers don't do this. As it would mean they would only need to have one line going, which would aid economies of scale. Plus the simplified, storage/shipping/sales of having just the one card for both PCI & AGP slots, would definitly outway any of the cost factors involved. Also a ISA/PCI combo NIC, would be a good idea to - you could have an ISA edge connector on one side & a PCI edge connector on the otherside, then when you upgraded to a all PCI board, all you would have to do is turn the card upside down, screw the backing plate on the other way arroung & finally switch over a jumper (if that was necessary).
I have a DDR GeForce card from ASUS in my computer. Yesterday I loaded up the Nvidia 5.22 drivers that allow you to enable FSAA. I fired up Q3 and just about shit my pants. It looks unbelievable. My framerate went to hell but I was able to lower the resolution to 8x6 and it without a doubt looked better than 10x7 with no FSAA, and I was still getting ~ 40fps. The best part about this is that I don't have a GeForce GTS, I have a regular GeForce DDR card. I love the fact that I've been hearing 3dfx hype FSAA for so long now and I download a leaked driver update for my old GeForce and BOOM I got FSAA too. Get the 5.22 drivers at http://www.reactorcritical.com , turn on FSAA in the driver properites, fire up an opengl game, and stand in awe. 3dfx may have a better FSAA, but that certainly doesn't out weigh T&L, AGP fast writes, and variety in card makers. Yet I still hear people yelling about how awesome the 6000 is, but for ~550$, and about a year life span, I can't see it becomming 3dfx's savior.
while i aint much to look at in person, i do look good on paper... ya know what i mean?
....
... i mean i cant sacrifice my rail for open source ... call me shallow .... but its just not an option.
so until they get the horse out of the gate, they arent in the race.
hmmmm more silly cliches needed
closed source or not, nvidia still retains the higher quality product, in both speed and actual picture quality. their gl implementation is much more mature and it shows it. BTW their linux drivers are a sight to behold, just as fast as windows...
now if we could only get my intellieye to work as smoothly q3 linux as it does in windows
3dlan.com --> Monthly lan parties in Western NY
nVidia didn't beat 3dfx by using FUD against them, nVidia beat 3dfx because their products are flat out better.
:-)
3dfx's FUD didn't really help them much, but they did do it as you point out. I was just trying to say that nVidia beat them by simply making better hardware and drivers (which apparently includes the Linux ones as you point out).
Sorry for not being clear about that right off the bat.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
i'm amazed to see how people who post in slashdot know so little ... don't you people read and get informed ?.. i mean ... 3dfx z'been braging about the phreaking cards for almost a year now and you still don't get it ? .. 600$ for the voodoo6 ... 128 megs / 4 processors 299$ for the voodoo5500 64 megs / 2 processors.. forget the shitty 32 megs / i processor voodoo4.. nywayz...i'm buying the card JUST FOR UNREAL TOURNAMENT since it IS a glide game ... Quake 3 just looks so ..BAD really after playing UT that it never hooked me up ... Read all the reviews floatting around before saying things you can't possibly comprehend .. hehe ... don't i look like a smart ass now ;) and hey... Nvidia Phreaks... geforce 2 SUCKS!!
http://mrhide.pinnesota.org
Having an average around 50-60fps is really at least what you want, to cover most eventualities.
Another point regarding the 140fps, all I do if I get very high fps is turn up those graphics settings and bump up the res! These figures are only used to show how powerful it is at this low res, to run at that res with that kind of power is silly, when it can look so much better and you can't tell the difference.
Hey!!! When TF2 comes out, Q3A will be out the window...
Soon my pet... soon.....
Where did that come from? I fully support Blizzard, I just like making fun of them. GFrazier hates it >:)
-subtraho (undertow)
Member, Operation Can't Wait Any Longer (CWAL)
Diablo II Stress Tester
Battle.net forumer
Here's my newer tag, too!
-subtraho