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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.
Hey, but why is everything 'Titanium' now anyway?
Well, at least its not E-Titanium or iTanium..
air and light and time and space
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!
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/
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
who in the HELL charged you $650 for a GeForce 3??? Even if that's in Canadian dollars, that's way more than you should be paying!!!! They RETAIL for about $350 now, and you can find them for under $300 on Pricewatch.
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.
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
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.
whoa!! that canadian money is getting WAY out of hand!
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.
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.
Why don't you use Adamantium like other people?
It's almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity.
Nope, actually that's not it. What they say is wow, for about $200 bucks, you can get something that performs close to a GeForce3, that's pretty cool. They also point out a product that is awesome and expensive and one which is cheaper but not so great, but the T200 (I think) has been fallen in love with.
ATI has caught up.
The Radeon 8500 is about to be released, and its got better hardware specs than any nVidia card. Check out Anandtech and look. Toms has a preview also I believe.
It's hardware is better, but the drivers are restricting it from performing to its potential. Once that is worked out, it will outperform the Geforce3 ti 500.
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.
" Seems that every time we turn around, nvidia has a new chipset... "
There's really very little interesting here. Some minor tweaks to existing chips and upping the speed of the core and memory. Moreover, it's not every time we turn around, it's every 6 months a new graphics product is put out. That's their cycle, they stick to it.
He could just make himself *look* like tatanium by using some paint from the eastwood company (they make all kinds of cool car restoration stuff). http://www.eastwoodcompany.com/cgi-bin/sgin0101.ex e. I think that gold-cadmium plating would be cooler on the ol' taco, but hey, who am I to stifle dreams of titanium?
" Can I get a Linux driver for it?"
Nividia is good about having all their graphics products use the same driver.
Heh... I used to have a bunch of utilities for game development on my Atari ST that were called 'XYZ Turbo Pro Elite'.
Now, the Dreamcast game I'm working is a rewrite of spacewar: Super Spacewar EX3 Evolution Alpha (I love those Japanese game names).
Current naming fad seems to be '...ia' names. Prolly cause with fake words it's easier to get a domain name for them (and trademark, of course).
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
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....
"Basically, NVIDIA's drivers cannot be open sourced. They contain several components which are licensed technology, and we have no rights to share that source code with anyone. We do not even provide source code to OpenGL or our kernel module to our board customers"
seems like a reasonable explanation to me. (Interview from theDukeofURL.org.
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.
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".
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?
Actually I think that Titanium is supposed to be the strongest metal...
Only 'flamers' flame!
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
It's hardware is better, but the drivers are restricting it from performing to its potential. Once that is worked out, it will outperform the Geforce3 ti 500.
Sure it will...Seriously that particular sales technique of "oh it's just the drivers, but once they're sorted out it'll kick ass!" is absolute rubbish and should be treated as such. ATI has a horrendous reputation for drivers and it is, IMHO, a very deserved reputation: I'm certainly not going to buy anything on the premise that THAT company is going to improve their drivers. Another "funny" thing they do is orphaning products frequently: "Oh you want drivers for Windows XP? Sorry, you'll have to upgrade to our new product line." nvidia has set new standards in continuing to upgrade and improve drivers for long existing products and I give them great accolades for that.
So in closing ATIs theoretical performance means absolutely nothing if it isn't delivered and in the public's hands (what was that S3 card with fantastic T&L that never actually had drivers delivered that enabled it? Yet there were S3 pimps out there talking up the hypotheticals fo this super duper T&L engine). The fact that AnandTech pimped the 8500 using the driver excuse on page after page after page was absolutely despicable.
As a contrast, nvidia stays quiet about drivers and delivers what they deliver despite the fact that they actually do improve performance with each driver release. Hell someone with a GeForce 1 is still reaping performance improvements upgrading to the new Detonator XP drivers.
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
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'
Open GL support for the open source driver is lacking. It's only available in XFree86 3.3.6, and renders extremely poorly. If Nvidia drops linux support, your card wont be usless, they seem to be providing information on 2d support for the XFree86 developers. You just wont be getting 3d ( which by the time 2.8 comes out will be rather slow anyways)
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
So, I guess, DX8.1 compatibility for GF3 Titanium means exactly nothing, just marketing buzzword.
-jfedor
Just so that idiots like you keep buying the latest and greatest.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
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;
the difference between a joke and a joke is ???
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."