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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."
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
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.
- Free tabletop fantasy gaming! Grey Lotus
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
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.
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.
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. :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
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..
Hetz (Heunique)
I agree.
> 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.
> 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 !
> 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.
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.
> 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
If you go to the retail section, there are is an OS menu with Windows, MacOS, Be OS (!), and Linux.
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.
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.
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.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
PK
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)..."
;) But there aren't many...
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.