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NVIDIA Unveils (And Tom's Reviews) The GeForce4
EconolineCrush writes: "NVIDIA has finally revealed its GeForce4 Titanium and MX graphics processors. Tom's Hardware has a some benchmarks comparing the new offerings to current products, and the results are pretty interesting. Meanwhile, The Tech Report does an excellent job cutting through the hype with an examination of each new chip's features. Both articles are well worth reading to get the full story on the latest from NVIDIA."
So the advanced features of the GeForce3 aren't being utilised yet, and the GeForce4 is out now... ouch what to do... do I get a GeForce3 now or wait...?
~www.devnull.co.uk
I almost can't stand it when I buy a new flashy graphics card that is praised by every magazine, and then a NEWER card comes out, that supports DX8 pixel shaders, etc., etc. (IE I bought a Radeon 64MB DDR card....two weeks later, hello GeForce3)
I hope if I buy a GeForce4, it'll last, in both speed and 3D technology.
And in an almsot suprising move, apple's offering as a build to order option in their towers (announced yesterday. For a company that almsot always has hidiously slow graphics cards, its kind of a nice change tosee them ahead of the game for once in this department.
Mod point free since 2001
I'm sick of these reviews with a line like "The results are *interesting*". Lets just agree that if the results weren't interesting, it shouldn't have been posted in the first place. By posting the article on slashdot, the "interesting" part is implied.
Please, go out on a limb, put on some body armor, and have the guts to say ONE MEANINGFUL SENTENCE about the results other than that they were "interesting". It's not that hard.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1583
And to everyone's suprise. Geforce4 is faster then
the previous chipsets. Has more pipelines and
bigger memory bandwidth. When will someone try
the new and fresh marketing trick and announce
hardwarre that is slower then the old hardware.
(I hope MS didnt hear this and starts making hardware)
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
So, you're using the previous top-of-the-line hardware and you're complaining? I can see if you were using some 5-year old board and it did everything you needed, but geez.
Games will come out (Unreal Tournament 2, anyone?) that will make your GeForce 3 lay down and cry like a baby.
Tech Report article
Just a MacGamer short blurb
How are they stealing from the community? Granted, their drivers are closed-source, but they're not stealing anything.
Read the title. Read what you posted. Please correct the grammar mistakes.
It's getting rather pathetic...
Agreed. I believe that humans are not able to distinguish framerates over something like 200fps (correct me if I am wrong please.) So instead of wasting that power on frames, put it to good use (like new rendering techniques - pixel shading was a step in the right direction.)
... Yes. I really heard this. No one believed me when I said I could play just as well at 30fps.
Once you have built one element of 3D to the top, start at the bottom of another and keep building it up. This is the way the actual *TECHNOLOGY* improves.
Besides, I can live with 30-40fps on ANY game.
<anecdote>
I heard people complaining in my school computer lab: "Yo, I sucked so bad at that CS game, my framerate was only like 70fps, I should get a new video card"
</anecdote>
LeadTek has a Geforce3 Ti200 with 128M of memory
for under $200. I just got one of these a
couple of days ago. Heaviest video card I've ever
owned. Looks great in windows. (I did windows
first because I knew it would take longer). If anybody's curious, mail me; I should have it
working under linux tonite if nothing comes up
after work.
funny story: I upgraded my mobo as well to
a soyo dragon+... That thing does NOT turn off
power to the keyboard or ps/2 mouse port when it
powers down. I finally had to unsolder that idiot
taillight on my MS optical mouse so I could get
some sleep.
I can't find my car keys. (no a's in email)
Developer: Hey, my game is so inefficient, it makes the last generation of high end graphics boards choke! Yeah!
No one will pay for that kind of bullshit.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
After this article and yesterday's overly-glowing review of the Xbox, it seems to me that Tom's has fallen on hard times. Consider the following sentence:
"The test guys who aught [sic] to have caught this driver bug seem to be busy selling their stock our [sic] counting their money instead."
All their articles now seem to have been written in five minutes and sent though to door without the slightest bit of editing- or even spell checking!
I don't mean to nitpick, but Tom's used to be a very reliable source- and a great read. Not so much anymore.
Look at Intel and AMD (Celeron and Duron). Both came out when their counterpart procs (P-III and Athlon) were faster both in Mhz and design (cache, architecture, etc). And they fit their market segment with very good results. If you think about it, the MX line is really the same thing. It's just that Nvidia came out with all flavors at the same time, instead of releasing the Pro/Ti then the MX.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
The hardware comes out so fast they can't design/code/test drivers fast enough. Have you tried the Geforce drivers for XP? BSOD every 7 minutes.
... no complaints from me.
Strangely enough their linux drivers are great. So short story is
Your opinion is confused. Just because there is a product (Geforce 4) that runs a game (Counter-Strike) ten times faster than another card (TNT2) doesnt mean the TNT2 is outdated. A TNT2 runs Counter-Strike just fine. Ok, you dont get the highest resolution, or crazy frame rates, but it works...
nVidia releasing faster video cards doesnt make other video cards less useful. Games do that. And why shouldnt they? Who doesnt want better graphics in there games?
Its the chicken and the egg problem. No developer is going to make a game if he doesnt anticipate that when its released, there will hardware fast enough to run it. So the hardware guys have to set the speed at which the industry moves forward.
If nVidia moves forward at a fast pace, good for them! Lets hope the software guys can keep up.
I just got my new GeForce3 Ti500 card and now there is a GeForce4?!... man, at least support will continue unlike my now sold Voodoo5. =\
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
try 60.
My Geforce 2 MX is still awsome, I can play pretty much anything I want and it only cost me $100. Now the Geforce4 is already out? Didn't Geforce3 come out less then one year ago? I was planning on upgrading to the 3 in a few months because it still seems to expensive. What do I do now?
So GeForce3's should now get a bit cheaper which is great news. I'm quite happy with mine and it sounds like I won't be missing out on much compared with the new GF4...so it's just an incremental step this time which is fine with me as I won't be missing out on major features when new games come out.
GF3, 512MB Ram (PC133 even), 2X 20GB HDD, 1Ghz Athlon and I can run Medal of Honour just fine in 1024X768 - a GF4 would be wasted on my system anyways I think.
Wow, the article is "interesting". Come on, at least *some* content in the Slashdot piece, like "overall about N% faster".
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Hey dumb ass, ever notice that Dues Ex and Counter Strike are closed source? are THEY stealing from the community also? or just companies that actually support their own hardware instead of waiting for amateur to make a buggy hack? So i suppose by Nividia hiring people to develop their linux drivers that is stealing? As opposed to what? waiting for someone to write them for free? Oh ok, well in that case there is the nv driver that comes with xfree which is obviously open source and recently updated in xfree 4.2.0...
You post makes no sense...
"Are they ever going to make a game detailed enough to take advantage of this capacity?"
and then in the next paragraph:
"a progress that is essentially pushing everyone who has a machine a year or more old to upgrade if they want to even play the latest games, much less enjoy them."
So which is it? The new hardware is useless becuase it's more powerful than you need? Or the new hardware is an absolute requirement to even load the latest games?
The fact that your post is getting modded up just shows how silly people who read slashdot are.
There are other gaping holes in your arguement but the idea of wasting time pointing them out to a group of people that are either to stupid to realize it or to blinded by foolish religous zeal to admit it.
highest end of those listed, is only listed as
costing $299. I remember that a GeForce 2 Ultra
with 64 Megs of Ram was something around $550 in
the store, even months after it came out.
Of course, I don't know if it is worth it to buy
one of these things. I'm playing Return to Castle
Wolfenstein on my GeForce 2 Pro at full detail, and
I'm still getting good performance.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Does anyone use these cards for anything other than games?
These cards cost as much as a decent CPU... or a console game system- yet are the fraction the cost of a CAD card. Their shelf life seems pretty limited as well. In a year or two they will all have a half gig of Rambus or DDR and we'll have 16X AGP? Then we'll all need high definition monitors because today's pixels will all look "blocky" by comparison. Then we'll be right back to unusable framerates at higher resolutions... it all goes full circle.
I've never been able to justify the cost, but then again I don't game. The ironic thing is that "fun and games" arguably stress the hardware more than any other apps for most general home users.
Those that suggest you "dance like no one is watching" really want to see you make a complete fool of yourself.
Deus Ex and CS... gee, those are really graphically intense games, let me tell you. Try playing Aquanox with FSAA turned on, it'll kill that card :)
Let me give you an idea of what to expect. Your framerate in Quake3 / Wolf is probably rediculously high right now, even in the middle of an airstrike or flamethrower (in wolf) depending on if you even have enough cpu power to power the card completely (i'm assuming you do).
Quake3 used about 10,000 polygons for each character model. The new report yesterday on Doom 3 is that it will use 250,000 FOR EACH MODEL.
Run it at 1024x768+ with 4x FSAA and antistropic filtering turned on, and that card will be going approximatly a nice fast 10fps. =]
More power means more features and higher resolutions and the card should last longer. And to your point about framerates and games, I play tribes 2 on 2 different computers one which gets 30 - 40 fps and the other which gets 70-90 (average) and I definately do better on the faster computer. My aim is more accurate because the display is smoother especially when a lot is going on.
Comparing 30 fps on TV/film to 30 fps on computer graphics is like apples and oranges.
The 30 fps is with regard to frames on film.
TV and film has motion blur that makes it easier to fool your eye, however computer generated graphics do not have the motion blur so your eye isn't fooled so easy.
Granted 3dfx made a weak attempt at creating motion blur, but it was not very effective and they got bought out before they could really mature the tech.
From Tom's review... 'Whether 136 fps at 1600x1200 is really necessary remains questionable'.
NO SHIT!!
-Sy/\/apZ-
The THG article indicates that for all intents and purposes, the average home-computer user still has enough power in his 700-1000MHz machine that upgrading to the rediculously overpowered 2GHz P4s and Athlon XP 2000+ etc, just isn't worth it for them (unless of course their livelihood is dependant upon computing time). I believe the same is starting to happen in the GPU field as well. A brother of mine recently bought a GeForce 3 card, just after the introduction of the whole Ti 500/200 updates. To this day it's still more power than he needs and should be able to outlast the TNT2 Ultra card he replaced it with. The main point being that except for those people that crave "the fastest," and there's nothing wrong with that ;-) , these incremental increases in performance are going to mean less and less to the consumer, most of whom go to the biggest electronics store around and say "my kid needs a special 3d thingy to play this new game." Although I honestly believe people would be happier if they informed themselves a little, it's impossible to think that they will and in the end it doesn't matter. We've been years away from any new device that shows real promise, instead the best some people can come up with is an integrated cell-phone / PDA. Hmmm... who would have thought... until something does show up... I'll be playing Quake on an 8MB single-head graphics card. Humiliation!
OK, I first want to admit that nVidia makes some good graphics chips. Right now there is nothing out there better for gamers (even though I personally don't care about gaming).
My problem with nVidia comes from their arrogance towards my friend, and also me here at the CES. We run a site called Target PC, and we scheduled a meeting with them at the conference. This was my first time meeting them, and my friend's third time. He didn't even want to do, because he knew that he was going to get mad, again. I didn't know what he was talking about, until we got there.
Our site gets several thousand visitors a day, and we both it's beyond reasonable to have nVidia send us reference boards for review like they do for the other major websites like Tom's Hardware and Anandtech. We get to talking to they guy about this, and he turns into a major jerk. He starts making up lame numbers, saying that they can't afford to send these cards to us, bla bla. He basically told us that they don't care about us, or our website.
He might as well told us to "get the fuck out of here, and don't come back". My friend said this is how he got treated before, also.
So anyway, I though you all might want to know how they treat reviewers who's names are not Anand or Tom.
Give your best card, and I will bring it to its knees....bwahahaa!
A 3D program like Lightwave or Maya can easily task the fastest card out there. Not surprising if you're working on a scene with 3-4 million polys.
What were you expecting?
Yes it was a mistake..But I ordered it anyway..
:)
Am I gonna get it ? With respect to the current financial condition of BestBuy, NOT!..
But the 60 seconds it took me to key in my Credit Card info to order the card (with a palpable sense of inevitable doom), was worth it..
And no..i am not gonna post the link. If you want to find out, go check out Anandtech community.
Rapid Nirvana
Right now or maybe wait a month and get a GF3Ti200 which OC's quite well to GF3Ti500 levels.
Basically the benchmarks say that for ultra high res ie above 1024x768 the top 2 GF4 cards are about 10-20% faster. Yawn. That is of course if you has a least a 2GHz machine. So basically this is an evolutionary not revolutionary release.
If your a causal gamer or play any "older" games a GF2Ti will work as well as most of these newer cards since these games don't use DX8.
BTW expect per history the GF3Ti500 to not really drop in price.
Anandtech has quite a good review here. They also have benchmarks from the lastest build of the unreal engine here. Enjoy :)
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I guess it's time for me to go buy that Radeon card I've been planning to get for quite some time now. And I mean _the original_ Radeon, not (7|8)500. Hey, I hardly ever play any games and I'm still using ATI's VideoXpression with 2MB ob memory from 1997!
I know you're out there John. :)
Lemme ask you this: it seems that with the previous generation of 3D cards, the technology had reached the point where any game with a reasonable game engine could be run at 1024X768x32bit with all the detail goodies turned on at framerates that were completely playable.
(Perhaps this is a mistaken assumption?)
If so, then what does this card bring to the table from a game designer/coder's perspective?
If there's no point in driving a Quake3 style engine any faster (because it's already fast enough) then what will you be able to do with this new hardware that you couldn't do with older stuff?
Or to rephrase, what hardware feature do you most wish was availible on the current generation of 3D cards, and does this new card have that feature?
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Tom's also has an article on the first cards by Leadtek and Gainward to incorporate 128MB onto a GeForce3 Ti200 card. Interesting results.... Makes you wonder how long until 128 megs of video memory is standard. Only ID knows that...
I think my principles are reachin' an all time low
(Flamebait powers on)
What is it with you guys? Every time something comes out on a review site like Anandtech, Tom's, or wherever else you whore it out? Us poor folks who actually read those pages on a daily basis end up with unloadable pictures and pages at time due to their sites being partially slashdotted.
I just don't understand why it's so hard to get YOUR OWN INFORMATION. Why not link to a report on nVidia's site instead of an independent reporter? Especially one that you link to (literally) 3 times a week? Please.
All I ask is that you be a little more original. Don't link to Tom's/Anandtech every time they update.
If it were on paper, I wouldn't even use it to put down for the puppies. He (they) destroyed his credibility with that Microsoft ad disguised as an X box review the other day. Pah. BC
So, does any company make good graphics cards with open specs?
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Um... this has to be a mistake, but apparently Best Buy is letting you Pre-Order these little slices of heaven for $129.00
Check it out.
There are a few hundred thousand animators out there who actually need the fastest cards out there.
But in reality computer gaming is a big American and world pastime at this point. A big enough number of people are willing to spend $200 every year on a new video card justifying Nividia's crazy release cycle. Trust me if there was not an insane demand for this new technology Nvidia would not being doing as well as it is. And no they have has not got to where they are today by simply marketing. There is a true demand for faster cards and will always be until we have infinitly scaling cards.
Not everyone who reviews hardware gets a card. There are thousands of sites like yours on the net and they all can't get cards. Instead of whining about it on Slasdot maybe you should wait a few weeks and try again.
Then again after bad mouthing them you have pretty much guarenteed that you'll never get a card again from them.
Stupid move if you ask me. I hope you feel better after complaining.
Squid
Wolfman (i guess this is the best)
Tidepool
Looks like they had some spelling errors on some of the videos (they spelled content as contnent).
Will someone elighten me on this whole fps thing? I am just a casual gamer, but normal TV is just under 30 fps, and it looks like full motion video. So, could you evn tell if something was over 30fps? At a certain point your eyes wouldn't be able to detect any difference, correct? If you can get 30 fps, is there any real advantage to having, say, 50fps?
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
Inefficient?.. no
using models with 20x the polygons of the games of a few years ago, yes.
Don't confuse slowdown due to added features with random code bloat..
they CAN be related, but it's not inherent.
More shaders, More pixel pipelines, More memory bandwidth... whoopee...
When the hell are they going to ditch the antiquated scanline rendering method and go work on some tile based rendering methods?
Hell, the reason why the Geforce line has to keep doubling its fill rates every generation is because its architechture is so god damn ineffecient. Look at the memory bandwidth requirements for the cards! Instead of using the relatively limited bandwidth of AGP for streaming textures from main memory (where it should god damn be) to the texture cache, the card is busy wasting bandwidth on the damn Z-buffer (which would be eliminated if they implemented hidden surface removal like the PowerVR chipsets).
Also, tile based renderers scale better. You stick another graphics chip in, you instantly double the performance of the graphics card because you can process 2 tiles at once.
How about seeing some new innovation in the field rather than just adding a few new pixel pipelines and a shader that nobody has any freaking idea on how to use!
Graphics cards will continue to get incrementally better until they can push enough polygons(or whatever) to create fully realistic life-like real-time fully 3D images at a constant framerate high enough so slowdown is completely imperceptible to the human eye.
That is still very, very far away. Your post is AT LEAST a decade too early.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I can't stand that the GeForce 4 is hardly an upgrade from the GeForce 3. According to the Inquirer, ATI is calling it the GeForce 3.5 (heh heh) because the chip really hasn't changed that much aside from the extra vector shader. Here's the article. And here are screenshots from an interesteing Powerpoint Presentation given by ATI. ATI accuses nVidia of "artificially keeping prices up by re-naming the same products."
This statement is false.
AFAICT gamers quote "Average FPS" or "Best FPS" as a proxy for "Worst FPS".
So when they say "I got 70fps" what they really meant was "When the action got hairy, it was down to 20fps, which was noticiblely jerky."
Also, certain game engines have bugs/features where if the fps is very high, your character can do things normally not possible (like jump real high or whatever).
There's also the phenomenon where a better videocard really does give a bigger penis and all of the chicks.
If you can't stand it, then don't buy a new friggin card, that's what I do! Damn, do we really need 20 posts whining like this every time there is an article about new graphics cards on /.?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Obviously not Tom's.
Granted, I can still see pages (sometimes, and when they don't come up, it's a battle to get them to appear) the images refuse to come up. (I have to reload them a half dozen times to get to the pictures)
Pfft. who cares about DirectX 8, it's an MS technology and this is slashdot.
Slashdot. News for Zealots, Stuff that matters (if you're a linux zealot!)
The idea is that if you are maxing out at 30fps, then when a more complicated scene (player turning, multiple weapon fire, smoke grenades, other players in field of view) your rate will drop well below 30... if your rate is 60fps, the times when it will drop to a visibly "chunky" speed are fewer and further between (on average). So, if you have a base rate of 150fps, you should be able to handle just about any event without noticable slowdown in drawing.
That being said, I just upgraded my 16MB TNT (original) to a 64MB GF2MX400 recently, and it is more than suitable for the 3D games I play (mostly sports sims and RTS types). The only difference is that I can now render Yankee Stadium at 1280x1024+ with better detail. Playability hasn't changed much.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Oh, I see now, thank you. I guess then I would just have to ask, why not when testing a card, give the lowest fps reached? Wouldn't that give a better approximation of how good a card would be when you need that extra grunt to ge tyou through the thick scenes?
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
Ideally, you need an image-update rate (FPS) that is equal to the refresh rate of your monitor. This can be 60Hz or 70Hz or so. If you run at 30 FPS and your monitor updates at 60 Hz, every image is drawn twice. When your eyes are tracking some object on the screen, they will make a smooth motion, while the object will appear twice, jump, appear twice, etc. This causes a ghosting effect (spatial aliasing): you will see a double image.
An other effect, of which I am not sure, may be that in games the I/O devices are sampled at the same speed as the graphics are drawn. Please contradict me on this one, because this would be bad. For smooth control of the game, I/O devices should be sampled at twice the monitor refresh-rate (remember nyquist?). If the sampling is independent, that's OK. If not, you need a very high FPS, which is a waste.
Excuse me? How the FUCK are they 'stealing from the community'? There's no law saying they have to open their driver source code. They're not taking anything away from 'the community' by not opening their source.
They've spent loads on developing this stuff, and you expect them to give away secrets which would help their competition?
You, sir, are an arse!
"Information wants to be paid"
If you're sick of all these senseless video card upgrades, just follow the $150 video card rule. No game is really going to take full advantage of a card less then $150. If you're paying more then that, you're wasting money.
Your money would be better spend putting the extra money towards a better monitor for instance. Be surprised the number of people that spend $400 on a video card to play on a $150 montior. Then wonder why things are still jumpy. A nice subwoofer and new speakers would also enhance your gaming experience.
The average slashdotter thinks that any program could be reduced to the following if it were written by "skilled" programmers:
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { return 0; }
Basically it's better to do nothing quickly than to actually accomplish something more slowly.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
lol, I ordered one too! About to order about some more to ebay later as well! hehehe
Standard /. post
complaining about
Tom's Hardware
not putting enough
information on one page.
We need a "slashbot" that will automatically post all the normal postings we have come to know and love.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
They're German, give them a break. (I think the Xbox writers are French.) There have always been plenty of misspelling and strange grammar in the English-language articles on THG. I have never had any problem understanding the articles, though, and I thank Tom et al. for making their reviews available in English.
>Wouldn't that give a better approximation of how good a card would be when you need that extra grunt to ge tyou through the thick scenes?
Yes it would:
Some of the reviews use benchmarks of certain games, with scripted "worst-case scenarios"... with Quake, people often tested with a "crusher" playback file, which was a capture of a really massive battle scene with many rockets, players, etc... the average fps on that demo is a pretty good lower bound... I'm sure that people have constructed similar scenarios for Q3, UT, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, etc... Maybe checking through the reviews at TomsHardware or AnandTech would reveal some of these... I haven't been keeping up on all of the benchmarks for the last year or so.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I see a lot of g4m3rz crowing online about the ungodly framerates they've managed to acheive through a combination spending a lot of cash and tweaking configurations until the wee hours of the morning-- 100fps and up.
If my monitor is only painting the beam at a rate of around 70Hz-- an acceptible rate for most mid-range monitors-- it would seem to me that for any framerate above that frequency the excess frames will never get drawn to the screen and are totally wasted.
Coupled with the fact that the majority of people aren't sensitive to frame rates over about 30fps, it makes even less sense. There's a reason movies run at about 24fps, after all.
-- Cerebus
I hate to say it, but the GeForce4 Ti series is FASTER THAN MY OWN COMPUTER.
What the hell? Isn't that ridiculous? I'm running a 266MHz P2, and now these graphics cards are running at 300MHz. I know P2 MHz != GF4 MHz but even still.
Now all I need is for Intel to stop dragging their feet about releasing the mobile P4 and I'll be quickly snapping up one of their 1.7GHz mobile P4s with a GF4Go video card.
Then maybe another few years down the line the new graphics cards will be faster than my CPU. Go figure.
I saw something amusing when I went to read the article on Tom's Hardware Guide. The first page was headed by a banner ad for the ATI Radeon 8500. But the banner was blank - the graphic was missing!
I suppose it's possible that the ATI ad just happened to come up in the rotation (reloading the page brings up a variety of different ads), and the ad banner server could be slashdotted... but I prefer to believe it's a fight between ATI's marketers and NVIDIA's hackers.
Hit your head when you fell off the shortbus today, sir?
The "stealing from the community" comment was tongue-in-cheek. He is poking fun at all the Open Source zealots who think Closed Source is morally wrong.
Until you have achieved the minimum IQ to post here at Slashdot, please refrain from doing so, or Timothy may be forced to IP ban you. Ok thanks.
I saw it for $120 and just hit refresh... now it's $400! Oh well, I didn't have the $120 anyways.
TVs display two field in a frame, so each field displays images which are 1/60th of a second apart. This really is noticable as smoother motion versus actual 30fps or 24fps as in film.
The difference in quality between 24 fps and 60 fields per second is subjective, but very noticable.
Yep, it was a mistake... they just jacked the price up to $399.99.
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The exciting thing about the GeForce 4 is not that it's faster or cheaper, it's that finally the programmability is at an appropriate level.
Uh-huh. 15%. Yawn. Don' need that. I can play Deus Ex just fine. Well, guess what. Even if you think that games are the entire universe, some day you might just need an MRI and need someone to be able to look at it and find something that will keep you from dying. Medical imaging is one of the things that the GeForce 4 will be good enough to do. Scientific visualization, volumetric rendering, that sort of stuff.
Why is this? About a decade ago, everything was basically SGI. These were big, expensive machines, suitable for vertical markets. It was possible to get the engineers to work with the microcode for the sales of a small number of units.
Then various card companies came along (NVidea has a lot of ex-SGI engineers) and started making cards for the horizontal gaming market. They concentrated, of course, on satisfying the needs of their biggest customers/promoters, which were the gaming people. Many of these cards were customizable, but at a level of abstruseness that made it so that maybe three people in the world could really hack them up the wazoo.
In the mean time, SGI suffered, because even people who should know better make decisions on the basis of "gee whiz." No magazine is going to benchmark a card on how accurately it shows a tumor from real data. A perception rose that the graphics problem had been solved for cheap, when it really hadn't been.
The GeForce 4 finally brings little-card graphics up to the point where mere mortals can actually do customization for vertical markets.
Just like everything else computer! I bought my Asus 8200 Deluxe, cuz it has the video in/out 64 meg of RAM plus hte speed. If I need anything more than this to use Blender, GIMP, of some cool games then I will buy an Oxygen!
How many games/applications truly take advantage of the GeForce 3? Not too many, cuz as most reports state, many people still have computers from 400Mhz to 1GHz. So if they have not upgraded yet, why on earth do they need this? Cuz some mag say's it's the greatest since sliced bread?
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
;-)
I can't really see why they have the need to come out with ever faster graphics boards. I can play games like Deus Ex and CounterStrike fine already with my GeForce3 (in fact, it is already a little overkill). You really have to start asking the question "Are they ever going to make a game detailed enough to take advantage of this capacity?"
No, of course they are never going to make a game that is as pretty as Final Fantasy or Shrek.
This is a typical case of duh. Remember your post when Doom 3 or Unreal 2 comes out and the Geforce 3 can't reach the highest resolutions at decent speed.
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
I'm surprised, as is Tom's Hardware. If NVidia wants developers to use their underutilized vertex shader hardware, which takes considerable programming effort, they need to put it in the whole product line. Right now, the GeForce 3 vertex shader hardware is in all the GEForce 3 parts, the XBox, and the Mac boards, but not in the NForce or the GEForce 4 MX. Those last two are GEForce 2 architecture.
This sounds like marketing insistence that the new low-end product be called a "GeForce 4", when it really should have been called the GeForce 2 MX".
The transistor count on a GeForce 3 architecture part is about 3x that of a GeForce 2 architecture part. This isn't a trivial difference.
Death, Taxes, and nVidia releasing a new product line every 6 months.
Every spring (since the original GeForce) a new generation of video cards has come out of nVidia. Every fall, that technology is "tweaked" and is dubbed the "fall refresh" which usually has more memory and higher clock rates. The Ti500 was the fall refresh for the GeForce3. Previous generations just had an "Ultra" stuck on the name.
I have a GeForce3 from last spring. I will probably wait until at least the Fall Refresh of the GeForce4 before upgrading, because honestly my GF3 just doesn't seem that slow!
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Bestbuy had pre-orders for the VisionTek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB priced at $129.00 for a few hours this morning. They recently changed the price to $399. I was able to grab one...lol!
Here's a copy of my receipt:
VisionTek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB DDR AGP Graphics Accelerator 3001522
On Order - Usually ships in 5-7 business days
1
$129.99
$129.99
Total Product Cost:
Second Day Shipping and Order Charge:
Tax:
Subtotal:
Coupons & Credits:
$129.99
$7.00
$5.20
$142.19
$0.00
Total Credit Card Charge: $142.19
Best buy has in the past, priced something low by accident, and rased the price not only on the page, but on peoples credit cards who have already made the low purchase.
The incident I am thinking of was about 2-3 years back, and over a name brand 19" monitor, going for about 1/3 it's normal price. There may be others, as I usualy don't follow this kind of thing.
So, the moral of this? be warry, check your cc bill.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
What a load of crap. You can program anything you just need the money to hire the right people.
1920 x 1440 @ 77Hz
1856 x 1392 @ 80Hz
1600 x 1200 @ 92Hz
1280 x 1024 @ 107Hz
1024 x 768 @ Ungodly High Hz
So your 1 year old GeForce3 can play 2 year old games based on 3 year old engines (Unreal and QuakeII respectively)? I'm impressed.
Maybe when you start playing current games at high resolutions with all the bells and whistles on you'll appreciate the GeForce4.
Wonk Wonk!
But I don't think this is necessarily true. I haven't yet, but I'm anxious to get my hands on a game that supports geomod. When you start adding technologies like this, and depending on how detailed it is, I see this as something that could place a HUGE burden on the GPU. Everyone says current boards are OK for CURRENT games, but I'd like to think that game development will eventually grow into the extra bandwidth with all kinds of cool stuff.
TV Shows and Movies have Motion Blur which helps your eye tie the two frames together and make the motion look fluid. Games don't have that. Also, as others have said, Average Frame Rate is not Worst Case Frame Rate.
Taken from http://webdog.org/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&time=2001 0222225435
:"I just got back from Tokyo, where I demonstrated our new engine
John Carmack
running under MacOS-X with a GeForce 3 card. We had quite a bit of
discussion about whether we should be showing anything at all,
considering how far away we are from having a title on the shelves, so
we probably aren't going to be showing it anywhere else for quite a while."
The main reason for me being in the market for a new 3d card and my main requirement for the new 3d card which I intend to purchase is that it be able to play existing john carmack games at a higher graphical standard and my main worry when trying to decide which one to buy and which one is the best value is that the card I buy will not be able to cope with upcoming john carmack games such as the new doom game.
www.newegg.com says
a CardExpert GeForce2 MX 400 64MB SDRAM AGP No TV-Out - RETAIL - costs $46
and
VGA LEADTEK GEFORCE4 MX440 64MB VGA & TV-OUT. RETAIL BOX Part# - costs $122
and
VGA LEADTEK Geforce3 TI500 64MB TV/DVI RETAIL BOX
- $350
(other geforce 3's range from $110 up)
According to the prices shown on this site I can pick up a decent graphics card for just under $130
,(A satisfactory geforce3 can be had for under $130 if the geforce4 price turns out to be a missprint),That is about the price I am willing to pay for a 3d card that will do what I want it to.
_________________________________________________
It means I'll be willing to buy a GeForce 3 soon.
:)
No sig for you!!
I think there might be an agreement between the two that new Nvidia products get "announced" for Apple hardware before they do on PC. Of course, essentially the only way to get Nvidia apple cards is to buy a new system, with a 6-8 week waiting period, whereas you can just go to the store and get a card for PC....
I learned a while ago that, at my budget, I'll get much better average performance (over time) by staying a bit shy of the leading edge. Also get fewer headaches from buggy products that way.
Sorry, this algorithm is too slow. Please optimize with
:)
int main() { return 0; }
since no command line args need to be processed, they can be optimized out.
Now I can do nothing *REALLY* fast...
.. Is mainly because of these $400 prices, and for some of us, Nvidia hasn't opened the drivers yet.
I don't have $400 to shell out for a video card. Maybe $100, but not $400. Thats about 4 days work for me,
and I also have to feed myself and my wife. My parent's helped my wife buy me the parts for a new AthlonXP 1.6ghz to build.
But that wasn't an easy thing to buy.
If Nvidia wants people to buy their cards, they better lower the prices a lot. Untill then, ill stick with my V3 3000 running @ 90fps.
--------------------------
Is this a sig?
--------------------------
I have a GeForce2 MX made by ASUS (not Prolink or whatever) driving a Samsung 900NF monitor. I also have an old Matrox Millennium II PCI. The picture quilty of the Matrox card is awesome (also tried w/ G450MAX also looking good). No amount of FSAA would make the GeForce look even decent. In the end I had to remove all the R/F filters from the GeForce to make it look barely acceptable. If I didn't play games I'd never ever keep that card.
I think they should first fix their picture quality issues before they go into advancing FSAA or whatever else. They all look dreadful. Any old Matrox or ATI card will beat them in that department.
D.
Tom's bashing. Gee don't hear that every day on Ars.
Tom's has for years given free extensive reviews on the latest and greatest products. You should be grateful the site is even there. While I agree it's silly to say for example, one mobo creamed another when it only won by 5%, as happened recently, their graphs and charts makes buying decisions easier.
So if you don't like having a free resource which review cutting edge products, keep it to yourself, because thousands of others apparently find the site useful.
I think you are thinking of Buy.com's monitor screwup? In Feb '99? See page 2 of this .pdf:
http://www.ars1.com/Channels/ecommUpdate.pdf
Buy.com honored the price for the ones they had in stock, then told everyone else to take a hike, and got sued. And paid $575,000 settlement for that.
Couldn't find anything about bestbuy.com making a mistake on a monitor in a google search.
(They'd better not try to charge me $800+ for the two cards I ordered this morning, instead of the $285 (incl tax and shipping) I agreed to pay, or my state's Attorney General will be contacted, at the very least).
"Hey, you kids-- get off that computer and get back in school! No hacking for you!"
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
That's more than the AXP IP4 Northwood's isn't it? The graphics chip just passed them all off! This thing better perform good!
If your goal is to play JC games, you should NOT get a GeForce 4 card with the MX suffix. These cards do not feature the pixel shader engine and vertex programming that Carmack so loves.
Get either any type of GeForce 3, or a GeForce 4 Titanium of some denomination.
/ Per
The new graphics cards in the G4s isn't as bad as people thought they were. Tom's seemed to find even the GForce4MX impressive (and the one with the G4s is the top of the line model the tech specs on Apples web site give a 64 MB DDR spec and only the top of the line MX had the DDR)
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
If you play at higher resolutions like 1280x1024 or 1600x1200, then once you get over a certain CPU speed (like 1-1.2GHz) your processor has very little effect on FPS.
I must say that I do not follow nvidia's products much, but it seems as if nvidia just released the geforce 3....isnt it kinda early to have a geforce 4?
What heavily annoys me is the lack of progress
from Nvidia's side. It's even worse I think
the Geforce4 MX is a severe case of consumer "fraud". John Doe goes to a shop and sees a Geforce4 4600 TI and Geforce4 MX440, plus
a Radeon 7500. What will he buy ? Of course a Geforce4 MMX440. Whereas this card/chip is nothing more than a revampled 2MX. Okay they removed the memory bandwidth limits, but still. No shaders, no 4 pixelpipes.
To close the gap between 3D cards and the games (at the moment it still takes 2 years before developers are actually using featuers), this 4MX
doesn't help.
In other words... the legacy of the 2MX, or DX7
still moves on....
Additionally, TV is recorded at its specified frame rate, and motion blur is captured in each frame for fast moving objects. Since a computer will generate perfect still frames, you need a faster frame rate to make moving objects look right.
Where the line is drawn where it doesn't make sense to go faster is up for debate. But either games need a faster frame rate to not look choppy, or they need to add in the motion blur that is there in TV and film to be acceptable with a lower frame rate.
About three years ago I had the pleasure to own a Quantum3d Obsidian X-24. It was two vodoo-2/12 meg cards on one full-length pci card. By full length I mean it just barely fit into my case... It weighed a good many pounds, had a jet black PCB and basically screamed "I Am A Graphics Badass!" at the top of it's silicon lungs... :-) That card is still running fine in a friend's computer, cranking out the frames in Unreal Tournament and the like...
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
wipEout fusion is out for the PS2 and it's fucking fantastic! you can stick your workstation-class, 8 zillion dollar uber-card where the sun don't shine for all the difference that it makes to FUN.
That was classic intercourse!
Since I use a G3, I ws noticing the first three programs all used directX and then, finally, Quake 3 uses OpenGL (unless OGL stands for something else). Then I noticed Quake has 2 to 3 1/2 times the frames per second of the DirectX games. Now, I'm not familiar with the other games but as a Mac user and as someone who has seen recent Slashdot comments saying OpenGl is dead and DirectX is the standard, I'm wondering why there is such a large discrepency between the DirectX games' fps and Quake's. It seems to me like the speed discrepency is overwhelmingly in OpenGL's favor but I know there may be other factors. I'm mainly interested in this from the perspective of someone who will never own a personal computer with DirectX technology.
Well, actualy, might have been buy. But what happened was my friend got charged the full amount, not told to take a hike or given what was in stock. And from what he told me there was a lawsuit, where they should have cancled the order, not auto fix their mistake on peoples creadit cards.
But GL. wish I had seen it earlier, else i would have tried to get one too!
According to nVidia's linux support people:
"The 2313 drivers do not support GeForce4, though new drivers with GeForce 4 support should be available roughly around the same time GeForce4's make it to the stores."
just in case you were wondering
`which fortune`
This is for intense graphic creation. It is overkill for current games. It doesn't even fully support DX8!
If someone is just surfing and typing letters, well 4M video RAM should be enough.
The benchmarks are the bottom line. If Kyro comes out on top a few years from now and NVIDIA's architecture can't scale then your argument will be vindicated. Until then its all amateur speculation at best. As it stands today NVIDIA's products are clearly in the lead.
"and sent though to door without the slightest bit of editing"
What the f does that mean?
If you're going to nitpick about spelling and such then you need to check your own writing a little more carefully.
Check out this article here:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1577
It's all about the board manufacturers putting crap low-pass filters on the boards. Solution: rip those suckers off!
FUNK!
Doom 3 (or whatever it'll be called) is only meant to be able to run at 30fps on the latest GeForce 3 stuff. GeForce 4 and onwards are really the only cards that will be able to run it at a decent speed 1024x768 and up. You think Doom 3 won't be a popular game? Hahaha.
These cards are not only necessary. They're going to be standard within the year.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Uh, didn't you ever HEAR of Doom 3 or games getting any more advanced than Quake 3? Quake 3 isn't where gaming technology stopped y'know. Doom 3 is going to need GeForce 4 or better to even get near 70fps.
Apple has always put premium hardware in their machines. They were a leader in graphics for a long time. They missed out on the first generation of 3d cards because game developers mostly ignored the Mac. They caught up harware-wise a few years later but the problem is that the game choices on the Mac are severely limited when compared to the Win platform. The gForce cards are mainly for gaming and if you're going to spend that much money for a gaming card then why would you put it in a machine with a very limited choice of games?
Maybe so, but as long as the blood still splats in GTA3 the PS2 will remain the king of the consoles. :)
Over Christmas I got a Leadtek Ti 200 and have been enjoying it when I get the chance. I downloaded the chameleon demo from Nvidia and still think it is quite the bomb. But I've noticed that a number of other demos on their web site were never released to the public. There were "movies" of them, but what's the use of a movie of something if you have a card capable of doing the real thing. These are "demos" aren't they? Why were the binaries never posted?
I was over taking a peek at the new demos and, looking at 3 of them, didn't see one which was actually available to download. Why is this? I hope they will show up in time but still don't understand why the others didn't, at least completely, make it. Why don't video card manufacturers include these in those silly CDs they have. The Leadtek CD comes with, among other wastrel silly programs, a pretty awful DVD program. Why can't they include some of the real demos which would show off the cards so much better?
What about the Kyro and Kyro II cards?
I went into eb tonight and they had the same thing (listed at $129)... so i tried to pre-buy one at that price and of course some schmo came up to the register and was like "what the fuck? those things are supposed to be $400" and so the salesman did a double take and wouldn't let me buy it anymore. god dammit
Just skip every other generation (or two) of video cards. If you're one of the suckers buying these things every time a new one comes out, all you're doing is helping feed the fire. Considering the fact that games are JUST NOW starting to use the capabilities of the GeForce3, there really isn't much point in upgrading right when a new product is released.
If you're having trouble resisting the temptation to buy Buy BUY, just remember the GeForce P-NIS XXXtension Ultra Accelerated 5-Billion is right around the corner!
And yes, I own a GeForce2 64mb Ultra, and I'm quite comfortable with the size of my... ramdrive. I plan to wait.
Alari
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
Your computer isn't the market they're targetting with their initial rollout. They're targetting the lunatics like myself who have P3 1Ghz's. Also, the GF2Go will probably be their most powerful laptop chipset for a while, as it already drains a few hours off your battery supply.
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
1600x1200 = 1920000
1920x1080 = 2073600
But, I see there are monitors with 1920x1440 res. out there, naybe that's the next step...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It appears that the costs of true innovation have got to such a height that nvidia is now trapped in the same situation as Intel. It is too costly in time and money to create a radically different architecture so all they can do is fatten out the existing tech. This is why we see the "new" nvidia chip is merely a slightly ramped up gf3 with some extra instruction sets added... think MMX.
I predict that within 2-3 years the graphics chip releases will be the same as the cpu, example: the new "3.2 Ghz GeForce!". Lets just hope that Nvidia a competitor someone like Intel's AMD.
I bought a Geforce2 Ultra (expensive)and about a month and a half later the Geforce3 comes out. I didn't wait because I didn't think the performance difference would be so great. Oh well, my card is still pretty good and should last another 6-12 months.
Ooops you just demonstrated the successful marketing lies Nvidia is trumpeting. anything MX will NOT run next-gen engines
See subject.
:)
Quote: "I don't mean to nitpick, but Tom's used to be a very reliable source- and a great read."
I hate to toll but nothing agrivates me more than people nitpicking about spelling or punctuation. Especially when such Redundant, uninteresting and defintaly not insightfull remarks are modded up to 5!
Ahh well, where are them damned mod points when you need them!
Let me guess by the time I find a working PS2 Emulator, it will need a ge-force 4
Anyway , bleem worked so well with my ge-force mx 2 that card still rocks it lets me play games thats processor spec is above mine , i have a p3 500, games like ghost recon and return to castle wolfenstein work great because of the card
>> "And as graphical effects get more realistic, the alpha channel...starts coming into play more and more....much of the recent research in non-real-time computer graphics has focused on adding translucent "subsurface" reflections to the ray-tracing algorithm. This (and approximations of it) is the sort of thing that future pixel shaders are going to be called on to do"
This is NOT what pixel shaders are going to do, because pixel shaders have nothing to do with ray tracing. You should have said "Approximations of this is the sort of thing...". Realtime ray tracing is very slow. It is common on the demoscene, but a single ray is shot for several pixels, the rest is interpolated. Hardware acceleration would help, but in the near future it is out of the question. Hardware ray tracing products exist, like RenderDrive, but they cost more than your average Itanium box, and are not usually targeted towards realtime rendering. On top of this, photon maps and subsurface scattering are computationally expensive. Even in the Final Fantasy movie photon maps were rarely used (an example is the caustic cast by the glass the general was holding in one scene).
-----
"Ah, I cast indeed my net into their sea, and meant to catch good fish; but always I did draw up the head of some ancien God." --Friedrich Nietzsche
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Good example. Kyro is a rev of the tile-based PowerVR technology. (I mentioned them as scanline based on memories of their earliest, earliest stuff but they've clearly been doing tile-based stuff for years now.) If it had ever shown up as faster than NVidia/ATI by an interesting amount, I'd consider it a possible landscape-altering innovation. But they haven't even matched them AFAIK. So they have to charge less for the card in an attempt to make it "faster than comparably priced cards" as even the most flattering reviews linked to by this Kyro website indicate. Which is nice but hardly a compelling technological breakthrough.
Besides what I mentioned earlier, another basic downside is this: a tile based renderer makes sense if there is a lot of 'overdraw' where a given pixel on the screen is redrawn multiple times for each object between eye's viewpoint and the horizon. Then the bandwidth savings of tile-based approaches payoff. But most FPS game and flight simulators have pretty low overdraw as part of the basic tuning process for more conventional architectures. I recall one of the Quakes having average overdraw per pixel of about 1.25, since BSP trees ensured that you only drew the nearest walls, and only a few pixels on average would be drawn multiple times (the portion of the screen filled by bad guys or in-room objects). In such a case, getting tile-based speedups above 25% (and that itself is a best best case) takes some other advantage besides the back-end memory bandwidth one.
--LP
Once again, NVIDIA has killed the Radeon!!!
:)
:)
Whoohoo!!! I'm happy
(Although I'd probably go for the Geforce3 TI 500)
(college students are broke, but we have the best dreams)
BTW, If NVIDIA had no competitors, what would happen if they released their source code for the drivers? That could spark a new Gamingfest for the Linux Community
python >>>
reduce(lambda x,y:x+y,map(lambda x:chr(ord(x)^42),tuple('zS^BED\nX_FOY\x0b')))
The benefits of photon maps is that they are NOT computationally expensive compared to other methods. Say you have a scene with a crystal vase on a table. You generate the photon map of 'light' passing through the vase once. You then use this to generate a light map, or texture, of the caustic pattern to 'paint' on to the table. Now its just a matter of rendering the table with a texture. Now in a scene like you described, where the glass is moving, that's a different story because a new photon map needs to be generated for each frame in the scene. To find out more about photon maps check out Henrik Wann Jensen's homepage
I read somewhere that 8 GeForce4s have as much polygon rendering power as all the first generation Voodoo cards ever shipped. Anyone have a link to that story?
I just received this email
l s.asp?e=11099619&m=488&cat=521&scat=522
Dear Best Buy Customer,
Thank you for your recent graphics card order.
A recent systems error on our web site allowed you to purchase the VisionTek GeForce4 Ti 4600 Graphics Card at $129.99. The actual price for this item is $399.99.
Due to the nature of this error, we have canceled your order for this item. We apologize for any disappointment this cancellation may cause.
We would like to inform you that the error has been fixed, and if you are still interested in ordering this product, please visit http://www.bestbuy.com/ComputersPeripherals/detai
to place your order again. This card is available as a special pre-order. It will begin shipping on 3/4/2002.
Thank you for your understanding. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions or concerns.
Best wishes from Best Buy,
The Customer Care Team
---
Oregon
I had ordered it yesterday. Just got a note from BestBuy that it's not going to be honored.
Oh well. They suck.
For those interested in keeping in touch with any other developments with this "scandal" of BestBuy not honoring their advertised price of $129 for the Visiontek GeForce4 4600, I started the Yahoo group bb_geforce4.
You should have said "Approximations of this is the sort of thing..."
.plans when he mentioned a paper proving that, in the limit, successive passes through shaders can approximate the output of true ray-tracing arbitrarily closely. So, in the limit, shaders can get you exactly the same output. But of course this is a very theoretical result with no direct impact on the real world, and it gets there (I think) only by successive approximation anyways.
Yeah, you're right. When I wrote that I was thinking of one of Carmack's
My larger point was that as graphics get better and better, pixel shaders will be used more and more to perform functions which, first, require input from other parts of the image and, second, induce alpha channel effects--both of which fit poorly in the tile-based rendering paradigm--and this is true whether the functions are equivalent to ray-tracing or just approximations of it. But you are quite correct to differentiate between the two.
Dear Best Buy Customer,
We sincerely apologize for the error in your recent pre-order of the
VisionTek Xtasy GeForce4 Graphics Accelerator. Because we value you as a
BestBuy.com customer, we would like to offer you a $30 digital coupon to use
on your next online purchase.
---
Oregon
jc says geforce4 not good for new doom game: "On the topic of current Nvidia cards: Do not buy a GeForce4-MX for Doom. Nvidia has really made a mess of the naming conventions here. I always thought it was bad enough that GF2 was just a speed bumped GF1, while GF3 had significant architectural improvements over GF2. I expected GF4 to be the speed bumped GF3, but calling the NV17 GF4-MX really sucks. GF4-MX will still run Doom properly, but it will be using the NV10 codepath with only two texture units and no vertex shaders. A GF3 or 8500 will be much better performers. The GF4-MX may still be the card of choice for many people depending on pricing, especially considering that many games won't use four textures and vertex programs, but damn, I wish they had named it something else. As usual, there will be better cards available from both Nvidia and ATI by the time we ship the game. "
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