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ATI's HyperZ Demystified
noname (guess who ;) writes, "There's a really thorough look at ATI's Radeon 256 32MB (which we've not seen yet due to the delay in shipping) and the technology behind it. The author of this piece not only pits it against NVIDIA's best (the GeForce2)also went behind the scenes of ATI's HyperZ technology by interviewing some engineers about the 3D graphics pipeline. Finally we get to the bottom of who's better, the GeForce2 or the Radeon and it looks like a win for NVIDIA here."
One of the few points very very few people ever catch about *most* nVidia cards.
/. raw) and..
:p
Take my comment with a grain of salt since im not providing URL's but....
Comparing side by side TNT2/Geforce whatever cards with a MAX in pictures and the MAX pictures were much more clear.
Everyone cuts corners including nVidia the performance kings. I wish I had a URL to a few pictures but its true and anyone who doesnt believe should research it. (I own a G400 Max which runs on my 19" sony, that I had to pay my left arm for, and it looks so awesome that I could give a crap my QIII performance is sub par.
That is how it is for most people, I stare at code more than QIII on my system which is more important to me?
SO I feel like im just getting the best deal with my Matrox, I can run QIII at playable framerates at 800x600, and I have one of the most crisp and clear pictures on any system I have seen (really).
I love Matrox so much I bought one for my workstation at work.
Anyhow
Jeremy
OT:I have noticed I never ever use my +1 bonus unless I forget to check the No Score +1 Bonus, since I moderate comments for myself (always read
I think it should be the default hehe I know a lot of other people do that on accident to.
Again Me
I can't run a geforce2 on my FreeBSD box. Won't buy one. Just business, nothing personal. Slightly personal, but still in the realm of the technical is the instability of the drivers nvidia uses for linux. Oh and their being locked to a kernel version.
Sorry nvidia, really wanted to buy your card, I did like the TNT2 for games. I don't even play games on BSD, but since you won't even let me drive it for 2d without a stable driver, guess I'll be going to the competition from now on.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I'd see if there was one for this particular article, but the corporate firewall is blocking. bastages
Guilty as charged. My name being Andy, my fingers' hidden Markov modelling strongly suggests that 'An' is going to be followed by 'd'.
Considering that the radeon has been getting reviewed since the 17th of July.
No matter how good ATI's architecture might be on paper, the simple fact of the matter is that ATI can't write drivers to save their lives and NVIDIA has the best driver dev team in the industry combined with a very mature and stable driver set.
Plus the GF2 kicks ass under linux.
As if that wasn't enough, the GF2 chip is bandwidth constrained, so as supplies of 4ns DDR SDRAM increase, GF2 ultras will become common. The Radeon doesn't have the horsepower to take advantage of these improvements in memory technology.
--Shoeboy
Although the GeForce2 does pull ahead a bit in the high resolutions in 32bpp (honestly, why bother benchmarking anything below 1024x768x32bpp on these cards? Is anybody intending to buy a $300 videocard and then use it in 640x480x16bpp?) it's good to see that ATI can deliver a product that can match nVidia's high-end card, if only to give nVidia a reason to keep the price down on the GeForce3 :)
I guess brute force beats good design again. Considering nVidia seems to be about 2 generations ahead of everyone else, I think ATI is going to need a little more than hyper-Z to catch up.
This is sort of off-topic, but I was wondering what peoples' experiences with FSAA are. I'm sort of in the market for a high-end card, but all the screenshots I've seen comparing FSAA to non-FSAA have been pretty underwhelming; images are almost unnoticeably smoothed, but FPS drops dramatically.
--
Hmmm... don't know where you are but the Radeon has been available in Canada for quite some time. Furthermore, I've seen the Radeon 64Mb version for around $440 Cdn (~$290.00 US using 66% exchange rate) for the video in/out version. So, to answer your question, a very misinformed individual would throw down $400 for a Radeon 64Mb version.
The card I'm waiting for is the All-in-Wonder Radeon. I just wish Asus would come out with a GF2 with a tv tuner. Carrying around a vcr just to watch tv on your computer sucks & buying an additional tv box is too expensive. So until then I'm stuck with ATI.
jacob
Ok, I've got a Matrox G400 32MB Dualhead that I'm very happy with, and I can run the GL versions of MESS and MAME in 1280x1024x32 and whatnot... But doesn't this all get really silly after a while?
Why would I ever need greater than 60fps in anything? And once I have that, in truecolor, why would I need much better than 800x600 in the first place? Especially if I'm too busy playing Quake to look at the graphics?
What I want to see is a more versatile, programmable hardware acceleration, like edge-detection style algorithms in hardware that lets you implement, say, Conway's Game of Life. Or let your graphics card churn away on a dataset, doing those funky matrix computations that we all love....
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It's interesting how algorithms emerge for every combination of these factors:
In the days of 286s, some people came up with S-Buffering (segments of Z values) to get around the storage and computation problems of Z-Buffering and snail pace of poly sorting, when using medium poly counts. Plain poly sorting was used for low poly counts.
When memory got cheap and CPUs a bit faster, Z-Buffering met the demands of higher poly counts.
Then cheap 3D cards came along (for PCs) and Z-Buffering was an obvious win. Back in the days of the first 3DFX cards, memory far outpaced the renderer. There's a few exceptions which used tile rendering, and we all know what happened to those.
So now the renderer is exceeding the speed of memory again, and plain Z-Buffering is finally becoming less attractive. Note that Hyper-Z seems to only be a gain for scenes that exceed memory bandwidth, and for anything less it's the same speed as Z-Buffering.
I wonder if anyone will ever find a tile rendering hardware implementation which actually beats Z-Buffering (or derivations), when cost isn't an issue - so far it's always been a cost saving feature at the expense of performance.
If anyone knows of any other techniques for improving rendering performance, it'd make a good discussion.
But how does the ATI's image quality, specifically text at 1600x1200 res, compare to nVidia's? I'm using a Matrox G400 Max (which looks *great*, but slow) because the nVidia's I've bought (the last being a Creative Labs GeForce256) looked fuzzy at hires, at least compared to the Matrox. I want to play Quake 3 at 1600x1200, but I can't sacrifice text.
Way to completely misread a post.
Here's how it breaks down.
The GF2 is bandwidth constrained but very powerful.
The Radeon is not very powerful, but thanks to the hyper-z technology, it doesn't have nearly the bandwidth requirements.
That means that as more memory bandwidth arrives, the GF2 chip will be able to take advantage of it. Check the 1600x1200 high quality benchmarks on the GF2 ultras with 4ns DDR SDRAM if you don't believe me.
The radeon on the other hand can't push enough texels/pixels to use the extra bandwith, so ATI will need another chip to take advantage of higher memory bandwidth.
Take a remedial reading course before you start flaming.
--Shoeboy
The Radeon has the best feature set available, with several advantages over GeForce:
A third texture unit per pixel
Three dimensional textures Dependent texture reads (bump env map) Greater internal color precision. User clip planes orthogonal to all rasterization modes. More powerful vertex blending operations. The shadow id map support may be useful, but my work with shadow buffers have shown them to have significant limitations for global use in a game.On paper, it is better than GeForce in almost every way except that it is limited to a maximum of two pixels per clock while GeForce can do four. This comes into play when the pixels don't do as much memory access, for example when just drawing shadow planes to the depth/stencil buffer, or when drawing in roughly front to back order and many of the later pixels depth fail, avoiding the color buffer writes.
Depending on the application and algorithm, this can be anywhere from basically no benefit when doing 32 bit blended multi-pass, dual texture rendering to nearly double the performance for 16 bit rendering with compressed textures. In any case, a similarly clocked GeForce(2) should somewhat outperform a Radeon on today's games when fill rate limited. Future games that do a significant number of rendering passes on the entire world may go back in ATI's favor if they can use the third texture unit, but I doubt it will be all that common.
The real issue is how quickly ATI can deliver fully clocked production boards, bring up stable drivers, and wring all the performance out of the hardware. This is a very different beast than the Rage128. I would definitely recommend waiting on some consumer reviews to check for teething problems before upgrading to a Radeon, but if things go well, ATI may give nvidia a serious run for their money this year.
It seems that ATI has all but sputtered to a stop as far as development goes. This was from John Carmack's .plan file from 5/17/00. Four months later, ATI is still way behind in the 3d market.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Anyone else noticing that some of these high traffic ''review'' sites are serving up less and less on a page?
It is getting that adverts are becoming a new form of punctuation that you use at the end of a paragraph.
At least Andandtech and Tom's Hardware give you a table of contents for the review so you can cut through filler like the exact details of the test platform.
It is all the more irritating since browsers do not have a serious problem with monstrously long pages, and the aggregation of the whole review on a single page would have raised no eyebrows.
> I have a GF2 and there isn't any game that even makes it sweat.
:) So we target a lower hardware to allow more people to play the game.
;-)
It's called market saturation.
Us developers can't cater exclusively to the "high-end" 3D cards as we would go out of business. No 3d-only game has come close to selling as well as 2d. Why? Because not everyone has the lastest, greatest, fastest 3d card, unfortunately. (As much as us developers wished everyone had a GeForce 2
Of course in 5 years, it's going to be pretty sweet to target a GeForce2 as minimum spec