Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Strangly few slashdoters want to talk about this.
Personally, I'm starting to think about replacing my TNT2, but I'd kind of like to get something with open source linux drivers. At the same time, I don't want to have to go back to a Voodoo 5 or some shit like that just because it is open.
I totally agree. Not only would I buy such a card myself but I would advertise it to everybody I know as the best(most flexable) solution.
So, does any company make good graphics cards with open specs?
The Raedon 7500 (AIW as well?) is the best non-nvidia card in xfree (4.2) right now.
The Xfree guys are working on the 8500, but who knows.
The problem is a one-two punch
Nobody bothers to try with Linux since good free closed source drivers are made availible.
Nvidia bought one the players and shrunk it two a two way race.
I would care less if Nvidia had bought 3dfx or released their own closed drivers, but both.....
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Of course the Quake 3 engine runs fast enough on the latest cards, it was released last millenium! (1999)
All of this changes this year when the new Doom engine is out -- as has been repeated to death, it will generally require a GeForce 3 or similiar card to run at a reasonable speed.
The hardware makers are refreshing their products a lot faster than the game development houses can keep up, as these days its starting to take nearly 3 years (on average) to develop a top quality game (in part this is the fault of the newest hardware, more polygons == more complexity for the artist, etc). What this means for the average user is that getting the latest, greatest videocard is not a wise idea unless you have lots of money to burn and an itch to have the 'fastest' hardware. It will be months if not years until games catch up with the hardware, this delta between games and the hardware is likely to get even larger as we move forward; nature of the beast.
And to answer the original question, though I'm not John Carmack what I'd like to see is more polygons, more fillrate and a more general programmable GPU interface allowing for really interesting code to be running on the video card.
Nice theory.
I like to play my games with Anisotropic filtering on, with antialiasing on, and with higher than 1024x768 resolution. And I don't like slideshows. 60FPS is bare minimum, constant 80+ is good.
GF3 can fit the bill barely. I still probably will replace it with a GF4Ti4600 soon.
If you are happy playing 1024x768, no AA, only trilinear filtering, and no new fancy pixel shader tricks, you prolly happy with GF2. I dumped mine over an year ago, and never regretted even if GF3 costed arm and leg.
Some of us just care more about the rendering quality. And yes, I have quite fine monitor.
Then again most people dont' even know what anisotropic filtering is, and how much better rendering result it gives, let alone how to turn it on in the driver options. And those who go and try it on their GF2s will watch the slideshow for 5 minutes and turn it off again...
Nonsense, who moded this to 5?? This guy doesn't have a clue. This card is the fastest, the policy of whatever works should apply, and will ultimately win in the market, people have tried deferred shading and tiled approaches, and while the NVIDIA system is not a scanline approach, it is not the scheme you probably envision that's WHY it's the fastest. The other approaches failed, and many of the people who worked on them now work for NVIDIA. There are hundreds of engineers at NVIDIA who make these design decisions based on what will work in terms of power requirements, implementation, programmability, speed and a host of other reasons. NVIDIA leads in performance because they get this right. Programmers DO know how to use the programmable shaders, but there are other more traditional ways to use this hardware, and the other pixel pipeline will help even simple multitexture applications too. Even scanline systems can scale very nicely, so the scalability of the tiled approach is just not true, you seem to have forgotten Voodoo SLI, but there are other ways to scale graphics systems too. Your post is a plea to support your pet favourite graphics scheme, but there are detailed technical issues to be considered beyone the glib appeal to emotion. The facts and NVIDIAs performance speaks for itself, and your post is the graphics equivalent of complaining that Ford doesn't make water powered cars.