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ATI R300 and R250V
Chuu writes "The ATI R300 (Radeon 9700) and R250V (Radeon 9000/Radeon
9000 Pro) reviews are out, at all the
usual suspects, but the one you want to
pay attention to is over at anandtech.com, since somehow Anand got permission to publish his benchmark results for the R300
while the other sites were stuck with whitepapers. The results? The R250V is a GF4MX killer, which is not saying much. On the other hand, the R300 absolutely trounces the GeForce4 Ti4600, running
54% faster in
Unreal Tournament 2003 and 37% faster in Quake 3 at 1600x1200x32 on a Pentium4 2.4ghz."
The reason Anand got to post his benchmarks is because he doesn't have actual numbers... just correlated data. The R300 didn't post 256 fps in UT2k3, it just did x% better than a GF4 Ti4600.
Of course, as he points out, the GF4 numbers are available, and it only takes some simple math to extrapolate from there.
The card looks very impressive. It's out 4 months before the NV30. Maybe by then ATI will have drivers worth a crap too.
Now we can all play games at 3x the refresh rate of the monitor.
Sure you can. Hell, you've been able to for years now. Just drop down to the lowest resolution available, turn off all the effects, textures on lowest quality, and look at the not-so-pretty pictures.
What? You want all that? You want fog, bump mapping, realistic lighting, high quality textures, and anti aliased to boot? At 1280x1024? Well, then keep upgrading. Because while the R300 comes closest to that of any card to date, I doubt it'll be able to handle it for long. Real time graphics still aren't even approaching the level of Toy Story, much less that of Final Fantasy (the movie), or (*gasp*) photorealism.
When we can do realtime 3D effects that are indistinguishible from reality, we might be there. We aren't even close yet.
Oh, and you contradict yourself - you ask for disposable form factors and then ask for an open laptop standard. Hint - if it's disposable, it's not going to be open. Unless you're talking about something as silly and trivial as alkaline batteries.
Hello? Anyone listening?
:)
Yes, an excellent troll; you've sounded passionate enough and invoked "cheaper!" enough to confuse some moderators into giving you points. Let me go over your completely misleading rants:
Now we can all play games at 3x the refresh rate of the monitor.
We don't PLAY games at that rate; we benchmark them there for comparison with other cards. I have a 15" LCD that I game with. I run my refresh at 60Hz, which I am imaging you are translating to "a maximum displayable 60 frames per second." I'll let someone more technical than myself debunk that one.
I just got a very nice MSI GF4 Ti4200 (for $145 from GameVE.com, free shipping, only because newegg doesn't carry them and they are extremely overclockable cards with a great software bundle). If I ran this card in my LCD's native resolution of 1024x768, with the basic graphics settings, I pull approximately 180 frames per second in Quake 3. If, however, I go to the driver settings, crank up Aniso filtering, and turn on 4x FSAA (anti-aliasing is beautiful, btw), and set all settings to max quality in the game, I get about 85 frames per second in Quake 3. That is what my GF4 MX440 card was pulling with no options on.
We need cheaper and more integrated. Get rid of the DIMM and PCI slots and all the legacy hardware. Put the memory on the motherboard and create a disposable form factor and an open laptop standard.
Again, very nice karma troll. Cheaper is nice, and integrated has its place, but we do not need it. We don't want to put memory, cpu, and all peripherals on the board, for a variety of reasons. The two bigs ones are 1) repair/replacement after failure, and 2) CHOICE. If you want to buy a $20 video card to put in that AGP slot, you can! If you want to buy a $400 Matrox Parhelia to run 3 monitors in Quake 3, you can! Anything and everything between, as well! Everybody has a different budget and a different set of needs. Let the consumer decide.
Disposable form factor? Is that tongue in cheek? Do we want disposable PC cases? Or just good standards like ATX? I know plenty of people who have had ATX cases for 5 years and have housed 4 different generations of hardware in them.
Open laptop standard? Good idea, but many OEMs already work from something similar. The problem is the high cost of development on miniturized, highly integrated systems like laptops, especially when they need extremely tight cooling systems. Someday there will be a standard, where you can go into a store, buy a chassis (for 12, 14, 15, 17 inch LCDs), assemble the mobile parts, and walk out the door... but why bother? There are tons of cost-effective, and vendor-serviced laptops available in any conceivable configuration RIGHT NOW. Just because you can't get it for $1.99 at 7-Eleven does NOT mean the market is broken.
So my summary is that we don't need more integrated, and cheaper is good, but we have cheap already. You were trolling, and I was feeding you. Any questions?
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
> Now we can all play games at 3x the refresh rate of the monitor.
:)
> We don't need faster anymore.
Nonsense.
A *lot* of people want movie quality graphics in real-time. Imagine playing a game with the visual quality of "The Matrix", but completely interactive!
There are a ton of physical effects that still can't be done in real-time (yet), due to the memory bandwidth and geometry complexity.
e.g.
High resolution (4Kx2K) color/z/stencil buffers used for ray-tracing, radiosity, and displaying thousands of models each with a million+ vertices (used by CAD/Medical/Games), etc, come to mind.
Then when you add in compositing / blending multiple alpha layers you just burnt all your left-over speed (if you had any). DOH!
There is a reason that Pixar and other CG studios render scenes at the *sub* pixel level @ 64 bits/pixel. We're talking about 100+ triangles PER pixel. Because detail, such as hair which is less then a pixel wide, needs to be "super-sampled". Right now, games show hair by approximating the surface of it which makes it look "blocky". UGH.
So if you want graphics to stagnate, and never look more "realistic", then sure, stick with your GeForce4 (or below.) It will continue to be usefull for the years to come.
The rest of us will be trying to dazzle the world with new visual FX making people go "Wow!".
Because when I find bugs in the driver, I will be able to fix them faster than the company will get around to it.
Because I can compile the drivers for my CPU, and screw compatibility with other CPUs I don't have.
Because I will know it will work with the kernel I am running, which may be some mutant patched up version that the vender has never seen.
Because when the card is discontinued, I will STILL have it, and will still be USING it, and will still want UPDATES to the drivers.
Because my bretheren who run *BSD also deserve to have good drivers.
Because I am an embedded software developer, and damn it I NEED to be able to tweak the drivers if I am using it in my designs.
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