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Benchmarks for ATI's TRUFORM Technology?
SanLouBlues asks: "I'm slow and still deciding on what video card to get, but it's caused me to wonder what the performance of
ATI's TRUFORM n-patching is like. I've heard plenty of subjective comments and seen the pictures, but despite my best efforts, no benchmarks. I would hope that similar benchmarks would be available for GeForce3s since I believe ATI claims that n-patching is part of DirectX."
First of all, benchmarks don't really measure actual performance well. With that out of the way, I can probably tell you that you won't be able to compare it to any GeForce card, even if there were benchmarks. The feature is supported in DirectX 8.1, which added features used by the ATI Radeon cards. Essentially, 8.1 is DirectRadeon and 8.0 is DirectGeForce, so just because the feature was added in 8.1 won't mean that the other card can support it.
No comment.
who would've thought
otoh do the ati cards support video/svhs/tuning under X or is it windows only?
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If you really want an ATI card, wait until they develop some better drivers. Some have done tests on the GF3/Radeon 8500 and the GF3 won in actual performance. I, and many others, suspect that it is ATI's drivers holding the 8500/7500 etc. back.
Just because a card provides hardware support for a feature (such as npatches) does not mean that the software (eg games) that you're using is utilizing that hardware. I do not know of a single shipping title that's currently using npatches, and the GL_NV_evaluators extension was only released to developers a year ago. I would not consider addition or elimination of hardware support for npatches to be a deal-breaker when deciding what video card to buy, unless I was planning on writing software myself that utilizes that feature.
It's been my experience that the NVIDIA drivers are superior to the ATI drivers. I've been using an ELSA GLADIAC 920 GeForce3 board in my workstation for a year now, with the NVIDIA drivers, and have nothing but praise for both the hardware and software. I have had problems with the software drivers for the ATI RAGE LT Pro in my laptop computer.
I'm assuming you want to run the card on Linux, giving you're posting the question to Slashdot...if that is the case, you need to wait for better ATI drivers.
The NVIDIA Linux drivers come from the same codebase as their Windows drivers. The drivers offer the same features and comparable performance to their Windows counterparts. The lastest driver release also added a few nice GLX extensions. All hardware features are exposed.
The current ATI drivers were written as part of the DRI project, not by ATI. They do not expose any features beyond what you would have found in a Rage128 (no T&L, no programmable pipelines, only 2 texture units, no cube environment maps, no 3D textures, etc.). There have been rumors floating around that T&L will finally be supported in the Radeon driver "soon", but this is only a rumor, and I've been hearing it for well over 6 months.
ATI's website claims that their FireGL 8700 and 8800 cards (Radeon based) will have Linux support, which is promising. But never, ever, ever, ever purchase a product based on promises. If it doesn't have what you want now, don't count on ever having it.
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In their forums there is a demonstration of it in action on a Vorlon ship
http://www.tgu.org.uk/Forum/ubb/Forum46/HTML/00
You'd have to ask them how it performs though
I had an ati r128 card. For ages I put up with screen flicker and corruption, the tv-out not working (even worse, if you boot with tv cable connected x-windows wont run until you unplug and reboot). All the time ATI promise open, free drivers with top support. If you search on the net you'll find many people have this problem, and in fact the r128 drivers cant accelerate 2D and 3D at the same time! Setting some ladahCCA option helps but completely disables 2D acceleration! Sloooowwww.
Eventually I realised that ATI have no intention of fixing these problems, so I upgraded to the cheapest GeForce2+tvout I could find. (no RF out though.. bummer). Its a huge improvement! No more flicker, getting the closed drivers working is a small pain but worth it. For Redhat systems you just install an RPM but for debian you have to rebuild your kernel. Anyway, I'd really advise you not to get ATI. For 6 months after buying my new computer even the Windows drivers had bugs (flickering vertical lines in 32bpp mode). If they dont test a common configuration like that you can guess how they treat lesser used ones.
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Others I am sure, but those are the three that I am immediately aware of.