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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.
Dell is featuring these on the Dimension 8200 series as an upgrade from the default GeForce2 MX cards.
ps. Do you mean solid ti bones or hollow ones? :)
Lasers Controlled Games!
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.
TNT
TNT2/TNT2 Pro
TNT2 Ultra
TNT2 M64/M64 Pro
Vanta/Vanta LT
Aladdin TNT2
GeForce 256
GeForce2 Pro
GeForce2 GTS
GeForce2 MX/MX 400/MX 200/MX 100
GeForce2 Ultra
GeForce3
Quadro
Quadro DCC
Quadro2 MXR
Quadro2 Pro
Quadro2 EX
I'm sure that if there's an xFree86 driver for the GeForce3, then the new versions will have equal support from the manufacturer. NVidia, surprisingly enough, has always been pretty good about releasing really nice xFree86 drivers for their cards.
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.
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.
The problem is that the regular Geforce3 already has shadow buffers! You just couldn't use them until the new XP line of drivers came out!
So these new cards technically have 0 things different from them than the old cards - they are just shipping with newer drivers. If you get the XP drivers for the old Geforce3 it will enable the shadow buffers.
Try reading some of the reviews before you post.
Derek
False!
60Hz is the lower threshold of the eye. The optimal minimum rate for a monitor is 72 Hz.
As for colors, it's pretty easy to distinguish over 4096, if they're lined up in progression. But saying red foo is different from red bar when they are against blues quux and baz is not so easy.
In general the difference between hi-color (16 bit) and tru color(24 bit). Is not discernible.
For a more in depth review of color discrimination
check out the PNG specifications which were designed for optimal viewing and compression
(as opposed to other formats which simply permute the colors ie same # of reds as blues and greens)
Were that I say, pancakes?