Slashdot Mirror
Nvidia Geforce 4 (NV25) Information
msolnik writes: "nV News has a
brief article about the long-awaited NV25-based video adapters. These graphics processors have similar capabilities compared to the XGPU, and are a lot more powerful than GeForce3 Ti500. Since they are manufactured using .13 micron technology, they will probably be clocked at very high levels."
Who cares about the specs if we can't see some real life benchmarks?
Will it be able to render Pengiuns under linux?
So... Will this mean GeForce 3's for under $200 in a year?
Ohh baby...
Does anyone know if nVidia has started using the technology that they acquired with the purchase of 3DFX? I know that 3DFX was working on some killer graphics routines and various chipsets before nVidia bought them out, and nVidia at the time was too far along with the GeForce 3 to integrate them. But supposedly they were going to use the technology in their next graphics chip.... which I assume to be the GeForce 4.
Thank you for reading One Man's Opinion. No participation necessary. Offer void where deemed by law or PATRIOT Act.
is a realtime raytracing chip. That would be cool, especially if it did radiosity and photon mapping.
Finally, something to face the Radeon
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
In case you miss it 3/4 down the page:
NV25 Information
I was browsing nVidia's forum over @ Fools, and there was a link to Reactor Critical. Here's what they have to say about NV25.
Long-awaited NV25 based adapters. This graphics processor that have similar capabilities compared with XGPU is a lot more powerful than GeForce3 Ti500. Since it is manufactured using 0.13 microns technology, it has a lot of chances to be clocked at the very high levels. The GPU comes in January/February 2002, while professional boards should be available in the second quarter.
ELSA is going to launch two boards based on NV25GL processor, both supports two LCD monitors, though, we do not know whether there are two integrated TMDS transmitters or only one and the second is external.
NV25 that works on 275 MHz. 128 MB DDR SDRAM @ 250 MHz.
NV25 that works on 300 MHz. 128 MB DDR SDRAM @ 330 MHz.
So, this is what a high-end NV25 part *might* look like...
* Rumoured 6 Pixel pipelines .13u Manufacturing process
* Core freq: 300 MHz.
* Memory: 660 MHz. (eff) ~ 10.5 GB/sec BW, assuming they stay with 128-bit data paths.
* Supports TwinView
* Supports (finally) Hardware iDCT
* More powerful T&L unit, to include a second Vertex Shader
* Can't find the link, but there's a rumour stating that we can expect Voodoo5 5500-esque Anti-Aliasing feature. The presumption is that the NV25 will bring a Rotated-Grid AA implementation to the table.
*
It really does sound like a pretty amazing chip. I would be willing to bet we'll be hearing a lot more in the way of rumours as the New Year approaches.
Live to be Moderated
I think the real question is:
When is it coming out? and How much?
Or perhaps: If I sell my soul to the devil, can I be sure that ATI won't be able to beat it for at least 18 months?
While the specs look really excellent (Sorry, no ray-tracing accelleration ;), I must ask you one simple question...
:)
Don't you think it's time they adopted a new family name for their newer cards? GeForce is kind of old-sounding now. I think it could use a new name, what do you think? Reply to this post with suggestions, please!
"Black holes are where God divided by zero." - Steve Wright
Is my sense of time totally off, or did the GeForce3 just come out a few months ago?
Stop the train, I want to get off.
SIGFEH
[08:06p] <Gangis> GeForce 4?!?! Pleeeeeease, be original for once
[08:09p] <[stig]> they need to call it an AK47 or something
[08:09p] >[stig]> just so i say to my friends in school "Yeah so I picked up an AK47 the other day, its really powerful!"
[08:09p] <[stig]> in front of teachers of course
"Black holes are where God divided by zero." - Steve Wright
Regardless of what that other person thinks, *I* think the REAL question is,
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
SLOW DOWN!
I JUST bought my Geforce 3, then a month later they have the Geforce 3Ti....now they're talking Geforce 4?
What's this? Why not SLOW down on the advancement just a hair. Just a smidgeon.
Guru 3D: GeForce4 / nVidia NV25 videochip
GeForce4 Specs
At the risk of being off-topic (putting on flame retardant suit) The Linux Game Tome (happypenguin.org) has been down for a few weeks, and I haven't seen any mention of why.
Does anybody know what the story is? They leave a big vacuum if they are gone. I think it's worth a mention somewhere.
It's amazing to see NVidia's dedication to forwarding their technology and continually improving a seemingly perfect line of cards, but with all this power, are we running out of an application to utilize this power?
I have a 800 Duron system with a Geforce 2 MX. It plays any new game at 1152x968 flawlessly. The GeForce 3 can pump out perfect refresh rates at even higher resolutions on any of the newest and graphical intensive game available today. There simply is no challenge, whereas years ago there was always room to improve - refresh rates, resolution, bit colour, texture size, etc.
Does improvement in the 2000's merely mean higher resolutions? If so, I don't want it. On average, most consumer level monitors are 17" and support a max resolution of 1280x1024. These new cards can easily support it flawlessly, so there lacks any point in investing a new card, and I see no point in running Max Payne, for example, at 4800x3600 resolution.
There is no "killer app" available today - even with the GeForce 3 being out for some time now - that will even begin to offer these cards a challenge, and with a GeForce 4 on the way, will NVidia be able to intise buyers into believing they need 300fps at 4800x3600 resolution? In the end, I begin to wonder if NVidia is beginning to find itself in a tough corner. Their hardware is revolutionary, but lacks any practical application.
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
according to the inquirer, nvidia is having problems with the foundry that supplies its' chips
It you! hahaha
There is another option. www.xig.com, makers
of Accelerated-X, have been working with ATI
(and many other pro/cad-3d cards, laptop chips, and some older 3d cards) for a long time.
Xig's drivers for ATI Radeons are quite good
and offer a real alternative to Nvidia that's
true to the linux community.
They support real OpenGL (from reference sources), direct hardware access, full VMWare support, hardware T+L, stereoscopic
viewing, multi-head...pretty much all the features of the Radeons are fully supported except for VIVO.
Currently, Radeons are supported up to the 7500. (8500 uses the new R200 chip, and they should release a driver for it soon -- you can bet it'll be released, and with all supported features, before Xfree86 has one)
Xfree86 CVS supports up to the Radeon 7500.
Xig is mostly a linux developer (they also
write drivers for FreeBSD, Solaris, and on Alpha and Sparc platforms) - so supporting them supports the Linux / Unix cause.
damn, and I just finished installing my new Ge3 Ti200!
Yes, I know this is off-topic, but I'd really like to know... I'm going off on a tangent from the new cards' support of LCD monitors.
Well, from what I've seen, it's not WORTH having high-end cards support LCD monitors -- because so far as I know, having a fast refresh rate on those monitors isn't worthwhile. The Viewsonic LCD I tried left nice ghost images and trails from bright objects.
But perhaps Viewsonic doesn't use top-performing LCD displays... Would anyone care to recommend an LCD monitor that's worth playing games on?
... We'll never need more than 640 KB of RAM either (sorry, all you BillG apologists).
This is part of the upward curve that will bring us into the TRUE information age. We'll need at LEAST 30 TB RAM and 50 GHtz once the holographic projectors become consumer level electronics.
I figure it'll be about 2012. Maybe 2015, but no later.
turd burglar
i shot his ass, and hes buried is biggie small's casket..nigga was rapping bout blunts and bras and menage-a-trois, and sex in expensive cars.
Heck, they are just now getting the drivers to implement the "whiz bang features" and Nvidia has a GF4 in the works.
At least I'll be able to afford the GF3 when I build my next system, there is that.
ATI has some serious work ahead of it to stay in the game. But If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and looks like a duck, chances are it Quack(.exe)'s like a duck too.
Heh, competition is good, n'est pas?
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
>nV News has a brief article about the long-awaited NV25-based video adapters.
:)
Games supporting the new features of the Geforce3 or using the Geforce2 potential to the maximum are long awaited... having a new chipset that renders the previous obsolete without even making full use of it, before being phased out, is kinda... well... what's the word
So, I already get 99fps in Counter Strike, I get 75 in UT and I have a Geforce 2 MX! I see no complelling reason to buy a Geforce 3 or 4 or 5 or whatever. They need to slow down and let their products mature more. Nvidia is starting to look like Microsoft. Release something new in 3/4 the time you took last time.
Maybe if a Geforce 3 was less than 400 bucks.
I'm sure there are guys out there who can use this stuff. But sorry guys, the video card isn't the bottleneck on most new systems. It is still bus bandwith and the DAMN HARDDRIVE
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
What is 3D's next killer app? Simple.
Doom 3.
Who cares if you can run Max Payne in 2048x1600 at 100fps? Nobody, that's not the point. Faster hardware begats more advanced calculation in software begats faster hardware. There's nothing new here, and I don't see how you can NOT understand that.
They are designing Doom 3 to run at about 30fps on a GeForce 3. 30fps is "low" compared to what we're running todays games at with a high-end card, so I would consider this the perfect Doom 3 card.
You're placing blame on the wrong people here. Don't blame the hardware people for making their hardware "too good," blame the software people for not taking advantage of that hardware as they could.
This is the effect of mainstream users/computing watering down the arena. "Why make a game that takes advantage of a GeForce 4? No one has a GeForce 4. Instead, let's make a game that runs at 30fps on a 400MHz Celeron and a TNT 2 -- it's a larger consumer market." -- this is a simple fact of a market going mainstream.
Nothing new here, so I say buy your GeForce 4, buy Doom 3, and support the true advancement of 3D gaming and technology.
Jason
I was wondering -- does anyone know what vendors sell Nvidia cards with TV/Video capture built-in that supports Linux?
/TV functions because I don't ever use windows (except for Minitab and Xilinx. gah.) Now that I'm looking at upgrading my computer again, I want to make sure I get maximum linux compatiblity.
I have an old Asus TNT3400/TV, and I never get to use the
Anyone have any recommendations?
Thanks,
Ian
As I hope most people are aware of, the human eye can only process so many frames per second on a TV or computer screen, so one has to ask at what point do FPS not matter. The last time I checked, when you go to a movie theater and watch a movie, it runs much slower then most computer games. I am still sitting on a P3 800 with a 64MB Radeon and 128MB of RAM and I can play any game I want at beyond playable frame rates at decent resolutions in the 1600*1200 range. We can even discuss Quake 3 for a sec. At 1600*1200 and with all graphics turned up, I still got between 20 and 30 FPS. Guess what, not only was it playable, it was fast and just as nice looking. I am not saying that faster frame rates do not look a bit better here and there, but is it worth $300 or more to sqeeze out those extra frames. If you have the money, then by all means, but for those of you that fear you do not have the biggest and the best, do not worry about it because you will always be able to play any game you want at decent playable frames. As a slight responce to another post, if games came out that brought the biggest graphics cards to their knees, those companies would not make any money since the large user base does not consist of people who can afford to upgrade their systems every couple months. So to those rich people out there have fun buying 10 copies of games so that those big graphic games make money while the rest of us have fun with playable frame rates at a lower price.
Fuck you.
I saw the Star Wars Phantom Menace on Fox tonight. I had forgotten how bad the acting and plot of that movie was. It was fucking awful. Thank God that hilarious JarJar character was added to pull that movie out of the toilet.
As a linux and open source purist I only play text based games.
Perhaps this will start to drive down the price of the GEForce 3 to more affordable levels. $300 Plus for a video card is just a bit much. Thats a 100GB hard drive, a new high end motherboard and processor, a ton of memory, or a larger monitor. I don't need to see the pores and zits on on my warrior to have a good experience.
Song sung to the tune of "Kick Raghead Ass."
"Let's go boot'n now,
upside the head, kapow,
kick raghead ass.
Let's go boot'n now,
right in the teeth, kapow,
kick raghead ass.
I'm gonna find me a sand nigger,
punch him in the liver.
I'm gonna find me a dune coon,
knock him to the moon,
kick raghead ass."
I don't care whether they adapt any of 3Dfx's hardware ideas. What I really wish they'd do is either implement a Glide support into their drivers, or open up the Glide source code to whatever extent they can (some bits and bobs may be proprietary to other companies).
Obviously, I'm wishing for this for compatibility with old Glide-only apps, not so that new ones could be written. No one has written new ones in eons AFAIK, since as soon as more open standards like OpenGL and DirectX came onto the scene people dumped the 3Dfx-only Glide route, thank God. But there are still several older games written in the Voodoo and Voodoo 2's heyday which are Glide-only, or which work significantly better under Glide than they do in DX.
These apps are few but they contain a couple of early PC classics, as well as the first and still-most-compatible N64 emulator UltraHLE and its offshoot SupraHLE. There are several Glide-wrappers that translate Glide calls into standard DirectX calls, but they don't work well or at all for everybody--me included. None of the Glide wrappers will let me play any Glide-only games or any game through SupraHLE. In addition, some older titles like the first *Tomb Raider* look much, much better under Glide than they do under DX.
So, for the sake of compatability with old games I wish they would release as much of the Glide code as they can, if not write a quick-and-dirty Glide implementation into their drivers. Some may remember that Creative Labs had promised a near-perfect Glide compatibility for their TNT2-based cards back in 1999, in a driver they called Unified. But after 3Dfx sued them the project disappeared, and now that a couple years have passed the desire for Glide capabilities has died down since the games are now so old. But some of us like those old games, and the idea of continued compatability. I just hate it when things break unnecessarily. It's funny how, although some of them need CPU-slowdown programs because they lack internal timing routines, I can still run almost any DOS game with the oldest I've run going back to 1982, yet the development of proprietary 3D APIs like Glide and even DX (Microsoft could break backwards-compatibility with older versions any time they wish) takes away that continuity and certainty.
Just my opinion, though.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
And I was going to ask for a Geforce 3 for Christmas. Does anyone else feel like they're actually aging three times as fast while they're using their computer?
I can't wait to play Quake III at 500 FPS rather than my currently pathetic 150 FPS!!!
Couldn't help but recall 3dfx's pace of innovation... seemed like at one point (Banshee-ish?) they were introducing everything almost simultaneously. nVidia was known then, as now, for introducing new products at a steady pace (e.g. every six months) whereas 3dfx was prone to sudden flurries of development, and then nothing for the better part of a year. nVidia has a good formula with their current twice-yearly strategy- even if the new chip was ready for production tomorrow, they could spend the remaining six months on R&D and COST REDUCTION- hell, maybe some games would actually support the GF3 chipset by then...
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
I think while it's nice to be able to run over 60 fps on a GeForce2 MX series, the problem is that you won't get the realistic 3-D look without taking a major hit (pun not intended) in performance.
With the GeForce3 and newer chipsets, you now have the capability to render in real time far more realistic-looking games and still maintain very high frame rates. The current GeForce3 Ti 500 can render DirectX 8.0 and later-compliant games with all 3-D effects turned on at over 60 fps even at 1280x1024 32-bit color on today's faster Pentium 4 and Athlon CPU's.
So we will finaly get hardware iDCT? It's about time. When I built my first computer it was a PII 300 with an ATI All-In-Wonder 8mb AGP Pro. I bought it because it had 3d acceleration (I bought a Voodoo 2 within 6 months that was 3x as fast and didn't make Quake 2 look like I was on an LCD trip when there were FINALY miniGL drivers), and because it could play DVD. I can tell you that "play DVD" on that computer meant "more than 3 fps".
But I wanted to be able to watch DVD movies, so I did the radical thing: I bought a hardware MPEG decoder (RealMagic Hollywood Plus) that has served me for years. It's been in many computers, and I have yet to see something that I think works as well. Low CPU usage (I can do all sorts of other things while watching a DVD). The only other computer that I have that can do that with software/"hardware assisted" DVD is my Dell laptop with a GeForce2 GO.
I must say that I'm amazed that it has taken this long for DVD support that is more than "We draw a blank rectange on the screen and you draw the image ontop" to appear. Kudos to nVidia, not only for finally doing something that should have been done long ago, but also makeing sure that the graphics card industry didn't become stale a few years ago.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Actually that would be 6x more -- and it exists now at ISU's C6.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
Even with GeForce 4, we've still got ways to go before we reach true photorealism in realtime.
The true panacea will be when we get a 1:1 ratio of pixels to polygons, and have dynamic tesselation ensure that this ratio is generally displayed as so.
At 1280x1024, this translates into roughly 110 million polygons per second. True, the XBox specs support this number already, but we're talking real world performance. We'll get this by the time GPU peak poly rates are rated at 1 billion or so.
To get there, we also need some fundamental PC system rearchitecture, at least in terms of the video card. Unified memory will help tremendously as will fatter busses.
Maybe we'll also see the return of SLI? Not a bad idea, but maybe better applied after hidden surface removal algorithms are perfected. Maybe a return to tile rendering would be in order...
I think what you are kind of ignoring is the fact that Quake 3 is no longer the real benchmark for 3-D graphics quality--after all, the game doesn't really take advantage of DirectX 8.x routines.
Try running a game that truly takes advantage of DirectX 8.x routines such as Flight Simulator 2002. If the display driver for your Radeon card properly addresses DirectX 8.x support you should be able to run FS 2002 at around 45-50 fps at 1024x768 32-bit color with no problems even with all 3-D effects turned on (I don't find running above 1024x768 to be useful in most games). That means even very complex 3-D scenes will be rendered with very smooth motion.
By the way, given the fact that memory is dirt-cheap nowadays, you may want to upgrade to 256 MB of RAM. That makes a big difference with the very latest games since you won't have to swap files to and from the hard drive so often.
You do.
There is NO video card out today that can handle the latest games at 1024x768 with all the bells and whistles turned up all the way. Sure, it may look ok, but it will still slow down to under 30 fps in many cases. And there is also Doom 3 on the horizon, which will run at under 30 fps on a GF3 according to Carmack.
There is still PLENTY of room for more performance with video cards and it will continue until we have FPSes running at 1600x1200 with completely photo-realistic environments, full anti-aliasing, acheiving 120 fps. And even then, I'm sure someone will have a reason to have even more power in their video card.
Current video cards are not even close to that.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Isn't Pentium sounding kind of old after 8 years? And Windows, after 12 years? Macintosh, after 17? Disney, after 90? Nintendo, after 112?
but soundblaster is a better video card,damnit! :D
ELSA will be creating a new line of its venerable WINNER series cards based on NV25/GeForce4 chips.
In other news, ELSA will be creating a new line of budget cards based on GeForce 2 MX called the LOSER series. Look for LOSER I to be in stores by Christmas.
...with that card and CPU and you will find it wanting. N4 only looks best at that minimum resolution, anything lower and it's pixely and jaggy.
You're one of those rich queer faggots who think that graphics are more important than gameplay.
go fuck a gardenhose, you sheep.
If you want to look at the scenery, sure, 30fps at 640x480 is ok. But when it somes to making a railgun shot across a map, 1600x1200 vs. 640x480 is like foreplay with oven mits on. Sure you can do it, but you can do it a LOT better the other way.
Same with framerates. If, at a distance, your head is only 3-4 pixels wide (which would be only one at 640x480), the more FPS I am getting, the more opportunity I have to register (visually) that my crosshairs are on you, and thus I am a better player.
Plus, there are many a "documented anomaly" at higer FPS that the l33t gamers use in Q3 (and I guess other games, but since everyone plays Q3 or Counter-Strike, who cares =)
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
The IBM digital LCD monitors are excellent. They have a 3-year warranty on the backlight, too. No ghosting, either.
I think they display about 60 fps, which is high enough for smooth gameplay.
The main reason to get one, though, is because it's very sharp. Digital LCD displays are the best -- don't bother with analog LCDs, which have pixel jitter. Get a card with a digital out (DVI usually).
It turns on instantly, too, and no fussing with positioning, shaping, degaussing, etc.
Damn.. I can't wait to see how fast the NV25 runs Quack3... I mean, Quake3
Game Quality that is. Granted, I was one of the first that had my hands on a GF3 but it doesn't make games any better in terms of quality. At the end of the day, I would like to see better storyline, better gameplay THEN better graphics. Seems like all the game developers care now is how to make the game look cooler. In terms of visual for example, Max Payne was really good, but what about the gameplay? granted, the bullet time thing was cool but there was no decent story line. Just like movies nowdays, special effects is the theme. Again, majority of movies had no storylines going along with them. The end.
kawai
Games such as RTCW Scream for this much power...
For example, I'm running a highly overclocked radeon 8500 (64Meg), equiv to a slow geforce 3 or fast geforce2:
with all the graphical settings turned up to thier max in the game (extra-high character texture detail, max everything else), and only 2xAA, I CANNOT PLAY THE GAME at 800x600 (the framerate falls to 4fps durring combat); If I turn things down some, I can get away with playing at 800x600. Even with weak settings though, 1024x768 is out of the question unless I turn AA completely off. The only way around this is to switch to vertext lighting (as opposed to lightmaps - which are wonderfully beautifull)...
Anyway, the point is, there is at least 1 game out Now, in which a card like this would be useful. Since games only get more and more complex, by the time a NV25 based card hit the market, many games would want/need this sort of speed.
man is machine
prices on the GeForce3 should start dropping soon :-)
Somebody let me know when a top end GF3 drops below $200...
That said, I think nVidia is playing with fire in simultaneously building "NV2A" chipsets for the XBox and trying to push the envelope on the PC. I understand they're covering their bases: games on PC are wiltering in comparison to console games (at least for now -- this is a recurring cycle with every new console that comes out). However, by creating one standard that users can lock in to, what's the impetus to purchase a PC and upgrade to a higher video card?
Wired magazine had an interesting take on the "secondary benefits" to Microsoft making the XBox successful. One was the obvious possibility that they will leverage the living room as a new monopoly (which, rightfully so, they agreed was simply conspiracy theory). However, another "benefit" is getting console developers familiar with the (admitally not that bad) DirectX 8 interface, and bringing them back to the PC to develop quality ports. This, in my mind, is the only way nVidia is going to honestly stay in the computer video card game at the growth rate it's been going.
I'm wondering, perchance, if this will release the other extreme: eventually, people just kind of settle on a certain type of technology "good enough" for their present needs. The internal combustion engine was pretty much finalized 60 years ago, and very real modifications have taken place since then. Televisions, likewise, were pretty much finalized in technology 30 years ago. Outside of a few fringe stragglers, very few people now make the jump to "upgraded" tech. I wonder if PCs will be the next.
And if it is, where's nVidia's future in all of this?
Historical Footnote: nVidia's NV1 and NV2 chipsets used Quads instead of Triangles. The NV2 chipset was never produced, due in part to chronic bugginess.
http://firingsquad.gamers.com/features/nv2/
When are we going to see hardware accelerated voxel? Before 3D hardware took oof, Novalogic released many cool games using this technology (Commanche3 comes to mind). Had those games been hardware accelerated with anti-aliasing, they'd have terrain detail far more impressive than polygon based engines.
I knew NVidia would release a chip similar to the XGPU in the Xbox, and there are fast processors than the Celeron 733Mhz. Beside stripping the OS off the XBox and the video encoder, how long till people are playing XBox games on their PC?
Samsung currently makes flat panel displays for the following OEMS:
:)
- Dell
- IBM
- Sun Microsystems
...including a handful of smaller OEMS. Note we are not the only ones making monitors for the above.
18.1" monitors are starting to look very small in comparison to what is being tooled and what is sitting in the labs...note there will be several new 24.1" TFT-LCD flat panel monitors on the market by March, 2002...keep your eye out for some very cool units between now and then
Hello wideangle, the human Archeologist, welcome back to NetHack!--More--
You see here a shiny nvidia card.
.
A geforce for 599 zorkmids. Pay? [yn] (n)
y
You bought a geforce for 599 gold pieces. --More--
"Thank you for shopping in Tom's discount hardware!"
R
You remove the heatsink.
You feel like you've done something bad.
#pray
A Large voice booms: "Thou hast angered me." --More--
The geforce explodes! You are blinded by the smoke!
It hits! It hits! --More--
It hits! It burns! --More--
It bites!
You die.
The shopkeeper gratefully inherits all your possessions.
Goodbye wideangle.
You were Microsoft-aligned.
You were inspired by user 31387.
You were unlucky.
You were broke.
Does anyone know who actually supplies Apple with the raw LCD panels?
When I can play a game that looks as good as the Final Fantasy movie, at a consistent 100 FPS that's when it's fast enough for me :)
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Have you ever wondered why, if our eyes are an analog interface, we see the wheels on vehicles appearing to rotate in the opposite direction they should? I wonder why, and I've never found a satisfactory answer.
Why not limit games to 28 or 30 fps and work on building things like accurate motion blurs? It's possible to calculate an object's change in position over 1/30th of a second and blur accurately in that time, producing a more photorealistic image. I know 3Dfx was working on the motion-blur and depth of field effects (T-buffer effects?) before they went under. The pictures I saw of their motion blurs were not terribly impressive.
I remember an old animation package I had bootlegged on my Apple IIE... the name escapes me, but it was my first exposure to "tweening": the process of interpolation between two or more end points. It would create smooth rotations and movement arcs.
I don't know how one would go about rendering a motion-blurred scene. I think the software would have to compare the end mesh to the start mesh and determine the distance moved, use the z-buffer to determine how to render in a foreground to background fashion for all moved object. Use a pre-defined max-distance-to-rerender to determine how many interpolated objects to render, and the alpha-blend and radially blur all of the layers?
I'm sure the more I write the more obvious it becomes how little I know about the rendering process.
My only concern is that more frames per second may not be the best way to increase realism, but that mimicing the visual process is.
This is almost 1:1 copy of "Slim Anus" that was performed by Insane Clown Posse in the in Howard Stern show. For a troll to be funny it should have at least a hint of originality.
Generally, I don't play games much, which is why I also don't care much about 3D performance (it doesn't hurt to have it though :p ). I care a lot more about 2D quality and the Nvidia based cards isn't exactly known to be the best there...
Besides that, I care about driver quality - AFAIK the NVIDIA drivers are generally great, both for windows and Linux (although they are closed source). I also care a lot about noise. I don't want a card that need a huge noisy fan. No active cooling, thanks!
AFAIK, the Geforce3 Ti200 doesn't *need* a fan (the NVIDIA reference card doesn't have one), but most cards comes with a fan anyway - if the heatsink is good enough, it should be safe to disable the fan.
I've heard Leadtek cards is some of the only NVIDIA cards that actually have good 2D quality.
A long-long time ago (1976), I worked as a student at a place which was doing some of the early stuff on graphics, the Computer Aided Design Centre in Cambridge UK.
We did some very cool things on hardware that was so cool that our techies had to build it themselves. We had some cool software as well such as Things/Hidden-Lines that could generate buildings for walkthroughs.
We couldn't do anything in real-time as a single frame took at least 5 minutes to produce. If we wanted full-definition (512*512), we had to produce separate RGB images which were photographed through a filter by an animation camera. The end result was cool in 1976.
What is the state of the art today? Shrek? Final Fantasy? Again, relatively huge resources to render each frame and no chance to do it in real-time.
Well, graphics has come a long way in 24 years, but if I want to do it in real-time, I have problems getting quality. This is why firms like Evans and Sutherland still clean-up doing the graphics subsystems for flight simulators. First-person shooters have come a long way, but still they are bound by the number of polygons and vertices, so rounded objects are difficult to render in real-time.
Yes, there has been progress, but maybe I will be happy when I can handle the equivalent of a Pixar Render Farm on my desktop and in real-time. The GeForce 4 isn't there, but maybe sometime.........
See my journal, I write things there
Grip3n: I have a 800 Duron system with a Geforce 2 MX. It plays any new game at 1152x968 flawlessly.
I too have a Duron 800 and Geforce 2 MX, and until last week I would have totally agreed with you.
Last week I installed 3D Mark 2001 .
Try it yourself. Wait for the scene with the trees... suddenly your system will drop to 1-2 FPS.
Trees. That is why we need a better CPU & graphics card.
Notice how all the "good" games are set indoors, in cities, or in deserts? Yet all the fun army combat films take place in rural areas?
Think of all those war or commando films where you've got a lone gunman sneaking around using trees for cover. Now when you look at games, you're always sneaking around using crates and boxes for cover. That's why we need better hardware.
The games run fast on our Duron 800 / GEF2MX systems because those games are set in an environment which is specifically designed not to challenge our hardware. It's always a sewage system, a couple of city blocks, an underground base, a desert airport. It's never a forrest, a farm, a suburb.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Actually seing the zits on the warrior would probably spoil the whole ambiance...
...
Unless you were playing Hercules The Teenage Years or something
To quote one of the comments in the original /. article:
/. article was from the same period when 3Dfx was suing Creative Labs for working on their Unified driver which would have offered Glide compatability for Creative TNT2 based cards. Today, all mention of the Unified driver has been removed from Creative's site except for a few old press releases, which link to pages which no longer exist.
> it isn't the complete Glide library that older applications (such as Quake II) depend on.
> Rather, it is a subset of the Glide API that allows Mesa and their new OpenGL driver to
> access the Voodoo3.
They never, ever, ever opened the Glide libraries. Instead, they released the source for the part of their Linux driver that hooks into Mesa. That's all. The rest has always been, and unless nVidia can be persuaded to do so will always remain, binary-only and hence not easily hackable (no successful efforts so far) to work with all video cards.
Note also that this
The Glide code is still closed and proprietary and hence old Glide games will probably be unplayable unless one uses an old Voodoo card, which will be increasingly difficult as time goes on for obvious reasons. After all, right now how many Voodoo 1's do you see floating around? There's the occasional one on eBay. In a few years, the same will be the case for Voodoo 2's through Voodoo 5's.
Doubtless there are a few tiny bits of Glide which are proprietary to third parties and hence unreleasable. But from what I understand most of Glide was developed in-house by 3Dfx, so most of it should be releasable. The only question is whether nVidia can be prodded to release it.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
Interesting. Anyone else experience this?
if anyone sees cowboy neil tell him i want my five bucks... he still owes me for that mcdonalds breakfast when me and him spent the night together...
Think of it, even if there is negligible time to react to your input, the delay to see the start of your input is 35ms. If it takes three iterations to get the gun lined up, you're at the 100ms mark, easily noticeable.
But when you are at 30fps, what is the minimum? At 10fps, you have NO CHANCE of getting synched with the game.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Pixar gnerally uses its software package called Renderman with sub-pixel polygons. This facilitates temporal and spacial anti-aliasing and detailed texture maps.
yet another super powered graphics card will come out, it will have options to increase the speed, quality and everything else in games.
But when it comes down to it, we are still going to benchmark something stupid and out of date like Quake3. It has no relivance to the card performance, and doesn't use half the features, but we will benchmark it.
I think gamers really need to start acting like they aren't 5 years old by not getting excited by big numbers. Realisticly 30fps in a game is more than playable, anything more isn't needed, and if you do it... well, you suck, and you shouldn't rely on hardware to help you win.
This time around, I really hope reviews do the right thing, and not benchmark the card, put the #s up and say "well, obviously this card is better than that" Even though one looks awful, and the other can't run future games efficiently.
Too much weight is put on speed, not nearly enough on everything else.
So, during the bios startup screens, is it really slow?
Is it when your booting into linux/windows?
Is it only happen when you do a dir/ls in a console window?
If its a fullscreen text based screen, and he is getting slow text, he might want to see if there is a way to manually adjust the refresh rate of the monitor, if its set real low this can heppen (ive never heard of anything like that happening, but im sure it could).
Zeno
(btw dont take this as a flame, im interestsed to see what he means by slow text mode as well)
Yes. (Is this normal, then? Was the other card faulty when it showed stuff much faster? =)
Can't really remember right now (uptime 3 days), but I think it may have been.
Now in comparison, this seems pretty fast - in the text mode.
When using frame buffer mode, it's considerably slower than the other card when using frame buffer.
Well, I dont have much of an idea though.. if you can get this to happen by booting off of a boot disk into dos or something, and it happens there, then it has nothing to do with video drivers or anything, its something with the hardware. Best of luck in trying to fix it! =)
They're not perfect. I don't get crashes that often, but occasionally (once every couple of days, usually while in a game but sometimes just randomly) X freezes and won't even respond to keyboard input. Luckily I have a palmtop (an old Psion 3c) and a serial cable, so I can still log in on a serial port and do "killall -9 XFree86" - after X restarts it works fine.
It might be X rather than the nVidia drivers, but I doubt it (my old computer, also with X 4, works fine with ye olde Voodoo3).
> Thank God that hilarious JarJar character was
> added to pull that movie out of the toilet.
No kidding! When the Gungadin's were being attacked and slaughtered en mass near the end of the movie, I laughted myself silly watching JarJar knock down still more of his friends swinging that blue ball around. If only he were present in the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, that movie wouldn't have sucked so much and he would have brought much needed comic relief to an otherwise overly stressful and serious scene.
I also liked how the king of the Gungadoos knew JarJar personally, and how the king's bodyguards let him hang out with the king in spite of being ostracized for thievery, gross destructive negligence bordering on treason, and what-not. That loveable ne'er-do-well!
On the other hand, I did complain that JarJar's leap into the water was pathetic looking, so they did have him do a Triple Lindy this time.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
I like to give people the benifit of the doubt.
I will try. Lets take things one step at a time. Step 1. Admit there is a higher power. Come back to me when you figure this out and then we can go to step 2. In 12 easy steps you will be "cured".
I play NASCAR 4, and during incidents where people start 'rubbing' (yes that's a racing term) and incidents, even smoke, start to occur, fps takes a hit due to the calculations needed. At minimum, you need 24 fps to not notice any weirdness. But when it dips to 20 and below, the effect becomes very distracting, if it sinks to 12 or lower, there is no chance of running good lines. So yes, sim racers need high fps so when it does dip during the incidents, you still have enough to keep the illusion smooth.
The card works well in both Windows (98, 2k, don't know about XP) and Linux (particularly with the XFree86 4.0.x and 4.1.x series of drivers).
I've heard the AIW supports DVD playback well, but as I don't have a DVD I couldn't tell you.
Insomnia, the lead developer at GATOS, the ATI video project, has accomplished miracles with this series of cards and the GATOS program itself will handle just about any type of TV video input you could throw at it.
In my experience both GATOS and the XFree86 teams have more solid work on the Linux side of things than the ATI people on Windows (go figure). Not that I don't appreciate the ATI work on Windows, but it works...
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Since we broke into the conversation, Has anyone used the IBM 275 20" (19.8) Flat
1920x1440@75Hz I found one good review on it but nothing else. I would like one for christmas?? but I haven't been able to get a review from a source I know.
I was comparing it to the Mitsubisi 200 Diamond Plus Natural Flat
22" (20") 1800x1440@72 Hz
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Is it just me, or does it seem like we're down to only the "Big 3" (nVidia, ATI, and Matrox -- and I could be wrong about Matrox).
You used to have all sorts of chipset makers... S3, Matrox, ATI, WesternDigital, Tseng Labs (whatever happened to them, anyway?), 3dFX...
What happened? Is this consoldiation a good thing or a bad thing?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I'm currently running 2048x1536 (73hz) on the Sony Trinitron/Multiscan G500. It's a nice resolution but the image isn't as crisp as when I go down to 1920x1440 (78hz). I don't know if it's the monitor or if it's the video card (TNT2) that's can't handle the high resolution well.
I'd move to LCDs if I could get 110dpi on them like I do on this CRT.
Apple is using LG/Philips. Samsung uses AMD....but alot of this depends on the panel size. The Samsung 24.1" is AMD. Others come out of Japan.
It seems to me that this is a little too soon, the GeForce3 hasn't been out long at all and were already hearing about a new nVidia card? My GeForce2 still runs any game that I can think of and thats an "old" video card.
i know that there are a few asus delux cards out there that offer true stereo vision with a pair of special glasses. How come this hasn't become mainstream ?
This technology truely takes the monitor tot he next dimention.
I mean, to support it, we need a screen with a good refresh rate and a pair of lcd glasses. both can be cheaply obtained.
I guess if a markeh leader like nvidia makes it a standard feature, we'll see it more often.