Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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....
---
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.
I have a geforce 2 gts 32mb. Occasionally I mess around with the fsaa settings, but in general i've found that the gain in picture quality is not worth the hit to performance.
In ultima ix, fsaa just makes the picture seem a bit blurry. While it is true that the jaggies go away if you blur your eyes, where is the benefit in that?
I've used fsaa on the fish screen saver from voodooextreme.com... at 640x480, fsaa makes a big difference, it gives the appearance of running at 1024x768 with a high dotpitch (0.4 maybe) monitor. The interesting thing is that the screen saver runs faster at 1024x768 w/o fsaa than 640x480 w/ fsaa. So even in this app where fsaa shows significant improvement, it is still better to just run at higher rez.
If you want to see the real deal, the genuine benefit of fsaa, just look at the windows boot screen. Would you believe that the resolution of that logo is actually 64x48 pixels. That's right, it was originally a postage stamp. That fine job of anti aliasing alone makes the os worth the purchase price.
cheese
I hate to point this out, but that post is ass-backwards.
To test a CPU, you run at low resolutions with V-Sync off, to keep the fill rate on the card from maxing out.
To test the fill rate of a card, you test at high resolutions. This tests both the pixel/texel rate and the memory bandwidth.
One legitimate reason to run at low resolutions is if you have a large display that doesn't support higher resolutions. Most 31 inch displays are 800x600, as well as any most multimedia projectors under $5000. So if you want to run a 31 inch monitor, or a 72 inch rear-projection screen, you are probably going to run at lower resolutions.
Also, with big screens like these, anti-aliasing is an advantage. So 800x600 with 4xFSAA is the best resolution for big monitors.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
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.