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."

Comments

Another article

[SILIZIUMM]

There is another article at Anandtech too, it's quite a good read. Contains pictures, benchmarks, etc.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1583

cheap geforce3

[belterone]

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.

Re:Can't stand it

[Zathrus]

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.

A question for John Carmack

[DG]

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

Re:A question for John Carmack

[Geek In Training]

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?

IANJC, but I think I can try an answer.

I play Quake3 online about 2 hours a night. At 1024x768x32, no less, on a TFT (which effectively limits famerates since the refresh is so much slower than modern tubes).

70 fps is plenty good for me in Quake3, and I don't really have much desire to go higher. But my GF2 won't do 2xAA over about 9 frames per second. This helps smooth out the picture considerably. So the newer cards will support the same old engines running with full-scene anti-aliasing at 4x at a "usable" framerate. No big change for coding there.

Another thing John talked about in his last remarks, though, was poly count. Your models and scenes can have beaucoup more polys when you juice up the core speed on a new processor, making the whole gaming experience a lot more realistic-looking.

John also talked in previous .plan files about vertex and pixel-shading, and how applying multiple lighting effects on single pixels can make things a lot cooler in actual gameplay. The eyecandy factor for this is hella-big.

As a side note, the one disappoitning thing is that while the GF4Ti cards (NV25 chipset) include a second Vertex Shading Unit in teh chip, there is *NO* dedicated pixel shading unit at all, as there was in the GF3. Why is this??

They go into this in the Tom's article, and it sounds as though the NV25 still supports pixel shading versions 1.1 and 1.3 (whatever that means), but won't support 1.4 until the next chipset. And *THEN* they should be fully DirectX 8.1-compliant.

On the other hand, why should that matter, as John Carmack uses OpenGL, not Direct3D. ;D

What else is there?

[Galvatron]

Seriously, are there any competitive alternatives to NVidia these days? 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.

So, does any company make good graphics cards with open specs?

Everybody's missing the point!

[epepke]

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.

Re:Geforce4... Wowee...

[LinuxParanoid]

First of all, nobody uses scanline rendering. Maybe NEC PowerVR if they're still around. 'Scanline' as most graphics guys use the term means you do hidden surface removal with something like Brezenham's algorithm rather than a Z-buffer. But everybody uses Z buffers and, as far as I can tell, a 'sort-middle' approach.

Second, tile-based rendering has been tried many many times, both by high-end graphics companies (HP's PixelFlow effort a few years back) and by low-end companies (PowerVR's scanline approach, Dynamic Pictures did tiles under the covers IIRC, MS Talisman, PixelFusion, Gigapixel, and others I'm no doubt forgetting of the 40+ PC 3D companies that were around 5 years ago...). Basically it's a loser. It doesn't fit well with DirectX and OpenGL APIs, it creates almost as many problems as it solves (e.g. load-balancing among tiles, bandwidth-sucking data overlap/duplication among tiles), and the marginal improvements it might generate in theory in speed are outweighed by the retraining time required for graphics developers worldwide to learn programming techniques oriented around tile-based hardware. I could describe these problems in more detail if you indicate interest in a follow-up posting, but I don't have the time now in the middle of the day.

Pixel and vertex shaders are at least relatively innovative. If they can figure out how to tie together not just 2 or 4, but 8 or 32 together in a simple, yet flexible and comprehensible way (I saw Pat Hanrahan give a proposal on how to do this at Eurographics a couple years ago) that makes it easier for developers to use them, that'd be an innovation in parallelism that really pays off IMHO.

--LP

Disclaimer: Any 3D expertise I have is a bit rusty. Feel free to correct any technical misstatements.