nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra Unveiled

Jacek Fedorynski was one of the folks who wrote in with a huge slew of reviews of the new GeForce 2 Ultra - starting with Hot Hardware, moving to RIVA 3D, heading to 3DGPU, and ending with FiringSquad, and nV news and probably all the other sites.

Comments

Actually, Microsoft sucks up to NVidia

[Temporal]

Think about it:

• NVidia may have good D3D support, but they also have better OpenGL support than any other consumer graphics card company. Most companies just support whatever Quake3 needs, but NVidia supports everything and more (through extensions). As a matter of fact, NVidia's OpenGL support is better then their D3D support -- more of the GeForce 2's features are available through OpenGL than through Direct3D. Specifically, I am thinking of register combiners (god I love those), which have been available in the GL drivers for some time, but won't be available in the D3D drivers for... err... some time.
• Speaking of which, D3D has been basically tracking NVidia's hardware in version 7 and will again in version 8. I read that DX 8's register combiner functionality is biased towards NVidia's hardware. This looks to me like Microsoft sucking up to NVidia. NVidia doesn't really care as all the register combiner stuff is already available in their GL drivers.
• The Indrema. It's a Linux-based game console, and it uses NVidia hardware! Think about it. If NVidia wanted to please Microsoft, what worse way to do it than provide hardware to a Linux-based competitor? I'm sure Microsoft asked NVidia to do the X-Box, not vice-versa.
• Hell, even the fact that NVidia has better Linux support than any other 3D hardware vendor probably pissed Microsoft off, big time. (If you don't believe me on their support being better, well... NVidia's Linux drivers are equivalent in speed and exatly equal in features to their Windows drivers. Sometimes, their Linux drivers are even faster (the recent speed boosts in the detonator3 drivers have been in the Linux drivers for some time now). Heh, and come to think of it, NVidia's Linux drivers have more features than their Windows D3D drivers. Not one other 3D chipset manufacturer can say that.)

Combine that with all the stuff be-fan said (which I agree with 100%), and you have one really cool company. Sorry, they aren't open source, but you'll notice that none of the open source drivers available compare anywhere near as favorably to their Windows counterparts as NVidia's drivers do. Where I come from, we judge our software on quality.

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Raw Deal.

[be-fan]

I don't know why there are so many people against NVIDIA. It seems that everytime news about NVIDIA comes out, people go out of their way to lambaste them. They release OpenGL drivers for Linux, people bitch about them not being OpenSource. It is found that they used a small amount of GPL code, people act as if they closed up the Linux kernel and released their own OS. They get some support for Microsoft, people act as if they are in a secret plot with MS to take over 3D, switch everyone to D3D, and help MS steal GPL code to boot.

Cool off. NVIDIA is a company that has a lot of class. Not only do they make quality products, but they go out of their way to make the user experience better. For example, they continually improve their drivers. Even though the current Detenator 2 drivers are already really high quality, the GeForce2 Ultra comes with the Detenator 3 drivers, which increase the speed by another 10-15% Best of all, you can use these new drivers on all cards dating back to the original TNT. Most companies don't even keep drivers for older cards on their website, much less continually improve them. The performance of the TNT must have improved 30 or 40% from the original 3.x drivers, and those weren't exactly shabby. Wheres Matrox get's major upps for doing OpenGL (badly at that) nobody ever points out that NVIDIA was a poineer in doing OpenGL on consumer cards. Back when everybody was doing "mini-GL" drivers, NVIDIA put a full OpenGL ICD in the box with the TNT. And not just any ICD either, NVIDIA's ICD has full support for everything from Quake to Softimage. Meanwhile, Matrox STILL doesn't have a full ICD. ATI's drivers are still flaky. Yet, everyone is saying "Is there an alternative to NVIDIA?" Hello, this comany releases fast prodcuts, excellent drivers with great OpenGL support, and goes out of it's way to support older users. In a market where good companies like Diamond have dissapeard, and bad companies like ATI abound, NVIDIA really does deserve some credit.