GeForce3 and Linux

IsyP writes: "I noticed on evil3D.net that they have posted the first benchmarks of the newly available GeForce3 in Linux. Funny how the marginal performance increase coincides nicely with shipping delays and a $150 price cut to ~$350 from the original $500. Either way, it is nice to see performance of that level in Linux."

Comments

Re:Heavy Price for kewl new gear

[Osty]

That being said, I think 3dfx getting killed was about the worst thing that could happen to the 3D industry. Competition is much less now, and 3dfx always showed a very strong commitment to Open source.

Bah. 3dfx had sucked for quite a while prior to their death. Half-assed competition is not competition at all. However, believe it or not, there's still competition in the 3D accelerator market. ATi's Radeon line is going strong, and a new rev is expected later this year. The upcoming Kyro II board (boards? Or is Hercules the only board manufacturer?) looks to really push nVidia on the low end, as well.

With that said, you'd have to be blind not to acknowledge that nVidia is currently the leader in high-end, gaming, mid-market, low-end, and even moving into mobile video for a reason -- damn good technology. The GeForce 3 continues along that line. The only problem is that we've currently hit a bandwidth bottleneck, so you're not going to see ever-increasing frame rates. What you are going to see are higher framerates at higher detail levels when developers begin taking advantage of the new features.

As for 3dfx being "good" because they supported Open Source, all I can say to that is "bah". If you want to make your purchasing decisions based on something so ephemeral, that's fine by me. I'll continue to purchase top of the line hardware because I like getting the most for my money, all philosophical differences aside.

Who cares about the speed ups?

[Gingko]

The graphics card area of interest has moved away somewhat from the super-high fill rate battles that were all the rage in the day of the Voodoo cards.

It's all about interesting and orthogonal features now. GeForce 3 brings vertex and pixel shaders in hardware to the mix, as well as hardware shadow map support. The disappointing thing is that 3D textures (despite word otherwise from John Carmack) don't appear to be accelerated in hardware, at least with latest drivers (see a recent thread in the advanced section of www.opengl.org on that unfolding story - NVidia are soon to make an announcement on what the deal really is).

Being able to program in a pseudo-assembler language for custom per-pixel effects is a hark back to the old days when you had complete freedom over everything you could do, but most of it was slow. Now we have a better mix where we are hardware accelerated, but pretty flexible down to a programmable level. *However* the current revision of pixel shaders (1.0? 1.1? can't remember) on DirectX (and very similarly and more relevantly on OpenGL) aren't as flexible as some may like (notably John Carmack), since to paraphrase him "You can't just do a bunch of maths and lookup a texture". Hopefully that will get better with time.

Yes these things are important to games mostly. And yes they are arguably the biggest step forward in consumer graphics tech since the original 3dfx card... certainly since hardware TnL. Wait for the price to come down (since initial pricing is aimed at developers and the *really* hardcore gamer), and in the meantime amuse yourself with some of the demos from Nvidia's developer site. Nvidia are by far the most developer friendly company I've ever encountered, so short of Open Sourcing their drivers (which we have no right to expect them to do), they are almost ideal from my (developer's) perspective.

Henry