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."

Comments

Re:Great...

[pmz]

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.