Slashdot Mirror
GeForce 3 Demoed - Running DOOM 3
green pizza writes "Yesterday at Macworld Tokyo, Steve Jobs and John Carmack demoed the new nVidia GeForce 3 (73 GIGAFLOPS of power)... on a G4... running DOOM 3. Please excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the floor. You can get more details
from MacNN." [michael adds: VoodooExtreme has screenshots of Doom 3 running on the new GeForce card; Shugashack has more. Looks like Doom 3 will be another game where the color palette is "shades of black". Sigh.]
Anyone know if there's gonna be a dualhead version available? Preferably with tv and video in/out?
Looks like there's no stopping NVidia. Of course, this only adds to the vicious cycle of hardware upgrades - upgrade hardware, the developers code more advanced stuff, upgrade hardware, wash, rinse, repeat...
Looks like the ol' holiday to Tahiti has gone for a Burton...
Looks awesome!! Like Tom Hall (former id employee) said, "fastdarkscary". Come to think of it.. still hoping about the "fast" part...
as it has crates. yeah lots of crates.
ooh, and barrels.
Mac OS X, no less. With GeForce 3 and drivers already sorta working, it looks like we won't have to worry much about OpenGL acceleration under Apple's new OS.
It's an 8:40 .asf file, and only 2:30 is of Doom3 footage. It is NOT prerendered, even though it looks like it. Also, taken into account that it hasn't been in production all that long, this is super impressive.
Sig missing. Reward.
but how does the GeForce3 handle Marathon?
Let not forget the important issues.
It's times like this when I wish I had a mac
Wouldn't ya know it? Just as soon as I finaly replace my aging Voodoo 2 with a GeForce 2 (MX), they spring this on me. Happens every time.
------
Not a typewriter
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-201-4881105-0.htm l?tag=cd_mh
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
You know what the solution to that is? Turn up the contrast and brightness on your monitor. I find games like counterstrike are far easier when you do that (like you can see what you're shooting...).
It would be interesting to see a graphics card which could do that automatically... Sort of keeping the colours always within a certain range when you tell it to...
Maybe some spooky castles? Robot-demons? Lava?
God, games suck.
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
I guess it's soon time to get a new video card. I'm hoping Deus Ex 2 is gonna use that engine... that'd lend itself to sweet cinematics...
Yes, DOOM3 is dark, but probably not as dark as what you are seeing in the screenshots-- look at those shots on a Mac or SGI instead of a PC and you'll be surprised how bright they are.
magic
a realplayer version of the video is available at CNet, so the rest of us can watch it...
Walter H. Trent "Muad'Dib"
Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe, IMHO
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Shutup, ATI Sucks, Matrox blows, 3dfx is dead and until Mircosoft comes out with a video card that renders the BSOD in realtime with fancy lighting effects , im not buying from the competition!
Just a few things here. The article was pulled. NVIDIA is becoming more and more childish with it's business practices. Is this a result of being so closely tied to Microsoft? Also, a few things I've read indicate that their latest consumer chipset is DX8 optimized - and doesn't produce equal performance results with OpenGL. Obviously, they're running on MacOS X - which means OpenGL... but are they currently working to appease the company currently lining their pockets? I've got a bad feeling about this. I really hope NVIDIA doesn't become a big evil corporate entity made arrogant and stupid by its massive success.
Creative soundcards are good. I have one in both my machines and I have no problems with either. Both were extremely cheap and work perfectly. I don't have any problems with monopolies so long as what they provide is good.
Think about it. Would you rather NVidia went bust and there wasn't anything good at all availale?
Oh, look at Intel. They were fairly close to getting the desktop market a while ago. Now AMD are (IMHO) ahead...
God forbid people using technology to have fun.
I was just at the AppleStore. The GeForce 3 w/ 64 MB DDR-SDRAM is a whopping $350 option on all models but the bottomw one (where it's a $450 option). Stock GFX on those G4s in your choice of an ATI Radeon DDR or a GeForce 2 MX SDR.
please. where's my railgun?
i could live a little longer in this prison
Welp, there goes that media blackout id was talking about.
The original DOOM had the impact of a drug. There was no one giving me small doses of it before I really took it. I just took it all at once and BAM! I was hooked.
Now with the new DOOM, I'm getting little drops of it on my tongue -- the air is full of new DOOM smoke and I can't get out of the room. Everybody's taking it, but I don't want it yet. It's not strong enough. But now I realize that when I do take the strong version, I will have built up a tolerance.
Well I guess this will be a nice workout of the new FreeBSD server. For the curious the screens.x script is PHP that works off a bunch of f_checks based on file and directory names to generate those screenshot pages. No database hits involved in serving up those DOOM images.
Oh yeah, and DOOM looks amazing. Too bad NVidia cant make up their mind about releasing more info on the GeForce3. They have changed their mind 3 times in the past 24hours.
-Steve Gibson
-Steve Gibson
Shacknews.com
Well, it certainly speeds up the renderer if you just assign half the screen pixels to black ;-)
--
--
"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
Creative soundcards are only adequate. There is no competition, and as a result there have been no really great developments. I would like to see soundcards with support for proper 3dimensional sound - this would do for sound what 3d graphics cards have done for graphics, add a whole extra dimension. But instead we are stuck with stereo, and no prospects of any improvement. There could be a lot of improvements in the world of soundcards, but it doesn't look like Creative will be introducing any anytime soon. Why should they? They don't have any competition.
--
Clarity does not require the absence of impurities,
/* And you'll never guess what the dog had */
/* in its mouth... */
--Larry Wall in stab.c from perl
Quake 3
Doom 3
Wolfenstein 3 (return to castle wolfenstein)
Geforce 3
I'd say Pentium 3 but 4's already out.
Does Duron count as the 3rd Athlon? (vanilla, thunderbird, Duron?)
Who else has a 3 coming out soon?
Is this the year of 3?
The MX has a "digital vibrance control" which produces a much nicer effect than turning up your contrast. You don't get any of that washed-out effect, and the colors are much brighter but don't oversaturate (unless you REALLY crank it...) and the contrast stays quite good.
But it does a wonderful job of making games a lot less drab. I can't imagine it not being a feature on the GF3, even though it's not available (to my knowledge) on the standard (non-MX) GF2 cards.
More like surprised by how bright they AREN'T.
I pulled up the shots on a powerbook G3 and a G3 workstation, both of which have been painstakingly gamma corrected for good display [this was a major ordeal with the workstation, which is using a complete piece of shit KDS 21" -conversely, the Powerbook LCD is probably the best monitor I've used. Ever). And I have to say, the shots are DARK. May as well be pure black- I can't imagine what the caps look like on a PC- probably nasty smudges of dark grey on black. It's iD - what were you expecting, really? Rainbows and paisleys? Still... the Doom 3 shots make the Quake 3 shots look like screencaps of the smurfs in terms of color.
There's nothing wrong with a product that dominates the market because it's just better than everything else. There are no artificial barriers to entry in this market; a competitor just needs to build a better card.
For a nice example of something similar, take a look at Photoshop. It totally owns its market, but only because nobody else can make anything as good.
--
This space unintentionally left unblank.
Not to advertise but my site http://www.doomworld.com/ has lots of screenshots as well as a direct download of the ASF movie, zipped up. If you're finding all servers are full you might want to try over here.
That's like saying "NASA spacecraft are only adequate". After all, they don't fly at 0.5c and they don't go to other galaxies. What software (except DVD players) is designed for full 3d sound anyway?
I mean, is this supposed to be meaningful in any way?: http://216.105.168.97/cgi-bin/image-o-matic.cgi?d
So close, but yet so far!...hehe...But this video clip is kinda cool.
2) Anyone know any concrete scheduling info. on Doom3?
3) So, how much do people think that Apple paid nVidia for the whole "out on Apple first" deal?
We have games like this. Everquest, Asherons Call, Ultima Online, Dark Ages of Camelot (beta), and many more to come. These games take cooperation and team efforts to do the fun stuff. Sadly, none of these are on the Mac or any other platform.
'Same speed C but faster'
I won't buy a better product because they have developed a technology that is too advanced for the competition. Rather, I will buy the inferior technology. Yup, I'll teach the world to create advanced technology and *GASP* -- get PAID for it!
Come down off your high horse. I think it's time that we all just grew up. The world isn't an ideal place, but there is nothing wrong with what NVidia is doing.
Okay, so the original post was stupid, but you sorta aren't very self consistent.
Creative soundcards aren't good, they're good enough. Without competition there really isn't any way to judge 'better' or 'worse'.
You have no problems, the cards are cheap, and they work perfectly. That's good enough. What about the alternatives? Real 3d sound? Mp3 playback/encoding acceleration? Multi-channel sound? Digital audio input/output? Digital audio acceleration? USB speaker support? Hardware/software support for Mp3 players?
Those are alternative features I don't think Creative offers yet because there isn't the competition to force them to.
Then there is your statement: I don't have any problems with monopolies so long as what they provide is good.
The problem with that logic is because you have a monopoly, it is the monopolist that defines what 'good' is. If Creative defined 8 bit sound, mono, and no mic in as 'standard', you'd be stuck because you wouldn't have a choice!
Likewise, Creative hasn't offered hardware acceleration for USB/digital audio yet, when they could. They don't integrate directly with MP3 players or Minidisc players, when they could. They don't have Dolby 5.1 channel support standard, when they should. The current AWE is only margianlly better than the AWE of 4 years ago; they've gone to PCI, increased the number of voices, and improved the drivers... but there really isn't a bunch of compelling new features. A new optical SPDIF port, but that's it. 4 speaker support. Whee.
Then there's the Intel/AMD thing. That's only true *because* Intel *doesn't* have a monopoly and AMD offers competition. Why the heck are you using that as an argument?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I was going to make the same comment, but since you beat me to it, I'll just add to your comment.
Anyone want to make a quick buck? Make a FPS with online capabilities that has great graphics. The end.
Doesn't this bug any of you? ID *used* to make innovative games (they invented the FPS). Now they are just the company that comes out with the newest FPS engine. Why not use the 'sacrifice' engine? I don't think the "greater polygon" is needed as much as the "full outdoor feel" that is used in sacrifice (sacrifice.net for the webpage, btw).
From the previous posts ran yesterday, I think that ID needs to stop worrying about adding polygons, and start worrying about what totally new innovations haven't the gaming community seen.
--
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
In other words, shield the competitors from the feedback of the marketplace, letting them produce inferior products without suffering the consequences for so doing. Even if enough people were willing to do this, it wouldn't produce a 'more equal' market. It would simply keep second-rate products coming. Only by allowing the market to signal an organization that it's putting out stuff that people won't buy will the situation improve.
is the fault of the artists, of course, not the engine. I mean, look at Alice -- nice bright colors, very pretty and vivid.
The contrast is not the issue, as others have argued. No matter how I turn up the contrast on my monitor or video card, I suspect I will only see dark blue, brown, and black.
IMHO, it's probably because American McGee left. I seem to remember Doom being a lot more colorful without losing any moodiness, and it wasn't because the levels were lit like bad 80s disco clubs either...
I agree with the first part of your argument... but the second part is rather circular in it's logic.
What software was designed for hardware accellerated 3d before there was hardware accellerated 3d cards?
I could very easily see games taking full advantage of full 3d sound once it was available. Although I was under the impression that it already was...
I agree there's a lot of wasted resources out there. I disagree that games are a "misapplication of technology", because if everyone was 100% serious 100% of the time.. well.. that would just be stupid.
Yes, DOOM3 is dark, but probably not as dark as what you are seeing in the screenshots-- look at those shots on a Mac or SGI instead of a PC and you'll be surprised how bright they are.
Cranking the Gamma on this monitor improved the movie no-end, so I expect the game will be the same. Think of the Quake3TeamArena demo level - with the gamma slider at the lowest setting you could barely see anything.
I'm amazed at the number of people who seem to think that DOOM3 should be some multicoloured bright-light party. Thats what Nintendo games are for. Doom's legacy demands dark rooms, illuminated by flickering flourescent lights, monsters which appear out of the shadows or drop on the player from the ceiling.
And seriously, looking at the video footage of Doom 3, this is going to be a game to give you nightmares. The characters are going to be closer to realistic images than ever before - those Maya-produced animations are pushing several thousand polys when up close (I assume that the meshes will have Level-Of-Detail) - playing this is going to be like starring in a good (or maybe even a bad :-) ) horror movie. I fully expect to see some Army Of Darkness mods based on this engine :-)
Don't expect Doom3 to be a game for kids. This one will earn a 'Mature' rating almost straight off the bat.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Doom3 just looks amazing. Even these early tech demo scenes make it clear that they have reached the photorealistic level. Say whatever you want about NVidia, but Carmack made that card fly...
-magic
I looked at the screenshots, and I could barely make out anything at all. Now, this could just be me, but I'd probably want to demo my newest video card with something a bit brighter than those doom shots. However, I must say, the pics seem to have a good amount of detail in them for being computer generated.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I can't stand it anymore! I know I will be branded an imbecile for the rest of my days for asking this but wtf does "All your base are belong to us." mean anyway and why do I have the misfortune of seeing this grammatically incorrect phrase everytime I try to read posts at /.?
2001-02-14 00:52:56 GeForce 3? (articles,graphics) (rejected)
And earlier today...
2001-02-22 17:41:27 GeForce 3 press release! (articles,graphics) (rejected)
Oh well...fuggit, I tried *sigh*
-Caino
Don't touch my .sig there!
Sure, that's why I play team deathmatch and CTF style tournaments.
Apple had a good GUI in 1984, when will PC users get a decent one?
My other sig is extremely clever...
I was hoping to get away with it... What happened with 3d is that people used software only. Then came the 3d cards and people rewrote software to go with them. That was when 3d was new. Thing is, all the sound APIs are defined already, and neither A3D nor EAX has a decent true-3d implementation. The technology is already there to do true 3d in Dolby 5.1, which many new cards support directly or through emulation, but no-one is using them.
Living in a world where the ARM controls all technology, censors history and operates in secert is not my idea of utopia.
Without the misfits who studied banned history texts and read about war the Earth would have fallen to the Kiniz (sp?). Most likely they played video games also.
Microsoft is the only supplier of Windows, and Creative is the only supplier of Sound Blaster-compatible sound cards. nVidia, on the other hand, is by no means the only supplier of OpenGL and Direct3D accelerators.
Really, what does nVidia have that no one else is theoretically capable of matching?
I don't see any kind of proprietary API that only runs on nVidia hardware. I only see them supporting OpenGL and Direct3D - two APIs that anyone else can use just as well. The only way they've brought themselves into such a powerful position is simply good products and good business. Ever since the TNT they've been aggressively pushing new features like 32-bit colour and hardware geometry acceleration. It's not they're preventing other companies from adding new features, so tell me, what egregious tactics have they used to shut out competitors?
Like Citizen Kane. What is that? CRAP!
Or The Maltese Falcon. That's crap too.
Or the original Gameboy. Shades of black on the screen. Ergo crap.
Or even that asshole M. C. Escher. Lots of shades of black there. And it was craptacular.
sigh
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Are you experienced?
"What WE REALLY need is LESS Christianity!"
--Clay
Its a new /. record, all 3 links are slashdotted as I type this....slashdotters are hungry for news, postings have been kinda slow today.
"...your future, make it a reality, all you have to do is fight for me"
I bought a radeon 32 for mostly this reason over the geforce mx.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I contend that things like this actually make things easier for scientific research.
Instead of building 10 amazing computer componets for $1M each they can build 100 000 amazing computer componets for $100 each. It makes it cheaper for those who want to do scientific stuff.
People buy faster computers for games and less so for office applications.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Dude, Get a life ;-))
Looks like Doom 3 will be another game where the color palette is "shades of black". Sigh.
If you have played more than 1 generation of any ID game, you will know that ID has a tendency to design games that are 'dark' in nature. They use shadows, darkness, and lots of metallic textures to emphasis an overwhelming feeling of cold and isolation during gameplay. This does not mean their engine only works in 'shades of black'. It means that their engine has the capability of realistically portraying dark, spooky scenes.
This is ID, and this is why they are popular. Would you prefer the nice and cutsie colours of Commander Keen? How about a nice helping of Barbi Software?
Ya sighing wanker.....
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
It's from an old (sega genesis?) game. Badly translated. It is called Zero Wing.
f
For some reason people thought it was funny enough to spam everywhere.
Someone went so far as to make a small flash movie of it... http://www.detonate.net/newsitems/01021601/ayb.sw
It's quite amusing actually.
Are you experienced?
Still, that card's feature-set is certainly a force to be reckoned with. I'll stick with the X-Box for now.
Since it doesn't appear that there will be a separate story talking about the other new announcements at MacWorld Expo, here are some of the highlights most interesting to Slashdot readers:
- The Power Macs were subtly altered. The former build-to-order dual 533 MHz model is now a standard configuration from the Apple Store (which means retailers will start carrying it as well), and there's an option to purchase a 733 MHz model with a CD burner in place of the DVD-R/CD-RW combo unit (saving $400 in the process).
- Those wild new iMacs have at least upped the specs slightly for the graphics chipset; still Rage 128-based, but at least there's more memory (16 MB) on board. Plus, the 500 and 600 MHz models are the new G3 chip with the full-speed onboard 256K cache.
- The Cube now offers the GeForce2 MX card as a build-to-order option (standard w/ CD burner on the high-end model). Guess ATi's still on Apple's shit list to some extent.
- Fellow Mac users should try running Software Update and see if they get CarbonLib 1.2.5.
- The $49.95 5-pack of DVD-R disks is finally available from the Apple Store, but the estimated ship time is 45 days.
Now, if I could only get a Flower Power G4 Cube..... mmmmmmm....
The Mac forums are blazing with commentary on the new iMac colors. Personally, I kind of like them, and hope they do a good job of stimulating interest in a highly overlooked demographic; women computer users. Anything that brings computing power to a wider audience can't be a bad thing. Besides, the effect is supposed to be slightly 3Dish, with the pattern all the way through the case instead of merely stuck onto the surface. I can't wait to see one in person.
--
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
"It'll be out in 2 weeks!" Of course, it's always 2 weeks from the present point in time... No wonder nothing ever gets release! :)
-Ted
-rt
======
Now, I think it would be GOOD to buy FIVE or SIX STUDEBAKERS
Yeah, I was wondering the same..._ wing.txt
http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/genesis/file/zero
It's all about the pixel shaders. You can actually write a little assembly language program and run it on the graphics chip now. Your program can calculate almost anything it wants for every pixel on the screen. The insane thing is that NVIDIA licensed this tech to Microsoft, not the other way around.
But people have the right to do anything they fucking want on a computer and why don't you go piss on your own self righteousness. (flame)
Controlling the world is not an option for you or anybody else. Banning violent games.... them's fighting words! Freedom ALWAYS trumps your vision of social control.
If you like operating at 100% efficiently then that's fine. Just loosen your grasp on everybody else and you'll find that this universe is completely and utterly in balance.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
"If I were to ask you a hypothetical question, what would you like it to be about?"
Creative soundcards are only adequate. There is no competition, and as a result there have been no really great developments. I would like to see soundcards with support for proper 3dimensional sound - this would do for sound what 3d graphics cards have done for graphics, add a whole extra dimension.
Sounds like you want a Creative SB Live! card, which has support for Dolby Digital.
Creative make good card with GPL'd drivers, and as such I have no problem in buying their products. nVidia make products that might be good, but with binary-only drivers I don't intend to find out. My 16mb Matrox G400 does me fine, good 3D performance (Quake3 runs very well)and proper open-source drivers. I don't intend to buy an nVidia card unless they change their driver release policy.
--
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Or at least that's what The Register says. :-)
This isn't just a demo of Doom, it's to show off the GeForce3. What better way to make all the dynamic light look the most impressive than to have the levels full of dark areas, shadows, etc...
Humanity will always have conflict. People will always have agression.
Any book that talks about giving people drugs to treat their "Aggressive emotions or tendancies" had better do so in the style of a satirical vonnegut novel. I like my feelings just the way they are, thank you.
Fwiw, I'd much rather juice someone into a puff of red mist in a video game and laugh about how nasty it looked than do it in real life and spend the rest of my days grabbing the bars while i get porked from the rear.
While we're at it, as long as people are at home playing video games, they're not out raping someone i care about. Thats fine by me.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Although its offtopic... its Kzinti, the "ratcats".
And, don't forget: In "Madness Has Its Place", the ones re-arming humanity (with lasers used to launch slowboats, powered by the Sun) were crazies who went off their meds, not "misfits".
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
y'know, i wasn't so sure about this "doom 3" thing. i was an avid player of the original doom series (imo, the best way to play it was in a dark room at 2 a.m. with a pc conneted to a big set of speakers, which are cranked all the way up) and i just wasn't sure that id could recapture that spooky atmosphere it had.
however, since i cheked out those screenshots, i have had my faith in id restored. id will be forgiven it's past transgressions (quake 2, hexen, heretic, no more commander keen games, etc) if this game is half as good as it looks.
i also seem to have something wet in my pants. excuse me.
--
Remember in the original game, the levels where you've been mucking around through dark tunnels and caves and finally come out into an open, well lit space? How you almost want to cry with relief, until a swarm of cacodemons comes screaming out from behind the pillars? You need that kind of contrast to make the game really enjoyable, and I have faith that ID haven't lost their touch.
If anything some of those screenshots have reaffirmed my faith. Nothing has matched the scare-me-shitless effect that playing the original doom on a 486/33 with a soundblaster had, but some of those screenshots are bringing back old memories...
-the wunderhorn
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
Great, another first person shoot em up that adds nothing innovative to the world of gaming. More blood, more splatter, more gore, nothing new.
You're right, it's really easily to extract gameplay elements from the screenshots.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
I don't care what you say about the color palette of Doom, that game is the only game that has ever elicited such strong emotion out of me---specifically fear! I've played alot of games, but Doom is the only one that has scared the crap out of me.
I remember one specific instance. It was 2:00am and the only light in my room was coming from my monitor. In the game, I was going down this long nearly dark passageway. The only light was some small flashing beacons. It was quiet--too quite. All of a sudden a pack of those beast things jumps out. It scared me so much I screamed and flew backward out of my seat.
For some reason, there was just something special about the atmosphere of that game. I hope Doom III can live up to it.
You'd get higher quality with two high up in front of you, two low down behind you and two floor speakers...
And I won't rise to the bait of your other point... Someone else probably will though :)
There ARE games like this due out. One in particular is Halo. It will be a multi-player game where teams will be important. There is still shoot'em up goals, however.
That's unbelievably short thinking. I am sure you were surprised by computers breaking the 640k of RAM mark, but power will always be better no matter what. Not only that more power means lower prices for the the same amount of power. Computers will not be fast enough for doing 3D animation for a long time. There are many many bottlenecks in computers. Video conferencing kind of sucks right now, even over high bandwidth. What could help this? Real time Mpeg4 compression and realtime mp3 compression. Can your computer do that? I didn't think so.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
go get a chatroom
(and save a copy of the log for me)
Running on... Mac OS X, no less
The Mac version of Doom 3 will be for Mac OS X only. Mac OS 9 and earlier will not be able to run it.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Come on Carmack.. We know you are reading this..
Give us something..babe..
Should I spent money on Xbox or should I buy Geforce3 and Doom3 (kinda rhymes..dont you think so.)?
Once again Id wins in making me pick up my jaw off the floor..
Its a good thing Voodoo slipped out off the race.. Even with their T-Buffer, they never stood a chance against such rendering..
Kudos to DX8 developers..none to MS.
Rapid Nirvana
There's a video of the event showing some of Doom 3 (as well as other info about the new card) on Cnet. I followed the link from bluesnews.com. I'd paste it here but the URL is quite large. Anyway, very impressive.
-Frijoles-
Actually what I should have said was "can your computer do real time mpeg4 and mp3 compression and decompression. I think that 1.5 Ghz pentium 4's and the 1.6 Ghz Althalon can just about do real time mpeg 4 compression.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
This is obviously a troll, but what the heck....
This is not just "a company". This is nVidia, the top consumer graphics hardware manufacturer there is. Minor difference.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Matrox has a binary only library that goes along with the open source driver they didn't develop.
That library is what enables all the special features.
What is so wrong with binary drivers? I know that its not super cool, but, i'd rather have a great card with great binary drivers than a piece of shit with open source drivers. I know that if the drivers are binary, its hard to tell if they're doing anythign nasty and we can't fix something if there is somethign wrong, but its better than nothing.
Niven a pacifist? No way. A pacifist would never write stories with themes like, "but sometimes you just have to fight anyway." That is exactly the theme that is presented in the short story "The Warriors," where pacifist golden-age-of-no-violence humans first meet the Kzinti and STILL kick their furry asses.
I know, I know, I shouldn't feed the troll. But I hate to see someone slander Niven that way. Well, go ahead and slander his last few years of work, but the classic Known Space stuff is still some of the best SF ever, IMHO.
(What good is a whiz-bang graphics engine when its output is so damned hard to see?)
you don't know what "intelligent conversion" is??
Let me guess....
you work for NASA.
I think there is a real danger that NVidia will do to the graphics card market what Creative did to the sound card market.
What? Make a pretty decent product at a reasonable price? Yeah, that would be horrible...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Creative makes OK cards, and crappy software. Other than a few ancient products on their opensource.creaf.com site, they seem rather anti-opensource. Just try to ask them for linux support for a NomadII ;)
BTW, SB Live just does DD decoding, or passthrough. If you expect to hook up a pair of RCA coax from your SBLive to your DD sound system, and have 3d audio in games, you'll be disappointed.
This
I have intercepted some of Peter's poetry. It reads:
[ begin ]
Everybody
Rock your body
Everybody
Rock your body right
Backstreet's Back alright
Oh my God we're back again
Brothers, sisters, everybody sing
We're gonna bring you the flavor show you how
I've got a gotta question for ya
Better answer now
Pre-chorus
Am I original? (yeah)
Am I the only one? (yeah)
Am I sexual? (yeah)
Am I everything you need?
You better rock your body now
Chorus
Now throw your hands up in the air
And wave 'em around lik you just don't care
If you wanna party let me hear you yell
'Cause we've got it goin on again
Pre-chorus
Chorus
So everybody, everywhere
Don't be afraid, don't have no fear
Gonna tell the world, make it understand
As long as there'll be music we'll be coming back again
Chorus
[ end ]
Jesus Christ, Peter, that's fucking gay.
bdigit's just another chucklehead that can't tell the difference between innovation and stagnation... and RISC is better architecture than CISC, nyah!
? Why can't we get good software, software that encourages co-operation and working for a common goal?
God, you sound like a condesending asshole. I bet you are the designated driver at all the parties you go to too...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
... and I'll be the first to flaunt that some software (i.e. DOOM 3) was released for Linux before its WIndoze counterpart.
For Mac, this is HUGE!
I contend that Seti@home is trivial. My guess is that any civilization capable of interstellar travel has developed a faster-than-lightspeed communication device.
Besides, thats 73GigeFlops on its internal execution units, and its a purely theoretical number. For all we know that measurement is made on some ultra-simple operation they have several execution units for, or perhaps its a calculation based on if every execution unit was processing data.
Besides if you need ultra-power for scientific computing there are a number of high performance ASICs out there.
FunOne
FunOne
Since the apache script that Voodooextreme is using appears to be not working (well, I can't get to the images!), here's the direct links. Someone want to mirror them? (delete the space in jpg... damn browser is adding it)
p g
p gp gp gp g
www.voodooextreme.com/apache/shots/newdoom/bg01.j
www.voodooextreme.com/apache/shots/newdoom/bg02.j
www.voodooextreme.com/apache/shots/newdoom/bg03.j
www.voodooextreme.com/apache/shots/newdoom/bg04.j
www.voodooextreme.com/apache/shots/newdoom/bg05.j
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
It seems hardocp is on the job already. They had a full technical review of the geforce3 and on their website but nvidia requested them to take the article down. Hehe, whats so gripping about a video card that does nothing more than draw dots on the screen? Madhu
I acidentally replied to the wrong post with this, so if you see it again, sorry.
That's unbelievably short thinking. I am sure you were surprised by computers breaking the 640k of RAM mark, but power will always be better no matter what. Not only that more power means lower prices for the the same amount of power. Computers will not be fast enough for doing 3D animation for a long time. There are many many bottlenecks in computers. Video conferencing kind of sucks right now, even over high bandwidth. What could help this? Real time mpeg4 and mp3 compression and decompression. Can your computer do that? I didn't think so.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
And, yes, DOOM is set in dark places. Jesus.
If you want bright colors, buy Mario 64.
...when one has the best damn machine with the best damn graphics card on the best damn OS running on the best damn chip architecture available? i mean, really!
>I concur. That is why I run Win2k. A wonderful product and reliable to 5 nines.
Yeah. To bad there's a few dozen zeros between the five nine and the decimal point.
More screenshots and video download links on http://www.nextdoom.com
Does anyone have an URL for a "download and THEN watch" version of the video, or an equivalent to "wget" for rtsp streams?
I'd really like to get the whole thing and then watch it full-size, rather than trying to cram it through my slow internet connection and losing most of the detail...
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I'm starting to wonder if the man sold his soul to the devil for this talent...
Please help! I'm stuck inside my virtual reality headset!
it's a $350 BTO option on a Mac, not $600...
"Looks like Doom 3 will be another game where the color palette is "shades of black". Sigh." Yes, because Doom should really have a color palette similar to Mario 64. Come on, Doom is all about being dark.
Moral of this story: never post any stories to Slashdot on time. Ever. :)
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I could just imagine a Mahir Cagri dancing GIF, stuttering out these phrases. No doubt attached to the ILOVEYOU virus, propagating through all of the broken MSOutlook mail-readers.
only $350 as a BTO option on one of those killer Macs...
If those projects need CPU horsepower, they can go buy a bloody 1600mHz overclocked Athlon. They certainly don't have any right to use MY computer that I paid for.
Your ideas of "worthiness" smack of some very very broken ideas about socioeconomics. (Specifically, somebody with a "worthy" cause has the right to use something that I purchased, since I'm using it for "unworthy" purposes)
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
If NVidia supplies GeForce3's to the PC market, competition among manufacturers will quickly drive prices (and profits) down.
If NVidia supplies GeForce3's to Apple, then monopolistic pricing applies. They can charge whatever price they want. Mac users are quite accustomed to being gouged, so sales shouldn't really suffer.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Ah! Now we get down to it! YOU are the arbitrator of all that is Just and Right in the universe. So if we, the poor unwashed masses, are indulging in distasteful stuff, You in Your Wisdom will ban it from us, only for our own betterment and edification. And then take away the things we purchased with our money and give them to causes that You deem Worthy.
Dear sweet Jesus on a popsicle stick, I hope you're trolling, because if you're not...you're a dolt.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
These graphic cards have some serious performance to offer, why can't I use this for my matrix operations with ATLAS? That would be really nice...
Why don't you quit your bitching and write such a game? Nobody else is responsible for realizing YOUR visions. Of course, nobody's really interested in them either, so you might have trouble selling your wares...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Try again boogie boy.
"Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi"
From Blue's News
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
For some reason, they went to an all-brown palette for Quake, and got so many complaints about it, Quake 2 and Q3A were super-colorful. But people bitched about that too. Q3A is too much like a cheezy arcade game, they whined. Quake 2 doesn't look like you're in a serious battle against evil. Too many colors!
Well, thanks a lot. Doom 3 is gonna look use the "dirt, feces and concrete" palette. Wonderful.
The hooligans are loose! The hooligans are loose! What if they become ruffians? -- Bill Hicks
Yes indeedy, it is very much about Thinking Different.
The techy PC market is saturated. People have sated themselves on cheap ram, cheap CPUs, cheap storage, and cheap video cards. There's no reason for PC growth to grow.
So now Apple is probably targetting the *non* techy market. Coincindentally that also happens to be the female market. Girls. The ones who don't know or care about the iMac's increased graphics memory or CPU speed, or video chipset speed.
The ones who buy new pairs of shoes to match their new dresses to match their new handbags etc.
If they can hook these girls even once, Apple can almost guarantee multiple resells as a fashion industry. Basic black with chrome highlights. Iridescent green with transparent blue panels. Etc.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Doom was all about destruction and mindless carnage, but it was actually pretty bright. People complained about Q3A's bright colors, but in fact I think Dooms bright colors helped the game be more fun. I think if Doom 3 is as dark as shown in those screenshots (and that's a relatively big "if" for a game still in development), it will be a snooze unless the gameplay is totally unprecedented.
for more on the shades of black palette, see here.
The hooligans are loose! The hooligans are loose! What if they become ruffians? -- Bill Hicks
Come on! What's the surprise in having a fully illuminated room where you can see each and every monster? Where's the suspense when every wall is pansy pink and wussy blue?
DOOM 3 isn't intended to be another Q3; this is Id Software's effort to plow back into the single-player spotlight it left behind 5 years ago. And they're not trying to make it a "guns a-blazing in broad daylight" cameo, they're trying to make it a dark, gloomy, somber, macabre tale through the infested zone.
If you're complaining about the game not being colorful enough, go back to your "colorful" world where UT and NOLF and N'Suck reign supreme. I'm going to wait patiently for this masterpiece to be released, and I'm going to like it, damnit!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
now my 2 cents...
there's one thing i like about id. they make some damn fine gaming engines. and they make damn fine graphics for these engines.
as soon as doom3 comes out, i'm diving head first into the shallow end of the MOD pool.
that way i can get some damn fine (read: innovative) concepts.
***
***
umm... what's a sig? is that a 'hacking' thing?
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
To generalize your question, what software is used that sound cards could accelerate?
How about digital USB speaker output? Right now that sucks up CPU resources that a good sound card should be able to handle.
How about MP3 encoding/decoding? Right now it's a trivial 2% of my system, but if I up the bitrate, the number of channels, and the 'effects', I can start soaking up CPU. Why not have a soundcard accelerate it the same way video cards accelerate 3d graphics?
How about voice recognition software? Hardware accelerate that!
3d sound: Anything that uses a 3d library should be able to use 3d sound. Imagine Quake3. If the soundcard could access the level data, the walls, the enemy placement, the weapon type, etc, it could actually do occlusions, echoes, reverbs, damping, amplification, cancelation, etc.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Woah! where have you been, or where have you shoved your head for the past year or so?
I have a SoundBlaster Live, and it has 2 sets of speaker output (front and back), and an AC-3 (Dolby Digital) coaxial output.
I believe that's the closest to true 3D sound you can get today (Just go to your local movie theater, they're almost always equipped with DD or SDDS)
---
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
I have a life, thank you! Excuse me for not knowing every goddamn geek-related piece of usless trivia. Follow your own advice my friend.
From the screenshots, it looks like Doom II is another ID game where your space marine has no trouble picking up hundreds of rounds of ammo off of his fallen comrades, but can't seem to find a single flashlight anywhere. Heck, usually when you find a flashlight in a FPS some joker has put 20 year old Ni-cads in it and it lasts like 30 seconds or so. You'd think you'd be able to power a flashlight for quite a while off of those cells the BFG/Plasma Rifle uses...
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
That is exactly the theme that is presented in the short story "The Warriors," where pacifist golden-age-of-no-violence humans first meet the Kzinti and STILL kick their furry asses. More like "cooked their furry asses" with the ships main drive laser, if I recall.
:: Quark Express :: (still waiting for a PC version of that one)
First saw this in '94... it's definitely out there.
Spelling, grammar, punctuation? We need something that checks logic.
Thank you! :)
Screw "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
The new slogan is:
"ALL YOUR BANDWITDH ARE BELONG TO US"
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Maybe they're that dark because there's little background or ambient light. Since this is an early stage for a game, perhaps iD wanted to keep things simple and save some surprises.
Looks to me like they just used a few models, emphasizing the details on the characters. Its a lot simpler to do that than model an entire scene (which would likely take away from the main model's details which is the emphsasis anyway.
It probably would have been more appropriate to have used shots from Maya (which is what Carmack and co used to make the models in Doom 3), but then it wouldn't have been as effective for Apple PR-wise. Gaming geeks and the general public don't care about Maya, but games.
Add in the fact the card costs $600 and I doubt many people will be rushing out to buy it soon.
Well...ya know what us imbiciles always say: We can always smell our own! Nice to see fellow bretheren posting at /.
But TrueType (an Apple/Microsoft venture) came standard with Windows 3.1 first.
TrueType is an Apple invention. It is NOT an Apple/MS joint venture. You are thinking of a technology swap: Apple's TrueType for Microsoft's PostScript interpreter. TrueType has been a standard part of MacOS since version 7.0 (which comes after Win 3.0 but before 3.1), but it also works with 6.0.x.
For more information, see A Brief History of TrueType. For even more information, see A History of TrueType.
Ok - Someone please help here: Is the geforce3 also the "NV20" i hear about? Is this the final product this 'code word' will ship as?
I'm not sure if I read this right.. it can't be true.. I WILL be able to get a GeForce 3 for my PC/Linux box, right? RIGHT?
-- Doesn't know anything about Macs, please excuse my ignorance.
------------
CitizenC
Am I the only one noticing that sparkling twinkly music that they keep playing when people clap and something "exciting" happens. It bothers me.
Casual Games/Downloads
Was there a Wolfenstein 2 that I missed out on somewhere?
I've always been fascinated by codecs that allow you to trade CPU time for compression efficiency.
An example of this was Iterated System's fractal codec, where you could spend literally days of 33 Mhz i486 CPU time searching for a better compression, or be satisfied with the compression you got from a few minute's search.
Are there any modern codecs like that? So that a powerful machine can really crank the compression up, but a slower machine had better have a fat pipe, 'cause it isn't going to have time to get much compression done.
I guess it'd have to be a codec whose compressed representation was almost turing complete (I guess we could just send a program, but the halting problem seems intractable.)
I loved the first games id published, I got my first PC (An IBM Bluelightning 486/66 with the speed of a 486/33) just so I could play Doom 2, and Quake was a big contributor to my later upgrade to Pentium, and I bought a Voodoo card and later a TNT so I could see Quake 2 in all its glory.
However, am I the only one who think that Carmack et al have really not moved creatively at all while the rest of the industry have taken huge steps forward? The only reason people and gaming magazines still get so exited when id is mentioned because they don't want to admit how far the company which gave them so many good memories has fallen. Ok, some mindless shooting is still fun for a short while (no matter if you prefer UT or Q3) and people will still buy their latest release just to see the cool graphics, but I just don't see them taking the gaming world by storm again unless they start coming up with something really innovative and original. And considering that ever since Doom 1 they have made the same game over and over again I'm not holding my breath that Doom 3 will be any different. I agree with Clive Barker where in one of his recent interviews he said that too many games are just "Here is a gun. There is a monster. Now shoot it. Wasn't that fun? Let's do it again, a thousand times". To keep the interest up, games need good plots and interesting realistic characters. (At least, that's my opinion. I love games such as System Shock 2, Planescape: Torment or Half-Life and I'm defenitely going to buy Clive Barker's Undying).
Getting back to id, they have shown again and again that they don't give a rats ass about plot or characters. Even more seriously, they don't care enough even to hire someone else to do the writing. Remember the introductory "story" in the manual to Quake 2 which read like it had been written by a 14-year old fanboy? Alien race with no background attacking for no reason, marine drill sergeants screaming about kicking ass. The only thing missing was "They sent us up the bomb!"
As for games the last couple of years, do reviews say "Good, but not quite Quake 2 or Quake 3"? No, they say "Good, but not quite Half-Life". And the stuff they complain about is not lack of graphics, but lack of good storytelling.
No, I hope the trend of getting more real writers in, like the guy who wrote the story for Half-Life (his horror book the 49th Mandala is really good), Clive Baker, or the Japanese guys who wrote the story for FF7.
As for Doom 3, well, I hope I can get pleasantly surprised. But that would surprise me.
************************************************ ** *
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Now if the pixel shaders could only do more than just shades of black! Man those screenshots are indecipherable. Guess we'll have to wait for GeForce 4. ;-)
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Doing this would make them much more competitive, and help them regain a lot of territory lost to MS.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
The Apple GF3 is shipping in the end of March or beginning of April. This is probably to coincide with the release of OS X. Look at this info about the PC NV20, Geforce3 that is: NV20 Pictures: http://www.geocities.com/tnaw_xtennis/GF3pics.htm NV20 Specs in detail: http://www.digit-life.com/articles/nv20/index.html
ASUS V8200 & Elsa Gladiac 920 Info: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/#982608161
Hercules 3D Prophet III box-picture:
http://www.vc-news.com/images/proph3.jpg
Hercules 3D Prophet III 128 MB-version rumor:
http://www.vc-news.com/news.asp?date=2%2F19%2F2001 #3840
Hercules 3D Prophet III, April 14th release date, $599 price, rumor:
http://www.vc-news.com/news.asp?date=2%2F19%2F2001 #3837
NV20 vs. NV10 full-scene-antialiasing-comparison-screenshots:
http://www.m3dzone.com/article.php?sid=98
NV20 Q3 1024x768 4x4 FSAA, 70 FPS, Info:
http://www.nvnews.net/ubb/Forum3/HTML/000561.html
Date of launch party: Feb 26th, Paris.
Date for end of NDA: Feb 27th, expect reviews on all major hardware-sites.
and THIS story from Feb 13th:
"It appears that the next generation chipset from NVIDIA will be named the GeForce3. If this story over at NVchips-fr is on the up and up.
According to the report, the pic appears to be real and some shops in Switzerland already have the card in their price list for around 500$. It also says that the GeForce3 will appear in stores around the end of February or beginning of March. Thanks for the tip Tanguy!
So who's going to order one
Update: I received word from a reliable source that CompUSA has the Guillemot 3D Prophet III logged in their system as SKU# 282126 with a retail price of $599. Hopefully this is a feature rich card (TV-Out, DVI, modified Blue Orb?) as Hercules products typically command a premium price. Keep in mind that the 3D Prophet II Ultra sells for $499 at CompUSA online.
Update II: I received a confirmation from a CompUSA Corporate Sales Manager that the SKU# for the GeForce3 is valid.
Update III: I've removed the image of the Hercules 3D Prophet III box shot at the request of Top D Computers."
Worst case scenario, they will be launched in mid March, but you won't see Apple roll the GF3 out until late March w/ OS X.
I hope so. It's nice not having to boot to windoze just to play a game every now and then.
"Or the original Gameboy. Shades of black on the screen. Ergo crap."
The original Gameboy was kind of a Split Pea Soup color on Light Puke, not really "shades of black"
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
Apparantely the new iMacs are shipping with not 16meg rage 128 pros, but Rage Ultras... So, anyone know the difference?
Games are a very beneficial and productive use of computing power. How many people have learned how to use the computer to play games (or use napster, or email which would probably fall under "useless" when you consider how most people use it). Sure, it didnt turn everyone into a linux guru (nor can everyone BE a linux guru) but it taught them something useful. Also, how many people "blow off steam" by playing games? This is a very important use of games, to release stress. Without games or other forms of entertainment, well we probably wouldnt have the computing power to begin with (nor a society whom to use it on). Civilization wouldnt have gotten this far without fantasy and entertainers.
That post was funny, not a troll!
rosie_bhjp
A radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
When I said "X-Box" I actually meant it. Instead of a GeForce3, I'll just get the X-Box in June and get pretty much the same experience. $600 for a videocard is ridiculous unless you are actually doing high-end renders.
The Geoforce 3 option will be available late march at a cost of $600 dollars! I don't think your average mac buyer is going to pay $600 to make quake look pretty especially considering most of your hard core gamers that would actually shell out the big bucks for the Geoforce 3 run windows.
You'd probably think something like this is very dangerous stuff. I bet you want to burn all evidence of its existence. Other people would consider Hamlet a classic of literature, stage, and screen. Different tastes, I guess.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Okay, so this is totally off topic, but I just ordered a Titanium PB, I'm going to get Mac OS X the minute I hear the PB has shipped, and I have a hobbiest's interest in gaming.
Prelude aside, I haven' been able to find much in terms of cross platform programming on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows 2000, three of the least popular gaming platforms out there behind PSX, Gameboy, and Windows 98. Though I suppose what with the DX 8/7 support in W2k, Windows 2000 isn't a problem.
I *really* want to learn and use Objective C, the Cocoa libraries, and OpenGL. I know that's not a problem with the Mac, given that Apple has made them all first class citizens of Mac OSX; is there any chance of being cross platform?
Or do you just code straight C for the game (and thus target every platform on the planet I guess), with platform specific code for the input and display handling?
I really wish someone had a book published, using iD as the case study, on cross platform development. IDEs, compilers, best practices, optimization techniques, workarounds, etc.
Of course, just saying all this out loud has given me a solution ^^; Code in C, abstract out the platform specific display, device, and input handling routines into a separate library, and use the 'best' software for each platform, whether that be Metrowerks, GCC, Visual Studio, etc.
Actually, I guess you could use Metrowerks for all the platforms, couldn't you? Is that what you do?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Now you've done it, you probably gave an errection to all the mac people around here to jump on you and punch you to death :)
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Juan Pablo Escobar makes crack cocaine. He offers it for sale. People buy it. He makes the kind of crack cocaine he likes to use, and he is lucky that people like it enough too support his desire to continue making it.
Perhaps if the Slashdot reading morons with IQs in the sub-80s stopped and thought for more than 1 second before posting, they would realise that maybe, just maybe, uncontrolled capitalism is not the only moral force in the world, and that perhaps simulated murder should not be treated as entertainement or be dignified with the title 'game'.
Personally, I think the developers of violent pornography like Quake, Doom, Unreal, etc are no better than a gang of Columbian Crack barons. It is difficult to determine which group has a worse effect on US society (or what's left of it).
We did a ton of testing the last two weeks while we were putting the demo together.
The 733 G4 was not as fast as my 1 ghz PIII in any of the trouble areas.
Apple is doing a lot of good work, but the CPU's just aren't as fast as the x86 ones.
AltiVec can compensate in some cases, because it is way, way easier to program for than SSE, but it takes a very simple batched, computation intensive task for it to pay off in any noticable way. Amdahls law and all that.
We did a couple functions with AltiVec, but they didn't make much difference.
Video encoding and large image processing are two areas that it can pay off, because you may be spending 90%+ of your time in one page of code.
Even then, it takes a special balance to let a G4 come out ahead, because it has less memory bandwidthd than a high end x86 system.
John Carmack
Dude, the iMacs don't have nvidia chips. They're still using Rage 128s.
with the specs on that card, I wouldnt worry... probobly a ton of super high res models running around. But then again, unless you have a top of the line system it wont look so good. After all, the game is a long way off. they probobly couldnt get a ton of those models on the Mac they are doing the demo on.... but when Doom3 comes out, there will be some insanely fast gaming systems.
Spoiling the story for people who haven't read it yet is REALLY BAD FORM.
If you ask me, $600 is waaaaay too much for a video card, and if NVIDIA still had 3dfx to worry about, you can be sure the GeForce3 would be more reasonably priced.
Competition is good, even if a company holding a monopoly is producing a good product.
can be found here: http://www.3dfinger.com/individual.php3?fingeracco unt=johnc@idsoftware.com
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
I just want to say I think it kicks ass that you post to Slashdot. Most senior developers have "better things to do with their time", which you do as well, but you post anyway, which is cool.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
"Artificially" has nothing to do with it.
NVIDIA needs to work with a hardware manufacturer to make money, or at least license it to someone. Unless I'm mistaken, NVIDIA is fabless and without any capability to make cards.
So if Apple got the card first, it's because they either made it themselves (possible) or they're buying from someone else. Regardless, they did the footwork because it's important to them to make inroads into the enthusiast and game community. Don't ask me why they think so, but it's unquestionable that the GeForce 3 is a gamer's card.
Dell could have done it. Compaq could have done it. IBM could have done it. Apple just did their job and got themselves a scoop on the rest of the industry.
NVIDIA can't sell to the PC world unless someone comes up and makes a card for them to sell.
It might even be possible for PC people to order and buy the GeForce3 card from the Apple store, plop it into a PC, grab the NVIDIA drivers, and see it do amazing things
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
A56.
A57 gets overexcited
: future envisioned by the pacifistic writer Larry
: Niven may not come to pass.
I'm sad to think that there will never be a guy who creates a mode of transportation that will get noticed by a pointy eared race of aliens who will form a Federation of Planets with us.
But as consolation, I can blow your spleen out in Doom 3. Yeah, I think it's a good trade-off.
BytesTemplar.com
Amen to that. If I hear one more Mac *fanatic* crow about Photoshop results I know where to point them.
Amen to that. If I hear one more Mac *fanatic* crow about Photoshop results I know where to point them.
Uh.. Did you even read what he said? Photoshop and video editing is exactly where the G4 *does* beat x86. Carmack was talking about his testing with Doom 3 and Doom 3 only. Here is what he said (emphasis mine):
Video encoding and large image processing are two areas that it can pay off, because you may be spending 90%+ of your time in one page of code.
Jeez, and I don't even own a mac!
Squozen
Duke Nukem merely ripped off the one-liners, but Doom used essentially the same plot without being insulting to the original. It's a matter of "look'n'feel". I don't know about anyone else, but I felt like I was Ash In Space.
Here you go.
-jfedor
I think the person you're responding to said that if a Mac user brags about their photoshop results he'll point them here where it says that a Mac will win in those cases, but not in anything else.
For those of us who don't apply four-pixel gaussian blurs to 256MB CMYK images...
But nobody would buy a computer just to run SETI or Folding @Home (or the other similar projects). The computers are purchased because there's a periodic task (games, 3d rendering, etc) which takes a kick-ass CPU. Then the spare cycles can be put to good use. But those cycles wouldn't exist if the machine wasn't made and sold for another purpose.
Most definitely. Carmack has always remained engaged with the community, which is one of the coolest things about him.
;)
That and his amazing programming skills which have cost me years of lost productivity
My $0.02 as a game programmer...
> Sticking to ANSI usually makes things easier in the long run, right?
Compared to finding working compilers that support STL, and templates, properly, then yes, it is easier to use ANSI.
In writing game code, no. C++ provides some nice paradigms: Abstract types via classes, inheritance, over-ridable behaviour via "virtual", templates, operator overloading, namespaces, etc. You can simulate all those in C, but it is much harder to read, then "native" C++.
In C/C++ you still abstract key components out, i.e. sound, graphics, networking, so the language doesn't matter for the "design". C++ just makes the implementation easier in some areas.
Often game developers, especially Id software make games thare meant to have a dark and foreboding atmosphere. It is also adding to the challenge in case you were planning on cruising through the game by sniping everything you see from a distance. However, I agree that they are also made too dark occasionally, maybe because developers are predicting the gamers' attempt to bypass this by cranking up the gamma, brightness, and contrast...
Ummm, yes it does. The 2D card on this particular system is an equaly aging Stelth 3D 4000. The Voodoo 2 card I have is the Monster II, BTW. I'm putting both in my GNU/Linux box and have the GeForce in my Winblows DSM (Dedicated Solitare Machine).
------
Not a typewriter
While the Mac is definitely slower at processes that are commonly found in your games, I find it very hard to believe that you had any trouble having the G4 come out ahead on video encoding. Using the same source video on a G4 500, and a PIII 1Ghz, resizing and compressing to 320x240 from a DV stream using the Sorenson 2 codec, the Mac completed the process over twice as fast. While I don't play a single game on my Mac, I also don't use my PC for any of my creative work. The speed boost I get with Photoshop and MCP on the Mac is noticeably different then my PC. Oh, BTW I love Team Arena to death and play it way too much, but you really need to get a User Interface designer to do some work on your Multiplayer menu system. The flow of the menus is atrocious, and the need to jump back to the main menu everytime you exit a server drives me nuts. It actually drove me to use GameSpy!
There's a VGA Box you can buy that allows S-Video and RGB (15-pin dsub). Sega makes one, and there are third-party boxes as well.
The AltiVec unit requires a couple of things that you dont have to deal with in normal code. The data has to be nicely laid out all in one place, and you have to be willing/able to deal with it more than one element at a time. Most programs are not designed that way (or if they are it is only by chance) so usually it is hard at first to find ways to retrofit Altivec into existing code. Certain trends in programming (e.g. OOP) make it even less likely that you will see these kinds of data structures. So to make a long story short, to get pervasive use of AltiVec, you have to design around it. I cant speak about the Quake engine, but from John's comments that sounds a little bit like part of the problem.
This is not to say that AltiVec is useless for such apps. AltiVec more often than not just so happens to be very good at accelerating that 10% of the code that consumes 90% of the CPU time. So, a little bit of work often goes a long way.
What you learn working with it is that memory bandwidth is almost always the problem. The result is that certain common old-gen programming techniques for code optimization that rely on memory access to save CPU time (longer code, lookup tables, etc.) are about the last thing you would want to do with AltiVec. You only unroll loops as much as is necessary to get proper scheduling and stop there, for example. Almost everything, including constants are best calculated on the fly rather than loaded from memory. As John points out, you are better off with one big complicated function rather than a lot of simple ones. Accessing memory is so expensive that once you have the data you had better do a lot with it. You typically have about 30-40 cycles of time per 32 byte block of memory that is "spent for you" every time you load memory. If you dont do something worthwhile during that time, it is your loss.
AltiVec is also good for sound code. It is a great way to reduce the overhead associated with single sound channels so that you can have lots playing concurrently without having time spent at interrupt running amok.
Ian Ollmann iano@cco.caltech.edu
There is a reason why John Carmack drives an F40 and you drive a Dodge Duster. -- z Straight Outta' Comdex
Straight Outta' Comdex
John- have you considered optimizing for 3dnow for doom3 (or hell, q3)? I know it ain't all that SSE2 is in terms of potential performance gain, but surely you stand to recoup some frames. You have any feeling about the p4 as opposed to the athlon and future doom3 performance on either platform? best /l
What the fuck is up with this, nVidia releasing GeForce 3 for Macs but not for PCs? Have they lost their minds? PCs dominate the market, and all of the best gaming products that come out on PCs come out on Macs a year later, if at all. What the fuck is this, an attempt by nVidia to force consumers to switch over to Macs, forcing us all to give up the games -- Descent 3, Tomb Raider 1 - 4, Quake 1 - 3, Unreal, Half-Life -- we paid good money for, and settle to be on a platform which is usually a year behind when it comes to gaming releases? This is a major tactical error on the part of nVidia. They are sending the message that their top priority is compatability with Macs, and this is not going to get the most sales/profit, as PCs dominate the market.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
"While I don't play a single game on my Mac, I also don't use my PC for any of my creative work." Same here. I own both platforms as well including two Power Macs (G3/300 and a G4/400) and one DELL PC (866MHz P3). Despite the clock speed of the Pentium being more than double that of the G4 I still do all of my image editing, video editing, 3D rendering, PERL programming and web design on the two Macs. Frankly the Mac's just better at that kind of stuff. Not to mention juggling all those files is just NOT something I want to do in Windows with its atrocious and botched file system in which you step one inch out of Microsoft's predesigned method and you're screwed.
Can you contrast your comments
The 733 G4 was not as fast as my 1 ghz PIII in any of the trouble areas. Apple is doing a lot of good work, but the CPU's just aren't as fast as the x86 ones. AltiVec can compensate in some cases, because it is way, way easier to program for than SSE, but it takes a very simple batched, computation intensive task for it to pay off in any noticable way. Amdahls law and all that. We did a couple functions with AltiVec, but they didn't make much difference. Video encoding and large image processing are two areas that it can pay off, because you may be spending 90%+ of your time in one page of code. Even then, it takes a special balance to let a G4 come out ahead, because it has less memory bandwidthd than a high end x86 system.
With those of graeme devine as posted on insidemacgames.
I finally got around to programming in Altivec support for Quake3 1.27h. If you have a G4 you'll certainly want to flex that velocity engine! I think this safely puts the G4 ahead of the PC. I'll probably post this tomorrow. We have in the office a G4/533 with a GeForce2 card. It's a very very nice setup. Graeme.
It would seem the two of you are at odds over this little issue.
First off, let's not open this up into another Mac vs. PC debate.
:)
:)
Okay, never mind, let's.....
First off to the %90-95 of you Mac users out there that think Windows is the only operating system that PC's run, well.... you're wrong. So there. BSD, FreeBSD, 3 x 10^ who gives a sh*t different flavors of linux, several commercial Unix flavours (including Solaris), BeOS, and several other OSes ALL run on the PC. Each one handles a little different. Each one takes tweaking to produce numbers suitable to release as benchmarks.
To the PC users that have never gotten any closer to a Mac that they fear that..... *shivers*... unnamed feeling of AHHHHH!!!!!
Get over it, Macs ain't that bad. I mean, MacOS is still a piece of crap designed for those that were to lazy to learn sh
But Rhapsody runs on Macs. So does *gasp* Linux.
And BeOS. And who knows how many silent others.
You can argue photoshop performance and video times until may next-to-most-recent-ex calls me back....
PCs have the current best price-to-performance ratio in the 32-bit market.
Macs are nice specifically because they're not PCs. They are easy to use. You don't have to worry about a lot of the same issues (chances are if some yahoo decided that they wanted to write a Mac driver for a piece of hardware, it's a gonna work). I like some of the development tools, and I like being able to relax and know that if I get that itch, I can still look across the network at my box and write my photoshop/prottols stuff to my FAT variant based shared disk.
But let's look at Mr. Carmack's argument, memory bandwith.
Somebody else can pull up some numbers, but what kind of memory subsystem do G4's use? I'm pretty sure it isn't RAMBUS, DDR-SDRAM, or 133mhz based DIMMS. I might be wrong about the last one. I've been out of hardware for a bit.
Point is this: the current incarnation of memory as it sits, they way memory subsystems are implemented, the PC archetechture has more memory bandwidth, and is favouring those running memory intensive applications.
That's all anyone was saying.
If you want a real test, then put both systems side by side, and see who has the best floating point performance. And no, nobody gives half a damn about integer performance anymore.
And this time, when you go to get the testbed systems, go dollar fo dollar, and see which one puts you on top.
BTW, does anybody have any hopes or aspirations about next-gen software finally being multithreaded? Even more daring, does anyone think that the new doom engine should be ported to 64-bit?
I have also enjoyed Team Arena to the detriment of the rest of my life. Although it has gotten me off of Unreal Tournament for awhile. I am in agrement with Tranj that the menuing system for it is crying out for a spit and polish. As an expert in user interaction design, I am offering my services. It really is annoying, and I would like to see that menuing system be all that it started out to be.
My guess is GeForce3 for Mac ASAP has more to do with having a powerful 3D card for Alias/Wavefront MAYA on MacOSX. Can anyone comment about estimated performance of GF3 in 3D modeling and rendering apps when pitted against "pro" 3D cards?
Doom3 has a totaly diffrent codebase then quake3, q3's code may get a bigger boost then d3s.
Rate me on Picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Not to mention juggling all those files is just NOT something I want to do in Windows with its atrocious and botched file system in which you step one inch out of Microsoft's predesigned method and you're screwed.
What the hell are you talking about? "step one inch out of microsofts..." The only thing I can think from that sentance is that if you drag the files into the wrong window or something (one ince off). Windows Explorer has a lot more ways to move files around then Finder does. (cut+paste, drag/drop, commandline, etc)
And how is Perl better on a mac then a PC? if anything, I'd say it would be better on a Unix machine.
Rate me on Picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Yeh, right...
Just try to get numbers like that in the real world, and the Itanium is going to be way slower then an x86 chip when it comes out.
The fact of the matter is that Doom3 runs faster on a PC then a g4. Mac zealots can rant all they want, but it isn't going to change anything. And anyone who believes apple's ludicrous numbers is a certifiable moron.
Megahertz don't matter, thats how fast the swith flicks on and off. the G4 processers have at least 4 times the AMOUNT of switches that a PIII has, making a 500 megahertz G4 processer equal to a 2 gigahertz pentium in speed.
You might be trying to dumb things down, but you only make yourself look dumb, That sentence makes absolutely no sense on its own with regards anything relating to CPU design.
Rate me on Picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Not that I know jack but it seems to me that these games are mostly designed around Wintel hardware and then ported to the Mac OS platform/hardware as well as Linux on x86. If the games were designed from the ground up around the G4 architecture and OS X I assume the performance would be very, very much improved. I also assume is not economical for this Microsoft world we live in. On that note. For all those who beet their drums in opposition to the Mac I can only ask for a truce. Apple is doing things right for a change in my humble opinion. Jobs is really bending over backwards to improve things. I seriously am a believer in the company and am putting my faith in this under dog. Microsoft scares me. Even though they pacify me with Office 2001, Outlook, and IE, and I have friends and family who work for them, they need to be Knocked down a bit. Fair competition needs to be restored. Their only competition is the Penguin who works for free. It's ridicules and sad that only Martyrdom can compete with the beast and eat away at it's foundation. I am sick with what happened to Netscape and every other co. that has not bent over. I am now scared for the next company on Redmond's radar, Real Networks ......And I am always worried about Apple the company that although piss' me of time to time I put my hopes in and believe in.
I'm saddened that Apple has to kiss ass to Microsoft just to have Office which if pulled would possibly destroy the company.
Even though they makes hundreds of millions from Apple customers if the Government wasn't breathing down their back they would have already drove the knife all the Way.
If they could get their hands on Linux they would knife the baby without a second thought. Thank god Linux is an invisible front.
Apple is leaving the past behind and putting it's life in Open Source Darwin/ BSD, Open GL, PDF Aqua 2D and QuickTime.
Its a corporate company but Apples after being whipped is walking the walk.
If Linux and BSD can work together or at least contently coexist then all will thrive and robustly grow and maybe Microsoft's bull sh__ can be muzzled and it will play nice..
And Steve Balmer will bring me flowers and choclate while riding a pink elephants back.
Woe. I'll shut up now.
--The first step in making our dreams come true is to wake up--
Alright... how many of you think that was really john carmack?? i mean seriously.. i could say HEY! THE P4 SUX and sign it Ex-President William J Clinton... but would anyone believe me... no.. they wouldnt...
Hey buddy, stop talking out your @$$ on pre-fabricated MacOS myths. Apple spent years of research on interfaces, creating their own theories and laws like Fitts' law. With the current MacOS, I have a power-user setup, with pop-up windows, hotkeys, you name it. And it WORKS. like a charm. Simple AND powerful. Windows can't be customized to the degree of Apple for my taste, save moving the taskbar around. Don't know enough about linux to say. Just check out OS X for even better improvements
>>Yep, borrowed from Windows, who in turn borrowed the idea from OS/2.
well considering that Microsoft developed OS/2 they were'nt really borrowing from anywhere
Although it was released by IBM, it was developed by Microsoft as a replacement for DOS but the two companies had major disagreements over what should be included(Microsoft wanted support for networking, IBM didn't) they split an Microsoft started work on Winblows
I don't know where you have been, but everyone knows a G5 2.5GHz and a Radeon 3 runs Doom 3 faster than any Pentium 5 system currently available...
Thanks, that's exactly what I meant. I have nothing against Macs, just the people who put the blinders on and cannot look at the facts objectively.
:)
Cheers
It was John Carmack. He has posted on /. on various occasions before. Also see this list of names of prominent /. users.
email me
@hotmail.com
er nm about the email
http://dione.cwru.edu/~ctp/doom
I'll keep them up for a week or so, reply to this when you've gotten them all.
WHAT?! Is it a joke? A Pentium is many, many times faster then G4 to compress a video. Even a Celeron 266 is faster than your G4 to accomplish this job, did u ever tried to compress in Mpeg 4 DivX using a G4? Of course Mpeg 4 has much better image quality than Sorenson. Just read this article: http://207.109.148.4/neish/shootout/page5.html Aurelio