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GeForce3 Titanium Reviews
Paladin128 sent us
Tom's and Anandtech's respective reviews of the new NVIDIA GeForce3 Titanium series.
DX8.1 compatibility (What is that anyway?), Shadow Buffers, 3D Textures, assorted other stuffs.
Hey, but why is everything 'Titanium' now anyway? Laptops. Batteries. Video cards. I wonder if I can get titanium plating.
way too expensive to justify for now, and by the time they're affordable, there will be something else out that's way better, just like everything in the computer world
you a winna , ha ha ha
Hey, but why is everything 'Titanium' now anyway?
Well, at least its not E-Titanium or iTanium..
air and light and time and space
Just remember, replacing your skeleton with titanium bones would add about 25kg to your weight, so go to the weight room for a few weeks and you'll be fine.
Now if you can find someone who will do the surgery, let me know.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
Dell is featuring these on the Dimension 8200 series as an upgrade from the default GeForce2 MX cards.
To answer your question:
Titanium implies that it's strong and modern. Titanium is stronger than steel, yet roughly half the weight.
It's all about the marketing. There's even Titanium credit cards, too.
I like fire ants. They are very spicy!
Seems that every time we turn around, nvidia has a new chipset... I wonder if any company (I.E. ATI will ever catch up. I also wonder if they aren't just putting a lot of products on the market to cover all bases. It would make sense.
I also think it's what Linux should do, and drive home to IT PHBs.
I live for the day when the question isn't "Linux or NT?" but "Which distro of Linux?"
ok...off my soapbox.
JoeLinux
DX8.1 refers to DirectX 8.1
Lame filler to avoid lame filter
why do they do this? atleast wait like a year before bringing out the next best thing. i just picked up a geforce 3 64mb ddr asus v8200 deluxe which i thought was top of the line. now, its these new video cards.
besides the fact that companies will get more money with new products every 6 months, why do they not offer a rebate or upgrade to the newest product???
And I just spent $650 on my Geforce 3 two weeks ago... Who can afford to buy these cards??? This is almost like the windows ME of the video card market... I'm waiting for the Geforce 4 to come out before I upgrade again...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
HardOCP has quite a nice review and explanation of just what is different with the Titanium compared to normal Geforce 3 cards running the ExploderXP driver set.
g f3 ti500/
http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/vidcards/nvidia/
Around the turn of the 20th century, Aluminum was the hip, new, with-it metal. It was also difficult to refine at the time. So for a while, it was a precious metal. I seem to recall some monarch having an aluminum crown being made.
This is an excellent addition, and very much needed. Shadows can be one of the hardest thingsto get looking good in OpenGL, and usually they are done in a hacked out, unsatistfactory sort of way, sometimes just by copying the model, setting all textures to black and using shear and scale transforms to squish the model onto the floor. This will hopefully do a much better job.
As for titanium plating -- you don't want it, trust me. It scratches and stains far too easily, and you can't clean it when it does. Looks good when it's undamaged, though.
Denial isn't just a river in Italy
having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming.
*yawn* VB is an interpreted language... meaning it NEEDS an interpreter to run it. so by definition it CAN'T BE KERNEL CODE
took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1
I thought you didn't believe in C, and if you don't believe in or use C, how can you have an understanding necessary to properly configure a kernel?
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs
That appears to be the extent of your programming/technical prowess
It's unfortunate that you're in a position to make recommendations about technology to large companies.. You've shown in a couple paragraphs that you do not possess the experience or expertise necessary to make any type of technology judgements.
If you go to Pricewatch and look under videocards/GeForce 3 there are already several place selling the 200 versions. Heck this place on Yahoo Stores is taking preorders for the Hercules GeForce3 Titanium 500 to ship on Oct 13! Talk about fast turnaround. Guess they had to step up or let the Radeon 8500 be king.
Wonder which one will ship a Mac version first?
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
The Geforce Ti 500 is just an overclocked Geforce 3.
Looking at Anand's Geforce 3 roundup, all of the cards tested overclocked to the performance level of the GF Ti 500. Generally, the core speed was lower, but the memory was faster.
If you read the reviews, your card is still top of the line. The only faster is the ti500 or whatever, which is 5-7% faster. Don't get upset... they're just repackaging the same card. Why innovate, when you can market it?
Actually, Mr. Rob, I do know a guy who sells titanium for plating large things al la the Bilbao Guggenheim. I did some consulting for said guy, a retired professor of architecture, several years ago. IIRC he was reselling products of TIMET, the Titanium Metals Corporation.
From what I remember, plated with Titanium you'd be able to survive 100 years of life in some large far-east city like Kuala Lumpur without corroding.
Which is exactly what we need from you. Really.
Naming a tennis racquet, racquetball racquet, computer, video card, whatever "Titanium" makes a little sense despite the fact that most (all?) don't have an atom of titanium in them. What gets me is the "Titanium Racquetballs" they're selling now. Excuse me? Racquetballs are made of _rubber_ so they _bounce_. No one wants a metal racquetball! Who hires these marketing droids anyway?
Now I LOVE my video card, and it runs every game i want to as quickly as i want, so I won't be getting this anytime soon... I'd rather skip several cards and spend the money on a cool trip or a cruise. If everyone would resist the temptation to have the latest and greatest, then maybe they wouldn't release new stuff every other day. Then maybe that $600 card you just bought would be obsolete in a month. I know this will never happen, so i guess i'm just talking to a wall again...
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
"I can understand gold and platinum, because they ARE valuable metals but titanium... it's like saying that "I've got a American Express Aluminum card"."
Well as I recall titanium is rather rare. When the government wanted to build the sr71 there wasn't enough titanium for it's hull so the CIA had to descretely get some through intermediatiaries in the USSR.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
As you all will notice once you read Toms interesting review there is not much new in the Titanium version of Geforce3 except a better price/performance ratio. All the added functionality is already available in current GeForce3 boards once you download the new driver.
Maybe now I will buy a Geforce3 TI200 instead of the Geforce2 Pro that I was planning on.
--
Keep your hats on. It's only money.
VB is an interpreted language... meaning it NEEDS an interpreter to run it. so by definition it CAN'T BE KERNEL CODE
Visual Basic has been a compiled language for several versions now.
Yeah, offtopic, but I hate to see incorrect info.
"Titanium is also an SOB to work with, which is one reason it's not used more often."
exactly how?
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
all you need to do is overclock the memory and processor core a little bit. Should be fairly easy to do, and with very little risk. Check out VoodooFiles for some custom detonator drivers, or for overclocking utilities.
Dunno, but I am proud to be part of the new Titanium Elite. I had one of my teeth replaced with a titanium implant. The Doctor said it was an "upgrade".
Now, if someone annoys me, I simply bite.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
Can I get a Linux driver for it? Not really much point in upgrading from the old Matrox G400Max if I can't. Everyone (even Matrox) has appeared to move toward less open drivers, so I am also concerned that the company I go with will orphan the Linux drivers and render me unable to use the video card in the 2.8/3.0 kernel timeframe.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Can anyone give info on what humans can perceive in
terms of:
frames per second: can anyone tell the difference between 60 and 70 frames per second?
colors: anything above 4096 cannot be discerned
resolution: CRTs have a long way to go until they are perceived to be as good as analog resolution.
Go here for tasty tidbits on everbody's favorite element and its alloys...
[titanium.org][titanium.org][titanium.org]
Here are some strength-to-weight stats, specifically.
GeForce has always made good cards, but everyone has gotta love the "ATI Radeon 8500" link located directly over the review... you know, the one that says "The most !#X*! amazing 3D gaming experience" just incase you wanted to look at a different video card. I must say I've always stuck with ATI but Geforce is making my head turn a bit towards them...
Geforce 4 announced,
:)
:) ) but the reality is, the engine/3d is a part, the game itself is the other part, and even if there are 50 programmers working on a project, it's not 50 programmers working on incorporating the newer technologies and figuring out all the new twists and tricks to do with stuff like the pixel shader.
:)
Featuring 28gigaflops, processing 2 billion antialiased pixels per second, 1000 voxels per seconds, support for surround video and all.
Nice!, no games supports geforce 3 to it's best right now
But serously, it's nice seeing the technology being pushed foward at a crazy pace like that, but the amount of data to assimilate for all the new stuff being shoved up at the programmers every 6 months is crazy... and you have to keep in mind that they gave a GAME to program, not only a technological demo. if there were 1000 carmack in the game community, I bet we would see stuff comming out a bit faster (imagine a beowulf clusters of Carmacks
It's exiting, but at the same time I'd feel a bit overwhelmed with working on a board or featureset and seeing it being crushed by something better even before I finish polishing the code on my current project
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Yeah, I want my Dell Lattitude XP Titanium 2002 Enhanced modbile with SuperStealth technology!
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
will be $10 cards.
Can you say sub $100 pc?
Remember when the Big Bertha Titanium driver came out? It was a sensation, everybody bought one, then all of the sudden everything golf related was "titanium." Titanium core balls, titanium putters, titanium umbrellas... it just didn't stop. Of course they never sold anything useful like titanium golf spikes, but hey that's marketing. So now I guess it's spread over to computers and probably everything else. Hell I even got a credit card advertisement for a Titanium Visa. That doesn't really make sense to me, I mean I get the Silver, Gold, Platinum - precious metals that are rare and valuable, but Titanium is widely available, more renowned for it's strength than value...
Anyway, I'm sure this video card is really great but I have to admit calling it "Titanium" lowers my level of interest in buying it. It's like if I tried to sell you a "Titanium" watermelon... doesn't really make sense.
~ now you know
" don't see how that disproves my assertion (not a theory).
"
the fact that I knew these people and they weren't either?
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
I mean first here was silver, then gold, then platinum.....I think they are going to create a new element/metal pretty soon!
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Meanwhile, don't forget to check out our big URL giveaway (did I mention IT includes a year's free hosting?). don't just sit around on your .asp, do something relevant/gnu.
re: I wonder if I can get titanium plating.
I bet you will get the titanium pricing though!
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
Actually you can get the DirectX 9.0 beta now... its available
here.
username: DX9Beta
password: DX9Gaming
Ah... but how can you be so SURE?
The titanium series of cards is basically the same, except a slight increase in speed for the Ti500 and a less expensive manufacturing process (more efficient).
They will be cheaper.
In the distance you hear an ominous moo.
[Hey, but why is everything 'Titanium' now anyway?]
It's just the latest marketing fad. Remember when everything was "Pro"? Or when soda (and everything else) turned "clear" or "crystal". I think Ultra was popular for awhile (not just with nVidia, but with detergents).
It's the same reason we had that year with two volcano movies, two asteriod movies, etc. There's only so many good ideas to go around when you're in product marketing.
Can you confirm my suspicion that most of these companies you work for are, in fact, open source companies?
Of course, the next series of credit cards are Uranium. A small green card with glow-in-the-dark feature, and if you every lose one, just use a Geiger teller.
I intend to live forever, so far so good.
Your card is still faster than all the new cards except the GeForce3 Ti500 and has all the same features. Also, NVidia always comes out with new products every 6 months so just live with it. If you are going to worry about money then why are you buying the top of the line stuff? It's called the bleeding edge for a reason, if you stay on the edge you'll be bleeding green! (Just like Spock!)
DX8.1 compatibility is DirectX 8.1. Just means they have drivers for it. Marketing-speak.
The answer is simple: because Steve Jobs said so.
You think I'm kidding? Look at marketing trends. Apple released the iMac line in multiple colors, and then we immediately saw Irons, staplers, Nintendo 64, and Compaq PC's out, in all the same colors. Now, Apple has released the Titanium Powerbook: software, hardware, everything is now "Titanium.
I've received three offers for Titanium Visa cards so far. If the cards were actually made of titanium, I might actually get one...
Why not adamantium? everybody knows that adamantium is the most strongest metal of all. And why mega, why not tera instead. Terastore sounds pretty cool for me.
hopey
John Carmack said, when the GEForce 3 came out, that developers should get one immediately, but gamers should wait. This new one is the "consumer product" version.
Remember that the GEForce 3 is the graphics engine in the XBox. So when the XBox games start shipping for the Xmas season, the PC versions will use GEForce 3 features. I'm looking forward to seeing somebody do something good with the vertex shaders. I have the Chameleon demo and a GeForce 3, so I can see what's possible.
Sort of... it compiles to VB bytecode, not to machine language. VB.NET will compile to .NET bytecode. You still need an interperter to make it machine-executable (thats the "VB runtime library"). The fact that the interperter runs as a dll and acts on VB bytecode rather than being a seperate executable that parses text doesn't mean it's not interperted.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/10/08/023023 8&mode=thread
I'm sorry, but if you spent $650 on a GeForce3 two weeks ago, you are truly a jackass. They haven't cost that much since they were first released. Mwave has Guillemot's offering listed as being $352 now, so you need to either do us all a favor and cut the drama or learn how to shop around.
I mistrust those little fans you get on graphics cards and used to get on CPUs, because I've had a few die on me (or people I work with), which can also take out the chip. The Titanium 200 shown on THG just has a heatsink like ny trusty Creative TNT, no fan, less to go wrong. I suppose whoever buys the state of the art to keep up with the Joneses doesn't care if the board blows up after a year, but I do.
I just can't wait for the aluminum video card
No no no, I got it now
the lead credit card
wait, How 'bout Mercury
...so you can avoid buying things you do (not?) need
Looks like someone wanted to mod it informative but selected funny instead, its right below it in the drop down. User error I guess.
"Get them before they get....
I guess it all started with the SR-71 Blackbird. A large proportion of that aircraft was titanium to withstand the heat of high-speed flight while being strong and light. Next, titanium bicycles (road as well as mountain.) Anybody could make a strong bike out of steel, but weight was always an issue. Titanium-tubed bikes were much lighter than steel bikes, although not as durable. On a side note, I had my wedding band turned on a lathe out of round titanium stock. Among engineers, titanium is cool stuff, so why would I want a gold or platinum ring like all the non-geeks? Before you know it, there's titanium golf clubs, rackets, you name it. I think the more of a buzzword titanium became, the more inappropriate uses it gained. Now we have things named titanium for no good reason at all (although the marketers would disagree.) Sooner or later, all the Joe Schmoes will forget about titanium and it will go back to being cool only for engineers and geeks. My guess is the next buzzword is iridium - uranium has too much of an image problem.
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
I'm actually surprised that more companies aren't making stuff out of unobtanium. This is a very strong and light weight element but I hear that its hard to get a hold of some.
Darren
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Like the above comment said it.
It's as much compiled as Java or Python (Perl?). It's compiled to bytecode and then the byte code gets interpreted. Speed's things up a bit compared to pure interpreted code, but VB is still interpreted in the end.
How long before we start seeing Titanium case mods?
Doh!.
Nice ad placement, ATI. I know it's random, but there's got to be settings somewhere to avoid such things.
What you mean is, VB is now an interpreted language with the interpreter built into an executable with the source. I really don't think you can call it "compiling." Same thing goes for Java "compilers".
That's what I thought I saw the first time round. Was wondering if the board would burn like an AMD without a heatsink on its maiden 3dMark test.
I'm waiting for the GeForce4 Adamantium myself.
"The power to rip the other cards to shreds..."
Actually I think that Titanium is supposed to be the strongest metal...
Only 'flamers' flame!
yeah and python works this way also, give the script the location of the interpreter and you got a "compiled" program.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
after seeing "I wonder if I can get titanium plating"...well, yes.
A Ti power book, a dremel tool and a little time invested.
Yeah, I know it's stupid, but the irony of this passing thought was "well, maybe the airport card built in will finally be able to transmit over 3 feet".
heh.
Moose.
Disclaimer:
"the above paragraphs are know to contain sarcasm and humor. These combinations are known, in the state of California to cause confusion in most readers"
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
2001-10-01 20:33:47 Nvidia Launches GeForce Titanium Line (articles,hardware)(rejected)
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
I'm actually surprised that more companies aren't making stuff out of unobtanium. This is a very strong and light weight element but I hear that its hard to get a hold of some.
that'll be why then !
Yes, the Russians have boat loads of Ti laying around. Actually, thats one of the reasons they built those Fast Attack subs out of Ti instead of steel was because of cost, not strength or MAD avoidance. Ti as I understand it, is a bear to work with for a structural metal in aviation or naval engineering.
It conducts heat pretty well and it looks good on my Powerbook though.
javac is a true compiler. javac is to the JVM as gcc is to the platforms gcc supports. Even gcc, now, is able to compile Java code into JVM code or even a true-to-life ELF file.
Java is often called an interpreted language, because it often executes within a user process, the JVM. However, the JVM specification is a true machine specification as much as the SPARC or IA32 ISAs are.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Well unobtanium is a rare element, some companies usually replace it with vapouranium for their press releases, see here
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Ha ha you kill me! It's so funny to make fun of Microsoft!!! Man I've never heard of "DOS" what is "DOS" HA! HA! HA!
Your comment violated the postersubj compression filter. Comment aborted
Titanium doesn't plate well. The bath is absolutely abyssmal, not to mention a pain in the ass to maintain. That's why we sputter Titanium.
While the GeForce3 is a pretty sweet card, I find the new marketing tactics of NVidia distasteful. The GeForce3 Ti-200 and GeForce2 Ti are actually slower cards[tomshardware.com] gussied up with new drivers and a new name. Not only that, but they timed the release [tomshardware.com] of their new Detonator XP drivers to spoil the release of the Radeon 8500.
I know that "business is war" and all that, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
This
Hey, but why is everything 'Titanium' now anyway?
Because the industry loves to copy Apple.
I know this is offtopic, but it's a good opportunity to bash the evil empire and their evil inventions, so here goes.
I have a friend who is a below-the-knee doctor. He stores his patient records in a Mafiasoft Access database. That by itself wouldn't be so bad, but he made the mistake of hiring a professional to set up a good system for him. Among other things, the professional wrote custom VBA (or VBS, something with Visual Basic in it) code for Access. This professional put together an elaborate user interface where you can't read any of the words because the background and foreground colors are so similar. To make a long story short, this eyesore looks very unprofessional. And it cost my doctor friend big bucks!
On one occasion, my doctor friend asked me to look at the thing and try to modify the colors and get rid of a few fields he never uses. Having no previous knowledge of Access, I went through all the menus and dialogs, thinking this change couldn't possibly be more difficult than clicking a few check marks. I discovered the Visual Basic noise (I won't even call it code) and spent the whole day trying to understand the unbelievable mess that was written there. Not only is the language syntax sloppy and obfuscated, the code^H^H^H^Hnoise was really horrible.
I never actually fixed the problem, because I know better than to mess with anything when the noise is so bad. I suppose this proves the theory that you can't make a programmer out of a BASIC luser.
Another friend of mine used Delphi 3 back in the days. I remember playing with it and (with no instruction) putting together a little database program for keeping track of books you have (and their author, etc). Although Delphi uses the Pascal language, the whole system from its user interface to the integration between visual stuff and code is excellent. I clicked together a simple window, wrote about 10 lines of code total, and the program functioned. I think this is what Mafiasoft tried to implement in VBS but they created an unbelievable mess instead. (Or rather, an innovative platform for compelling enterprise-wide virus solutions--remember, everything revolves around marketing, therefore sh*t is actually fertilizer, which will promote the growth and vigor of the enterprise.) To make a long story short, I don't care whether VBS is compiled, bytecode, interpreted or self-deleting. It's a crappy system and it promotes crappy programming.
What now? Retro names? Something like the "NVidia Locomotive"? Nah. Probably coined words and numbers again.
I got a deal on a GF3 to replace my GF2. So far I haven't found a thing that takes advantage of it. No way I'd upgrade from a GF2 at this point for normal price.
I think the vid card companies are running in to a major problem. Games aren't keeping up with hardware. Developers have a much longer development time than the hardware companies do.
I finally broke down and bought a GeForce3 to replace my old 2-GTS. (Got the exact same card as you, as an aside.)
Received and installed the card Thursday night, heard about the new cards Friday afternoon.
(Granted I can get comparable speeds just by overclocking it a bit, but it's the principle of the thing.)
.sigh.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
Why's everything titanium these days? Because chumps are impressed. Welcome to Madison Avenue.
Things about titanium I've noticed:
The "titanium" notebooks I looked at in Best Buys had such thin casings that I could easily deform the LCD screen with finger pressure on the top of the lid. They were the least durable laptops I've seen recently.
A lot of titanium (the metal, not Tio2 the pigment) is produced under brutal, slave-like working conditions in third-world countries. Participating in the titanium trade is thus contributing to the bankrolls of The Opressors [tm] unless you are certain of provenance.
Titanium is an AWESOME thermal conductor. Some of the Thiokol guys split a titanium rocket motor case in half and made a barbecue out of it; the damn thing radiated heat so fiercely it was essentially unusable.
--Charlie
Yep, there sure have never been any old, religious queers pretending to be straight! Nope, never in the history of man!!
so you base your VB opinion on some guys crappy code? And you didn't bother to figure out the problem?
access has its problems, but bashing it on the fact the someone wrote spagheti is just ignorant.
this is like someone looking at obfuscated C code and claiming that C is useless.
One more thing, if you want people to take the dangerous of Microsoft seriously, then refer to them as Microsoft. If you choose some bastardization of their name, people will immediatly write you off and not even pretend to think about what your saying.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Remember the marketing fad a while back when everything was "Clear"? Clear softdrinks, clear antipersprants, clear computer cases, clear.... you get the picture.
Well, 'titanium' is the latest fad.
(what the hell ever happened to Crystal Pepsi anyway? It was pretty yucky...)
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Hey, but why is everything 'Titanium' now anyway? Laptops. Batteries. Video cards. I wonder if I can get titanium plating.
No, but if you act now, you can afford all that and more with our new new low-APR, no monthly fee titanium **click** hello? hello sir?
just say no to credit
No, VB compiles to native code since version 5.0.
From http://www.win2000mag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Arti
Well yeah, you can, sorta. Go wear a wetsuit. Titanium was the hyped thing in wetsuits up until about 3 years ago when surfing manufacturers turned instead to laminating with Spandex instead of nylon to make the suits more flexible.
The hype around titanium wetsuits was that little flakes of it embedded in the glue would reflect heat and keep you warmer. People have actually taken the time to investigate and debunk this, but the wetsuits are still selling.
So, there's your titanium plating, but it will only deflect heat rays, not bullets, and I make no warranties about the effects of sweat dripping off your forehead and into your keyboard while wearing it.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Hey, but why is everything 'Titanium' now anyway?
Get used to it. Titanium may surplant Aluminum and Steel for many uses. I've read this many times and seen many articles about how we are now entering into a Titanium Age.
In fact, Slashdot wrote about it nearly a year ago!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
You've been reading too much Anand and Tom. They use (and mis-use) e.g. way too much.
E.g. is for exempli gratia, "for the sake of example" or simply "for example". While it technically makes sense in your sentence, it's superfluous.
It doesn't make you sound like an intellectual, but rather a pseudo-intellectual.
Games do not need a GeForce 3 of any race in my experience. I have a GeForce 2 MX (the cheapo one) and an Athlon 850 and have had no slow-downs at all.
First, almost all on-line 3D gaming is Half-Life mods such as Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike (and the under-rated GlobalWarFare) as most of you probably know. I get a solid 60 frames per second, no matter how many explosions or close-up models. (I use OpenGL. There seems to be a quirk with close-up models and DirectX.)
I cannot speak for on-line RPG gamers, but I assume they are sitting pretty as well.
The most detail rich, awe-inspring, gorgeous game I have played in over a year was Serious Sam (which only costs $20 and don't let the cheap price fool you. It is great!) This game has pool reflections on the walls around the pool and in the pool, glowing monsters, lens flares, dusty light rays and a portal showing another world with waving flags all at once! I have had in excess of 50 monsters on screen chasing me down. (Yahooooo!) My set-up plays it flawlessly. (Also, I tried it on a P3 600 Mhz with a GeForce (1) and it stuttered.)
If I haven't made my counter-point, it's that these new cards are fine, but not the next level that may be needed once a new generation of games come out (if ever). Having worked in 3D graphics, my feeling is that most of the tricks from research have finally been used up and it will take a new generation of crack programmers to get much farther, like the good ol' days. So, until then, have fun with a GeForce 2 (or equivalent) and an Athlon 850 (or equivalent)!
$650US ~= $414.33CN Anyone who spent $414.33 for a GF3 card is a jackass, and so are you.
link
Why not? They trademarked "Windows", one of
the most generic computer terms available. And
yes, it was generic back in '90 when they got
the tm.
I guess they'd better trademark "Shitbox" too,
just to keep it off the market.
You can release your tensions and act out your aggressions (on the equipment only, mind you) with another kind of titanium ..
http://www.taurususa.com/titanium/index.html
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
I sympathize with you; Access VBA is horrible. Using Access for anything is horrible... but Access is not the same thing as VB. There is no redeeming feature to Microsoft Access, now that MSDE (Microsoft's free (beer) SQL database engine) is available.
I write top notch code in VB, and reach for C++ when I can't make the VB version work fast enough. In the last three years, that's happened once - I needed a fast way to concatenate an array of strings, so I wrote a one-function DLL. Part and parcel of this is profiling, and I found that if I used the same algorithm, there were NO improvements gained by writing in C. All benefits came from using pointer arithmetic techniques that were not easily available in VB.
Since I can write fewer lines in VB, compile faster, debug more easily, and so forth, I produce more results in less time. The downside: people who see my stuff don't believe it's written in VB, and when they do find out, go language-bigot apeshit. Summing up: VB is a real compiled language. Access VBA sucks giant ass. Your experience with bad VB code does not make the language bad. Have a nice day.
-- Jeff Paulsen
Just a nitpick: They timed the announcement of the new drivers to coincide with the announcement of the Radeon 8500. Announcement, not release...
Point taken. I worked with DELPHI since its early days delphi 1, 16 bit apps (not anymore, tough, until they port their C++ builder thingie to Linux Ill stick with perl), and I am still amazed how some people choose to use VB over delphi (or BCB). VB is a complete piece of shit, slow, ugly, and the code becomes a freakin mess for everything above "hello world". OTOH, Delphi enforces OOP, which is a good thing, form designer and code integrate sweetly, and I loved the experience (even tough, PASCAL disgusts me a bit, and I switched over to BCB as soon as it rolled out). Its amazing how far human stupidity goes, like choosing a fscking PROGRAMMING PLATFORM based on marketing shit instead of real merits... pfft.
oh damn, this is hella offtopic.
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
No, that's not so. There are a great many calls into vb.dll, but those are exactly analagous to calls into the C runtime. It's real object code, linked by pretty much the same linker used throughout Microsoft's toolset
As I posted below, I have written the same code in C++ and VB, and found them to run at the same speed - the performance improvements available in C are due to using techniques that are very difficult in VB (such as pointer arithmetic). What you say was sort-of true for earlier versions, but hey, it's not 1996 anymore.
-- Jeff Paulsen
...and I love it. It's extra hard military aviation grade, and very light. Any other jewellery would be destroyed in no time with my life style. Highly recommended! (sorry for getting way off topic, but it's pretty neat).
Artificial intelligence or natural stupidity?
Guess which wrote this...
However, the next-gen games, which are right around the corner (Unreal2, DOOM3, Quake 4) all but require a GeForce3. I think (numbers are not accurate I'm sure as I'm trying t oremember them) that Carmack mentioned getting 20 - 30 fps in DOOM3 running a fast-assed system with a GeForce3.
That translates to st-st-st-stuttering with anything less.
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
I thought only Ukranians had Plutonium in their bones?
let the pro-linux flamefest begin...you zealots were once the underdog, and now you're nothing but spoiled counterstike playing gimp advocating weenies who STILL can't grok what unix is really about. Whiners, let it fly.
good news. the starting price for newer cards is steadily decreasing...
give em books, and they just eat the covers. It amazes me the lack of grammar on the net, while I was under the impression that netizens were the more innamalekshual of meatbags, guess not. Oh, wait, I forgot that here at /. most are still punks without drivers licenses.
The GeForce3 Ti500 is just a Geforce3 running at higher clockspeed (core and memory) due to a smaller lithography process. Functionally, the new chip is identical to the old one. This is NOT a next-gen product, merely what's known as the "fall refresh" of an existing product line.
Same thing happened with TNT2, TNT2 Ultra, original Geforce, etc. They could've called this the Geforce3 Ultra but marketing decided otherwise. The performance difference compared to a regular GF3 is not that big, no sense in upgrading if you already have one.
There are no new features that the Titanium cards offer that can't be done on the older GF3's.
Just go to nVidia's site and download the DetonatorXP drivers (they picked up the XP moniker too... ugh) and you'll get all those fancy "new" features touted in the Titanium press releases. Those drivers are also considerably faster anyway, on older GF3's.
The next-gen product will be out next spring (assuming they don't break the 6-month cycle) and will probably have multiple geometry units like the XBox, even faster clock speeds, and some new hardware rendering features. Next spring's product will probably be nVidia's first hardware that uses some of 3dfx's tech, hopefully 3dfx's anti-aliasing which was the best around IMO.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Remeber the "Crystal Gravy" commercial on SNL? It was a good, homestyle gravy in a jar, but clear. Yummy!
Hey! Taco also cares about those goofy big-headed japanese cartoons!
I hear that "Titanium Ragamuffin" is coming out on DVD, better get in line!
One more thing, if you want people to take the dangerous of Microsoft seriously, then refer to them as Microsoft. If you choose some bastardization of their name, people will immediately write you off and not even pretend to think about what your saying.
I disagree, in fact Id say that is absolutely untrue. By bastardizing the Microshaft name, we very intentionally use their massive marketing muscle against them.
Doing these association techniques we are purposefully meddling with their mind control program (marketing) by dropping their name proper and forcing people to read "MS" but see "M$", or read Microsoft but see/think "Macroshaft".
Go read a little about memetics, culture jamming and propaganda. Then move on to some Chomsky
It is very usefull vaccine to the marketing mess they blast at humanity.
Does anyone see that???
h work.
NO FAN !!!!
That's why my video cards so far have been Voodoo3 2000 and Asus GeForce 2MX.
No fans. For the peace of mind. For the lack of the ugly wire. For _real_ advances from 0.18 to 0.15 microns, not just overclock-it-bruteforce-and-do-some-cooldown-patc
Good job! I'm looking forward to seeing faster no-fan video cards.
What the fuck does WTF mean?!!!
So, I guess, DX8.1 compatibility for GF3 Titanium means exactly nothing, just marketing buzzword.
-jfedor
Gee so much venom, so much jealousy ...
All because dude was successful at his job, running Software Company.
it's like saying that "I've got a American Express Aluminum card".
Saying that you've got an aluminum card would give away that you're a mongoloid, since it's written aluminium!
Just so that idiots like you keep buying the latest and greatest.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
In general the difference between hi-color (16 bit) and tru color(24 bit). Is not discernible
Thats not really true, you can tell the difference. The main noticeable difference is "colour banding", areas that appear to be smooth gradients when viewed as 24-bit become discrete areas of solid colours. (The effect can become very noticeable if you work with graphics a lot, especially on textures in 3D graphics). Anyone here can confirm this by trying it themselves; take a 24-bit image with areas of smooth gradients (e.g. try www.scorpioncity.com/gradient.png, or search images.google.com for something like "sunset") and then view that image alternatively several times in 24 and 16 bit mode (e.g. by switching resolutions or using software like gimp or photoshop, or ideally save the 24-bit image as a 16-bit TGA (for example) and then compare the images side by side), you should be able to see the colour banding (which actually starts to look pretty ugle after a while). The other effect you often see in 16-bit mode is in the commonly used 565 format (5 bits for red and blue but 6 bits for green), since there only 32 possible values for R and B but 64 for green you end up with different subsampled intensity from the same source value depending on which channel you're subsampling. The result is that you will see purple-ish and green-ish bits appearing even in supposedly grayscale images (e.g. an intensity of 43/64 in the green channel can only be represented as 21/32 in the red or blue channels, which corresponds to 42/64, not 43/64). Obviously this can be solved by using 555 format, but then you have fewer bits for colour information, and hence more colour banding.
check out the PNG specifications which were designed for optimal viewing and compression
PNG was designed to be lossless (no colour information at all is lost) so I don't understand what colour discrimination has to do with PNG compression techniques. PNG has no "perceptual encoding" type techniques such as the (lossy) MP3 format. PNG is designed to be lossless, not for "optimal viewing". That is why 24-bit PNG files are often larger than a good-looking (but lossy) JPEG counterpart. Perhaps you were thinking of JPEG and not PNG?
60Hz is the lower threshold of the eye. The optimal minimum rate for a monitor is 72 Hz.
Yup .. I get annoyed by anything less than 85Hz (especially with solid white areas on screen), although 75Hz is still tolerable. 60 Hz never used to bother me, but after years of staring at computer screens I think it gets more noticeable, 60 Hz gives me a headache very quickly now. Thats refresh rate. As for frame rate, I can't really see the difference with anything above about 70 Hz, but 60 Hz can be noticeably "jerky" (although not much).
Egads! A titanium plated Cowboy Neal! Run for your lives!
DX8.1 compatibility (What is that anyway?)
That would be DirectX 8.1.
For the same reason everything was translucent fruit-colored plastic two years ago. I'd say it's pretty damned obvious.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Act now, and we will include details on how your entire business is screwed and must completely upgrade ALL software, hardware and networking in order to get the basic functionality that was offered from previous versions but never implemented. Our newest intercommunication initiative, codenamed: Money Drain, will allow exciting and alarming drops in revenue due to the time it takes to get your enterprise system back to running in a fraction of the way it previously worked. Our promise is also to exponentially increase the resources necessary to implement each new release of any portion of our products from a holistic point of view (from the beginning of purchase, on to troubleshooting the individual systems, to fixing the now broken enterprise services, to purchasing and waiting for 'MS latest product specific' drivers for that new hardware necessary to even think about installing, to switching the infrastructure, to necessetating the entire new adoption of a .000001 version increase that is entirely incompatable with the earlier versions across the entire company, to converting 'old' data, to trying desperately to find work arounds for 'old' hardware and 'old' software still in use and under license, up to the eventual mass suicides by your administrators and many employees, and the eventual submission and buying of the 'NEXT NEWEST VERSION' of the product in order to start right over.
Order now, and for only 25,000 USD more, you can buy our first of many series of books to train your administrators that found that their MCSE certifications suddenly where declared obsolete (regardless of the fact that they should still be usefull for pre-2000 releases, and should theoretically work well for 2000... of course, that is based on a theory that MS has a competent staff of engineers and smoothly transitions between versions). We are very proud of this suite, codenamed: Leech. Next we have our product codenamed: 'Scum sucking leech the life out of the world and Rip money from clueless and willing sheep' This is our set of marketing and law products, including paper books that are obsolete the day published and cracked e-books. These are the products that give such usefull MS business strategy algorithms as: The amount and over-reach of the Marketing and Law departments (and their ever encroaching and hollow procedures and missions) should be inversely proportional to the competence (and also funding and priority given to) the engineering departments.
All this and more, and for FREE we include the ability to track your every move both online or not, in order to sell this information and make us even more money!
Just see what Merriam-Webster says about Aluminium.
the difference between a joke and a joke is ???
Titanium is just a meaningless buzzword, like turbo was a few years ago. The turbo button on my 386 didin't turn on any turbines in the box, I checked. :-)
Sindri Traustason.
Sort of... it compiles to VB bytecode, not to machine language.
No. You are flat out wrong here. Visual C++ and Visual Basic share the same code generator. From Microsoft's VB feature list:
"High-performance native-code compiler.
Create applications and both client- and server-side components that are optimized for throughput by the world-class Visual C++® 6.0 optimized native-code compiler."
Do not forget credit cards, which have also gone Titanium!