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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."
Will there be Linux drivers for these cards supporting 3D acceleration/OpenGL under XFree86, so I can play RtCW and Flightgear on my favorite platform?
If so, count me in. Otherwise, I'll stick to NVidia.
Every time a new card is announced, some uninformed consumer feels the need to point out that Quake 3 runs at 3x the refresh rate of the monitor. And, he always gets several intelligent resposnes explaining how Quake 3 is a benchmark, and that some games, like UT3 at full quality setting, still can't run very fast with the current cards.
And, yet, the original post always gets to "5, Insightful".
It's almost as if the hardware review sites need to explain the situation in the intro of their review, so that the masses could understand what's going on.
And if you had read the Anandtech review, you'd see that he comments on these rumors - that they're most likely baseless.
The only product scheduled to come out of ATI by Q4 is the 9500, which is a slower, stripped down R300 for less money.
And by that time it'll have to compete against the NV30, which is allegedly going to blow the R300 away (as it should given the time differences involved).
When we can do realtime 3D effects that are indistinguishible from reality, we might be there.
I find it interesting that untouched realism is frequently just not fun. There are aspects to games that require tweaking or simplifying the environment so it isn't frustrating or impossible to make progress.
Masters of game-making understand that fun isn't derived purely from realism and that some unrealistic elements are the only way to make a game interesting and playable. For example, do you really want a football to get lost in the sun, so the receiver screws up and you lose the game? Or do you want clues in a mystery game to be so well hidden that you have to have take the hours of a real forensic investigation to find that triply-ricocheted bullet embedded in the neighbors compost pile?
I really think that super-realism in games is a pipe-dream, and the only way to achieve it is in a Star Trek-style immersive holodeck...or, perhaps, just going outside.
It also seems to be harder to find the basic time-waster games, since, I guess, it is a waste to put classics like Tetris or Solitaire on gigaflop-class consoles. In a way, this really is not progress at all.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin