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Today's Hardware on Tomorrow's Games
GweeDo writes: "Anandtech has gotten their hands on a recent build of the Unreal Engine to give today's hardware (Geforce 3 ti's and upper-class Radeons) a run for the money to see how they will do on tomorrows games. The article is here and quite a good read ..."
It may have already been said, but does anyone get the impression Slashdot has been posting so many game stories so it can show off the new Atari icon?
Im not going to upgrade my machine for the "latest and greatest" when the original unreal tournament is just fine.
Im quite sure my current machine could "handle it", the other two machines on my network would have to be upgraded considerably in order to play it with other people in my house (upgrade = throw in trash and buy/build a new one)... no game is worth $2000.00 (plus the cost of the game)
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Wouldn't it be easier to create a subsection for gaming news like the oné you have for security and programming etc...?
Then whining about the number of gaming articles could be minimized because they can deselect the topic in their customisation.
It's great to see that the gaming industry is doing it's best to influence the graph card manufacturers.. up untill now it was the otherway around so developers were having to release games that were not fully endorsed.
Nothing more depressing if things were not as you want them to be.. now it's easier to do... however... it also means the unreal engine will be the dominant factor in the industry ruling out almost all other engine's...
However, you can put all the greatest graphics in the world, but if you don't add something interesting in terms of the game itself (plot, gameplay (both single and multiplayer), etc), then all you've got is a pretty looking game that no one is going to buy. And too many of today's games are just that; there hasn't been anything 'different' in the FPS arena since Half-Life, Deus Ex and No One Lives Forever, Diablo 2 in terms of RPGs, and so forth. There's only two interesting areas of games that I've seem them take great steps above their predecesors as to make them different; first is the X4/real-time strategy games such as Black & White and the recent Dune title, which are now combining good 3d engines with good gameplay (though Myth would be the first real entry in this catagory). The other is the simulation area: recent entries of games like Startopia combine the graphics and a rather detailed but playable ruleset to make a good game.
So while the hardware makers keep pushing out better cards capable of running all the graphics effects today, the game makers seem to be too tied up in taking advantage of that and not of improving the underlying game itself. I'm hoping that we hit a plateau in the graphics card ability, as once that is hit, then the game makers will turn back to the game since they can no longer optimize the pretty-ness of the game itself.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Am I the only one that thinks it's a bad idea to judge how a game will perform on certain hardware before the code has been optimized for a full blown release, or are these games already more or less "complete" and waiting to be released for marketing reasons?
Show of hands here, who actually wanted to SEE pics of the new engine in action?
What's the point of saying 'Gee these are really nifty in this demo' if we've got no visual point of reference?
A major part of a GPU benchmark is how well the display _appears_
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
The even more interesting thing is just how well the Kyro II line of card (Herc 3D Prophet 4500) is standing up to the GeForce 2 line of cards. That's not bad if I say so myself. At 1024x768x32, the card that nVidia dubbed "TNT 2 class" is keeping up with the GF2 pack, and is right behind the high-end GeForce 2.
Personally,I think that the Kyro 2 is the best deal in video accelerators right now. It's got plenty of juice for current games, produces a beautiful image, and can be puchased for a price as low as $60-$70. There really is no reason to buy a GF2MX considering the performance gain that you get with a Kyro 2. And, when the chips finally get a hardware T&L unit, they will be smokin.
Now, if only they would release those Linux drivers...
I work at one of the many companies that license Epics Unreal technology and I can tell you something of what is happening with the engine compared to the older titles like Unreal and Unreal Tournament.
:-)
There are a LOT of rendering improvements. The new renderer depends heavily on the GPU to offload the triangle rendering from the CPU. There are new primitives dubbed in the engine that are there to explicitly call for GPU support and render very, very fast.
This is why most games based on the new engine is going to have a lot more polygon detail and can use these rendering primitives to step up from blocky, repetitive levels to much more realistic environments with more depth.
Terrain is done in a similar manner, and the editor tools allows you to paint and modify the terrain in realtime preview. Multiple layers are allowed and you can control the blending in many ways.
A lot of other small improvements are in as well, such as texture compression, native skeletal animation, advanced particle systems, render anti-portals (for manual occlusion specification).
And the thing runs in very acceptable FPS
(sorry about being an AC but I don't want to be pinned to the wall and shot for saying anything I shouldn't have)
I refuse to use a nvidia because of thier unstable drivers
Yes, well, the TNT drivers are part of a unified nVidia driver package. The nvidia X drivers on linux don't spaz any more then X spazzes on anything else. On the Mac it's more about OpenGL implimentation, and Giants looks better on Windows because of it... but still...
i guess that matrox card from 1996 must be as stable as shit. good for you.Hmm so you would use ATI who drops their drivers a few months after released? I mean seriously, they release drivers then as soon as they release their next greatest video card, they drop development on the other card drivers. I used to have an ATI Rage 128. It was so buggy I couldn't use in three or four games. ATI never did release new drivers or fix the problems. I finally ditched it and got a Nvidia which worked fine (and it still working in one of my older computers).
//m
I also didn't see any mention of which graphics API was used. My hunch is that it's Direct 3D.
What follows is simply my opinion: I prefer the looks of OpenGL rendering on Nvidia hardware. My order of preference from a visual perspective was OpenGL, Glide, then D3D. I know Daniel Vogel (once a Loki guy - PS: Good career move) was responsible for most of the OpenGL work on UnrealTournament (i.e. using the S3TC-based textures on the 2nd CD), so my hopes are that this new engine will have OpenGL rendering.
I definitely take a performance hit going from D3D to OpenGL, but with pageflipping enabled in the drivers it's not too bad. I also am willing to do this for my perceived visual enhancements.
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
I look at the idea of playing Capture the Flag on Quake-family games, and see the quest for ever-more-real 3D, and wonder why people just don't go for the Ultimate. Pick a decent night, go outside, and play Capture the Flag. Real Reality, the Ultimate in Virtual Reality. I remember real Capture the Flag from Boy Scout campouts, and the nights weren't always that decent, but that was part of the fun.
The 3D gaming is getting just a bit bizarre, but I'm still reasonably happy with Quake3 on my Matrox G400 - bought on the strength of 2D image quality as well as Open Source 3D support. Unfortunately the latest'n'greatest drivers seem to be headed back to closed source.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Speaking of Capture the Flag, you can't beat that old PC version (not the quake mod) from around 1991. You could run and explore and capture the opponent.
;)
The only bad part was having to leave the room for your opponent to make his turn. But that's what the Super Nintendo was for
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What's wrong is that you have butchered the capitalization of a proper name. The product name is "GeForce3 Ti".
"GeForce3 Tis" ends up parsing as a different word entirely, so the apostrophe is a useful separator.
They should have renamed the executable to quack3.exe before benchmarking :)
Kidding aside, it's cool to see Radeon 8500 definitively beat out the more expensive competitor in a next gen game, but of course, as anandtech points out, there was a bug with fog in the ATI driver which may have helped performance as a side effect. Now the question is how long until the linux drivers support some sort of hardware accelerated 3D on 8500 chips.
Also, in XFree 4.2.0, are XVideo overlays working for Radeon 8500? All I see is 2D is supported, but 3D is not, and 2D "supported" could mean a lot of things. Also, does the GATOS stuff work with the 8500DV?
I've been considering purchasing an All-in-Wonder 8500DV, but if good support is not coming soon, I might hold off...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I assure you -- nvidias aren't unstable. I've been using my MX oc'd to 195/195 for a while now, and it's up to 8-10 hour gaming sessions without a glitch or a crash, even with several of those a week.
:)
I suppose you bought an s3 card then?
Besides that, Nvidia cards are currently the industry standard. Games are designed to run on those cards. That's a very important distinction, and it has the same effect as when 3dfx was king -- it'll work.
It's been a long time.
No offence to the guys coding Unreal, but I've always believed Id to be at the forefront of games that take advantage of hardware. I'd really like to know what they think about all this, and since he's been so up front with us before...
Carmack, are you listening? How long before we start seeing engines that are going to take advantage of all these whizzbang features in the GF3? Are you still thinking (like what you wrote that got posted on linuxgames) that the GF3 is still the best card of the lot? Tested any Doom builds on the latest ATIs or GFs, and got any insight for us?
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
With the 23.11s being a major culprit in the infinate loop error problem and the 8500's 3286s being replaced with a newer version that is WHQL certified (6014) which is availible publicly from windowsupdate.com, how relevant are the results, especially for the 8500?
I know that my score in the Nature test went from an average of 30 FPS to 45 when I went to the 60xx series of drivers.
Moreover, people are showing huge OpenGL speed differences in the leaked 6018s that are floating around at http://www.rage3d.com
In the end, is this a real test of where these cards will be when the game actually comes out?
I don't think it is.
Radeon 8500 drivers are in fact LESS supported than the GF3's!
AFAIK, ATI has yet to release specs for the Rage 8500 to a dri-project developer!
dri.sourceforge.net, then browse to lists and read the dri-devel archives. That's the best you can do.
Right now ATI has yet to release adequate technical specs to a DRI-project developer.
(by that I mean Radeon 8500 specs)
Their charts only showed the average frames per second, which is nice to know. But if I am looking at a card, I don't want to see wildly diverging frame rates... I think they should have an extra factor on their charts showing the slowest frame rate noted during the fly by.
34 fps might be alright if you never dip below 30. But I seriously doubt that to be the case.
Maybe they should even give a percentage of time during the fly by spent at less than 30 fps.
AFAIK, ATI has yet to release specs for the Rage 8500 to a dri-project developer!
Well that's interesting considering that during the IRC meeting of the DRI developers, it was decided that they'd first work on getting the Radeon 8500 up to speed with the other Radeon drivers and then focus on T&L.
I think you should do a little research next time before posting.
Dinivin
John Romero felt the same way about technology -- it had reached an "acceptable" level and design was really the only thing that was important. Well, that was back when he decided to licence the Quake 1 engine for Daikatana. Midway through, the designers realized that they had run into a wall because the engine would not allow them to do all of the things they had put into design documents. So, they quickly (well, not so quickly I quess) switched over to the Quake II engine.
People in the interesting have long been claiming that it is time for technology to lose it's relevance, much in the same way that the technology in the movie industry took a back seat to the artistry and content that went into motion pictures.
Why do people constantly make the mistake in assuming that all of the games made 20 years ago were good, and that the current generation lays exclusive claim to having crappy, derivitive games? The fact of the matter is that the percentage of good games to bad games hasn't changed all that much. Sure you remember how the gameplay of PacMan trancended its graphics, but do you remember the gameplay of, say, "Bop n' Wrestle"? If you're lucky the answer is no, because it sucked ass! Bad games are forgotten quickly.
Will technology in games become irrelevant? Probably. Just as good 2D performance is presumed, I'm sure that the same will be true for polygon-based performance someday. Have we reached that point yet? The answer is simply no.
Technology in the movie industry lost its relevance around the time directors realized that their imagination was becoming the limiting factor in what they could accomplish. I feel that we have a ways to go before this happens with video games.
Personally I hope we don't stop pushing technology until we get a game with Final Fantasy's gameplay, and... Final Fantasy (the movie) graphics! That would be sweet.
all I had to play with was a brick and a rusty bucket. What is it with these kids today and their fancy 'puters! I had plenty o' fun, and I didn't need no fancy-shmantzy GEE-FORCE THREE!
If a brick and a rusty bucket was good enough for me, it's good enough for them, dag nab it.
Firstly, a correction of the initial post, this is not just "a recent build of the Unreal Engine," it's a build specifically designed and packaged to stress rendering hardware to their limits. The 2 games nearing release using the Unreal Engine (Unreal Tournament 2 and Unreal 2)will be using a dramatically different codeset than this "UPT 2002" does, and those games will be better optimized for more efficient utilization of system resources than this thing is, while still using a number of cutting edge features that this thing doesn't (like custom particle engines, vertex/pixel shaders, and nifty stuff like that).
Quoting Mark Rein, who works for Epic:
This is all being discussed extensively in Infogrames' Unreal 2 forum.
Oh, and one more thing: Unreal 2 will be D3D only, and I wouldn't be surprised if UT2 is the same (although I don't follow it as closely). You may commence your moaning and bitching.
The Humblest Mollusk on the Net
Yeah, but in Boy Scouts, they didn't let you use Sniper Rifles or Rocket Launchers as part of the game.
ShoutingMan.com
Have you tried anything to fix it? I know about such things (being an ex-s3 Savage4 owner myself, I know all about catering to crappy drivers), so I may be able to help you.
Try some of these first.
1) If you are running an AMD chip, try the fix mentioned a few days ago. I haven't had any problems with that, but maybe I'm lucky.
2) Are you sure you're running cool enough? It's possible that your case is too hot, and is causing instability.
3) Ensure that there are no cables by your video card. Try your best to isolate power cables from the rest of the machine to reduce EM and RF interference. The interference caused by 12v is likely small, but I've had problems with that in the past.
4) Are you sure you don't have anything overclocked? If you do, set it back to it's normal speed.
5)It's also possible that your motherboard slightly overclocks it's bus(not uncommon) to get a small boost. This could in turn overclock your AGP bus, and cause problems with your card. I had this problem with the Savage4, but then it was an overclocked PCI bus making things unstable. I had similar symptoms to yours.
In the end, remember that video cards can be *very* tempermental if they are stressed in the wrong places. If most people are having no problems, ensure the hardware isn't at fault.
It's been a long time.
Dump ATI, go NVidia. I have and have never looked back. NVidia's XFree86 support is amazing.
A mistake most people seem to make is assuming that you need top-of-the-line hardware to play games. How about.....NO! Really, your entire comparison is extremely weak. "I use a five year old console because I don't want the best graphics card money can buy"? Understand this: You don't need to buy new hardware every 9 months if you're willing to put up with console quality graphics. Hell, a Geforce 2 MX-200 is pretty easy to get for the price of a new game, and at console resolution (640x480), it runs current games just fine. The arguement you present reads like "I drive a pickup truck rather than a car because I don't like how sports cars made later will be faster".
Remember these, and you'll live a lot longer.
1)You don't need the newest hardware to run the latest games. That Nvidia TNT2 many years ago will still run most, if not all, games on the market right now. It'll likely play them well too, as long as you turn down some graphics features. You don't even need more than a gigahertz to play the latest games.
2)If you buy a PC to play games, you can just set it up and let it sit there. Install the latest drivers at the time you install the card, and leave it at that. Driver updates are nice, and with nvidia, they generally speed up the card, but they really aren't nessessary if the program you want to run works.
3)It's entirely possible to build a computer which will last for quite a while for less than the price of that ultra-high end video card. Buy intelligently, and choose low cost, high performance components, and you'll have a system which is inexpensive to maintain, and is cheaper to keep up with than the latest console. For instance: I've got a Geforce 2 MX 200 right now. It'll last for quite a while, and judging from the benchmarks in this article, it'll probably run Unreal 2 at decent speeds if I'm willing run at 640x480x16bits, which I am. Even then, I can spend another 100 bucks(the price of maybe two games, quite reasonable) for a Geforce 4 MX when it comes out in march.
It's been a long time.
I'd do more of that, too, but the hardware is just so expensive! I mean, you just can't compete without an automag, and then a nitro kit and boy, you go through a full case of paint a day that way! It's so much cheaper to just play Q3...
What do you mean you can play capture-the-flag in meatspace without paintball markers?
-JDF (who plays with a stock Tippman '98.)
- Unless you can sucessfully guess which direction games are likely to head, hardware-wise, you will need to upgrade your hardware. Sure, that TNT-whatever card you mention probably works fine if you bought one but if you went with something else you might find yourself trapped at DirectX version 3
- You do need to upgrade drivers, all the time, if you want to play new games. At least Direct X, if not
.DRV files. And some of the older games that need DirectX 3 won't work with the latest version. - The only way to have a working games PC is to build it (or have it built) part by part. You can't walk into a store and buy a ready-made, tested, QA-ed PC model from a name brand and expect it to even play the latest games, never known future ones. So you can have a games PC with no support or a games console that's trival to fix/replace.
And a final point, not necessarily matching the rest of this; What's with the original Crazy Taxi being released on the PS2 even though CT2 is out on the Dreamcast? I mean, don't get me wrong, as a DC owner I'm happy to be able to play the same game as PS2-owning friends, and it's a good game, but doesn't it make the PS2 look a little... redundant?I'll start with your last point first.
:) ) if you don't. I ended up buying a really cheap, suprisingly reliable SiS 735 motherboard from PC Chips. Why did I go with that company? Well, Every PC Chips board I've owned in the past has been slow and unstable, but -- BUT! I did the research this time into the issues I was worried about (broken PCTEL modem, general slowness, instability, lockups), and after learning about the board, and it's twin (the EKsomething...), and all the praise it got from users and press, I went with it, after I also tried to find out it's weaknessess(note: The only weakness I found was that people still don't trust PC Chips.)
I have no clue. Perhaps it's a grab at the PS/2 market, like "Hey, I love that game! What?! The sequel is only coming out for dreamcast? I've gotta get one! What? 50 dollars? SWEET!"
...
maybe this whole thing has been a clever ploy by Sega to lower prices, and the dreamcast never died at all?
As for the rest:
-It's usually obvious when cards come out, based on reviewer slant, which companies will survive. At the time of the TNT, it was either that or the Voodoo(actually, I think voodoo2) if you wanted to buy a card you knew would last. Personally, that's why I bought the Geforce 2 MX. I get enough performance for my needs, and I get a fairly high quality TV-out as well. Everythings a lottery there though, and just as you could have ran out of luck and bought a ViRGE, you could have bought a sega 32x, or a Sega Saturn...or a Sega Dreamcast(this is an awkward pattern, but you get the idea.). The whole industry is rather volitile, so it's a gamble to pick anything up. Just go with who you think will stick around long enough to support your card. I would have sworn 3dfx was unstoppable before the voodoo 5 came out, but then things started to go downhill...
Games which require DirectX will usually install it during the installation. The process is nearly automatic, so it falls under the category of "I don't need to do anything, why should I care?".
As for a PC, I think that whole "support" thing is a myth anyway. Oh no! My hard drive just failed! Well, I'll bring it back to the place I bought it from, because they sent me a defective part. Sure, I could get an Compaq, but that's quite a hassle! It's a matter of trying to stay a little informed before you shop. Plan before you put down the cash. Don't be suprised if you end up with a lemon(or a K-Mart blue light PC
...and a Console is much harder to fix than a PC. Really, the modular design of a PC just can't be beaten for repair purposes. Even replacing broken components is just as easy. Just think smaller. Don't ask for a refund on the entire PC because the CD-ROM died, just ask for a new CD-ROM. 50 bucks if you're out of warantee, rather than the cost of a whole new console,
It's been a long time.
logs to this irc meeting are where?
posts in the dri-devel archive contradict that...
If you want to have a Games PC, you get a games PC. If you want a work PC, get a work PC. Don't bitch when the objectives combine. The only thing there stopping you from upgrading seems you be you.
It's been a long time.
Unfortunately, that's the way it must be if you wish to have a stable PC like that.
It's been a long time.