ATI vs. NVIDIA: The Next Generation

doppler writes: "There's a killer graphics card round-up at TR today that compares the new GeForce4 and Radeon 8500 128MB cards against each other in extensive testing. Very good stuff. Most interesting: a visual representation of a texture upload problem in OpenGL on the Radeon 8500 chip."

Comments

Sweet

[k_d3]

It sure as hell beats my motherboard graphics... Now if only I can get some cash...

Re:Sweet

[FredBaxter]

I'm with you, but this round time I HAVE the cash so I might finally upgrade. (Hell, for only $75, how could I NOT have the cash?) I know my jaw almost actually hit the floor (I would quote the article, but see below)

On a completely unrelated note, or maybe not so unrelated after all, I can no longer read the article! Perhaps my internet is screwy, or perhaps the tech report was slashdotted in less than 10 minutes. That would be somewhere deliciously between really amazing and really scary. Well, /. DID take out Apple's servers, so I suppose anything is possible...

--Anyone downing on .sigs just can't think of a good one

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah. I remember that one. That was the full screen 16:9 streaming quicktime video of Jobs snorting coke off the new mac with those underage Mexican hookers.

That ruled!

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

Bueno, no tengo ni puta idea de ke estais hablando. Todo sea por tocar los cojones, putos yankies de mierda mamaostias saltacharcos....

128! Wowzers

[splume]

That has more memory than my Webserver running FreeBSD!(64MB) Sheesh.

Re:128! Wowzers

[dimator]

Raise your hand if you remember a time when one company would make fun of the other for adding more and more memory because "You'll never need 32MB of video memory!"

Re:128! Wowzers

[splume]

/me raises hand

Re:128! Wowzers

[Com2Kid]

This is noting that having over 32MB of memory has proven to be of NO benefit in benchmarks outside of the occasional 1 or 2 FPS difference (and when you are getting over 100FPS any ways. . . .).

Texture size is REALLY not a problem. Do you realize how fr*gin big textures can be byte wise before you get to being just plain old silly?

It is NOT the size of textures people, it is how COMPLICATED those textures can be.

Currently LOD is used in order to keep video cards from having to render full 256x256 textures when an object, say, only appears as 25 pixels in its entirety on the screen. You know, that sniper across the street with that gun? Yah that one, (duck).

This works quite well, until you get up close to the object. Shoddy unrealistic Bumpmapping (I highly disprove of bumpmapping, more on this later) can come into play at really close distances, and games like Serious Sam even make this look halfway decent, but it still is not real, or realistic.

The ONLY way to get good texturing done is to DISPENSE with the concept of textures all together. Polygons do not make this easy in themselves, and competing technologies can even make it worse. Some technologies like vertex coloring are a bit useful, but not much and they are just the texturing model relabled.

But once you DO dispense with textures, ooh yah.

Now for bumpmaps.

Bumpmaps are often times just a cheap shortcut to REAL modeling. Geometry deformation texturing is the next step, but until we get some video cards that can model each little crack and bump of an object we are not going to get anything near 100% photo-realism. Not to mention characters with actual nostrils. Yes there is a level of diminishing returns, but quite frankly, until I can model every last little crack bump and lump in a model and have it render real time on a home users computer, bumpmapping is what we are stuck with, and I don't like it.

But I repeat, I REPEAT, larger textures (and bumpmaps) are just a cheap low quality shortcut They DEFINITELY have a point of diminishing returns, and it is one that HAS ALREADY BEEN REACHED. Most new games do NOT do just plain old texturing any more, and a lot of what is happening now days in relationship to textures (Bilinear filtering and such) is just in fact ways to correct errors in the original texturing model of thinking. Or at least further refine the mathematical model used to show those textures.

But why do games look better you ask?

Mostly because video cards have any number of fancy TnL units that can independently create some rather nifty effects while working AROUND or OUTSIDE of the plain old texturing model. At the very least the texturing model of thinking has some. . . rather funky. . . math applied to it in an artistic manner with the results rendered to the screen.

Look at Nvidias werewolf model as an example.

The HAIRS on it look great.

The actual model though?

Hell looks like shit.

No it does.

Notice the face people. Horrid. The textures. It is not the modeler or textures fault, it is just a fact that, well hell, you CANNOT do realistic skin textures without using Pixar level technology.

Actualy, I recently read an article from awhile back that was an interview with someone at Pixar. They were describing the INSANE level of work that was necessary to even get something that SORT OF looked like a skin texture to render. The FF movie had kinda-sorta-maybe-ifyousquint real looking skin, it was nice, but it took a lot of work and it still was not perfect. Once again, diminishing returns.

While NVIDIA is doing good work in relation to getting various funky technologies out on the market that move around the texturing problem, as long as we rely on textures as our main source of coloring objects, we as a community of people who love to Blow Things Up are going to have problems.

Hell the very idea of textures themselves is exactly opposite to how existence works. Objects are not gray by default with colors added later. Objects are. . . . real. They exist. More or less. The color is an INTEGRAL PART of what an object is. You cannot separate the two.

In other words

I want molecular modeling please. :)

Re:128! Wowzers

[scot4875]

You seem to be upset with the current technologies available to developers simply because they aren't photo-realistic. Or, in the case of bump mapping, it's a "cheap shortcut to REAL modeling." Well, yeah. That's exactly what it is. And, used correctly, it's extremely effective. (See Star Wars:Rogue Squardon 2 for an example)

But as for photo-realism, who cares? I, personally, think that the solutions people have come up with to maximize the hardware's potential are fascinating. And playing non-photo-realistic games has never been a problem for me, any more than watching a non-photo-realistic episode of the Simpsons.

Not that this has anything to do with nVidia vs. ATi. My $.02: Buy nVidia's high end cards if you're rich or like to waste money. Buy ATi's high end cards if you just want to play games and don't care about an extra 2% on your framerate.

--Jeremy

Re:128! Wowzers

[UnknownSoldier]

&gt This is noting that having over 32MB of memory has proven to be of NO benefit in benchmarks outside of the occasional 1 or 2 FPS difference (and when you are getting over 100FPS any ways. . . .).

I agree.

&gt Texture size is REALLY not a problem.

It IS when your PC game is being ported to consoles and you ONLY have ~ 2.5 Megs of VRAM say like on a PS2 ! (Yes the PS2 has 4 Megs of VRAM, but you need space for the framebuffer and zbuffer.)

Now consoles make up for the lack of video memory by having a high bandwidth (i.e. PS2 can DMA ~20 Megs of Textures per frame) but I'd rather upload my textures ONCE, not every bloody frame. Yes, you be more efficient at texture uploads (draw the last model from the last frame, first this new frame, etc) but you're still tying up the BUS.

&gt The ONLY way to get good texturing done is to DISPENSE with the concept of textures all together.

I don't compeletely agree, but you raise an interesting point, because of the fact that textures are a form of (color) compression. If we take this to its logical conclusion we should be able to have a triangle PER pixel, and that would negate the need for textures. Unfortunately that has its own problems -- there's no way we can send a million vertices across because we'd saturate the bus! Doh! (Give a reward to the person in the back who said, well let's move to paramateric surfaces then!)

In the "Real World" (TM) we have a *unique* texture per pixel (ala ray tracing) however we don't have the memory to store that, unless we calculate them parametricaly. Sure we can get nice "marble" ala Perlin Noise, but it's going to be a while before we can mathmatically generate EVERY texture !

&gt But why do games look better you ask?

&gt Mostly because video cards have any number of fancy TnL units that can independently create some rather nifty effects while working AROUND or OUTSIDE of the plain old texturing model.

You'd be amazed at what multitexturing and multipass render does. Even a simple repeatable base texture with a "random" noise texture overlaid with a bump-map, looks OK.

&gt The color is an INTEGRAL PART of what an object is. You cannot separate the two.

You *can* get away with this, but you have to be aware of the tradeoffs. One common "solution" is to crank up the bit-depth.

i.e. If you use 16-bit color channels ala 64 bits per pixel, then you don't have to throw out your whole rendering functionality -- you just extend it. Not a perfect solution by any means, but "its good enough."

Take a look at "Titanic" The ship was rendered via tradional textures, and it looks pretty good. The hard part is getting that quality in real-time with so little memory ;-)

Cheers

--

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." - Thomas Jefferson

Re:128! Wowzers

[GrfxGuru]

This is noting that having over 32MB of memory has proven to be of NO benefit in benchmarks outside of the occasional 1 or 2 FPS difference (and when you are getting over 100FPS any ways. . . .)...blah...blah...

This isn't true. Textures are not the only things stored in local video memory (i.e. the 32 MB you are talking about). Vertex buffers can also be stored in local video memory. It is quicker for a video card to fetch the vertex data from a buffer in local video memory, than it is to read it from system or AGP memory and feed it to the chip. Simply put, bandwith is less of a bottleneck with local video memory than it is with AGP.

Don't believe me? Try it yourself! There are many example OpenGL and Direct3D apps out there that you could hack (just check out the DevRel sites for both nVidia and ATI). Throw a frame counter in there, and measure it when you create a vertex buffer in system memory, in AGP and local video memory.

Now, you're correct that with "older" apps (pre-2000...heh, only in CS can you call something that's 2-years-old, old), there will be no difference in performance...but that's because those apps were written with 32MB boards as the high performance parts...so they didn't try to use much more than that out of fear of running too slow on what was current hardware. There will be a difference on any graphics-intensive app that was made in the last couple of years.

As games begin to use more complex models (and larger textures), even 128 MB will someday be too small.

Re:128! Wowzers

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice the face people. Horrid. The textures. It is not the modeler or textures fault, it is just a fact that, well hell, you CANNOT do realistic skin textures without using Pixar level technology.

True, but just what do you think pixar technology is apart from (admittedly very complex) per-pixel maths and texture lookups? This is where Nvidia is going with per-pixel shading, vertex shaders, and large texture spaces. Obviously they are still miles away from Renderman's Shading Language, but they are much closer than they were.

Renderman has the luxury that it can operate at at least 50,000 time slower and so can have as much geometric fidelity as colour fidelity. But even at the very high end, objects are described to the renderer with far less geometric primitives than appear on the screen - renderer builds extra geometry using displacement shaders, which generally reference textures...

Hell the very idea of textures themselves is exactly opposite to how existence works

It's certainly not opposite, but it is inaccurate if you are simulating and the microscopic view. But you're not! (View of street with 30 characters fighting simulated at molecular level???) In the meantime/real world image textures are a good way to describe how an attribute varies across a parameter space. Have a look at Nvidia's developer site to see how they are using cube-mapped textures to approximate much more complex reflectance models than are used by T&L by default.

Re:128! Wowzers

[Com2Kid]

A modeler has to be a complete nitwit to fill up 128MB with verticies, heh. Or even 12MB with vertices. . . .

It is not like verticies have to be loaded THAT often, and when they are they can often times be predicted, though how Messiah did things sucked (wow, look at that! SERIOUS texturing problems AND ass end load times AND the scripts get fucked up! Bah) but a GOOD loader can load a level dynamicaly and Not Suck.

I would MUCH rather 64*2 Megabytes of ram with a half clock seperation between them (In other words, fast ass access. :) ) then 128MB of RAM that, err, uh, costs an arm and a leg and MAY provide some future performance, but by that time the texturing units on the video card will be old hat anyways and 'everybody' will have moved up to the next best thing.

I myself will likely still be using my Matrox G400 MAX. :)

I cannot believe that some complete IDIOTS credit ATI with first having dual desktop displays. . . . grrr. Idiots. :(

Re:128! Wowzers

[Com2Kid]

You seem to be upset with the current technologies available to developers simply because they aren't photo-realistic. Or, in the case of bump mapping, it's a "cheap shortcut to REAL modeling." Well, yeah. That's exactly what it is. And, used correctly, it's extremely effective. (See Star Wars:Rogue Squardon 2 for an example)

When used correctly, then yes, it CAN help, but when used IN PLACE of proper modeling. . . .

See ears on almost ANY character in any game. Horrid. Bumpmapping is used instead of putting an actual HOLE in the ear. . . . And most games have no geometric detail to the ears at all!

. And playing non-photo-realistic games has never been a problem for me, any more than watching a non-photo-realistic episode of the Simpsons.

Which is a 2d scenario anyways. :)

But yah, photo-realism is just one example.

Hell how about some realistic water colors, eh? Current systems use some VERY high end psuedo-reality modeling algorithms to make something that kindasortamabye looks like watercolor but they sure as hell are not watercolors.

Same with arcylics. Hell does anybody even know of a program that DOES simulate acrylics? Painter 6 doesn't do it and it generaly tends to have one of the more advanced (consumer level) paint simulation systems out there.

Of course some day computers WILL have the power to compleatly model the physical world (Ray Tracing is NOT a model of the real world. Raytracing is actualy backwards, light is projected from a virtual view back to the light source. VERY weird and it leaves some ... glitchs behind) and this will all be a moot point as all of us will be sitting in our VR chairs growing fat and old as we party on Internet3. :)

Re:128! Wowzers

[GrfxGuru]

A modeler has to be a complete nitwit to fill up 128MB with verticies
Agreed...for now.

Or even 12MB with vertices. . . .
Well, now you're calling some pretty important people in the gaming community nitwits. If you believe some of the rumors floating around, Doom 3 will have models with 250,000 polygons...well that's probably bullshit, so let's say they will have 10% of that, 25,000. If we assume they're stripped (so the number of polygons is close to the number of vertices), and each vert contains position, normal, color, and 3 2-d textures (this seems like a valid assumption if the app uses the GPU to do most of the graphics computations), then you've got...

3 dwords (position) + 3 dwords (normal) + 1 dword (packed color) + 6 dwords (textures 0,1,2) = 13 dwords = 52 bytes per vert

25000 verts * 52 bytes = 1.3MB of vertex data per model! That means if there are 10 different models on screen at once, there will be 13MB of vertex data in memory...not including the surrounding scenery.

If you believe the Unreal 2 rumors of 7000-10000 polys/model, using the same calculation you get 364KB-520KB per model.

This isn't limited to future games. Aquanox supposedly has scenes with 170,000 polygons...that's 8.4MB of vertex data in a game that is on the shelves right now.

Of course keep in mind that textures will fill up a nice chunk of this memory also. So, yes, I agree that 128MB of video memory for now is overkill. But you were suggesting that today's games don't need 32MB and 64MB, and that is clearly false.

It is not like verticies have to be loaded THAT often
You're correct in that an app does not have to load data into memory very often, but that's not very relavant. The app loading vertex data into memory does not consume much memory bandwith (assuming it is not a poorly written app).

A GPU needs to read the vertex data from memory EVERY TIME it has to draw it (since it will need to use the data to transform it, light it, clip it, texture it, etc.). This is what I was talking about in my previous post. If you create the example app I was talking about, the app will load the buffer into memory only 1 time...but the GPU will access it every time it draws something.

Re:128! Wowzers

[Com2Kid]

Thanks for the educational post. (aka schooling.) :)

I am getting SO sick and tired of polygons though, ugh.

250k poly models? Holy SHIT, what the hell are THEY smoking? Must be some gooood shit, because man they are wacked out of their minds!

See why modern modeling techniques are not nearly 100% efficient.

Booleans, fun to work with, but oh man does the efficiency suck. ^_^

(seriously, umm. Maybe for some grandiose end of level boss but. . . . sheeesh!)

Reminds me of that story about, in the days of 486s, the game company who hired an artist.

"I need a faster computer, this one is way to slow for me to work on!"

The artist had a state of the art (at the time) 486 fully decked out. So the main programmer went to see what was the problem (obviously not the computer hardware).

Turns out the artist had painted one brick object and was copy and pasting it to make up an entire brick wall. As in a few hundred objects per one wall. . . . .

Not pretty.

Artist got hit with a clue by 4 and all was well, but I do believe that a serious thwacking may soon be in order.

Holy shit, 250k models PER character? Hell when I was doing the models for a MMORPG the polygon count PER SCENE was estimated at a mere 200K tops. Preferably per second if it was possible. (we figured that we could expect to have the higher end customers push 1million polygons a second maybe).

Of course the way we did things was to look at Quake2 (this was well after the Geforce2 had come out mind you, did I mention that we were aiming for conservative? :) ) and say "hey, we can do that that that that and that and have them look better and take up less polygons."

Main programmer left (kinda kills a project, eh? :) ) but I have my portfolio left over and a goodly few years of experience at ultra low polygon inorganics modeling.

Anybody need a 50polygon knife? :)

yes! yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

YES! Now I can have an expensive video card that I can use for displaying xterms, emacs, and mozilla. Where do I sign?

Re:yes! yes!

[JonWan]

You know it's sad because I get laughed at because my videocard is an old diamond Stealth 64 with 2M ram. A guy I know even give me a 16M card to replace it with but I just can't bring myself to kill my uptime to install it. I will have to wait untill the kernal upgrade to reboot. Damn if I would just run Windows I would have it installed by now.

ATI and drivers

[NovaScorpio]

I have an original radeon - I've always felt that ATI makes crap drivers... Their chipsets, if you ask me, are on par with NVIDIA's, it's just that their driver support is crap... If only they actually let 3rd parties develop like they said they would...

Re:ATI and drivers

[sebi]

Are the nvidia drivers really better? With these two companies I can't help feeling that their hardware department is much better than the driver developers. Maybe they are not supposed to make optimized drivers. After all - when you buy one of their top of the line boards you know that its fast. If it doesn't really perform that well you will have to upgrade. Because the next one is really going to rock...

Re:ATI and drivers

[dimator]

NVidia deserves a lot of credit -- especially from Linux folks -- for their top notch drivers. Installation is a snap (two tarballs, sudo make install), and once they're up and running, they're very stable and quick. And they're maintained. New versions are released fairly often, and the very latest cards are supported as well. I tried a radeon card once, but prompty returned it because there were no drivers, and only after a while did they finally appear.

I've sent NVidia some mail stating that because of their support for my OS, I plan to continue buying their products. It's good to give them that kind of feedback, I think.

Re:ATI and drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the nVidia drivers don't work on all computers, and all installations of linux.

oh, yeah, there closed source too, so take that.

GPL Everything!!!!!
GPL my nutsack!

Re:ATI and drivers

[realdpk]

Probably not a bad idea to register your hardware (with those mail-in cards they include in the box (if nVidia doesn't, forgive me for my mistake. :)), making sure to select Linux as your OS. That way the real number counters get the message. :)

Re:ATI and drivers

[gmack]

Works great until you upgrade the kernel and discover it's now incompatable with the interface changes.

Or if you have a kernel crash and discover that you now get NO support from anyone since they can't debug that driver.

I've actually banned my employer's supplier from including nvidia card so I can be more flexable about what OS I want to put on the machines later.

Re:ATI and drivers

[mrm677]

Why is this labeled a "troll"?? It is a valid opinion. I have an original Radeon and am extremely pleased with it. The 3D performance is very good-- maybe not as good as nVidia, but good enough for me. What makes me really like the Radeon better than my old GeForce2 is the 2D visuals. For 2D picture quality, I think ATI is somewhere between Matrox (the very best) and nVidia.

Re:ATI and drivers

[YetAnotherName]

At a previous job we ran a mix of Linux and NT4 boxen, with a mix of ATI and nVidia cards. While the Linux boxen never locked up, the NT4 ones would at least a couple times a week.

On the blue screen of death was the module stack. And always, always at the top of the list would be the offending culprit, atirage.dll .

Need I say more?

Re:ATI and drivers

[GutBomb]

nvidia cards work just fine in linux without drivers for the most part. it is the 3d acceleration that nvidia's drivers enable over simply using the frame buffer.

Re:ATI and drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh, this must be a troll.

But then again I've always run duallie machines.
I had an original radeon DDR on a duallie and it was rock solid. Hours of UT and no crashing ever.

Upgraded to a Geforce3 Ti 200, and now I get 2-3 video crashes a week. Funny, the crashes don't tend to happen while I'm in a game, but more often going back into the menu.

I've noticed that if I have a background process working where I'm copying 10G+ or so from my machine over the local network, then fire up UT, I'm totally guaranteed to lock the whole thing up.

If the Radeon 8500 linux drivers get decent I'm DEFINITELY going to dump my geforce card and go back.

Re:ATI and drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm are you on crack, NVidia has closed development and docs for the cards. Binary only parts that work only on certain distributions. No *BSD development (closed = bad). No GL or DRI support unless you are running a distribution that they support. Top notch my ass.

Re:ATI and drivers

[Iosef Vissarionovich]

You're joking, right? ATI is crap. It is nowhere near the NVidia chip, not by a longshot. Surprise, surprise, ATI is going to stop making video cards and just make their chips, why? Cos they suck.

Re:ATI and drivers

[xercist]

Personally I've become very frustrated with nVidia's linux drivers. They cause my machine to crash randomly. This is not just me, either. All of my friends who have nvidia cards under linux seem to experience the exact same problem. All my friends using different video cards are stable as hell. Coincidence?

I'll give you that when the drivers work, they work quite well. They look good, and run fast. But part of the reason I started using linux in the first place was to avoid the constant rebooting that comes with the alternative. Being totally closed eliminates the possibility of someone else coming in and fixing the problem, so all I can do is wait and hope they fix it on their own....and so far, they haven't.

Re:ATI and drivers

[dimator]

Works great until you upgrade the kernel and discover it's now incompatable with the interface changes.


Incompatable? That shouldn't be happening. Remember that the nVidia drivers are kernel modules, so when you upgrade your kernel, you need to reinstall the driver. Just go back into NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-NNNN (if you got the tarballs, which I recommend) and su; make install. /sbin/lsmod to make sure, and then you're set. You might want to put the driver in your /etc/modules if you're rebooting a lot too.

Re:ATI and drivers

[nihilogos]

Works great until you upgrade the kernel and discover it's now incompatable with the interface changes.

I have never had this happen with the 2.4 kernel series and I upgrade regularly. From the nvidia documentation

" ... cd into the NVIDIA_kernel directory. Type 'make install'. This will compile the kernel interface to the NVdriver ... "

Or if you have a kernel crash and discover that you now get NO support from anyone since they can't debug that driver.

Once again I have never had a kernel crash with an nvidia driver. What makes you think it was at fault?

I've actually banned my employer's supplier from including nvidia card so I can be more flexable about what OS I want to put on the machines later.

Your and your employers loss. Besides if you don't like the accelerated drivers just use the Xfree86 one. It's not like you'll get good 3d for linux with any other card.

Re:ATI and drivers

[nihilogos]

NVidia has closed development and docs for the cards. Binary only parts that work only on certain distributions. No *BSD development (closed = bad)

So what? They have no obligation to open up their development and they might have good reasons for not doing so. The fact remains they provide linux drivers out of goodwill (i'm pretty sure they're not making enough money from linux users to justify development on them) and they deserve kudos for doing so. ATI doesn't provide squat for linux.

No GL or DRI support unless you are running a distribution that they support

I use Debian. It's not 'supported'. Both GL and DRI work fine.

Re:ATI and drivers

[DudemanX]

I've seen nvidia cards do the same thing under WindowsXP, only the culprit was nv4_disp.dll. nvidia fixed the problem in recent drivers, but I'm betting it was more of an XP issue since the same driver had no probs in 2K.

Re:ATI and drivers

[Dasher42]

I have to disagree. NVidia's driver's, even when I tried the releases as of this January, destroyed the reliability of my Linux box. After years - since kernel 0.98 - of happily developing on Linux, I've had to switch to developing on a Windows 2000/Cygwin environment so that I can get more than an hour of uptime while developing OpenGL-driven content.

I'm not happy about that. Prior to Nvidia's drivers, I could have counted only a handful of times Linux ever required me to do a hard reset - most of those involving mucking with SVGAlib binaries while running as root and other nonsensical stuff.

You can't control the stability of an OS if you can't fix the drivers. :/

Re:ATI and drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

I too had lockups using nVidia drivers, but it was only when using AGP mode on my flakey 503+ chipset, and only with some games. Set Option "NvAgp" "0" and no more problems. I have had zero problems with the drivers since learning that.

The issue may not be the drivers, but rather the hardware.

Kernel 2.4.18-preempt-alsa-lm_sensors. NV drivers 1.0-2808 using src.rpm or tarball install. BTW, it's ALL overclocked: The CPU, the Mobo, and the Videocard. And it's 100% stable.

Big Ups to nVidia for looking after it's customers.

Re:ATI and drivers

[Ogerman]

NVidia's linux drivers are available only as closed source binaries. That is 100% unacceptable and anyone with a brain will not use their hardware until they change their policies on giving us developers documentation. Of course ATI doesn't exactly have the best record for releasing timely or complete documentation either..

You know why 3D still generally sucks on the PC? Because the market has been ground to a halt by patents and restrictive licensing. Imagine if the Internet developed this way. Stupid greed.

Re:ATI and drivers

[PlaysWithMatches]

I tried a radeon card once, but prompty returned it because there were no drivers, and only after a while did they finally appear.

I have a Radeon gathering dust for similar reasons. Its capabilities are much beyond the (now fairly crappy) GeForce 2 MX I'm using currently, but the drivers just aren't there for the Radeon. I spent days (yes, days) getting DRI working properly with the Radeon, and what did I find?

• Tribes 2 (my then-main 3D game) ran at a whopping 5fps indoors and around 2 outdoors. Not acceptable.
• If I started X, then exited, and started X once more at any time afterwards, the system would die. Not just the graphics, the entire freakin' system. It died so fast, nothing even made it into the logs. Sorry, but even Windows would offer better stability than that.
• Random crashes. I used to have such problems with the NV drivers, but they've been gone for a loooong time.

I'd prefer NVidia's drivers were open source (some fixes just take far too long), but they do a good job so far. Considering this is a desktop-oriented company supporting an OS with such an insanely small portion of the desktop market, I'm very pleased. Everybody should stop bitching about NVidia, and praise them for investing their resources in making things possible for us. As long as they do a good job, we should support them (yes, including with dollars).

Re:ATI and drivers

[dimator]

That is 100% unacceptable and anyone with a brain will not use their hardware until they change their policies on giving us developers documentation.

Well, zealots can stick to "open" crappy, out-dated, and unmaintained stuff, and non-zealots can stick with working, timely, stable stuff. Usually, I let practicality choose instead of politics.

You know why 3D still generally sucks on the PC?

Interesting, I've never noticed that. Compared to what? Game consoles that are built solely for churning polygons, or the latest flick from Pixar?

Stupid greed.

Imagine that! A company wanting to protect the hard work it has put into their products! And on top of that, they want to turn a profit! How disgusting!

Re:ATI and drivers

[bzzzt]

Try to compile the nVidia driver on a Linux 2.5 kernel and come back please...

Re:ATI and drivers

[Kuad]

It's not just greed. Nvidia has a lot of licensed patents from other people (esp. SGI) in their drivers. Maybe they don't want to open them, maybe they do. Either way, they *CAN'T*!!

Release the raw data

[gmarceau]

I just wish one benchmarking site would release the raw data in some kind of ascii based table. I would love wasting coutless hours of gnuploting, generating variations on plots like those.

Does anybody have a pool of varied cpu & motherboard machines, new and old? There are a couple of statiscal tools I would like to throw at the benchmarking problem - if only I had the data.

Re:Release the raw data

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody have a pool of varied cpu & motherboard machines, new and old? There are a couple of statiscal tools I would like to throw at the benchmarking problem - if only I had the data.

It might help if you posted your email address or some other kind of contact info so that people could let you know.

Re:Release the raw data

[gmarceau]

You know you are perfectly right about that. Here's an address : dnys2v4dq1001@sneakemail.com

Who cares if NVIDIA uses closed drivers

[Wolfier]

As long as the GeForce drivers exposes what the hardware really can do, and the Radeon drivers continues to limit the card to be a really really fast....Rage 128, I'll stick with NVIDIA. Thank you.

And I'm a Canadian.

Re:Who cares if NVIDIA uses closed drivers

[moankey]

It matters when you compile a new kernel and find that the drivers Nvidia has doesnt work right and since it isnt open people cant patch it as quickly and everyone waits for Nvidia.
Although so far Nvidia has been pretty fast.

Re:Who cares if NVIDIA uses closed drivers

[LOTR Troll]

Well, tough shit. Should've got it right in the first place.

Re:Who cares if NVIDIA uses closed drivers

[Genyin]

Well, short of being open source, how are they supposed to magically predict the little changes in the kernel that might cause the incompatibity in the first place?

Or, alternatively, no decently large project can be expected to be bug free.

(erm, wait... I'm responding to what is essentially a troll from someone with troll in their username? oops.)

(and, don't get me wrong, it would be nice if they'd be open source, its just that they're actually doing a better job, for the most part, of their closed drivers than most all of the open video ones.)
---
(insert something here about T(HG)SBO. if you don't know what that is, turn on those dang .sig's)

Re:Who cares if NVIDIA uses closed drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

When's the last time you used a Radeon? I've got mine running under Linux with full hardware support for OpenGL, and full source for the drivers! While the Linux driver isn't nearly as fast as the nvidia Linux driver, the Windows driver works well for me and the card in general is faster than a GeForce 2 GTS.

So what was wrong with ATI again?

Oh, and I owned a TNT2 before this card and believe me, I had my share of driver problems with that card as well. ATI is not alone in the buggy-driver department.

Re:Who cares if NVIDIA uses closed drivers

[Wolfier]

There is no implementation of ATI OpenGL extension in their open source drivers while the closed source drivers implements all the OpenGL extensions the hardware supports.

Yes, OpenGL works on Radeons but it just works like a fast Rage 128. For example, no vertex shaders.

That's my gripe.

Game Programming

[saveth]

As an amateur game programmer, I must say I prefer NVIDIA-based cards to ATI-based cards, simply because NVIDIA takes care of their customers.

I've used the latest flavours of the ATI Radeon series, and the drivers always seem to be a bit unstable. Downloading updated drivers doesn't always fix the problem, either; sometimes, it makes the problems worse. It's hard to tell whether they're even trying. It seems ATI, at this point, is just trying to keep up with NVIDIA in terms of speed, rather than in both speed, quality, and stability.

NVIDIA, on the other hand, fixes bugs properly *the first time*. They don't really produce many bugs, either, which means they can put forth more effort toward making everything more featureful.

There's no contest, in my opinion. NVIDIA wins, hands down. It will take quite a bit for ATI to change my mind, or the minds of my game programming colleagues, about this one.

Re:Game Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

As an amateur web programmer, I must say I prefer your website compared to everything else, simply because you have a logo and no content.

Re:Game Programming

[saveth]

Personal websites are usually just clutter, rather than content. I prefer the "just a logo" approach. :)

Re:Game Programming

[saveth]

Hmm, you have a point. I guess I never thought of it that way. :P

Re:Game Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

And for this he pays $40 a year plus hosting? I guess his bandwidth costs are low.

;-)

Re:Game Programming

[beefstu01]

nVidia fixes bugs the first time?! I'm currently running the 23.11 drivers instead of the current ones because the newest driver set SUCKS! I've got a Quadro 2 Pro, and let me tell you that trying to get the newest ones (DetXP 28.whatever) trying to run has been hell. Case in point- Jedi Knight II. It runs fine under 23.11, but the newest driver won't let me load the OpenGL subsystem. Is that getting it right the first time? Every time I try nVidia tech support, they just say "uhhh... restart Windows." That's not the thing I want to hear from tech support. And when you have a question about linux, don't even dare talking to nVidia tech support- they think it's a program running on Windows!

I've never had to contact ATI tech support because nothing went wrong with the card that I previously owned.

Times have changed, and I'll tell you this. If I were to buy another graphics card for my computer, at this point in time I wouldn't know what to get. The GeForce4 looks tempting, but so do the Radeons. I'll have to look at the linux compatability for each (nVidia cards aren't nice to me when I try using Linux. The one time linux crashed on me was the time I was trying to configure a nVidia card)

Re:Game Programming

[brer_rabbit]

I know you're talking about software, but I can confirm on the other side of the fence that Nvidia's chip designers are absolutely picky when it comes to their work. I used to work for a standard cell library vendor a couple years back. Nvidia tore apart our 0.25um library when it came to timing characterization. Those guys were pushing the envelope -- they needed timing on the cells accurate to better than couple percent. I'm not talking simple propogation delays, these were setup and hold times of flip flops and latches. We ended up giving them tables of setup and holds, not just a couple numbers like most of our customers were happy with. Real interesting job for a just out of college EE.

Re:Game Programming

[saveth]

I can't say I've ever owned anything from the Quadro series, but the GeForce series handles the drivers very well. *shrug*

Re:Game Programming

[saveth]

Nah. It's on an ADSL line with 128kbps upstream. Which is another good reason to only serve up a logo. ;)

Re:Game Programming

[Ambassador Kosh]

I have to disagree with this idea. I used to have some random crashes under linux when using the nvidia drivers and when I dual booted to windows also. When I replaced the nvidia card with an ati card all of the crashes went away. I had tried lots of nvidia drivers and they all had the problems.

Even more annoying was that I found that the nvidia drivers would break up the audio on my sblive. I would get all these crackles in the audio which where very annoying. When I replaced the nvidia geforce with a radeon all of those problems went away. Overall I am not impressed with nvidia quality at all. ATI is better but for a really stable video card I would go with matrox. On a box I have with a G200 X has NEVER crashed. I have never had a single issue with that card.

Re:Game Programming

[jred]

I had a couple of problems with the latest drivers on my geforce2 dual-head card. 1. it won't start in default init:5 I think I had that problem before & it went awy, though. I just stopped bothering with the pretty login. 2. opengl apps load in between the two monitors, which sucks.

Note: It might be because I recently installed Mandrake 8.2.

Re:Game Programming

[zmooc]

Matroxes used to be find, but since the G450 they don't make decent linux drivers anymore. So no tv-out under Linux.... So I won't buy Matrox anymore.

Re:Game Programming

[mcmanus]

The one time linux crashed on me was the time I was trying to configure a nVidia card

So you just take your oops to linux-kernel for a little insight and lickety split.. oh, wait. It's a binary only driver - they'll tell you that the only people that can debug your formerly open source system are at nvidia.

[linux-kernel] Re: Kernel hosed or Nvidia modules?

Riddle: What do you do if you're running two closed binary modules from different companies?

Re:Game Programming

[Reality Master 101]

For what it's worth, I recently downloaded the latest drivers for my old TNT2 card off of NVIDIA's web site (for JK/II), and it absolutely screwed my system. Then I went back and downloaded them off my manufacturer's web site (Guillemot), and they worked great.

Moral is that it's better to get them off your manufacturer's web site.

Re:Game Programming

[psp]

John Carmack obviously agrees, since he wrote something along the lines: If I find a graphics error I blame the drivers, unless it is Nvidia's where I probably have done something wrong myself.

Re:Game Programming

[Ambassador Kosh]

I have never used drivers that matrox made so I have no idea how their drivers have worked. I ust the drivers that come with xfree86. Also tv out is not a selling point for me so that has not made any difference to me either. However I can see why you would not like their cards for that reason. I like their cards because I find them to be extremely stable and when you are doing software devel having the video card destroy a test run really bites.

Re:Game Programming

[GrfxGuru]

As a professional game programmer ;), I agree with you to an extent. nVidia is "in the lead" when it comes to resolving issues and putting out good drivers, but things have changed at ATI.

In the Rage128 days, when you pointed out a bug to their developer relations people, you were only guaranteed 1 thing...you'd be contacting them again because their 'fixed' driver would break 2 other seeming unrelated things. With Radeon, it was a bit better, but there were still those "how the fuck could you break that? It's worked fine for months" moments. But now with Radeon8500, for the past year every fixed driver was better than the previous one. I don't think nVidia is winning "hands down" anymore, but they're still winning. Now if only ATI could release the drivers with fewer bugs...

Re:Game Programming

[L0rdJedi]

A binary only driver on a pre kernel.

Re:Game Programming

[L0rdJedi]

I myself wonder if LucasArts didn't screw something up when they wrote JK II. On their website, they recommend the 23.11 drivers for JK II, although a few people have had the latest ones work just fine as well.

Re:Game Programming

[abdulla]

this could be attributed to the employees of nvidia all being from colourful backgrounds (sgi et al), they have the experience that ati doesn't

Re:Game Programming

[phaze3000]

www.matrox.com/mga

Full drivers with TV-out. If you run XFree86 4.2.0 you get g550 with dual-head support out of the box..

Re:Game Programming

[zmooc]

A bit stupid, but I don't know exactly what it was that's the problem... but dualhead works. No problem. But the tv-out doesn't work. And I believe there was also something with no xvideo on the 2nd head... so then what software do you use to watch movies on your tv? I'd like to know... since that's what I bought my g450 for:(

Re:Game Programming

[phaze3000]

You might want to check out MPlayer, it has support for TV-out on the Matrox cards and also acceleration for them too..

The GeForce4 TI 4200 is the best

[sgtsanity]

Firingsquad just posted a report about the new GeForce TI 4200. They're coming out with two seperate versions, one with 64mb of faster memory, and one with 128mb of slower memory. The 64mb one was faster in the benchmarks that they ran, even though it was $20 cheaper than the other variant. Plus, it even beat their comparison TI 4400 in some of the benchmarks.

But it gets better. The TI 4200 can be overclocked to speeds comparable to the TI 4600, Nvidia's fastest card. Get the fastest performance available for half the cost!

OT: non-AGP graphics card?

[brer_rabbit]

Is anyone doing decent PCI cards these days? I realize I'm behind the times here, but my motherboard (Asus CUR-DLS) has no AGP slot, leaving me with a GeForce2. Still, my dual P3-1.26 ghz setup isn't far enough behind the game to warrant buying a whole new setup. I do have a couple 66mhz 64bit PCI slots going unused in the motherboard, any graphics cards go that route?

Re:OT: non-AGP graphics card?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe spend $59 on an ECS K7S5A and $89 on 1GHZ Athlon and you'll get an performance boost anyway...

Re:OT: non-AGP graphics card?

[Hamshrew]

From a dual P3 1.2 GHz? These are P3s here, not P4s... that would slow him down even on non-SMP programs...

As for cards, they might have some... Alpha boards still use PCI, I think. But none of the flashy new stuff.

Re:OT: non-AGP graphics card?

[Kenja]

You can get a PCI GForce 2 MX 440 with 64megs of RAM for about 80$ off of e-bay.

Re:OT: non-AGP graphics card?

[nzAnon]

Gainward makes a PCI Geforce2 MX 400, only Windows drivers AFAIK, mate of mine has one running under Win98se, works well:
Gainward Vid card listing This card is about fourth from bottom of the list here.
Geforce2 MX 400 PCI Card details
Drivers

Re:OT: non-AGP graphics card?

[Anonymous Coward]

ok well i have a Geforce 2 MX-400 PCI, but i have a cyrix chip (PR 166+) but OC'd to 300 mhz. However, it claims it's not supported because non-intel boards lack AGP drivers even though it's not an AGP card. Any suggestions?

Slashdotted Already

[aelfwyne]

Let's just hope the performance of these cards excels the performance of the reviewer's webserver.

What's the point?

[Jucius Maximus]

These things can already render graphics at insanely high resolutions and refresh rates with framerates above the refresh rate of the monitor.

I don't see a reason for most people to upgrade to one of these things unless they are developing 3D technology.

Re:What's the point?

[PoiBoy]

Agreed. I'm still using the Riva TNT2 that came with my machine two years ago. It displays 1600x1200 at 24 bit color just fine. What more do I need? My xterms, xdvi, and Mozilla look just fine, thank you.

Re:What's the point?

[geekoid]

sure, you can get your fram rate up higher then the refreshrate, and of course your vision. But its about keeping the framerate above them with 20 people shooting each other on the screen.

Re:What's the point?

[barjam]

I have a geforce 3 ti200 and there are many games that will push this card well below 15fps.

Everquest
RealFlight
Wolfenstein (everything turned to max)
Microsoft Flight Simulator

James

Re:What's the point?

[Guitarzan]

Spoken by someone who is not an avid game player, obviously.

Re:What's the point?

[foobar104]

...refresh rates with framerates above the refresh rate of the monitor.

Strangely, most people don't seem to realize that this is a BAD THING, unless your app is running at an integer multiple of your monitor refresh rate.

To make it simple, imagine your monitor scans at 60 Hz. So every 60th of a second (16.67 msec) you get a whole new frame drawn on the screen. Assume, for sake of argument, that drawing the screen takes zero time. It's just instantaneous.

To achieve smooth motion, the same amount of time must pass between each frame. This is guaranteed if your application renders 60 frames per second. Unless you drop a frame somewhere, you'll see one rendered frame for every screen refresh, and you'll perceive smooth motion.

But what if you drive your screen at 60 Hz, but your application renders 95 frames per second. (Assume that it's exactly 95 fps all the time, rather than a variable frame rate, just to make the math work out for this example.)

When you run your game or whatever, the clock starts at zero. The first frame from the graphics pipeline is in the display buffer, so when the monitor gets ready to draw the screen, it draws frame zero.

10.53 msec later, the application has drawn the second frame, so it swaps buffers. The display buffer now has frame 1 in it. The application now starts drawing frame 2.

But the graphics card isn't ready to draw frame 1 on the monitor until a little over 6 msec later, at t = 16.67. At that time, though, the application hasn't finished drawing frame 2 yet, so frame 1 is still in the display buffer. The monitor draws frame 1. Game frame 1 comes after game frame 0, so we're still in sync.

During this time, the application has been working on frame 2. It finishes frame 2 at t = 21.05 msec and swaps buffers. Frame 2 is now in the display buffer, and the application starts drawing on frame 3.

The monitor is ready to draw frame 2 at t = 33.33 msec. So it reaches for the frame from the display buffer... but what's this? The frame in the display buffer isn't frame 2. It's frame 3! We dropped a frame somehow!

In the meantime, at t = 31.58 msec, the application had finished drawing frame 3. It swapped buffers again, before the graphics card got a chance to display frame 2. Frame 2 disappeared from the display buffer, never having been shown on the monitor. That's a dropped frame, and it's a bad thing.

Games aren't hard-real-time applications, of course. They run freely, sometimes drawing frames more quickly, and sometimes less quickly, depending on the load. This is okay. But don't just assume that because your game runs consistently at a rate higher than your monitor, you won't be dropping frames. In fact, you'll drop frames like crazy, at a rate determined by how far your game frame rate is from your monitor rate, in modulo arithmetic.

Re:What's the point?

[Gogo Dodo]

These new cards would be of interest to people who want dual monitor and/or DVI support that haven't heard of Matrox cards. It's easier to find ATI and nVidia cards at your local computer shop than Matrox cards. In fact, I don't recall ever seeing a Matrox card at a retail store.

Re:What's the point?

[Jucius Maximus]

"In fact, I don't recall ever seeing a Matrox card at a retail store."

The last Matrox card I saw in a retail store was a Mystique 220 4MB PCI years ago at Compucentre. (I've still got one of those cards in a server low end...their overall 2D picture quality is excellent.) But being in the reselling business, I can tell you that it is easy to get Matrox cards from the larger OEM suppliers.

Re:What's the point?

[pjrc]

In the meantime, at t = 31.58 msec, the application had finished drawing frame 3. It swapped buffers again, before the graphics card got a chance to display frame 2. Frame 2 disappeared from the display buffer, never having been shown on the monitor. That's a dropped frame, and it's a bad thing.
...
But don't just assume that because your game runs consistently at a rate higher than your monitor, you won't be dropping frames.

Isn't that what the vsync setting is for??? (to only render a new frame each time the monitor is refreshed, so you don't get "tearing"). It's turned on by default with the few cards I've installed, but they always need to turn it off to run these benchmarks.

Re:What's the point?

[Have Blue]

It is possible to configure most games to ignore the vertical synch wait, and swap buffers while the screen is being refreshed. Of course this isn't really a solution because it leads to tearing, where the swaps become visible as horizontal discontinuities on the screen.

Just adding to the information pool...

Re:What's the point?

[foobar104]

I don't think so. Most of the consumer 3D apps I'm familiar with (games and whatnot) have a free-running internal clock. If they can run hard-real-time off the vertical refresh, then that's cool and all. But it's news to me.

Re:What's the point?

[ThrasherTT]

What you are forgetting is that by rendering as many frames as possible, the frame that the user actually gets to see is a closer representation of what is "current" in the game space. I know that the difference is only a few milliseconds, but there is a difference.

Also, many games (iirc) use a simplistic integrator for their physics models, so they are more accurate at smaller timeslices (faster framerates).

Dropping frames isn't a bad thing (except for the use of "too many" CPU/GPU cycles) as long as you dont see the same frame on two or more consecutive monitor refreshes.

I'm Glad

[BiggestPOS]

That ATI was able to emerge as an actual competitor for Nvidia. Once 3dfx finally died, it looked as though Nvidia might have a stranglehold on the market. The first couple of offerings from ATI were crap, and didn't look too promising, but the 8500 is a perfectly decent chipset, and some of the ViVO features put it way ahead of the GeForce 4 for some people.

I have a DV cam with RCA inputs, and firewire, so my video card doesn't need to be able to capture, just a nice S-Video out for watching downloaded southparks on my Wega in the living room.

Re:I'm Glad

[BWJones]

Once 3dfx finally died, it looked as though Nvidia might have a stranglehold on the market.

Actually, Nvidia purchased most of the intellectual property and rights belonging to 3Dfx back in December of 2000.

ATI and NVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I favor nVidia. I just through out my ATI Radeon 32Mb DDR card because it was causing to much grief. With the latest ATI drivers and the latest via chipset drivers I couldn't get the card to work unless I set the motherboard to use 2xAGP! Even then most 3d games would crash after 15minutes of game play. Just a couple weeks ago I replaced it with a GeForce 3 and not a problem since!

So now it nVidia all the way for me.

Re:ATI and NVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

You know that the difference between AGP 2x and AGP 4x, considering todays games, is minimal, not to mention the fact that you have to have ddr memory to make real use of it.

Why ATI are a bunch of sissies

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of bruteforcing polygons the MAN'S way, ATI decided to be a bunch of sissies and implement HyperZ technology. 'Discard unseen pixels'? BAH! I'd much rather have these unseen pixels rendered than let them go to waste. Their proprietary TRUFORM technology is good, if you like seeing rounding errors (see Serious Sam SE's shotgun model). Moreover, their names are misleading. 'Pixel tapestry', 'Charisma Engine' - what do these names mean? How can a pixel have tapestry?

Meanwhile, NVIDIA continues its dedication to their customers by giving them 128MB of VRAM; conveniently providing the customer with 32 extra MB of VRAM to use as a RAMdrive. Instead of fudging around with names like ATI does, they've simply decided to follow 3DFX's naming scheme and simply name their cards GeForce(n + 1). I look forward to the day when the GeForce requires an input from the +5V power supply.

Re:Why ATI are a bunch of sissies

[CaseyB]

ATI decided to be a bunch of sissies and implement HyperZ technology. 'Discard unseen pixels'? BAH! I'd much rather have these unseen pixels rendered than let them go to waste.

Nvidia does this too. The call it Lightspeed Memory Architecture II.

Instead of fudging around with names like ATI does, they've simply decided to follow 3DFX's naming scheme and simply name their cards GeForce(n + 1).

But they do this so badly. 1 -> 2 was just an increase in clock rate. 3 was a new generation. 4 is a clock rate increase -- except for the G4 MX, which is SLOWER than any of the G3 cards. Stupid.

Re:Why ATI are a bunch of sissies

[Anonymous Coward]

> ATI decided to be a bunch of sissies and
>implement HyperZ technology. 'Discard unseen
>pixels'? BAH! I'd much rather have these unseen

>pixels rendered than let them go to waste.

You are an idiot beyond help. You have NO FREAKIN idea what HyperZ is about and you have no hope.
If I were you, I would jump off a cliff--you probably can't even open doors, that is how utterly stupid you are. Your brain has so many defects it belongs on a junkyard.

Learn about Z buffer, then post. Slashdot feedbacks always annoy me because of incompetent ingrates like yourself always fuck all review,
completely bastardizing any good idea or a good piece of technology without even knowing WHAT THE HELL it is about.

Damn!

Re:Why ATI are a bunch of sissies

[k_187]

The GF4MX is more like another clock speed jump of the GF2s. It doesn't have the programable pixel and texture shaders that the GF3 and 4 have.

Re:Why ATI are a bunch of sissies

[CaseyB]

You're quoting the original post. Why did you reply to mine?

Besides, he was joking, and you're the idiot for not getting it.

Re:Why ATI are a bunch of sissies

[Anonymous Coward]

If you actually went into depth with the cards instead of talking with a cock in your mouth, you could learn what they are. But no, you have to diss on em. Bad form Kid

PCI video card

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of the bandwidth limitations of PCI (compared to AGP), not many manufactures (read: none) are making PCI video cards any more.

I know that ATI still does occasionally put out a batch of 32MB PCI rage128 pro cards, and matrox has some PCI cards designed for multiple monitor configs... but overall there are no other PCI cards.

Compare PCI (33Mhz or 66MHz if you are lucky shared between your PCI devices) to AGP (133MHz+ on a dedicated channel) and see which one you would rather have :)

Also, the speed of most GPUs these days (graphics processing units) is too fast for the PCI bus to give it its data. That is why you will never find a Radeon PCI or Geforce2 GTS or better PCI. Heck, AFAIK the Geforce2 MX-400 cards are not PCI.

So that is what happenned to PCI cards.

Please mod me up as I am not logging in :)

Re:PCI video card

[Anonymous Coward]

I am currently using a Radeon 32MB SDR PCI card, on a PC with no modifications. Clearly, they can be found. (maybe not in stores, I bought this early last year sometime.)

Developer Relations

[chronos2266]

NVidia's developer site is why they will win the GPU war. Only because they help developers by prodiving an extensive forum in which they can educate themselves about their technologies. I recently started researching vertex programming, I went to NVidia's site and they had a entire SDK dedicated just to it. I haven't see anything like that on ATI's site. Keeping the people that develop for your hardware informed is the only way to win support, ATI hasn't realized that yet.

Re:Developer Relations

[Anonymous Coward]

Not screwing OEMs with high prices and exclusivity clauses is why ATI will win the GPU wars. NVIDIA hasn't realized that yet.

What's your point?

Re:Developer Relations

[midimastah]

I hope no one 'wins' the GPU war. It's because of ATI that NVidia is pressed to do things like this, and release all these cool new cards we're talking about. Competition is healthy.

Newest drivers

[Hamshrew]

I agree, for the most part... when the 8500 came out, it was months before ATI released official, updated drivers. When they did, they were an improvement, but still had some stability issues. I was disappointed that after all that time, they still hadn't gotten it right. Especially after they kept talking about their "new commitment"

But then they released newer drivers pretty quickly. Fixed some rendering bugs, seem much more stable... I'll wait and see a little longer before recommending them to anyone else, but it looks like they may be getting their act together.

Re:Newest drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

But the 7500 is still great - eh?

Re:Newest drivers

[Hamshrew]

I guess... I've only used the 8500, the Geforce2, and a heap of Geforce3 cards(for work)

Plus, I've only used it in Linux and XP. From the message boards I've been on, I have the worst-supported configuration, so if it's okay for me, they must be getting better.

Even more OT

[realdpk]

I feel your pain man. I took an old web server and turned it in to my desktop. The thing that's keeping me from upgrading is the onboard SCSI (P2B-S, BX chipset baby! The last stable chipset in some time..). I've yet to find an AMD motherboard with onboard SCSI (granted, I have only looked in a few places but.. you'd think they'd be common from ASUS). 'course, I'm still running a p2-350, so I guess I don't feel all of your pain. ;)

Re:Even more OT

[ncc74656]

I've yet to find an AMD motherboard with onboard SCSI (granted, I have only looked in a few places but.. you'd think they'd be common from ASUS).

The Tyan Thunder K7 includes dual-channel Adaptec Ultra160 SCSI, dual 3Com Fast Ethernet NICs, an AGP Pro 50 slot, 64-bit PCI, and a bunch of other stuff. It's also a dual-processor board, so you get twice the Athlon goodness. :-)

Re:Even more OT

[BigBir3d]

Biostar makes one, with the AMD 761 chipset, here.

Re:Even more OT

[realdpk]

Ah.. nice. Dual though, wouldn't that require the MP chips? The cost of this is rising rapidly I see. Ah well :)

Re:Even more OT

[ncc74656]

Ah.. nice. Dual though, wouldn't that require the MP chips?

Not according to this, which links to an article on modding newer Athlon XPs so they'll work in multiprocessor configurations. (Older Athlon XPs have been said to work without this mod.)

nvidia vs. ati

[soap.xml]

When its all said and done, I have to place my vote for nVidia, hands down. There are many reasons for this... howerver this is the most compelling...

nVidia Drivers page link

• Windows 95/98/Me Drivers
• Windows XP/2000 Drivers
• Windows XP 64-bit Drivers
• Windows NT Drivers
• Linux Drivers

ATI Drivers page link

• Windows XP
• Windows ME
• Windows 2000
• Windows NT

At home I run about 7 computers, a mix of linux winXp 2k and 98. The fact that my geforceX cards can and will run great in all of the above os's using proper driver support is all I need to buy from nVidia. Good customer support, and good OS support. That will bring in my dollars...

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[Hamshrew]

True... but the ATI cards do run in linux, and ATI does provide a link to the drivers. And ATI provides the specs to do open-source drivers. For me, it isn't that much of a concern that the geforce drivers are proprietary... but it is a concern. And for purists, it's a major concern.

It wasn't a concern at all, until I ran into a situation where I actually wanted to look at the source...

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, the ATI drivers are included in XFree 4.x, and wait, it gets better, the DRI is supported by the ATI stuff, fully 3-d accelerated and open source.

I hope your closed sores nVidia doesn't just decide that winXP is the only future and drop you linux dorks.

Sucka's out!

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[felipeal]

So maybe they are just missing a link to:

http://www.ati.com/support/faq/linux.html

I have 2 computers at home, one with a nVidia TNT2 card and the other with an ATI Rage Pro 128, and I can tell you, I'm much happier with the ATI one (the nVidia one sometimes freezes the whole system, for instance).

The overall situation (If I'm not wrong) is that even though nVidia provides the drivers (and even the source), they don't disclose technical information about the cards, while ATI does the opposite.

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[realdpk]

Well, nVidia isn't ALL good. The nForce drivers are not available for 95/98. Having to buy XP added about 50% to the cost of my parent's new machine, more than negating the cost advantage of the integrated motherboard.

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[Darren Winsper]

Would you care to point to the documentation stating the R8500 has full 3D support? The original Radeon's drivers still have piss-poor T&L support, if any.

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[soap.xml]

I have not done much more than a cursory look through the ATI dirvers pages. After not finding them quickly I, just as quickly, ditched ATI in favor of nVidia. If they do provide them, it would be quite helpful to make them more easiliy accessable.

And yes, I'm aware that if I really wanted to find them I could quickly google for the driver also.... ;)

-ryan

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[soap.xml]

Good point. I would say that from an end user standpoint and somebody that doesn't always want to spend hours tinkering with my boxen, having that link readily available from the drivers area would be very helpful.

Granted if I was really interested in finding out more about the ATI cards and if they have linux support, I would have spent much more time during my decision process. However I wanted a quick and simple solution for multiple machines without a hassle. nVidia made it clear to me as an "end-user" that they supported all of my OS's from the download page. ATI didn't. This is pretty much just a "bad marketing" or "bad website" issue, but none the less, it was enough for me to buy 7 nVidia cards ;)

-ryan

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. ATI drivers can come with a distro. Nvidia can't. That's heavy in ATI's favour.

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[mcmanus]

The overall situation (If I'm not wrong) is that even though nVidia provides the drivers (and even the source)

nVidia does not provide source - they only provide closed source binary drivers.

Their source distribution contains a binary module (Module-nvkernel) and a little glue code that you can compile. This is so you can run it with your current kernel. The driver itself remains opaque.

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[felipeal]

I have the feeling that they have the idea that a linux user is smart enough to find the link (as you mentioned, you would spend more time in your decision process), which is the perfect example of what the companies think about linux (i.e., it's not used by your average Joe AOL user).

But you're right, it wouldn't hurt for them to have such a link.

This is pretty much just a "bad marketing" or "bad website" issue, but none the less, it was enough for me to buy 7 nVidia cards ;)

Maybe you should tell them that (as NOT having the link actually hurt them :)

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[HeUnique]

Oh really? is ATI that great...

Then you wouldn't mind showing me the specs where I can switch on/off the Macrovision part, would you?

Oh, how about giving me very fast 3D drivers? oh, that will be only available in June..

What about The Rage 128Maxx 2 processor use in Linux? no support..

Maybe can I get a full support for both TV out and VGA without Xinerama (a-la Nvidia's Twinview)? nop, not supported...

Yes, nVidia doesn't give the source or specs, but I can use ALL the features of my Geforce card - top to bottom, while with ATI Radeon I can't (currently), not mentioning Matrox G450/G550..

I don't give a damn about the source - I give a damn about full feature driver (which got some nice extras - true dual head without need of Xinerama, shadow mouse, 2 versions of AGP for compatibility, and tons of other feature) which I don't get with others...

Sad, but true..

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[Thagg]

The last time I bought an ATI card I was shocked by the fact that the Linux driver had incredibly bad 2D performance. ATI had paid the Precision Insight folks to write the 3D driver, but didn't include any money for accelerated 2D performance.

I don't know if this has been remedied since then, this was the status 6 months ago.

thad

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[dinivin]

I don't give a damn about the source

Good for you. Some of us do give a damn about the source (and not for purely philosophical reasons, for practical reasons).

Dinivin

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[CynicTheHedgehog]

Yeah what's up with that. I mean, you click "Find Driver". You select "Radeon 8500". Then you select "Linux". It takes you to that URL.

This compared to NVidia's site where you click Support, then Linux, then read and agree to a disclaimer, then choose a version, then download the kernel patches...

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[soap.xml]

I have been going to the wrong part of their website for quite some time. If you go to the OEM portion of the site you will see that the options listed are the same as the ones I listed in my previous post. Another poster pointed this out. It was my mistake. I stand corrected.

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[Anonymous Coward]

Why in hells name did you buy it?

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[Anonymous Coward]

The ATI drivers come standard with XFree86 and all of the major Linux distributions. When you install Red Hat Linux, for instance, it automatically chooses the correct Radeon driver.

How much more "easily accessible" do you want the drivers to be? :)

(Note, too, that the development versions of ATI drivers for Linux are easy to find... they're at
the DRI development page. You can't find better service... the development mailing lists are in the open, and the driver writers directly respond to messages. :)

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[Anonymous Coward]

And your parents need 3d acceleration for word prosessing I presume?

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[abiogenesis]

nForce is a mainboard chipset, not a 3d accelerator.

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[Jacek Poplawski]

At home I run about 7 computers, a mix of linux winXp 2k and 98. The fact that my geforceX cards can and will run great in all of the above os's using proper driver support is all I need to buy from nVidia.

I am happy to tell you, that you can use ATI cards in Linux. I am sorry to tell you, that nVidia drivers are much worse, than any other drivers for Linux, becouse they are closed source. It means, that you could have stable system if you have a luck or russian rulette if you don't have it.

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[Zathrus]

Gee, let's see... nForce came out when? Oh yes... about a month before Win95 was officially decommissioned.

Not having Win98/ME drivers is vaguely surprising, but not too much so.

And, of course, like everyone else, I have to question just how smart you were to buy the nForce board when there's no driver support for the OS you wanted to run. If you bought the board first and figured it out second, well, that should damn well teach you to do your homework next time.

You do realize that there are highly integrated KT266A and KT333 motherboards out there, right? The only thing the nForce 420 has that they don't is integrated video.

Finally... uh... added 50%? What exactly did you build? WinXP Home OEM is $88. OEM Pro is $140. The home edition is already less than the cost of the motherboard, the Pro is pretty close to the cost. Once you add a hard drive, memory, CPU, keyboard, mouse, and monitor there's no way in hell that it's 50% more. Yeah, you were probably upgrading piecemeal. Again, you fucked up and didn't do your research, but want to blame someone else for it instead of accepting your own screwup.

Re:nvidia vs. ati

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I recently threw the GF2MX card out off my computer in favour to a Radeon 7500, It has great 3D support, the 2D support is accelerated however not noticable faster than GF2,

the 2D drivers lacks some extensions in X to name a few: SHAPE and DGA are missing

or that's probably just because I'm running the TCL enabled beta drivers from Tungsten Graphics (former PI) need to try the old ones again...

Voodoo 4/5 might do for you

[bbk]

Try and find a Voodoo 4 or 5. They've got decent (Geforce 2ish) 3d capabilities, will work at 66Mhz in a PCI slot that supports it, and have quite decent linux drivers.

They're also dirt cheap on ebay, as WinXP and MacOSX don't support Voodoo cards, and people are selling them off for better cards.

You may also look for Mac cards - for the longest time, there was no AGP slot on the Mac, and I think you can get a Radeon PCI with mac roms. Flash it to be x86 compatible, and there you.

BBK

Re:Voodoo 4/5 might do for you

[MisterBlister]

Keep in mind that there's no decent official driver support for Voodoo cards now that 3dfx is gone. There's already some games that are DirectX 8.1 only and the list keeps growing. Many of these games wont run properly on Voodoo cards because there are no updated drivers.

They do have PCI GeForce 2 boards though for obvious reasons they suffer a performance hit when compared to the AGP versions... That's your best bet until you upgrade your mobo.

Re:Voodoo 4/5 might do for you

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mac Radeon PCI runs at 66mhz. If the re-flash really works, that's probably the best bet for his system as most other PCI video cards only run at 33mhz.

Re:Voodoo 4/5 might do for you

[cobar]

There may not be official drivers, but there are a number of people creating new drivers by themselves. See x3dfx.com for some of them, or just go to the old 3dfx site.

So far they appear to work ok in Win98, but since they're not certified, I couldn't get them to install properly in XP. Many of the new drivers at least claim to be Directx 8.1 compliant.

One thing I've noticed.. (OT)

[Steveftoth]

about pc hardware, and after reading people's responses to this article it just enforces my belief that PC hardware is really bad because the standards are not strict enough. I've had problems with so maney systems and you never know where to begin debugging a computer that doesn't work correctly. Sometimes a problem that seems like it was a 'video card issue' turns out to be a problem with your main memory. Even when useing the 'high quality' components, one low quality component or slightly defective card can bring a whole system down.
Hell, just not having a pci card plugged in correctly can totatly trash a computer with a low quality MB. Ever pulled out a PCI card when the system is running? Sometimes it reboots, sometimes it don't.
The point of this diatribe is that people seem very polarized on the subject of video cards, mostly due to the other guys card not working for them. When probably in many cases it wasn't the video card causing the problem at all, but rather an incompatibility in their system that was brought out by the video card.
Guess it's the price we pay for getting such cheap, bleeding edge systems.

Re:One thing I've noticed.. (OT)

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, just not having a pci card plugged in correctly can totatly trash a computer with a low quality MB. Ever pulled out a PCI card when the system is running? Sometimes it reboots, sometimes it don't.


Nope, being a computer person, who checks this computer related site often, I can say that I never have pulled a card while the computer is on.

Flamebait aside, thats the problem with demanding hardware standards to a point where we all have to make PCI cards or motherboards to function the same way when some idiot pulls one off the mobo while the computer is on.

Re:One thing I've noticed.. (OT)

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen brother!

Re:One thing I've noticed.. (OT)

[Elbereth]

This is definitely true. I wonder if there's a generic troubleshooting guide on the internet anywhere. It would be very cool to write one. I could easily make one that's better than the Windows hardware troubleshooter.

I'd recommend doing the following, if you're having trouble with system stability: replace your memory, power supply, video card, sound card, and motherboard, in that order. If you do it in that order, it will minimize the cost, while maximizing your chances of success.

Also, don't underestimate the problem-solving ability of moving PCI cards to different slots. It really does work sometimes.

Re:One thing I've noticed.. (OT)

[Anonymous Coward]

It works, dipshit, because different slots are, gee, well actually different! Not because of the voodoo bullshit that you think applies. Get a clue or pay some motherfucker who knows.

Re:One thing I've noticed.. (OT)

[Zathrus]

Hell, just not having a pci card plugged in correctly can totatly trash a computer with a low quality MB. Ever pulled out a PCI card when the system is running? Sometimes it reboots, sometimes it don't.

The proper thing for the system to do in this case would be to fry itself. This is, in fact, what occurs in a large number of systems.

The only variablility should be if the sound card will scream "YOU IDIOT" first or not.

Re:One thing I've noticed.. (OT)

[Steveftoth]

---quote---
Also, don't underestimate the problem-solving ability of moving PCI cards to different slots. It really does work sometimes.
---end quote---
Why? I mean why does that work. I've done that in the past and to DOES work, but what's the difference between pci slots when they are all supposed to be 32-pci slots.
Makes me want to destroy all computers before they gain the intelligence to crush all hu-mans.

Re:One thing I've noticed.. (OT)

[jibs]

I don't have time to explain all of it, but look into IRQ assignments. Motherboards are all different, but there are some common traits.

To explain a little bit, usually slots 3 & 6 are shared, and also 4 & 5. Also, if you have an AGP card, don't use the first PCI slot since that's usually shared with the AGP. Look in the BIOS, maybe that'll shed some light.

Some cards can share IRQs with others, and some can't. XP takes care of the problem on newer boards with PCI steering, so that's why you can't change them in the device manager if you installed using ACPI.

When you change cards around, be prepared to re-install them. Win2000 & XP remember the slot it's in.

Wait and see.

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI are currently developing Linux drivers for their FIRE GL 8700 and 8800 professional workstation-class cards, and if I'm not mistaken, those cards share the same chipsets as the Radeon 8700 and 8800 respectively. I would be surprised if they only supported the FIRE GL line.
Currently, only the FIRE GL 1 - 4 cards have Linux drivers, but as a stated above, FIRE GL 8700 and 8800 drivers are in development.

Re:Wait and see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction, the cards have radeon GPU's, they don't share the entire chipset.

Re:Wait and see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Arrghh... I really should hit that Preview button more often...
The FIRE GL 8800 uses the Radeon 8800 GPU and the FIRE GL 8700 uses the Radeon 8800 LE GPU.

rumor has it...

[zoftie]

Matrox is coming with new dual head card with load of features. It might have been demonstrated on GDC, but when their computer froze up, they covered the screen. It might have been GeForce, but hey. Matrox might have something up their sleeve, being in backwaters of 3d they might have something cool soon.
2c

Re:rumor has it...

[cREW oNE]

Rumor has it the bitboys are coming with something amazing too!

Re:rumor has it...

[Anonymous Coward]

M4+r0x 0WNz J00

Re:rumor has it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just FYI, it's supposedly called Parhelia.

Re:rumor has it...

[zmooc]

Rumor has it that tv-out-support on the new (as of g450) Matrox cards is total crap onder Linux. Don't buy this shit if you want tv-out. If you don't want tv-out...I have a g450 for sale for you:P

correction

[gmack]

They do not provide source. They provide a compileable wrapper for their binary only module.

Re:correction

[felipeal]

Thanks.

I knew they provided something that you could compile with your own kernel (I mean, not the ones that come with your distro), but I never bothered to look at it.

Nvidia Chipsets vs Nvidia TV out

[BrookHarty]

I personally use the Nvidia chipset. If I want to use video in, I use a mpeg2 capture card that does a better resolution and doesnt skip frames. For output, I do get nvidia cards (Asus) with video out, but I perfer ATIs video out. ATI displays a better picture on tv out, I can display 1024x768 (about 500 lines on svhs out) and its clear. Its visible that ATI has better compression and output to TV/SVHS. ATI also polish's their driver tools, they look better and have more functions. Nvidia is lean and mean with their tools.

I picked up a PNY GF4 4600 128 Megs, VIVO, (video in/video out). Not impressed with it over a GF3 Ti500. Check the benchmarks out and see what I mean. I cant tell the difference between 80 and 90FPS. The big part of GF4 was it running at 1600x1200 in 4x AA which the GF3 cant. 2X looks good enough for now.

If anyone cares about some Benchmarks on GF and CPUs. I tested 3 video cards and 2 cpus. GF2MX, GF3Ti500,GF4 4600 (128 meg), P3-800 and a AMD 1800. I could swear I had GF3 benchmarks on the P800, Guess Ill need to do that when I get home. I wanted to show how a slower CPU can play newer games with just an updated GPU.

AMD 1800 + GF4 4600 - 9697 3D marks - http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=3157957
AMD 1800 + GF3 Ti500 - 8204 3D marks - http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=2777031
P3 800 + GF4 4600 - 6170 3D marks http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=3167224
P3-800 + GF2 MX - 2368 3D marks http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=2929648

There is no overclocking done on these tests, but I did hit over 12000 3Dmark with minor overclocking.

Re:Nvidia Chipsets vs Nvidia TV out

[modipodio]

I am in the market for good mpeg2 capture card which is supported by linux.do you have any recomendations ,(preferably not pricey),?

Wait a sec...

[ROBOKATZ]

I thought Slashdot said ATI and NVIDIA were merging? What happened to that? :)

Me too...

[Ixe]

... d00d I totally agree...

I have an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon.... I was at the end of my rope when I first got it because the drivers either didn't work or crashed shortly after (windows drivers from ATI out of the box). I found the latest drivers on the net a few weeks later and haven't had a serious problem yet.
Linux however (Mandrake 8.0 at that time) had a little trouble at first but when I updated to XFree86 4.1.0 just about all my problems were solved.

In short, I think ATI has very nice hardware but unless you plan to not use it for a month or two when the descent drivers are available-- you're in a world of hurt.

Wise choice... But not an ideal one.

[locoluis]

Sometimes bad content is even worse than no content at all.

Then again, why are you even HAVING a website if the only thing there is that logo?

Makes you wonder...

Text weighs less... (n/t)

[locoluis]

what I said.

What's old seems new again

[DeadBugs]

ATI makes good products but I still have to give the nod to NVIDIA because of their all-in-one drivers that still support older cards. I installed the latest drivers on a 3 year old TNT chipset (Diamond Card) and actually noticed a performance gain. So if you are using an older (NVIDIA TNT/VANTA on up) video card, try the latest drivers (Detonator 28.32) they offer improvements across the board.

Re:What's old seems new again

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. I've got an (old) TNT2 Ultra PCI card sitting in my beige box, and when I installed the Detonator drivers on it a few months ago, the result was an AMAZING improvement! :)

Thumbs up to nVidia for new drivers that supports older cards! Now that I've got a board with an AGP slot in it, it's time for an upgrade...

Where the Linux drivers link is

[Gogo Dodo]

You went to the OEM driver section (Powered by ATI), not the Retail driver section (Built by ATI).

If you go to the retail section, there are is an OS menu with Windows, MacOS, Be OS (!), and Linux.

Re:Where the Linux drivers link is

[soap.xml]

Ouch, I stand heavily correct ;) Thanks for pointing that one out. I have done that multiple times. Until you pointed that out I have not even noticed the "Built my ATI" part of the website. Must be the way that my eyes move along the home page or something. Once again thanks for pointing that out. I will have to investigate an ATI card for the new box I am putting together ;)

-ryan

Read Carmacks .plan on 8500 and Doom:

[k2x]

It's quite interesting, and he talks about ATI a lot with fair comparisons to Nvidia's offering. See it here

Re:Competition is good but...

[Anonymous Coward]

From Amazon:

A Dog Year : Twelve Months, Four Dogs, and Me
by Jon Katz

List Price: $21.95
Our Price: $15.37
You Save: $6.58 (30%)

With savings like this it's unforgivable to not buy this book. Katz's crack habit doesn't come cheap you know.

Why I won't buy a NVidia

[Balinares]

Actually, NVidia does worse than just keeping its drivers closed as hell. Reportedly, when they bought up 3DFX, they had the XFree developpers give them back all the stuff 3DFX had given them to play with and develop a driver.

As a result, the XFree guys had to stop developping for the Voodoo series, and I find myself with a card that won't ever be totally supported, nor will the current driver ever be debuggued. Only way I can get a stable X server now, without my current weekly or so weird crash, is by buying a new card. Needless to say, it will not be an NVidia, trust me on that one.

Whew, it's just OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing it doesn't affect an API that people actually use to get work done.

nVidia supports OpenGL

[Screaming Lunatic]

That is one of the main reasons I choose nVidia. Whenever I have an OpenGL question, the nVidia driver writers are right there to answer questions. It is not hard to find them on the discussion boards at opengl.org and the opengl gamedevelopers mail list. There are also tons of opengl demos on the developer site.

Secondly, their Linux drivers are quite good. I don't care too much if they are not open source, at least they work well.

Btw, the reason why nVidia drivers are not open source. nVidia wanted one driver for all cards under their Unified Driver Architecture model. The open source community (XFree I believe, but correct me if I'm wrong) wanted the specs to the actual hardware. nVidia was willing to give the community exactly what their Windows driver writing team has and the community did not agree.

Some agree with nVidia's point of view, others agree with the community. It doesn't really matter, the end result is closed source drivers.

PK

Re:nVidia supports OpenGL

[dinivin]

The open source community (XFree I believe, but correct me if I'm wrong) wanted the specs to the actual hardware. nVidia was willing to give the community exactly what their Windows driver writing team has and the community did not agree.

I keep hearing this, but I've never actually seen anything to suggest that this is the case. Does anyone have any proof of this?

Dinivin

Re:nVidia supports OpenGL

[Screaming Lunatic]

I googled and googled and googled, but I couldn't find any direct proof. I was able to find this in the google cache though. This seems to be the only statement which nVidia has made with respect to Linux and open source drivers. If anyone else has more info, that would definitely be cool.

PK

Re:nVidia supports OpenGL

[dinivin]

I googled and googled and googled, but I couldn't find any direct proof.

If you have no proof, then why the Hell did you say it in the first place? Why not just admit that you have no idea if nVidia did, in fact, make that offer to the XFree86 or DRI developers? Now, unfortunately, with your +3 (Insightful) moderation, you've probably even convinced people that that load of crap is actually true.

Dinivin

Two Linux 3d graphics questions

[stevef]

1. What is currently considered the best 3d accelerator with open drivers for Linux?

2. People that I work with use hardware stereo on SGIs. I'd like to phase out the SGIs over time and move toward Linux systems. Has anyone done stereo 3d in linux (I know that the Xi xservers support stereo 3d, but haven't seen it myself) and if so on what hardware (card,goggles,etc.)?

Note that on question two I'm not concerned as much on the "openness" of the drivers as on question one.

Thanks!

Steve

Re:Two Linux 3d graphics questions

[Anonymous Coward]

This guys are.....
http://vr.iao.fhg.de/portal.en.html

they have a system that runs in both sgi's and linux, mind you, it's a research prototype.....

Triumph of open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Ati == Open Source
Nvidia == closed source

Ati == shitty drivers
Nvidia == 0wn3z at quake

Linux Zealots defend closed-source nvidia, that's the hilarious part. Show your true colors. "closed source bad! evil company! OOO SHINY!"

8500 should be vs. GF3 .. not GF4

[Kewjoe]

ATi has a new card coming with the R250 (summer), and R300 (fall) that will compete (and possibly surpass the GF4)...

saying a GF4 beats an 8500 isn't news.. it *should* beat it.. 8500 was brought in to take on the GF3 TI500 and does ..

Re:8500 should be vs. GF3 .. not GF4

[Anonymous Coward]

NVidia's not going to stand still for the next 6 months.

Re:8500 should be vs. GF3 .. not GF4

[Kewjoe]

never said it would..

but ATI has two cards coming out soon.. an 8500XT (not sure if they will call it that) that will have 128mb of ram and run at 300 core and 300 memory.

and the Radeon 8800 which is based on the R250 core which is a die shrunk R200 (8500) and will having 128mb of memory and run at 350 core and 350 memory..

the first card i mentioned should be out very soon.. and the second card i mentioned should be out early summer.

Nvidia will probably have a Geforce 5 out by the fall.. and ATI will match it with their new R300 core.

Quick summary

[Animats]

Summary: everybody's current generation card is within about 25% of the same performance. Nothing exciting. It's not like the days when there were 10x differentials.

BOYCOT NVIDIA

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvidia dont want to support the free software movement, so supporting NVIDIA is NOT in your long term best interests.

Small Nvidia whinge

[AlexCompy]

I have been using a GF2 pro on my main PC for a while now. When I bought it, I deliberately chose a version with TV out as I have a big telly but only a 17" monitor.

Last weekend, I finally got round to plugging the TV into my Geforce, and what did it tell me? "You can't use the TV-out feature for DVDs". WTF?!? I hardly want to use my TV for writing word docs or doing spreadsheets - the only time I want to be watching TV is for DVDs.

I know that there is some software available to enable TVout for DVDs but it is a real hassle (and you have to pay for it) - and I think I've already spent enough on that card.

As a result I had to rip the card out of the machine and bung my old Matrox G400Max in there. It might not be anywhere near as fast as the GF2 but it does do REALLY good TV-out.

AFAIK the deal is the same on GF3s and GF4s.

Just my two cents.

AL

linux driver support??

[gol64738]

until i see native support for linux with ATI technology, i don't care what the benchmark results are in comparing these 2 technologies. i'll continue to purchase nvidia based products.

i love the linux support that nvidia provides via updated drivers. other hardware manufacturers should take note.

correction

[modipodio]

"Spoken by someone who is not an avid game player, obviously". 3d game player.

Re:Egads!

[Anonymous Coward]

wont someone please think of the children?

AMD Merger

[(outer-limits)]

I bet the AMD merger with Nvidia leads to an unbeatable lead in performance in the future.

Do I sense a little anger in the air?

[modipodio]

So Many card owning zealot's on both sides Have expressed there views and now I the confused consumer find myself attempting to interpret and hence pick and purchase.

Initialy I was in the market for 2 new card's,one to play my current favorite fps and one to record tv to mpeg2,(at a decent resolution), both of which had to work under linux and both had to be within my budget.

Now initialy the choice seemed simple , a nvidia card for gaming and some other card for tv.Then the 8500/7500radeon'swith all of the seemingly nice pvr options came out and suddenly my inital options seemed a bit broader.

I have yet to see some one lay out the pro's and con's of the 8500/7500dv in a non biased way .
There are plenty of reviews of the card's performance under window's , I have yet to see a review of how the card performes under linux.This I presume is due to the ati linux driver situation Which so many nvidia users have gleefully pointed out.

So many ati fans laud the fact that nvidia's drivers are closed,(?), and so many nvidia fans
point out that ati's linux performance is less than amazing and that ati's drivers are only slightly more open than nvidia's,(???).To me this whole situation is confusing.

Basicly from what I can decipher atm ati's radeon 8500/7500 dv drivers for linux do not full fill what I want them to do,(capture tv and play games under linux ), and therefore atm these two cards are not for me.

I would prefer to support ati over nvidia as they 'seem' the more open of the two companies
However there performance or rather the performance of the 3rd party people who develop there drivers seems under somewhat under par.

So in conclusion I think I am going to stick with an nvidia card for gaming under linux and shop around for a different capture card.I am really looking for suggestions as to what i should buy and would be happy to listen to any advice anyone has to offer on this matter

good review

[modipodio]

http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/ 19/0357219&mode=thread

Source...

[jmu1]

Don't be such a mental midget. Read their faq about Linux drivers at ATI. They actually give source code and are helpful to the folks over at XFree86.org. NVidia? Hell no, they want you to use those shitty closed drivers... I'll stick to the stuff that will still be available years from now.

Re:Source...

[soap.xml]

Mental midget? I'm sorry, but I was looking for a quick solution for a bunch of computers. I didn't want to spend a lot of time searching around on the net for source that I will have to compile everytime I upgrade and/or change os's and I know that nVidia and ATI cards are both very good.

A very quick look at the websites was all I needed to make that choice. I had no desire to go digging everytime I wanted an upgrade/change...

However after posting the original comment here on /. I became aware that I was actually looking at the wrong part of the ATI website. (Thats what I get for not spending enough time to do my research) I am currently in the process of building a new system, and I am going to try out one of the new ATI cards.

-ryan

Hmmmmm... no MX 460's for sale?

[q043x]

from Conclusions: "...Right now, there's a gaping hole in the middle of NVIDIA's product lineup, because the GF4 MX 460 is apparently stillborn (I challenge you to find a GF4 MX 460 for sale anywhere)..."

right. well, it's 9:02 in the AM. what's there to do anyway?

parlez-vous français?

Leadtek - WinFast GeForce 4 MX 460

MSI - G4 MX460 VT (looks sexy in red!)

MSI G4MX460-VT - GeForce4 MX460 64Mo DDR sortie TV if Materiel isn't good enough...

They're there. ;) But there aren't many...

I love this...

[AA0]

there are so many ignorant people it isn't funny. ATI drivers suck, nvidia rules, blah blah blah.

I have used dozens of ATI cards since the rage 128, and have only 1 issue with 1 card, which was just one version of the drivers wouldn't install, the other version does. All the other drivers work fine, but even if they didn't nvidia isn't the king of drivers like most people are thinking, and there is one reason for that.

In win2k/XP nvidia has the infinite loop bug, it has been around for months and months, making many people's systems completely unusable for all games, even mainly 2d ones. No matter how many fps they pump out, the sacrifice isn't worth it. nVidia doesn't care one bit about their customers like people say, they would have fixed this bug months ago if they did. Its all about how much money they get out of you, and the thousands of people with useless systems right now aren't too happy. That reason alone puts ATI drivers on top.

That being said, the lastest beta drivers for ATI are quite superb, and they have a lot of performance left to push out, they are very new to the all in one driver package that nvidia has. nVidia on the other hand hasn't been making driver improvements lately, they can't, the drivers are very close to being maxed out, and if you were to compare both drivers side by side, ati has some nice features (truform, AF in d3d) that nvidia doesn't, and nvidia has some ati doesn't. I'd put them around equal, both have problems.

IMO, if you can't get one card or the other to work for you, you are an incompetent asshole and shouldn't be using an uncorked fork. Stop complaining and spreading your ignorance.

Huh? the drivers are there, 1/7/2002!

[Simple Simian]

you worried me for a sec and I went to check the drivers here
nothing fancy in the search, it's the standard nForce driver page and they have
* Win98SE
* WinME
* Windows 2000
* Windows XP
* Linux

Right there. Now perhaps you only had Win95x to go from, but I think Win98SE is still a good solution for me...

No, you suck

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't read anywhere that ATI is going to stop making cards, but if they are, it's because they can make more money making chips and let other manufacturers make the actual cards. Nvidia does that and they're doing fine. 3dfx tried to make its own cards and they're gone now.

Image Quality W/ NVidia

[dusanv]

I have GeForce 2 and I regret buying it. The image quality sucked until I removed the junky R/F filters on the card (I can probably microwave a dish real quickly on it now /*joke*/:) ). I spent money getting good monitors and all I got from that card was what looked like 12X FSAA:) From what I hear their newest GeForce4 4600 still suffer from the same problem. Hell, if I were to buy one I'd feel pretty cheated. I mean a US $400 card and they can't put half decent R/F filters on it... Geez (and the Linux driver is still unstable!). No thanks.

BTW, ATI's & Matrox's cards never had these problems - I can testify to that.

This is

[oO0OoO0Oo]

only a test.

ATI == bad drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

As the owner of a GF 2ti and an All-in-wonder Pro, I feel that I must correct you. In many cases, ATI's linux perfomance is nonexistent. The Rage Pre chip on my ATI card was not supported at all. My Gf2 ti works great under linux playing sof and quake3. The tv-out works as well. The only thing that doesn't work yet is the tv-in, but there's a project on sourceforge fixing that right now :)

BTW, I too was transfixed by the AIW radeon 7500. I really tough about getting one, but the fact that my current AIP crashes every 10 minutes in windows and I just don't want to deal with their crappy drivers anymore. To be fair though, the AIW pro's tv-in/out was excellent though.