Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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
What now? Retro names? Something like the "NVidia Locomotive"? Nah. Probably coined words and numbers again.
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.