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Zooming in on the GeForce 3
Couple of more in depth hands on looks at the GeForce 3 popped up lately including Sharky's
coverage (with DX8 screenshots) and
AnandTech's take. Same basic story. Good card, ahead of its time, overpriced, nothing will take advantage of its best features. I bet in 12 months we think differently.
If you owned a Mac, you could Think Different right now.
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Anonymous cowards live for moments like these.
Thats why nvidia should invest efforts in other features.
1. built in analog capture
2. built in firewire IO
3. built in IDCT mpeg2 decomp/ compression
4. built in video overlay for mpeg streams
i nother words, the same shit $6000 cards do but for $300.
Games have always pushed the limits of hardware, and have been responsible for a lot of the advances in hardware over the years. Sure there are always some strategy games out there like Civilization which will not need the latest greatest stuff. But other games will try new tricks, push new features, and see what kind of magic they can perform.
People complain about the video card upgrades but looking back, this isn't such a bad situation. I don't buy the latest video card every time one comes out. I tend to go every other generation or so. At home I've used a Voodoo 1, a TNT 1, and GeForce 1 so far. Total money into these is around 400 bucks because I didn't buy them all hot off the production line.
Now compare that to the pre-hardware acceleration days. If some game was pushing your computer beyond its limits you had to buy a new CPU. A single CPU would easily cost more than the three upgrades I've done on video cards. So I like the situation we are in these days, hardware-wise.
As for gameplay value - well that's something people determine pretty easily. Better games will rise to the top - whether they have the latest greatest effects or not. Fallout and Halflife were both great sellers. Fallout was 2D, nothing flashy, while Halflife was using the Quake engine. Yet they both sold well because they were fun to play, which is the bottom line.
I wish the drivers were open, or even more open -- but that's not the main reason why I dont eagerly
follow Nvidia video cards (and, instead look more toward Matrox and ATI). FWIW, the kernel driver is fairly actively hacked on, so when kernel module changes break them, an (unofficial) fix is usually posted within a few hours/days.
The reason I dont go for Nvidia cards is the (often forgotten) issue of 2D video quality. I've used TNT's and Geforces, but gee, text on the desktop is just not very sharp. There's a world
of difference in image quality between Matrox,ATI and Nvidia based cards. Nvidia's licensees tend to cheap out on the filters on the card. I hope this situation changes, but since they're all competing on price -- well, I'm not holding my breath. I play the occasional game, but I have to stare at the desktop for long periods...Geforces just dont have the sharpness of their competitors.
FWIW, I found that Number Nine (Alas, defunct now) made the sharpest, fastest 2d graphics+text displays. The Imagine128 and Revolution series (T2R-based; the chips they made themselves) were legendary in that regard.
Once you calculate the exact amounts of light [using that vast dynamic range] you then post-process the entire scene with an iris simulator which brings the pixels back into the dynamic range of the monitor ("retina").
The whole complex process is required when you want to properly simulate scenes which are mostly dark but have extremely bright parts - e.g. a prison escape with spotlights.
Some of the work at SIGGRAPH 96 in this area was awesome.
Face it, graphics hardware has hit the same plateau that CPU power has--for the overwhelming majority of users what we have is fine, and there's no reason to upgrade.
Who's going to be the first to say the screenshots have been edited in Photoshop? (or gimp) :)
Baz
128 bit color? 24 bit color most people can no longer distiguish between individual changes in color, 32 bit color is quite enough.
While this is true, most cards add a few extra bits per colour component internally to keep roundoff errors in blending from causing visible artifacts. 30 bits was standard for that, if I recall correctly (more if you count the alpha channel).
128 would just be silly, of course...
128 is not silly at all. The problem is only partially accuracy - it's also dynamic range. 32-bit integers *still* don't carry enough dynamic range to properly differentiate between a moonlit and a sunlit scene. [...] I forget the dynamic range of the human eye, but it's vast due to the ability of the iris to allow more or less light onto the retina [the dynamic range of the retina is much smaller].
However, with all current display technologies, you can see all of the screen at one time. Thus, varying the iris size just brightens or darkens the scene by a constant factor. Within the scene as a whole, the dynamic range you can percieve is just the dynamic range of the retina - which is quite low, as you point out.
Thus, being able to accurately represent sunlit and moonlit scenes on the same monitor would be useless; your iris would respond to the average brighness of the screen, which would cause the sunlit scene to look washed-out and the moonlit scene to look black.
If you're looking at the images one at a time, you might as well just normalize both to the same 256-level brightness range.
...it won't be ahead of its time anymore :-)
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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And, of course, if the Indrema comes out, it's gonna have one of these puppies in it. :)
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(Send all "yeah, but it wont have games" replies to
In short, if you want games with plot and gameplay, perhaps these Uber-cards aren't the enemy after all.
Actually you can't even see 24bit colour from an emittive source such as a monitor or a tv. Reflective surfaces such as paper you can see about 50 milliion colours, but then of course we forget about the small percentage of the female population who are essentially anti-colourblind, and have 4 colour receptors in their eyes as opposed to our 3 (or two in most colour blindness).
Of course, when they say 128bit colour, they mean intenrally, and trust me it's a good thing, 3 or 4 4channel (rgba) polygons on top of each other can introduce a fair amount of clipping in a 36 bit colour space before it gets trimmed down to 24bpp for output.
And don't jump up about you're in 32bit colour mode, you're in 24bit colour mode, with an extra byte per pixel to speed up access.
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
All the cards are based on NVidia's reference design (with very few exceptions.. very very few) and so all the cards are basically the same.
They only vary with the heatsink/fan used and the quality of the RAM (some kinds of RAM can overclock higher than others so that's something to keep a look out for). All the cards run at the same default MHz for memory and core speed, and the RAMDACs are identical because they're built into NVidia's chip.
In the end, buy the cheapest one you can find because they're all the same.
So, yeah, in 12 months, we'll probably *still* be saying "nothing takes advantage of it".
The voodoo 5 5500 only uses an internal power connector. The 6000, which had the external power brick,was never released. So your story is not very funny.
Last I heard the GF3 was coming out the same time it was on the PC as it was for the MAC.
-PovRayMan
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Check out my blackbox styles
Nah, they both use 230MHz DDR (460MHz effective) SDRAM. But, you are correct, the GeForce better utilizes the bandwidth.
Mark Duell
-Chris
Looks like my machine, and the "goodness" of the image depends on the rendering engine a lot more than the video card....
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
With 128bpp, they may be talking about different buffers.
The high-end SGI workstations in '93 had an effective 140bpp video memory. (I thought I recalled 142, but this is from my hazy recollections.)
8+8+8bpp RGB front buffer.
8+8+8bpp RGB back buffer.
32bpp Z front buffer.
32bpp Z back buffer.
24bpp Windowing buffer.
4 bpp (rle compressed) per-pixel video mode selector.
I'd like to see more of that (plus today's dedicated memory for texture, vertex, transform, lightmaps, etc.)
As for color bit depth, 8bps (RGB 24bpp) is the most you'll see on most CRTs. You won't see 32bpp onscreen, usually the other 8 bits are just dword alignment for speed or an alpha channel for video source weaving.
However, the human eye is quite capable of seeing more colors in other situations; Hollywood typically does 16bps (RGB 48bpp) on their special effects, because they don't like to see 1"x1" jaggies or dithering on the 30' screen.
[
Now all they need to make realistic looking graphics is 128bits for color and a few orders of magnitude of the speed improvement.
You're kidding me, right? Why do you need 128 bits of color? Your eye can't really discern above 24 bits of color. Anything more than that would just be a waste. As for speed, you can't really tell above 70 fps, either, which is what some of the better setups are hitting nowadays. (You can get up to about 125 or so, but you're not going to be able to discern a real difference.)
The GeForce 3 allows for essentially infinitely many different effects as its "vertex shader" (It just does whatever transforms on vertices) unit is fully programmable. You can do fisheye lenses, motion blur, lens flare, whatever with the unit. That's where the beauty of it is, since nVidia knows that pushing the speed and color envelope isn't really important anymore. Now their focus is on getting more effects out there for programmers to play with.
It should be rather interesting, as hopefully programmers won't have to worry about optimizing graphics code so much, sacrificing time from AI, physics, STORY, etc. Maybe this whole post sounds like some pro-nVidia propaganda, and I hope it hasn't come off that way, but I've just been rather impressed with the *reviews* of the card so far (in other words, no, I haven't seen it in action yet).
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
Transform and Lighting is nothing new - all 3D programs do transform - rotations, scales, translations, skews, projection, etc.
Take OpenGL as an example. The "T" (in "T&L") functions are glRotatef, glTranslatef, glScalef, and glMulMatrix. Before there was hardware T&L, people don't use these functions often - they write their own. And it was amazing that even a very simple unoptimized matrix transform code performs better than these gl functions most of the time.
What hardware T&L does (in terms of OpenGL) is to accelerate these functions in hardware - formerly, the OpenGL library does inefficient software transform. Now they'll just blast the arguments to some chip registers and let it do the rest. And it is fast, not only because it reduces bandwidth use (intra-chip communication is fast), but it also releases CPU cycles for other uses, which inevitably will have a positive impact on performance.
So, in short, if developers ditch their own matrix libraries and use the ones provided by the graphics API, they're already making use of hardware T&L. And, yes, unfortunately, hardware T&L only has things to do with frame rates - there's no other advantage than frame rate that hardware T&L provides.
Just remember - ALL effects are archeavable with software. The more you offload from the CPU to the GPU, the more CPU cycles you can save for physics, AI, and graphic effects that the hardware does not do yet. So, even hardware that "only" increases framerate sounds good enough for me.
set your monitor to a 85htz refresh rates, and you're PAST that!
(if you don't catch the meaning of that joke, well... then you didn't catch the initial joke, either)
Voting Moo Anyway!
wtf?
The output would still be 32-bit. It would only be processed at 128-bit internally.
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That's just a few of the new extensions NVidia has added to OpenGL to support the new features of the GeForce 3. They are every bit as good as the DX8 stuff.
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In an ideal world, all pixel computation would take place in floating point, period. You'd choose color that way. 24/32 bit is entirely inadequate for sophisticated image processing. It's not about what gets on the display; it's about the computations that got it there.
One of the reasons for the high price of the Ultras is the high price for components: It uses very fast (and expensive) memory chips, and this is the main reason for the performance increase. If memory serves, the memory on the GeForce Ultra is faster than on the GeForce3 - the latter uses new technology to make better use of available bandwidth instead of increasing it.
So until the prices on this kind of memory decreases quite a bit, I don't see the Ultras coming down
this card isnt about the higher FPS numbers, its about the programmable hardware. The Carmack is wringing all the 31337 out of this thing and if you don't have one, then you aren't going to experience Doom3 as it will be meant to be experienced... But by the time Doom3 ships (Christmas, 2002 anyone?) ...the GF3 will be about $350 and the next best will be there to make us all turn green.
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I like to watch.
Uh, why is this a troll? Come on, moderation downwards is for abuses, not for controversial or strange viewpoints.
That used to be a typical price for a "professional" 3D board, with hardware geometry transformation. I used it to run Softimage.
Yes, it cost $500, but I paid over $2000 for a far-inferior 3D board just a few years ago.
It looks like Hercules will be the lead board vendor on this round. Creative is dropping out of graphics boards.
Carmack has written that all developers should get one of these boards as soon as possible. Gamers may want to wait.
128 bit color? 24 bit color most people can no longer distiguish between individual changes in color, 32 bit color is quite enough.
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I still own a TNT2 Ultra, and am happy with it (I'm content with playing at 800x600 resoltution). Now, one of the big features of the GeForce was the hardware Transform and Lighting capabilities. Question: What game(s) out there actually take advantage of this (or the GeForce in general) in a way other than frame rate? Remember, it's been over a year since the GeForce was introduced, so consider this before running out to get a GeForce 3.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Should hardware manufacturers really "optimize" around proprietary (e.g. win only platforms?) APIS/languages?
I think this is a big mistake in the creation of the GeF3.
that's like, deep, man
pass me some of what you're smoking
Well, then you're probably just not into that sort of thing. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't make sense for you to go around disparaging it just because it doesn't float your boat.
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I read in another article, that in order for games to use the chip the programmer needs to learn assembler code to use the special effects. Wasn't the purpose of that hardware speed overkill to make it easier for programmers. They didn't like PS2 for that reason and GeForce3 has the same thing. Why don't they make a chip which makes it easier to programm faster and more realistic games. As far as I have heard the hardware is way ahead the software and that is part of the current crises on the market. There is no software (aka good voice recognition) that boosts productivity and needs faster processors. Therefore one could classify nVidias decision to go that way as dangerous for the world economy (they almos alone now next to ati).
Let's say you're a wealthy dot-commer (you were smart enough to sell your shares before the NASDAQ tanked). Which manufacturer makes the top NVIDIA based board? Guillemot/Hercules, ELSA, etc? I know that Creative isn't doing the Nvidia uber-board this time around; but does it matter? In terms of quality, drivers, support, etc.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Expect to see the likes of ELSA, Guillemot/Hercules and VisionTek (nothing from Creative this time around) fight it out for GeForce3 shelf space sometime in the coming month. Not only will they be releasing a new product line but also all of these companies have told us at one time or another that their current range of Geforce2's will have prices cut (but probably not the Ultras). This is a good thing..
I tend to agree, these are top top end, in a different catagory then the Ultras. It's not just an upgrade (as the Ultra 2 was to the geForce). More of an evolution. Prices drop when products are either not selling well or they are old technology (and a replacement is out). I don't believe that to be the case with the Ultras.
I showed you my two cents...
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
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I bet in 12 months we think differently.
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In 12 Months we would have GeForce 5 (Nvidia releases a new card, either speed bumped or new architecture every six months)
Rapid Nirvana
Average eye cannot discern any difference between anything beyond 70 fps. And now that we have hit the plateau, its quite obvious that image quality is next. Even the GeForce2 Ultra hits a measly 25 fps when you run it on 32 bit, 1600 * 1200 splendour with 4x FSAA enabled. This is whats gonna keep the vendors busy for the next one year or more, bringing ultra realism to the graphics. Halo, Unreal II would all be capitalizing on that issue.
Gameplay would be next. AI would improve tremendously, storylines would improve, though sometimes you just dont care a f@#$ about the story and just wanna jump in and let that Chaingun rip.
My only worry would be that DirectX8 is fast becoming the API of choice among the developers (except Carmack who claims to only use OpenGL till kingdom come). And considering that Nvidia has now an unfair advantage over other cards, since they developed DirectX 8 along with M$, well my guess is as good as yours.
However a couple of weeks back, there was much stirring among the gamers when Kyro II kind of beat Ultra in Tile Based Rendering capabilities. I would welcome someone like that anytime.
Rapid Nirvana
but as far as games are concerned, programmers are constantly pushing the limits. why? cuz you still can't render a photo-realistic 3d scene. people still have angular heads and rectangualr hands. trust me, the video card market is still on the steep part of the parabola.
i could live a little longer in this prison
Actually I was at work and didn't want to log in.
Just because I don't respond to people all day doesn't make me a newbie, stop assuming things.
In 12 months the price will be what, half it is now? Still too high for this potential customer.
If current games are any indication of what to expect I doubt I'll be buying any for some time:
Counter-Strike (a Half-Life modification) is filling up with egotistical people who think a year is a long time to have been playing the game.
Quake3 was a *big* disappointment. Especially with CTF, where there is no grapple and there are bottomless pits that do instant kills, stuff you didn't see in Quake2 CTF, probably the biggest mod for the Quake trilogy. Rocket arena is impressive, but doesn't have quite the same loyal following.
Baldur's Gate series and the various MMORPGS just use graphics as eye-candy to lure 30-something year old men and women who are into fantasizing and playing roles, the meat of the games often misses the point of stratetic play, and they are a big downer for those of us hoping for more.
Sacrifice is, IMHO, the best game to have come out to take advantage of what some of the new graphics cards can do. Unfortunately for the rest of us, developers like Shiny are dropping the PC platform and now going back to console programming.
I hate to say it, but it looks like the future of gaming is going to rest back in the hands of consoles. I guess they finally figured out broadband was the device to attract users who used to use consoles before computers.
Only problem is that I don't want to go back to consoles. Guess I'm just screwed. Hell awaits me.
I attended a LAN party where a guy came in and hooked up his computer, monitor, and speakers and then asked if there was a fourth outlet he could use.
Everyone glanced at us when I loudly asked, "You don't have a Voodoo5 do you?!?".
He sheepishly packed up his computer and left.
By the way, you also claim that all the "hardware features of nvidia's last few generations" which I'll assume means "Hardware-assisted T&L" has "no software taking full advantage of it." This is just outright false. Every game made using the Quake 3 engine uses T&L (like Alice, FAKK, and that new Star Trek shooter), as do Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Sacrifice, all are examples of current 3d titles using T&L. You may say "they're not taking FULL advantage! They're not using Hardware Mipmapping!" or some other obscure function, but we all know that T&L was the GeForce's flagship technical function and developers have rallied behind it.
What am I trying to say? Don't dismiss nVidia's new innovations as things developers are not going to support, because there's a damned good chance they will.
Coolest thing I've heard about GeForce 3 is from Tim Sweeney - the guy who made Unreal engine. In the last PC Gamer he said that the card is essentially feature complete for the purpose of creating photo-realistic realtime graphics. Now all they need to make realistic looking graphics is 128bits for color and a few orders of magnitude of the speed improvement.
Products like the GeForce3 are the reasons why Nvidia is flying high and 3dfx is out of business. Now who was really going to buy a huge video card that needed it's own power supply? I wonder how many people were going to buy it only to find out it wouldn't fit into their present machine.
and im thinking wow, that looks great, much better than my video card.... BUT THAT IS MY VIDEO CARD showing that image!
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you never thought it was possible
It keeps getting
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No one cares about your lame ass site..
We Geeks don't even like girls, we have an attachment to our puters
Its funny how Geeks stared out being nice and accepting of everyone from all walks of life, but then turned into the same social ladder climbing, labeled clothes wearing preps that they were trying to escape from in the first place :)
Am I the only one looking at these screenshots and thinking "this is underwhelming"? I mean with all the hype surrounding these cards and all the research that went into it I really expected to see a photographic quality 3d in a couple of years. From these cartoonish characters it looks like we're decades away from anything that resembles reality. I for one couldn't tell whether these shots are any better than those of Quake 3. Perhaps I'm missing something significant though. I find this 3d "revolution" disappointing anyway.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Tom's Hardware Guide has a good article on it too. It's 'the longest article he has ever written and it doesn't even have any bar graphs.'
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
I just have to give this obligatory rant now.. since it's almost on topic:
In all tests of new graphics cards, the average FPS is shown. And with new cards, it's usually something like 165 fps and such. But who cares? The only interesting figure is how much time there will be between frames when there are a large number of enemys on the screen, doing something that takes calculation time, such as shooting. So, instead of giving average fps's, make a demo that does some beyond-the-usual action and show us the WORST fps. THAT's what matters. You don't want that below 40 or something if you play like CounterStrike.
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I make a practice of buying slightly behind the cutting edge hardware. I find it's much cheaper and nearly as powerful. In this case, I've been waiting for the GeForce3 to be released so the price of the GeForce2 Ultras will come down.
"The night is long that never finds the day." -- William Shakespeare
If the GeForce 3 can't derivatate, I want nothing to do with it.
Be a Derivatater!
When you can get it for $200 and games actually take advantage of it.
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I'm always happy when stuff like this comes out because it drives down the prices in a domino effect: 2nd best has to be cheaper than best, 3rd best has to be cheaper than 2nd best, et c. down to the cheap junk I buy.
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Well it seems like Sharky realy knows his stuff. He tested Quake 3 with DX8. Well that's nice, except Quake 3 uses OPENGL for rendering.