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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."
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!
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?
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
ATI Drivers page link
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...
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.
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.
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