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."

Comments

driver support required

[mallan]

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.