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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.
Who's going to be the first to say the screenshots have been edited in Photoshop? (or gimp) :)
Baz
Actually by making it pretty easy to put "flashy" effects in, this card might allow the developer to spend more time working on the other parts of the game.
Perhaps, but not likely. Almost every effect is a special case hack that is designed to look good, at the expense of generality. This means that the engines for games (Quake 2/3 is a perfect example) become very specialized. If you want to base a second game off of the same engine, you get exactly the same set of effects as before, because the design is not very extensible.
My reference to simpler games of yesteryear goes farther though... try to get a group of people together for a netparty, for example... how many people do you think will be able to run stuff that requires a Geforce 1, much less a brand new Geforce 3? Second quesion is: why would you want to?
It seems like the technology trend is to push the envelope to the next step (GF3 is a logical progression from GF2), and then software has to play catchup (no, not ketchup :). It seems that, especially with the first few games for a technology, games focus on doing things because they "can", not because they "should".
Instead of designing games with a clear focus, plot, and motivation, games tend to get dilluted to being flashy silly things. Sure they look cool and have nifty features, but are they really FUN to play? Where is the replay value and interactivity with other human players?
The problem with, for example, vertex shaders and the other DX8 features is that they are not a simple extension of a uniform graphics architecture.
Instead of being able to designing a simple graphics engine that supports a variety of features, and then enhancing it as the game progresses, they have to "Target" a "technology" (for example DX7 or DX8). Of course, they two are essentially completely different APIs, and they are mutually exclusive. This means that you get to rewrite your engine every time you want to support a new "technology".
In a lot of ways, I'm really happy that cards (specifically the radeon and GF3) are moving towards programmability and higher quality visuals. It's quite a different race than pushing fillrates and making up stats on textured poly's a second. Maybe when things are fully generalized, we won't NEED an API like DX that gets constantly mutated, torturing developers...
Oh wait, that's called OpenGL. (sorry, couldn't help it. ;)
-Chris
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.
Another thing to note is that alot of the really cool effects this thing can do are only noticeable in moving images. Bump mapping, for example, can be faked using regular texturing if nothing is moving. You really only see the difference when you see it in action.
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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.