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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
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1583
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)
Which merely proves that you haven't read the article, or pretty much ANY article on nVidia cards.
The MX isn't a stripped down GeForce3/4 - it's a totally different chip without nearly any of the features that make the GF3/4 powerful and a good match for today's and tomorrow's games.
The MX chips lack any vertex or pixel shaders. Yes, the GF4 MX has limited vertex shader support, but it's more akin to the GF2 shader than anything else.
Go look at the benchmarks. There's a reason that the MX line score so far below the regular ones. And a reason why they're performing abysmally in DX8 games - they aren't DX8 compliant. It's about like getting a 2D card and trying to run Quake with it - it simply doesn't have the guts needed to do it.
If you want to go on the cheap, pick up a full fledged GF3, GF3 Ti200, or the as-yet-unreleased GF4 4200 (I think that's the designation). All have the hardware needed for DX8 games (and contrary to the articles and to what some would have you believe, there are games out right now that make use of DX8 and these cards - one of them is Everquest), and they're cheap - under $200. I suspect the GF3 Ti200 will be heading toward $100 very soon now.
Personally I bought a GF2 the 2nd day it was out. I paid $350 for it. I would've liked to wait for a bit of a price drop, but my new computer wouldn't work with my old cards (dual Voodoo2 at the time). That was two years ago, and my GF2 is still perfectly acceptable for playing games. It's a bit slow in EQ, but I'll live. It won't handle the upcoming games though.
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
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
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.
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!
Ironically, this post was modded "+3, Interesting".
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.
Many people disable vsync when they play games, so their monitors set refresh rate won't matter.
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.
This isn't true at all, if it was, a 70hz refresh rate would be useless as well. There are a few variable that make a difference in your perception of PC monitors, TV displays, and movies.
From Article
There's much more detail in the article than what I've posted below, and it's defintely worth reading.
First off, you are sitting in a dark movie theater and the projector is flashing a really bright light on a highly reflective screen. What does this do? Have you ever had a doctor flash a bright light in your eye to look at your retina? Most of us have. What happens? A thing called "afterimage". When the doctor turns off the bright light, you see an afterimage of the light (and it is not real comfortable). Movie theaters do the same thing. The light reflected off the screen is much brighter than the theater surroundings. You get an afterimage of the screen after the frame is passed on, so the next frame change is not as noticable.