GeforceFX (vs. Radeon 9700 Pro) Benchmarks

Obiwan Kenobi writes "Looks like they guys at Maximum PC got lucky -- they scored the first ever GeforceFX benchmarks via an Alienware prototype machine. Two 'marks to notice: The Geforce FX scored 209 FPS in Quake 3 (1600x1200x32) and 41fps in 3dMark Game4 demo, while the Radeon 9700 Pro attained only 147fps in Quake 3 yet came back with 45fps in the 3dMark test. It seems that the GeforceFX is the clear leader in pure processing power, but in memory bandwidth the 9700 Pro is still king."

Comments

good news

[mirko]

All these improvements mean that any new laptop, includign iBooks can play Quake 3 in full res at a decent speed :)
I guess that future Lan parties will be more and more wireless !

Re:good news

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you can do that now. My 2.2 Ghz P4 laptop with GeForce4-440 plays Q3 1280x1024 at 100+ FPS.

Of course I actually play at 640x480 (with all candy turned off) because I want it as fast as it can be and I don't care about looks.

By the way, iBooks, like all Apple products, are not something I'd want to play Q3 on because they offer no where near the maximum speed (FPS and responsiveness in Q3/UT) of a Intel/AMD PC, especially for the price.

Re:good news

[mirko]

I own an iBook (oct2002 -> 800MHz).
Both Q3A and Team Arena run more than fine at maximum resolution !?

Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Anand_S]

ATI's 147 fps has always been a problem for me in Quake. I like to blink a lot.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Framerates are not static. They will dip heavily with complex scenes, especially map geometry. If you play any Q3A mods like UrT, True Combat, or just Q3-based games like SoF2 and RtCW, the framerates aren't going to stay a magical 148fps.

More importantly is how this will translate into capacity for future games. Doom 3 will take considerably more muscle than Q3 does.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[OldStash]

True gamers blink between frames.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[SimplyCosmic]

Conversely, simply having a higher average fps number doesn't guarentee that the highs and lows will be better than the lower average fps.

There's nothing in that single number to say that the higher average fps doesn't suffer from a number of wildly varying large peaks and valleys in performance, while the lower number could be much more steady, with relatively low variance in the number across its peaks and valleys.

It only makes you wish that these benchmarks, especially the "real world" Quake 3 tests, had a graph of fps throughout the test to see how performance was at any particular point.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Masem]

I certainly have no problem with id and others trying to push the limits of real-time 3D rendering power, or the hardware makers making boards that can do that.

However, I do question the point where much of the work for games is put into the engine, and little of it put into the gameplay itself. I realize that we're almost at the point where one company is making the engine, and another company licenses that engine to make the game, so the responsibility of good gameplay is on the shoulders of the latter company. However, it seems that a lot more of the games that have been published of late focus more on the realism and the 3d-modeling that the playability of the game, and the continuous push to up the abilities of rendering does not seem to allow the developers of new games to step back and think about gameplay.

The other problem is that right now, with the specs we're getting on Doom3 and other games, it sounds like another focused hardware upgrade cycle if you want to play these games reasonably. Sure, you can drop the screen resolution, and there's probably hundreds of tweaks you can apply to the engine to cut back details, but older, but still viable cards, will have problems. I know people don't want to develop for outdated systems, but there is a point where you have to include a reasonable amount of backwards compatibility to allow non-power gamers to play new games as well. One of the reasons that Half-Life and CS sold so well was that the game was optimized for play on a previous generation of processor/vidcards compared to the average system that was sold. (HL/CS, also, IMO, excels at it's gameplay as mentioned above). I know a lot of PC game writers are of the opinion that the gaming market will only move forward when vidcard makers put out new features into cards, and then when PC game makers follow up by using those new features in predominate titles, but the PC gaming market is just not healthy right now, and to make games that require the latest-and-greatest hardware will limit sales further and may push this part of the market into a slump, while console gamers will continue to see more improved titles.

Again, I'm not against improvements in 3d rendering tech and pushing polys as fast as possible; it's the game makers themselves that need to realize what the average hardware of their target audience is going to be and not just to focus on how pretty the game looks.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[afidel]

This is why I absolutly HATE average frame rate as an indicator of a cards game performance. A much better indicator would be minimum framerate. I don't care if a card can create frames faster than my monitor can display them 95% of the time if it bogs down to sub 30 fps for the other 5% of the time. It really sucks in shooters and is annoying in rpg's when you go from glorious full motion action to flipbook graphics just because some effect or combination of effects took place in your field of view. As an example my gf3Ti does very well in NWN at 1024*768 full detail most of the time (average 40fps) but if you get too many lights on screen it would bog down towards single digits, so the only thing I could do was turn off dynamic shadows which looked way cool but which were causing such slowdowns that I was ripped out of the gaming experience.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Jedi play and win blindfolded and don't care about fps.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[afidel]

The reason Carmack designs his engines for the top of the line card at the time of launch is that ID only makes ok money with their own games. Where they rake in the cash is selling the engine to other game companies, who then go and make another game around it. With game development lifecycles being fairly long with regards to hardware lifecycles this makes a fair amount of sense. The fanboys will go out the day doom3 ships and buy a new top of the line rig, for the rest of us that technology will get into our computer over the next year or two, which probably is in line with the amount of time it will take the companies that buy the ID engine to make their games. So Carmack puts everything into his engine because he knows that by the time most people use it their hardware will be up to snuff. Remember when he started working on the Doom3 engine the idea of programmable pixel shaders was just that an idea, now most people who play games have a card with a PPS. If Carmack did all of his engine design based on the hardware available when he starts the design it would be outdated before it ever got used outside ID.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[PenguiN42]

Interesting!

Maybe it would be a good idea for benchmarks to start reporting even just the standard deviation along with the average fps. I'd certainly find it useful/informative.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Lispy]

Basically it boils down to: Yes, if you want to play the latest 3D-Games you better get a new machine.

I don't see why this is bad? I personally dislike 3D Games since they all look alike. If you want you can still play great games with older Hardware, the whole simulation, build-up scene for instance. And most likely your system could even handle games such as DarkAge of Camelot or Everquest, wich are games with a focus on gameplay and not grafics. I agree, there are a lot of crappy games out there with really stunning grafic fx, but i don't care about them (anymore). I let my friends play them and when one diamond among them is found i consider wether it's worth the hardware upgrade. The last game i did this for was Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Had to upgrade for 20$ and get a TNT2 to play it at decent fps. Now i wonder what doom3 brings. Is it worth the upgrade to Radeon/GeForceFx? I don't know. Maybe I will keep waiting for WarhammerOnline until I upgrade. But someone will betatest for me and then i can still stick with my XentorTNT2/32MB and keep playing Anno1503 or DarkAges.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Oculus Habent]

If (big if, sadly) I get one of these cards, I'll probably cap the framerate in games that support it and play with everything as cranked as it'll handle. It seems better to me to have 60 FPS with incredible detail than just 200 FPS.

My monitor refreshes at 72Hz. What am I getting out of 100+ FPS? Sure, the raw power is impressive, but we dont use it.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[interiot]

If you use shutter glasses to display Quake in 3D, then 147fps total = 73.5fps for each eye, which is clearly below the magical number of 85hz refresh that we all love and need.

(now try to find a monitor with a 170hz refresh rate)

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[cdrudge]

I bet that 95% of the people that would buy this card right now could care less about the standard deviation or any other statistic about the card beside fps. They just want bragging rights to be able to say that they got .0002% better fps then card XYZ.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[JohnFluxx]

Say it is 100fps, so each frame takes 0.01 seconds. In that time your eyelid has to travel 2cm's say (1cm down, 1cm up again). s=d/t = 0.02/0.01 = 2m/sec = 2*60*60/1000 = 7.2 km/h.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[OldStash]

You could halve that speed by blinking with one eye at a time (or "winking") and reduce it even more by squinting.

A true gamer would know that. ;)

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[AKnightCowboy]

That does make me wonder, is there some superhuman person that can tell the difference between 60fps and 147fps? I start to notice if a game slows down to 30fps or less since the movements get kind of jerky and weird, but around 50-60fps it seems smooth on a GeForce 2. The only game that gives me problems is Grand Theft Auto III which is the only game I've ever had that causes my computer to just spontaneously reboot itself once in awhile (3 or 4 times since I began playing it several months ago). Ah well, I can always play Vice City on PS2 which seems much smoother and less flaky than GTA III on my 1.4GHz PC with the GF2. :-/ Go figure.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[hackstraw]

I'm not a gamer, so bear with me, but where does one get a monitor that has a refresh rate over 200 Hz at 1600x1200?

I am correct in that your game's fps cannot be faster than the gun in your crt, right?

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Anonymous Coward]

"And most likely your system could even handle games such as DarkAge of Camelot [darkageofcamelot.com] or Everquest [everquest.com]..."

You sir, Are NOT A GAMER.

GET OVER IT.

bitch.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're calculating how fast your eyelid has to move if you want to miss no more than one full frame. True gamers blink *between* frames, during the vertical retrace, which takes about 1/10 of the total frame time. At 100 fps, normal human beings miss 30 frames of action during blinking. Ergo: True gamers blink 300 times faster than normal humans. And they know how to sync to the vertical retrace.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[afidel]

You can't, one of the best 21" monitors I have ever used is the Sony CPD-G500 sitting on my desk and it maxes at 1600*1200*120Hz. If you can find a monitor with a better gun than this one then congrats but I doubt there is one that is nearly twice as fast.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Emil Brink]

No, you're not. If you turn of the pesky habit video drivers have of syncing the back-to-front switch to the vertical blanking of the monitor, you can draw many more frames per second. Of course, those frames will probably not be "whole", since the varying rendering times will cause the flips to occur mid-screen. This is known as "tearing", since it looks like the image is being torn apart. But it does allow higher actual frame rates, which in turn can allow physics etc to give a smoother game experience.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[tshak]

You obviously haven't played splinter cell. Cutting edge game engine, incredible gameplay.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[ThrasherTT]

As a poster above mentioned, the average FPS doesn't paint the whole picture. If the average is 120fps, I can pretty much guarantee that you will see dips below 72 Hz (in Quake 3). I personally tune my settings to the best that can maintain 75Hz during intense combat... and until I got my GF4 a while back, the settings were fairly low.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[gmhowell]

I didn't think that was to be released for another two weeks or so on the PC. If you are referring to the demo, hardly long enough to be indicative of anything. If you are referring to a warez release.... I'll take your word for it:)

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Anonymous DWord]

And that's where you run into a situation like Duke Nukem Whenever, where they're constantly swapping engines out and trying to build a game around it. Unless you're writing the engine yourself (like Carmack), your time is pretty limited. Get the game out, and move on.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Realm Lord]

Yes, but how do you define a minimum frame rate? There are lot of things that define a minimum frame rate. You would need to define what steps are required in some game or a FPS checker to decide where exactly a minimal is.

You wouldn't expect a card to be able to maintain minimum 60 fps if you have 120 people shooting you with flare rockets generating all sorts of weird shadows, online, while you are watching. But that is not something that realistically happens now. But later on it could be, so this minimum would have to evolve over time.

Usually, the maximum framerates and average framerates at least tell you something about what you can expect the worst framerate to be. Not always, of course. I just don't think there is truly a better solution that everyone will accept, and is infallible (people will always look for a way to boost their scores).

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[lewp]

What I was once told from people who are likely to know better than myself, is that the Quake series of games had, for a long time, physics quirks in it. These very well may still be in Quake 3, though I don't know for certain. In these games certain jumps that allowed you to reach various places (usually the homes of high-powered items) much faster than normal players became possible only if your framerate was above a certain number. I can't remember if it was 100 or 120 FPS, but it was a triple-digit number.

There used to be, and very well may still be, archives of game demos of people demonstrating these jumps and trying to one-up each other. Almost all of the people I know who contributed to these archives believed this was true.

That said, I have never been that hardcore of a 1v1 or Team DM player to care about this and as such haven't researched its truth myself. It very well may just be some bullshit that spread because enough people blindly passed it on like I am. If someone wants to correct me, please do.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Daniel Phillips]

However, I do question the point where much of the work for games is put into the engine, and little of it put into the gameplay itself.

Given a choice between John Carmack pushing forward game technology and John Carmack pushing forward the literary arts, I'll take the game technology, thanks. Some other team with less engineering talent can specialize in great stories. That said, Doom3 is to incorporate more cinematic elements, perhaps even some kind of story line. However, if developing a story line interfered with the raw technolody, that would be really sad. Let somebody else write stories, let John Carmack and the ID crew concentrate on the immersive experience.

If this bothers you, then send emails to your favorite game companies and plead with them to license the latest ID engine to produce some story with it.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Cramer]

I have the "professional graphics" version of that thing. It will do greater than 200Hz, just not at maximum resolution. Plus, the RAMDAC(s) on the video card is(are) not likely to be able to generate such high resolution frame rates. And you're rapidly approaching the limits of changing the actual phosphor pixels on the monitor. (We're already beyond the retenative properties of the human eyeball.)

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[mangu]

It seems better to me to have 60 FPS with incredible detail than just 200 FPS

Yes, but those rates they mention were at 1600x1200 pixels. How much more incredible do you want your details?

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[patter]

Some other team with less engineering talent can specialize in great stories

I'm not sure I buy the less vs. more engineering talent idea at all. Within games, there are many specialties, and engine tech is but one of them.

Carmack's not more or less talented than the top AI programmers, but he'd be as lost in what they do as they are in what he specialises in. Looking at jobs in the industry, there's demand for truly talented individuals in all sorts of areas.

The industry is generally comprised of people talented enough to know that no generalist is going to excel in all areas simultaneously. And either by necessity, college training or inclination folks end up in a specialty of sorts.

There's been huge leaps and bounds in game AI in the last decade.. but because it doesn't have that mass market eye-candy ooh ahh appeal to it, most people probably aren't aware of LOD AI systems exist (and we're not supposed to be the unwashed masses here), unless it was hyped to the max like that monkey in Black and White.

If you don't think on the fly 'role' changes, dependent on how much you interact with the agent in an AI system take as much talent as what Carmack et al put into their engine tech, you probably don't understand as much about computer science as you think you do ;).

It's unfortunate that there's no seemingly objective measure like fps for an AI system, else we'd be blown away by some of those also...

Otherwise, I agree with the sentiment that we need these 'specialists'.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Broken Bottle]

To your first point, I agree that hardware focused development can make for some games that aren't as fun as they should (or could) be, and that's why I'mglad that iD licenses their engines. I look at iD games as interestings, pretty tech demos that are probably the simplest application of the wonderful technologies under the engine's hood. Wait about 9 months after iD ships and you'll get the GOOD games (pretty graphics with a more involving story).

To the second point, I think we have to keep in mind that Doom III is a ways off, like a year or better. And that's for the crappy (well, kinda) iD game, not the ones that we'll really want to play that get released a few months after that. By that time, you'll probably be in need of a decent graphics card upgrade, unless you card is brand spanking new and top of the line today.

Chris

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[William Tanksley]

Yes, yes. Right.

But those aren't the important numbers; what matters is the heat generated by the high frequencies. This is why proper cooling is vital to a real gamer; not only for your system, but for your eyeballs.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said. I would be quite happy playing another game of the quality of Half Life, with the same engine, and perhaps slightly more involving story, than I am playing UT 2003, for all it's graphical prowess.

Why game creators (such as the Duke Forever team) seem to feel the need to update their game engine for every "sequel" is beyond me. I do appreciate devs who push the graphical edge now and then, but the upgrade cycle is a little on the fast side, if you ask me. Perhaps game developers could concentrate a bit more on game play, plot, writing, design, and voice acting? Get those facets of a game right, and the human imagination can compensate for "average" graphics.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Jagasian]

I still play the original Quake on a regular basis, and there are plenty of benefits to having no less than a 72 frame per second framerate during the entire game. Your movement improves, such as jumps, turning, running speed, etc... In addition to that, your lightning gun (the most powerful Quake 1 weapon) does more damage.

So for Quake 1, the magic number was 72 fps.

Another cool thing is that, unlike other FPS games, which mandate at minimum ping. For example Quake3 ping on a lan is 50ms, even tho it lies and says 0ms. In Quake 1, there is almost no limit to your minimum latency. So yes, Quake 3 in many objective ways, is not as good as the original Quake. So anywhere you can improve speed in the original Quake, you lower your ping. On a lan, your ping is about 13ms, in Quake, with 72fps.

However, if you have 400fps, your ping is about 3ms. It might be hard to understand why such things matter, if you haven't played Quake, but the game requires fine precision unlike any other first person shooter.

If you don't believe me, watch the "Def Dag Extreme" and "Frags Done Extreme" videos. Seriously, the stuff that people do in Quake, beets hands down any other skill related thing done in other games.

Considering that the original Quake is over 6 years old, maintaining at least 72fps in the game isn't very difficult.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[tshak]

I'm talking about the XBox release, which I've been playing non stop for the last couple of weeks. If you have a GF4 Ti4200 or a Radeon 9500 (or higher, respectively) then you should be able to experience the graphics at similar or better detail than the XBox version.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Quake3's magical number is 125 fps. Giving much of the same benefits as 72 fps in q1.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Proc6]

More importantly is how this will translate into capacity for future games. Doom 3 will take considerably more muscle than Q3 does...

... yet, sadly, will be equally mind-numbing, retarded and repetitive.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[iannn]

no, framerate makes a difference for jump height. it has to do with rounding error accumulation. in quake 3 92, 120, 140, and 170 are around the best framerates. here's the post i ripped this from: http://www.quake3world.com/ubb/Archives/Archive-00 0001/HTML/20000822-3-015173.html he posted the C++ program to read his heights. with one of these new cards you could r_picmap the graphics down and get 400 fps, you could get around 300 with the geforce 3

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Since I'm a Quake3 player I notice whenever my fps drops below ~100 (from the 125 max) because the mousesensitivity drops with the fps.

If I'm just watching someone else play I would probably not see the difference between 60 and 147

That's the main thing concerning framerates in 3d-shooters. The game is designed to run at specific speed at a specific framerate and when that framerate is changed the game runs at a different speed.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[cp5i6]

I believe the GFX will actaully sustain that high FPS.... however like the previous person who blinks alot mentioned it's kinda silly :)

But then that goes back to the old disagreement (almost as old as the MS vs Linux camp) where how good the details were.. how does image quality look and all that.

I bet if you turned off all the textures and ran q3 in wireframe mode I bet my Cirrus Logic 4 megs vram (that's right folks.. VRAM!!! not some cheap SDRAM crap they put in these new cards) can run q3 at 150fps :)

Anyhow on another point.. (and here's a tip for all you beginner FPS players) Benchmarks are stupid.. As any decent gamer knows when yer playing these FPS games... you turn off all details... turn off all that maximum image quality shit so you can get the advantage over a newb who has maximum detail and is busy admiring the view. I may have a ge3 .. but I RARELY ever test the limits of my card.. if you'd look at my screen.. you'd see like big squares (not polygons) running around...
Why you ask?... cuz big blocky squares are easier to hit then high resolution anti aliased polygons :)

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Drakonian]

Good point. What about the fact that the majority of monitors have an 85 Hz refresh rate, so they only update 85 times/second. Can anyone tell me if I'm out to lunch here or if all the people complaining about +100 fps rates are just over-compensating for something?

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[LoudMusic]

Blink? What's that? Something like the rumored "outside"?

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[JohnFluxx]

Hmm indeed. Say, like the other poster said, that you blink at 10x what I said, so 70km/h.
Now say the eyelid weighs only a few grams - say 0.01kg. ( I have no idea really, but those eye lashes seems quite heavy.) Say that we move them at a constant acceleration for 1/2cm, then constant deacceleration (seems a fair enough model.) We need the other to go from fully open to fully closed in 1cm/70kmph = .0005secs. At the middle of the eye we will need a speed of 140kmph (to average our 70kmph) and need to do so in 0.00025secs. This requires an acceleration of 140kmph/0.00025sec = 155555m/s^2. This would require a force of f=ma = 0.01*155555 = 1555N.
We require that force again to slow down, and then we have to open the eye again. (I'm assuming things like gravity cancel out etc).
So a total force of 1555*4N = 6220N. This is over a period of 0.001secs, so a total of 6220*0.001 = 6.2Watts are used. Say it is 90% efficent (muscles aren't perfect convertor, there will be friction despite the eye being very well lubricated,etc) so you will get 0.62W in waste heat.
That's not that much heat, although you would probably need to blink a lot more, since the blinking wouldn't be as effective. Since a blink takes about (guessing) 1/2 sec, let's say you would need to do 0.5/0.001 blinks = 500 blinks. Say you blink every 10 secs (I have no idea really), that would be 50 of these quick-blinks per second, so now our output heat is 50*0.62 = 31W - which would sting like a bitch :)

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Anonymous Coward]

How much more? Much more!!!

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Jett]

This is a really great point which is missed by many in the gaming world - this is also something that is particularly important to gamers with lower end machines. The case in point would be back in the early days of hardware acceleration.
Anyone remember the second generation Renditition Verite? It looked like crap in benchmarks - barely hitting 25-30fps on what was then a high-end PC. The thing is - it would also hit around there on a low-end PC. AND - more importantly it never dipped below that range. I ran one on my old crappy P100 system - I didn't have HIGH framerates in GLQuake but I did have CONSISTENT framerates, regardless of what went on in the game. I got the card for a 1/3 of what a Voodoo cost and got better performance out of it on my machine than I would have from a Voodoo (since my CPU wasn't powerful to push the thing).

I've never seen a benchmark which takes this sort of thing into account, the only way to tell is to physically sit and play with the card to see how it feels and to watch the FPS counter rise and dip.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Anonymous Coward]

It always cracks me up when someone takes the time to be a stickler about something like the capitalization of "iD" and gets it wrong. It's "id".

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Zzootnik]

It's unfortunate that there's no seemingly objective measure like fps for an AI system,

Now that's not a bad idea...I doubt we could put a number on it...(well--maybe XX number of simultaneous decisions per second)...But I'm thinking we could start a classification heirarchy that is relative to the other systems...Find some standard-ish, but good bot that can play different games...and throw it up against lots and lots of em...
Any given AI could then be rated as -Better than Zeus-bot AI- or -Worse than that walking eyeball AI-.

Pretty much, as long as we can get some kind of agreement on what AI will kill our test-bot the fastest/slowest, we can get a scale...Hmmm....Anyone have a bot that simulates human interaction in a game? (i.e.- outside of the games actual running code, but still inside the computer?)

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[deadsaijinx*]

there is more to just pixels. LOD is important, too.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[deadsaijinx*]

This is probably why consoles do so well. All the consoles are the same, they have only minor upgrades (some extra memory here, a new controller there), and you don't need to ever upgrade its core components. Perhaps the computer game industry should focus more backwards compatability.
Then again, maybe i'll just buy a PS2.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Ashran]

> Perhaps the computer game industry should focus more backwards compatabi
Huh?
A PC is 100% (well, maybe 99.999999%) backwards compatible. I'm still playing old games on my pc just for fun.
While the XBox II will most likely be able to and the PS2 can play games from the prior console generation the Nintento GameCube can not.
Although Nintento is releasing a GBA game adapter for the GC there hasnt been anything announced about N64 game adapter.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Spacelem]

And again at 333 fps. This allows the Famouss Q3DM6 bridge to rail jump to be done in a single jump, if a proper circle jump is performed. Otherwise, at 125 fps you need to start from the far end of the bridge, perform a circle jump and then bunnyhop to gain a little extra speed.

Oh, by the way, this jump can only be performed on a remote server, as for some reason a listen server screws with the physics enough to make this jump impossible.

Quake 1 jumps always seem far more impressive though in my opionion, because your speed is only capped if you press the forward button, and the stunts a good Quaker can perform are totally unbelievable. See http://www.planetquake.com/qdq/ for more crazy Quake 1 action.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[The Analog Kid]

Yes but for future games it won't be as high that's why. I also don't know why the stock Quake 3 is used a benchmark, what to see how funny it would be to see the card's fps on a 4-5 year old game, well we might as well pull Half-Life and benchmark that.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[KewlPC]

that's for the crappy (well, kinda) iD game

That's funny, since according to a couple of guys I know who downloaded the leaked alpha version of Doom 3, it's scary as hell.

id Software has stated, time and again, that for Doom 3 they are focusing on making the game as scary and cinematic as possible. They have a story, script, the whole 9 yards.

People forget that John Carmack isn't the only id Software employee. While I would be willing to wager that most (if not all) of the id Software employees have at least some programming knowledge, only a few of them actually do the game programming. Aside from John Carmack and maybe 2 other guys, the id Software employees create levels, make textures, create and animate models, etc., and don't have anything to do with the engine programming (aside from the occasional, "Hey, John, it'd be way easier to make levels if you changed engine aspect X to be more like Y." type stuff).

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[KewlPC]

Except that hardware makers would still be coming out with new, faster, better hardware every 6 months or so, in a continual game of one-upsmanship.

So it is only natural that game developers would want to take advantage of the abilities of the new hardware.

I'm sorry that you have to upgrade your computer every so often so that you can keep up with the rest of the world. I really am. But please, you aren't the only person in the world. If you don't want to upgrade your computer, THEN DON'T, but don't expect developers to keep supporting your TNT2 or whatever.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[KewlPC]

Sorry to burst your anti-id Software bubble, but according to people I know who've downloaded and played the leaked alpha of Doom 3, it's scary as hell.

id keeps telling people, "No, we're not going for mindless action this time. We're trying to deliver a very cinematic game that will scare the shit out of people." but nobody seems to want to listen.

It's much easier to just write the game off as being stupid so that you can remain an elitist snob and (the real reason) not have to upgrade your computer, isn't it?

I'm not an id fanboy myself, but unlike you, I haven't decided that Doom 3 will suck before it's even out yet. If the Doom 3 alpha is any indication, then the game will kick ass.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[randyest]

Good point that applies all to often. But have you played Battlefield 1942? The developers of that game did both amazing graphics (and view distances / LOD management!) and amazingly fun gamepqly.

There's a free muliplayer demo and a bot-laden 1p demo as well. Google knows about it.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[deadsaijinx*]

by backwards compatibility, i meant newer games on older systems, not older games on newer systems. And I know that your going to say, "but you can't play new games on an old console." I realize that, but the amount of time a console is considered to be top of the line is a lot longer than that of a computer. After all, if I had purchased a PS2 when it first came out, I could play any game that was released for the PS2 today. Computers, on the other hand, well, they're outdated before you open the box.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Jagasian]

The tricks done in the QDQ videos are impressive, and definitely worth checking out, but the tricks done in the Frags Done Extreme (FDE) series and the Def Dag Extreme (DDE) series are far more impressive. They contain both frag tricks and acrobatic stunts.

The fact that there is truely no limit to your speed in Quake is one of the key reasons it has more interesting physics. The other key points are the ramp jumps and no weapon switch delays. Things missing in Quake 3.

Just like rocket jumping was a bug at first, but then later designed into FPS games. And in fighting games, juggling your opponent was not designed into the game at first, but once people saw that such combos required skill... such things started to become designed into fighting games. You would think more FPS designers would design these things into future FPS games (no weapon switch times for juggling and no max speed, bunnyhopping, strafe movement for acrobatics).

Obviously the trend of today is to do realistic FPS games, but for the fun FPS games, these things should be standard gameplay constructs, just like the rocket jump.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[Jagasian]

Sorry, forgot to hyperlink Frags Done Extreme. Also realize that in these AVI videos, everything is in slow motion. Most of these frag tricks and acrobatic stunts happen so fast, that the entire videos are done in slow motion. Some are more slomo than others. So no physics modificaitons were made. Its all standard physics, just in slow motion.

Re:Finally, a decent frame rate.

[shplorb]

(now try to find a monitor with a 170hz refresh rate)

I'm looking at one right now as I type this. =]

21" Sony FD Trinitron, model CPD-G520

Keep this in mind..

[OutRigged]

I'm sure the GeForce FX drivers they were using were early beta versions, and as such, not optimized to the standard of which release drivers are.

I'll wait for the final hardware and drivers before I decide which to buy.

Re:Keep this in mind..

[blwrd]

I'll wait for the final hardware and drivers before I decide which to buy.

... and again this falls down to the driver issue, for linux at least :) For me as long as the nvidia provides better drivers (who cares if they're closed source :), I'll keep buying their products...

Re:Keep this in mind..

[Lt Razak]

Compared to what? Deciding now before it ever comes out?

Re:Keep this in mind..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, most people seem to be in the habit of doing that.

The general idea among most of the nVidia fanboy's I know, is if it's made by nVidia, it must rock, and totally own ATI.

Re:Keep this in mind..

[Anonymous Coward]

The general idea among most of the nVidia fanboy's I know, is if it's made by nVidia, it must rock, and totally own ATI.

Well isn't that true?

Re:Keep this in mind..

[Anonymous Coward]

This is total bullshit. Why was this idiot modded up? Because his username is X-BOX LIVE DEV TEAM? Nvidia drivers from beta to final have had *dramatic* speed improvements in the past.

Re:Keep this in mind..

[asv108]

I work for a major video game developer and can unabashedly say that the "release" drivers you speak of will barely differ from the "early beta versions" that you mention.

Then how do you explain the substantial performance boost with new releases of Nvidia's Detonator driver package over the years? I remember one particular release improving my quake3 FPS substantially a few years ago.

Re:Keep this in mind..

[dinivin]

How do you explain the crappy performace of nVidia's most recent linux drivers?

Dinivin

Re:Keep this in mind..

[prefect42]

Which is why in the article they say that the drivers are beta and as such the results should be viewed as beta too.

Come on, read the article.

The reluctance of NVidia to allow them to test the higher levels of AA is more telling if you ask me.

Re:Keep this in mind..

[Anonymous Coward]

I concur mr. dev team is talking out his arse...drivers have never been optimized before official release, and as a nother responder said, the detonator series has shown dramatic improvment every time a a new release comes out.....post your BS on your Blog where some fool may believe it

Re:Keep this in mind..

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT DOWN
-1, Troll

Parent post is the biggest crock of bullshit I have ever read.

Re:Keep this in mind..

[Zathrus]

Apples and oranges.

The release drivers are rarely substantially different from the "early beta" drivers... unless the beta drivers had massive amounts of debugging enabled, but that's generally not true either since video card makers want developers to have an actual reference platform and can send debug mode drivers if needed.

The speed improvements for the Detonator drivers have come over time as nVidia has refined the drivers. The speed improvements rarely coincided with the relase of a new card, but instead came 1-2 months afterwards. Or even in between product cycles. Hardly a case of beta vs release drivers.

Re:Keep this in mind..

[nautical9]

OutRigged was correct - there can be MASSIVE differences between driver revisions, and there typically is, which is why "leaked" betas are so wildly popular in the O/Cing crowd. I grab a new one every month or so, and although I may not see much of an improvement 4 out of 5 months, my benchmarks will suddendly leap up 10-20% (even NVidia claims the recent 40.x reference drivers are 25% faster than the 30.x). I also find the newer your card, the bigger the performance gains you typically see by upgrading the driver.

The reasons for a speed increase aren't always related to the graphics card itself, but can be due to the motherboard chipset, type of RAM, BIOS, or even a specific game or app itself. These tweaks will change how the card communicates with these in specific circumstances, which can be vary greatly between different consumers' machines.

Since the graphics card industry is hugely competitive right now, it's in their best interest to spend a lot of time tweaking their drivers to the max.

The reason consoles don't worry too much about it is because they have a standard set of hardware (read: one graphics card - no competing card that customers can benchmark against) that ALL game developers must work with. This also simplifies game development because they know the exact config and driver set that EVERY user will be using.

Even though I'm sure they COULD tweak the drivers (forgetting the expense of distributing a firmware patch), they'd prefer to leave the tweaking in the game code. Besides, you can't easily benchmark the various consoles against each other, whereas the graphics card folks for PCs know that every performance site and magazine is going to use the exact same hardware config and same game to test their card against all others.

Re:Keep this in mind..

[asv108]

Actually the most current release fixed a lot of problems for the integrated graphics on an nforce board I have.

Re:Keep this in mind..

[MrJones]

I Agree, you can ont compare a mature hardware and software(drivers) to a beta hardware and software.
It is insane to do so.
I afraid that we all need to wait until the final gFX card and drivers are out.

Re:Keep this in mind..

[Anonymous Coward]

The crappy X11 architecture.

Re:Keep this in mind..

[tshak]

How do you explain the crappy performace of nVidia's most recent linux drivers?


I think you answered your own question, sir.

Re:Keep this in mind..

[Anonymous Coward]

Even Nvidia can't do anything about the crappines of open sores GNU/software

Re:Keep this in mind..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, ATi Radeon 9700 Pro beats nVidia Ti 4600 big time at 1600x1200 with 4x AA (AntiAliasing) and 8x AF (Anisotropic Filtering); see here.

If GeForceFX can't beat the 9700 Pro at 2x AA then probably it won't stand a chance vs the R350 in todays games; the R350 (and RV350) should come at about the same time as GeForce FX, or shortly thereafter.

The xbox is the killer app here. Any graphic card develope touching it looses development speed on their high end cards (read nVidia).

Re:Keep this in mind..

[Anonymous Coward]

not to mention WAY AFTER final.

i think nvidia meters their drivers, as a tool to control among other things...stockmarket, benchmarks, competition, when you upgrade...etc.

one thing you can be guanteed of: the day you buy a new nvidia card...you won't see it's best performance for another 18months...quite possibly after you have upgraded 2 or 3 more times.

Re:Keep this in mind..

[TheCrazyFinn]

What are you thinking, the XBox's GPU is a byproduct of NVidia's last generation, which was delivered on schedule. The development of the NV30 began on schedule, and wasn't even affected by the already released NV2x XBox GPU.

competition

[vistic]

Competition like this kicks ass. The big players taking turns taking the lead. I only wish Matrox were making a larger effort than the Parhelia.

What I am surprised about though is that prices are so high for graphics cards still even with relatively good competition in the marketplace. I mean even the Parhelia debuted at like $400 didn't it?

It always seemed to be that the benefit of having AMD competing with Intel, was that I could get a really good CPU pretty cheap. (Though now it seems AMD is taking it easy for awhile, so that benefit may have been short-lived.) Yet I don't see the competition driving video card prices down.

There's some evil conspiracy afoot here, I know it!

Re:competition

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe one of the significant reasons for the comparatively high prices is that gfx card makers with these new ultra-high performance chips have r&d costs on the order of cpu makers like intel/amd, but sell considerably fewer units.

Re:competition

[netwiz]

What I am surprised about though is that prices are so high for graphics cards still even with relatively good competition in the marketplace. I mean even the Parhelia debuted at like $400 didn't it?

It's mostly due to high-end video chipsets costing so much, plus the added expense of the uber-fast memory that these cards require, but mostly, it's driven by ultimate demand for these products. Everyone needs a P4/Athlon XP, but only a few people need the absolute fastest display adapter out there. As a result, fewer units get produced, as fewer units will actually sell. Combine that with the already higher cost of producing core logic that's 1.5-2x the transistor count of high-end CPUs and RAM that's 2-3x faster than desktop stuff, and you've got a recipe for pricey hardware.

Also, don't forget that most products these days are priced at what the market will bear. People will pay $400 for the fastest thing on the block, so that's what they sell for. My general rule of thumb is to wait a month or two after the new, fast, whiz-bang product, then buy whatever card has the fewest problems and costs $300.

Re:competition

[vistic]

Everyone needs a P4/Athlon XP

I don't know... I'm using my Athlon 850 and it works fine... no plans to upgrade any time soon. (-:

Re:competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Though now it seems AMD is taking it easy for awhile, so that benefit may have been short-lived.

Hell yeah I wish I could have such a relaxed time, hanging around all day doing litle more the designing an entire new x86 chip with new instructions and a totall new platform design, getting test silicon out, squashing bugs in that, working with vendors like via which couldn`t survive if it wasn`t for you being easy on CPU bus IP issue compared to others and other chipset designers which need loads of help becouse they are new to the chipset arena or just wanna scale your platform way beond what you was thinking of when you started your "lets add 32 bits, how hard can that be" adventure while you are short on cash.

This just when your main competitor has just done the imposible (rather then updating the same boring pentium2 design, design a chip that makes no sense whatsoever except for one thing, upping clock speeds just as fast as consumers can afford and marketing can market).

And all of this while you try to inovate on "normall chips" to (pxa and memory) that all of a sudden noone wants anymore becouse just while you where bussy negotiating you way trough cross licensing agreements with intel then there is an "economic downturn" (hired all these bright people that think up intergrated memory controlers and stuff but none of them can think of such a simple thing).

Then there is the small issue of having to get rid of 10-20% of your staff just after you milion dollar production line was at risk of getting washed away with the rest of dresden, but overall quite relaxed.

Re:competition

[Anonymous Coward]

STFU loser. Go back to playing solitaire and don't ever post here again.

Re:competition

[patter]

It always seemed to be that the benefit of having AMD competing with Intel, was that I could get a really good CPU pretty cheap. (Though now it seems AMD is taking it easy for awhile, so that benefit may have been short-lived.) Yet I don't see the competition driving video card prices down.

Yes, the commodity GFX cards (which are insanely powerful compared to bleeding edge a year ago) are substantially cheaper due to competition. The _top end_ CPU is still not really cheaper than it ever was in my recollection, from watching the industry over the last 8+ years.

So you can't compare what any product debuts at with what it eventually will cost.

CPUs still seem to start at about $800-$1200 and decrease in price.

GFX cards seem to come out at about $600, and decrease until they're 'commodity'.

This is based on my experience in CDN$, so your numbers may be a little different ;).

Re:competition

[Anonymous Coward]

8-9 months between the retail launch of these cards and we're comparing them?? That's a whole generation of cards in the GPU/card market these days.

This has to be the most common story in the tech market - like every Louis L'Amour novel - same game, different names.

Nvidia is accomplishing here something akin to what Sony did during the Sega Dreamcast vs. Sony Playstation2 hype. Dreamcast was a great machine that was out long before Sony, and all Sony had to do was post theoretical specs and consumers held off on Dreamcasts and settled for their comparatively lame PS1 for another year or two.

Don't wait....

[swordboy]

nVidia still haven't release the integrated graphics version of the nForce2 that they announced over 6 months ago (although you can buy the non-IGP version). They told me that it would be out in September of 2002 and now they just ignore me. I've made the decision to not buy any more products from them since they actively engage in announcing products that take forever to materialize. ATI, OTOH, announces a product only as they are readying to ship it. I have much more respect for this.

I wouldn't be surprised if ATI has something oodles better than the FX if/when it ever ships.

Re:Don't wait....

[Anonymous Coward]

Nforce2 SSP motherboards were available since November. IGP version is late because there isn't much demand.

Geforce FX will be shipping within couple of weeks: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7050

Re:Don't wait....

[windex]

ATI still has the dual 9700 config to announce, they hinted it off when the 9700 first came out. I'm sure it'll kick the shit out of the GeforceFX, untill nVidia makes a dual GeforceFX card... That is, if nVidia designed their chip to be capible of running in a dual configuration like ATI did. =)

Re:Don't wait....

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, so that's the only way you can get people to buy ATi's stuff? Nice job.

Re:Don't wait....

[AmigaAvenger]

ATI has had some notoriously bad drivers that should not have shipped though... (ask some early owners of the various AIW cards...)

Re:Don't wait....

[Anonymous Coward]

They have caught up and are better than NVidia in some applications. When NVidia was the underdog, they didn't have drivers which compared favorably to 3dfx's drivers.

Re:Don't wait....

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm: http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=IO_20030103_7436

"SANTA CLARA, CA--JANUARY 6, 2003--NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, and Shuttle Computer Group, Inc., a leading provider of motherboards and small form-factor PCs, today announced the immediate worldwide retail availability of Shuttle's new XPC SN41G2, a shoebox-sized PC based on the award-winning and industry-leading NVIDIA nForce2(TM) motherboard platform processors. ....
Weighing only 12 pounds (5.4Kg) and measuring only 11.7 x 8.9 x 7.2 inches (295 x 200 x 180 mm), the SN41G2 incorporates GeForce4(TM) graphics, dual VGA outputs to drive two independent displays, Dolby® Digital 5.1 audio playback and an AGP 8X slot for future graphics expansion. For digital connectivity, the SN41G2 sports a S-Video-out, four USB 2.0, and three FireWire® ports for easy connection to high- speed digital cameras, MP3 players, and other popular digital consumer devices. The SN41G2 also makes use of Shuttle's patented Integrated Cooling Engine technology (ICE), which allows the efficient cooling of high speed processors, such as the AMD Athlon(TM) XP 2800+, without the fan noise associated with traditional high-end PCs."

Yes, Nforce2 IGP is released and shipping.

Re:Don't wait....

[mobets]

Early owners? I recently tried out an AIW 7500 and I don't know about the drivers, but the software that came with it was horible. I even went to their download page and got the latest versions of all of their sofware and it still gave me many problems.

Re:Don't wait....

[Majik Sznak]

Early doesn't come into it... I've got a Radeon 8500DV. Even the current set of drivers and software is buggy. (snif)

Re:Don't wait....

[Anonymous Coward]

I've made the decision to not buy any more products from them since they actively engage in announcing products that take forever to materialize.

Amen brother. I'm holding out for the secure version of MS Windows..

Re:Don't wait....

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen brother. I'm holding out for the secure version of MS Windows..

lol. Sarcasm at it's finest. ;-)

Re:Don't wait....

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just about the dumbest reason to leave nVidia, especially considering the product mentioned is already shipping.

Re:Don't wait....

[Anonymous Coward]

too bad that ATI has the worst driver on the planet and are complete Idiots in supporting the fastest growing operating system on the planet..

please. dont buy Nvidia.. that way I can say that only smart people buy nvidia and point to your supidity as proof!

Re:Don't wait....

[Anonymous Coward]

bahaha, and have fun with your suck-ass ATI drivers...

Re:Don't wait....

[theLOUDroom]

I am the unhappy owner of one of those AIW cards, specfically and AIW pro. There drivers for that card were horrible. I couldn't play any decent game for a reasonable amount of time without the damn drivers locking my computer. They never fixed the drivers, either. I tried every set I could get my hands on and they all had something wrong with them. I'm not going to buy an ATI card again unless they can actually go a few years without releasing awful drivers for any of thier cards and I don't see this happening soon.

I got rid of that damn AIW pro and bought a Gainward GF2 Ti golden sample (ships overclocked) card with VIVO. Now I have working (and stable) 3d, tv-in and tv-out under Linux, as well as Windows.

Re:Don't wait....

[blincoln]

Yay, then it will be possible to spend $800 for a gaming video subsystem!

Re:Don't wait....

[windex]

Yay!!!!!!!!!

oh wait..

*sobs in corner* I remember when VIDEO CARDS COST LESS THAN MOTHERBOARDS! NOW they're more than BOTH THE MOTHERBOARD AND CPU! WHY, GOD, WHY?

Re:Don't wait....

[Anonymous Coward]

...untill nVidia makes a dual GeforceFX card... That is, if nVidia designed their chip to be capible of running in a dual configuration like ATI did. =)

The GeForce3 and GeForce4 were both multi-GPU capable designs.

Quantum3D (spun of from 3dfx) is currently making dual NV20gl and NV25gl based products.

I have seen a presentation that mentioned the NV30/GeForce FX is multi-GPU enabled as well. Of course, like the GeForce3 and GeForce4, that doesn't mean NVIDIA will productize it.

Re:Don't wait....

[Eraser_]

I went to download some Rage Pro drivers for my computer. Turns out they have two sets of drivers, one that is WHQL certified, for what it's worth, but it says uses a barebones featureset. The other one then goes on to say how it uses your card to the fullest potential, but they can't seem to get it certified.

Come on guys, the Rage Pro is eons old, and you still can't write a decent driver for it?

Re:Don't wait....

[Radius9]

And that isn't limited to early owners. I bought a Radeon 9700 2 days ago, and ran into a problem installing the driver, where ATI's recommended solution was to reinstall windows. I didn't spend a lot of time on trying to get around it, I just re-installed windows, as it was a new system, but my experience with their software reliability so far has been very poor.

nVidia vs Everyone else

[Ninja Master Gara]

The early beta is probably the reason nVidia wouldn't release this before. They don't want to see numbers I like this out in the public before they're ready.

I'll still bet money the GF FX will be the dominant card come final release.

Re:nVidia vs Everyone else

[Seahawk]

The early beta is probably the reason nVidia wouldn't release this before. They don't want to see numbers I like this out in the public before they're ready.

Ready for what - making some optimizations to the drivers to make them look good in some random benchmark?

Ofc the drivers are beta, and the final release will probably be faster, but these figures look more realistic than the figures Nvidia told when the card was announced!

And tbh, unless things change drasticly(they seldom do), this card will probably not be much more than 20-25% faster than an radeon 9700 - but the radeon will probably be a bit more than 20-25% cheaper at that time!

Besides - who cares about those $400+ gfx cards? No sane person would buy them anyway, but instead go for a Ti4200 or Radeon 9500 Pro - value for money you know... :)

Re:nVidia vs Everyone else

[martyn s]

I'll still bet money the GF FX will be the dominant card come final release.

They better hope so. The 9700 was released, what, 3 months ago?

Re:nVidia vs Everyone else

[Ninja Master Gara]

The driver optimizations have similar effects on game performances. It's why nVidia's drivers are so highly praised. The benchmark optimization is retarded, but everyone does it. But nVidia gets it with the games too.

these figures look more realistic than the figures Nvidia told when the card was announced!

This is true. Marketing is evil. Evil evil evil.

this card will probably not be much more than 20-25% faster than an radeon 9700

When DirectX 9 is out the door, it will not only be faster, but look better. Much better. I suppose I'll catch flack for buying into the hype, but I've been blown away every time.

Besides - who cares about those $400+ gfx cards?

You're right about that last part. For me, it's just about keeping track of who's leading the industry and what technology my next card will have, when I buy it in a year for $120 :)

Re:nVidia vs Everyone else

[Ninja Master Gara]

I think it speaks volumes that despite that release date difference most people are still holding off their purchase decision until nVidia's card is out.

nVidia has one hell of a reputation to maintain, I don't think they'd let it drop for no reason.

It is entirely possible they screwed up the FX of course. If so, they're going to have to explain some devastating returns to accounting.

Re:nVidia vs Everyone else

[martyn s]

I'm not saying they screwed up the nVidia will screw up the GeForce FX. All I'm saying is that of course the GeForce FX will, for the most part, be more powerful than the Radeon 9700. The 9700 was released 3 months ago, and the FX isn't even out yet. That's the way the industry works.

Re:nVidia vs Everyone else

[k_187]

I'll still bet money the GF FX will be the dominant card come final release.

Well maybe, but I doubt if ATI will sit still. The 9700 is a damn fine card and they've still got like 3 months to cook up a 9900 or something to combat the GFFX. They're normally just leapfrogging each other, but I think nVidia dropped the ball when they GF FX didn't ship in november like it was supposed to. ATI's last 2 generations of products (8500 & 9700) have been pretty damn good, and they've gotten into the 6 month dev groove that nVidia used to have (before the GFFX) Well, competition is good, and I'm on a iBook anyway, so I can just drool. :(

Re:nVidia vs Everyone else

[Bluefire]

When DirectX 9 is out the door, it will not only be faster, but look better. Much better. I suppose I'll catch flack for buying into the hype, but I've been blown away every time.

How's that? Radeon 9700 is Fully DX9 compliant, so what in GFFX will look so much better?

Re:nVidia vs Everyone else

[GarfBond]

When DirectX 9 is out the door, it will not only be faster, but look better. Much better. I suppose I'll catch flack for buying into the hype, but I've been blown away every time.

Directx 9 IS out the door. ATI has released a new driver set designed for DX9 (although the OGL support within that set seems to suck, so stick with the Omega drivers until another Catalyst release) and all those demos they showed off at the 9700pro launch. Don't forget that a 9700pro is designed for DX9 too. GFFX is not unique here (or even the first).

Graphics will not look substantially better on a nv card than on ati. That is marketing hype.

Re:nVidia vs Everyone else

[couannette]

Who cares about directx ? What about write some good code in proper and portable library ????

Re:nVidia vs Everyone else

[Anonymous Coward]

until r350 comes out, which may have roughly *twice* the memory bandwidth of the GF FX.

Re:nVidia vs Everyone else

[damiam]

I had one in September, so it's been four months at least.

Re:nVidia vs Everyone else

[10Ghz]

When DirectX 9 is out the door, it will not only be faster, but look better.

Huh? What are you talking about? Both R9700 and NV30 are 100% DX9 compatible. To say that since DX9 is out, NV30 will "look better" than R9700 is in full honesty just plain stupid.

Re:nVidia vs Everyone else

[Ninja Master Gara]

The NV30 surpasses DX9 reqs, while the 9700 complies.

See info here, here, and here.

Re:nVidia vs Everyone else

[10Ghz]

The NV30 surpasses DX9 reqs, while the 9700 complies.

But both are 100% DX9 compliant. If a game is written with DX9 in mind, it will look identical with both cards (not counting such things as filters on the card and such. Those have usually been better on ATI cards than on NVIDIA, with Matrox being the best). There are some features in NV30 that go beyond DX9 specs, but in practise they don't make any difference when it comes it the image-quality

Good opportunity for a little question :)

[NeoEinstein]

Hey, as this is about graphic cards. What do you suggest me, an ATI Radeon or an nVidia GeForce ?

I always go ATI cards but I'm thinking about changing to nVidia, what's best ? I'm using mostly Linux as OS !

Re:Good opportunity for a little question :)

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't be happier with my 9700 Pro.

Re:Good opportunity for a little question :)

[ShwAsasin]

If your so happy about the card, why did you use anonymous? This would indicate you don't want the rest of the population knowing you like ATI. =D

Re:Good opportunity for a little question :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I'd rather not use a conventional username/password at work is all.

Re:Good opportunity for a little question :)

[mao che minh]

You won't have any problems with an Nvidia card under Linux using XFree86 4.x.x. I have installed maybe 50 systems with Nvidia cards, and use a GeForce 2 400MX myself.

Re:Good opportunity for a little question :)

[Anonymous Coward]

About even just now. Drivers are available for both. I currently use a Radeon 9700 Pro, upgraded from a Radeon 7500, and I was happy with both. I've used a Radeon VE and Radeon Classic with Linux as well, and those worked well, too. I've also had pretty good luck with the GeForce2 GTS and GeForce4 MX in the past too. Just now, I'd recommend the 9700 pro, though. By the time the GeForceFX is ready, the R9700 Pro will be buttloads cheaper, and almost as fast.

Re:Good opportunity for a little question :)

[Anonymous Coward]

NVIDIA seems to think the GeForce card you bought still belongs to them. They don't document their hardware and their "Linux" drivers are essentially closed source (what you compile is only a shim that calls the x86 blob they expect you to trust at ring zero).

Re:Good opportunity for a little question :)

[haloscan]

If you're using Linux as the main OS, then the best choice would definitely be the nVidia card. The nVidia drivers are much more mature than the ones for the Radeon (Catalyst). The nVidia card/drivers have not failed me yet. ;-)

Re:Good opportunity for a little question :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have room for the FX is your computer?
How much does fan noise matter?
Not rhetorical questions for some people.

GeForce TI4600 and Radeon 9700 Pro pictured together.
The GeForce FX is a rather long card, the same length as the TI4600 at 216mm or 8.5 inches:

http://www.ocprices.com/index.php?rev_id=95&cat_id =64

GeForce FX without it's cooling unit.
I read somewhere that the cooling unit is VERY LOUD. But that was one person's opinion.
The white Molex on the end is for the required 12-Volt power connector,
which makes the FX card effectively even longer, about 9.25 inches.

http://www.ixbt.com/video2/images/nv30/nv30-card-f ront-big.jpg

Page with a distorted picture that makes the FX look much shorter than it is,
but it shows the card with the cooling unit installed.
The cooling unit is very large and requires the space of the first PCI slot.

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/videocards/a rticle.php/3211_1502451__3

Maybe this is a better picture:

http://www.hardwareseeker.com/articles.html?f=gefo rcefx

But what about performance? I know I'm sort of blowing this off,
but from what I've been reading,
the Geforce FX is probably going to be the better card.

3dMark 2001 is not the end all be all

[Aggrazel]

3dMark 2001 is a guestimate on how fast things will work, its meant to torture your card and Game 4 (nature) is just that, the most punishing thing they could come up with.

But it is actual game performance that is important with most people, so while you may get better 3dmark scores, most people aren't running that a whole bunch to see those nifty graphics, they'd rather be running games.

Also, don't forget to mention that all these tests were run with 2xFSAA on.

Re:What's the big deal?

[TheToon]

Well, let's say 50fps just to have a number. You can spot a difference from 30fps to 50fps depending on how you view the output (crt, lcd, projector, broadcast, cinema... whatever).

But still, the reason for 100+ fps is that you need that extra speed when the scene is complex; 8 players, 12 monsters, 56 light sources, 93MB of textures, 1000+ objects.... then even a GeforceFX or Radeon9700 could drop down fps to noticable levels.

Re:What's the big deal?

[OutRigged]

If you've ever seen something moving at 30fps, and something moving at 60fps side by side, you can easily tell the difference.

We may only be able to see 30 frames per second, but 60fps sure does seem alot smoother.

Q3 Framerates are WITH 2xAA turned on

[uncleFester]

For those who don't rtfa, the quake3 framerates for both cards had 2x antialiasing turned on. When thrown in the mix, this becomes a bit more impressive than the simple 1xx fps rate shown, as a number of current cards can achieve mid- or high-100s speeds but with no AA.

It's not simply the frame rate, but what's actually being generated in that frame.

=r

Re:Q3 Framerates are WITH 2xAA turned on

[Anonymous Coward]

And those are 1600x1200 benchmarks. According to web statistics, most users still don't have desktop resolutions above 1024x768, which means they are probably going to need just 40% of the fillrate in games too. Framerates measured in kHz?

Re:Q3 Framerates are WITH 2xAA turned on

[KirkH]

What'd I'd love to see is these same tests with 4x or higher AA turned on. Apparently, nVidia disallowed MaximumPC from doing any tests but those, which is probably why the FX comes out on top. I'd bet that the 9700 wins at 4x and up.

Re:Q3 Framerates are WITH 2xAA turned on

[uncleFester]

I'm okay with being patient on that stat; the increase of 2xAA to 4xAA would be a exponential increase in processing, right? This is where driver optimization becomes more critical.

I figure Nvidia did enough internal testing to know they're safe on 2xAA but want to do further improvement before going higher.

Re:Q3 Framerates are WITH 2xAA turned on

[TheCrazyFinn]

nope, Memory Bandwidth is king at 4xAA. ANd the 9700 bootstomps the FX when it comes to bandwidth (about 20-25% more Memory Bandwidth for the 9700 Pro)

Re:What's the big deal?

[muyuubyou]

The eye can see, in most cases, from 60 to 80fps. More if the image is pure blinking. For FPS you can't tell the difference from 70 to 200fps is those 70 ARE STABLE (worst case - low peak).

The point isn't getting Q3 to 400fps but new generation games over 100fps AVERAGE.

Re:What's the big deal?

[digerata]

The big deal is that its a real world number. Yes, the eye can't distinguish much over 30fps, but we aren't concerned with that here. This is simply an established benchmark to tell us how well a card is performing compared to others.

Full benchmarks coming in few days

[Anonymous Coward]

You can disregard these results since they are made with alpha/beta drivers and silicon: "With early drivers and freshly fabbed silicon, the card we tested isn't quite what you'll find in stores when the card ships in February or March.".

Full benchmarks made with production silicon and drivers should arrive in few days.

Re:Full benchmarks coming in few days

[rxed]

I guess that explains the card that takes up two slots (as pictured on the review site).

From the Article....

[RebelTycoon]

And if you really twisted our arms, we'd bet money that it will be running on a 0.13-micron core and using 256-bit DDR II memory.

And if we grab your nuts and twist, you'll confirm this? And if we threaten to cut them off... I think you'll scream just about anything...

So let me guess, they know what's coming from ATI... But like they said, its not about bandwidth, its about GPU processing power, so how will a even bigger pipe that ATi isn't filling going to help....

Re:From the Article....

[daoine_sidhe]

Actually, as I recall from reading the article, it said the question was whether they'd be relying on GPU processing power or memory bandwidth. The other possibility is that once ATI goes to the .13 micron core, they may raise the clockspeed as well, which will mean a whole new ball game. We'll have to wait and see. Meanwhile, the only games I know of that may potentially use that generation of card is Doom 3; others will follow, but I think it'll be awhile. UT2003 runs just fine on a radeon 7500 or a GeForce 2 GTS.

What?

[Isbiten]

No benchmarks for Doom3? How will I know what to buy for my future über computer ;)

There goes all my Karma...

[Ogrez]

sorry, but I cant help myself

In Soviet Russia... Video cards benchmark YOU!!

Really though... it seems ATI is still suffering with problems writing good drivers for their hardware, and at least for the gamers out there, Nvidia has been the better choice for a long time.

Re:There goes all my Karma...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did this Soviet Russia stuff originate? Let me in on the joke dammnit!

Re:There goes all my Karma...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yakov Smirnoff jokes.

IN SOVIET RUSSIA
Jokes don't get you!

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

You may not be able to see but it effects game play drasticly. If you are at 30fps, you will be at a disadvantage to someone who is running at 70fps. The difference in FPS is also an indication of how well your PC is going to process the game, so its ok saying "i'll settle for 30fps" but this is an indication your PC may not be processing things as fast as it should be.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Alan Partridge]

Not true. X-Box itself runs at 59.94 fps (or 50), as do the PS2 and Gamecube. The flicker fusion frequency is normally taken as something in the region of 60-70Hz. Henec the "ergonomic" 74Hz standard that was adopted at one point.

Re:What's the big deal?

[blazer1024]

The important bit about fps is not what you can see, but what you can process between each frame that you see... stuff like AI and physics happen in between displayed frames, so the more you're able to push out, the more processing time you have for other stuff.

Re:not as many units?

[vistic]

Well I'm not so sure considering that most PCs shipped are x86 or Mac... and there's maybe three major chip manufacturers among these three (AMD, PPC, and Intel). And yet almost ALL these computers (certainly the more high end ones) will ship with either a graphics chip by ATI or nVidia.

Even when you take into account a lot of the graphics workstations which may be running some more exotic processor, both ATI and nVidia make high-end workstation cards too (though I'm not sure who 3dlabs is owned by these days).

And yes I know there are some *really* budget PCs out there that ship with onboard graphics by companies who primarily manufacture chipsets, but these PCs I'm pretty sure make up a small number of PC sales. Usually the "budget" PC still ships with graphics by nVidia or ATI, they just package one of their lower-end cards.

Who cares

[nuggz]

Geforce FX scored 209 FPS in Quake 3 (1600x1200x32)
while the Radeon 9700 Pro attained only 147fps


So what they are saying is that even at a ridiculous resolution, either card is capable of a higher framerate than your monitor, and your eyes.

Re:Who cares

[rschwa]

So what they are saying is that even at a ridiculous resolution, either card is capable of a higher framerate than your monitor, and your eyes

In a rudimentary game like Q3, yes.
Your point?

Re:Who cares

[Lethyos]

So what they are saying is that even at a ridiculous resolution, either card is capable of a higher framerate than your monitor, and your eyes.

With frame-rate to spare, you can achieve really silky-smooth images by syncing with the monitor's refresh. This prevents those ugly redraw lines that can occur from the next frame being drawn right as the display refreshes. So, having a rate higher than your refresh can be useful.

Re:Who cares

[gl4ss]

having _capability_ for higher fps than your monitor is refreshing at is good.

if you actually have the card do faster (by disabling wait for refresh) it will look teared.

Re:Who cares

[VistaBoy]

Actually, in the subject of Quake III, a high framerate is really important. The ideal framerate to be at for all points is 125 FPS, since the game's physics aren't based entirely on floating-point math. You can actually get a boost in jumping if your FPS is consistently 125 in Quake III.

To explain, you have to realize that normally, in C or C++, if you convert a floating point number to an integer, it always rounds down. However, Quake's physics engine rounds to the nearest integer due to special routines. The way that Quake jumping works is it's something along the lines of (jump velocity / FPS) for any given frame. So if you run at 125 FPS, you get the little decimal of how high you're going to go each frame to go round up, and you gain jump height.

nVidia and driver performance

[netwiz]

I'm willing to bet that there's another 20-30% in the FX due to driver tuning. nVidia typically releases a new product, then, after about two to three months, releases a driver that actually makes the card fast.

Plus, if this is the first of the GigaPixel cores, then there should definitely be more in it, and the fact that it's down on memory B/W shouldn't make much of a difference.

Re:nVidia and driver performance

[T5]

I would have agreed with you before the advent of the 9700 series by ATI and the broken product cycle because of the lateness of the FX. Nvidia's off their usual product cycle by about 6 months and no longer has the luxuries of (1) being the current performance leader and (2) having a vastly superior solution in silicon and drivers. ATI's drivers are much, much better than I expected (I'm a Rage Fury owner who has been enraged and infuriated at ATI's lack of drivers more times than I care to count). Nvidia must be in shock over the 9700 series. I don't believe that Nvidia has enough overhead in the FX to play their usual driver games.

Re:nVidia and driver performance

[netwiz]

I don't believe that Nvidia has enough overhead in the FX to play their usual driver games.

I wouldn't necessarily call it a "game". I suspect that they're off their cycle due to a massive change in chipset architecture at a transistor level, and that comes with delays as engineers try to wrap their brain around a new way of doing the same old thing. Remember, they went six generations of architecture w/ the old system, and by now understand all the implications of that method of turning numbers into pretty graphics. Now that they're doing something different in silicon, it's going to take some time before they reach that level of familiarity. I think they'll come along nicely in the months ahead.

maximumpc website

[asv108]

I like Maximumpc magazine, I even subscribed to it for a couple of years, but what is up with their website? It doesn't look terrible, but they could have a lot more content on there. Maximumpc seems to have always viewed their website as a threat to magazine sales. The magazine would have been much better off having a content filled, updated daily, community based site that would attract people to the magazine. I even remember one time a year or two ago when their website was not updated for a few months due to "renovations." Who shuts down for such things besides personal websites consisting of cat pictures and one of those "under construction" animations that came out with Netscape 2.0?

Re:maximumpc website

[Soporific]

MaximumPC would sell more mags if they didn't charge $8.50 or whatever per magazine on the rack. I saw one a month or two ago that was actually $10 bucks. Good magazine, too pricey at the news stand though.

~S

Re:maximumpc website

[asv108]

Yeah I love how they still try to use the included CD as a means to jack up the price. A duplicated CD that probably cost them twenty cents, filled with a bunch of readily available freeware is justification for hiking the price up by $3-$5.

Re:maximumpc website

[rxed]

I've unsubscrubed after the 'must-have-gear of year 2001' suggested $100 screwdriver (with lifetime warranty!). I wonder how much they got paid (the MaxBS magazine) to say that.

Re:maximumpc website

[Anonymous Coward]

Granted, the newstand price is ridiculous, but the subscription price is more than reasonable. I get it and it's something like 1$ an issue, which is definitely worth it, as far as I'm concerned.

Hm...

[foxtrot]

The Radeon 9700 pushes 147 frames per second.

The GeForce pushes over 200 frames per second.

My monitor refreshes 75 times a second.

Tell me again why I want a top-of-the-line graphics card?

-JDF

Re:Hm...

[DAldredge]

To help the US economy. If you don't buy one, you are helping the 'EvilDoers(tm)' and are no better then the terrorists.

Re:Hm...

[Anonymous Coward]

To display scenes at least 2-3x as complex as Quake 3, of course.

Re:Hm...

[mdwebster]

So you can turn up all the dials and switches in the latest games. Battlefield 1942 with 8x Antialiasing & 16x Anisotropic Filtering would still likely cause either of these cards to dip down well under 75fps.
That's more what I'm interested in, from reading about the Radeon, it's supposed to give you high-end AA & AF "for free". There's some performance hit but not nearly as much as other cards. I wonder how the GF-FX will stand up to high-end AA & AF.

Re:Hm...

[mobets]

Doom 3. I saw the Doom 3 Theater demo at Quake Con. This game will kill my GeForce 2. And if I am going to upgrade, why not get the best, like I did with this one, and not have to upgrade again any time soon.

Re:Hm...

[Zathrus]

Hey, why don't we test it with Quake1? Bet we can come close to 1000 fps.

And, yet, even with Q1 running at 1000 fps UT2k3 only runs at 140 fps. Wonder what something with even more complexity than that would run at... oh, look, there's a benchmark that only did 41 fps.

Or go look at CodeCult.com's Codecreatures, which does a lovely 6 fps on a 2.5 GHz P4 w/ Radeon 9700 at 1600x1200 anti-aliased and ansitropic filtering. And it still doesn't look real.

Until we have holographic imaging that's indistinguishable from reality the cards aren't there yet. If you don't need/want it, then fine, don't buy it. But whining that it's clearly beyond what's needed is, well, stupid.

Re:Hm...

[Jorrit]

Because a faster 3D card allows you to:
- Spend more time doing other things.
- Make more detailed worlds.

Running the old games at such high speed doesn't make much sense of course. But it does make it possible to created even more detailed games.

Greetings,

Re:Hm...

[Vireo]

In all seriousness... In Quake 3, the physics model is tied to your framerate (i.e. a new snapshot of the "world" is computed at each frame). It is well known among avid quakers that the physics is different for different framerate, and that there is an optimum at 125 FPS. This has nothing to do with the visuals. You can go faster and jump higher when getting 125 FPS. In one-player mode, it is possible to separate world snapshots and visual frames, but not in multi-player mode. So most gamers will in some ways try to achieve above 125 FPS and then cap it (using the com_maxfps in-game variable) to 125 FPS. It is then important that the card do above 125 FPS in all maps, all occasions (moreover in heavy battles involving many models and thus many polygons).

I can't talk for other games, but since the Q3 engine is widely used, that may be the case for some of them too. That partly explains the "need" for high-FPS.

Re:Hm...

[Zog The Undeniable]

ISTR that Quake 3 actually switches the monitor to a 60Hz refresh rate. It flickers visibly with a bright map. So yes, I see what you're saying.

Re:Hm...

[roystgnr]

It is well known among avid quakers that the physics is different for different framerate,

And does the Quake 3 client actually transmit it's own private physics calculations to the server in a multiplayer game? If so, why would the server believe a client's physics over it's own calculations and why have no cheats sprung up to take advantage of this ridiculous security hole? If not, why does the "different physics" matter?

Re:Hm...

[haloscan]

Quake 3 actually switches the monitor to a 60Hz refresh rate

Erm. No, some *operating systems* (Windows XP/2k being examples), switch all games to 60Hz rate for some idiot reason. Win98 and such don't have this behavior (if you choose "Optimal" in the refresh rate setup). Also, Q3 I know for a fact definitely doesn't use a 60Hz refresh on Linux. Whatever settings you have setup in your XF86Config are used--as they should be.

Re:Hm...

[ivan256]

Until we have holographic imaging that's indistinguishable from reality the cards aren't there yet.

That's an interesting comment to make considering that isn't the direction these cards are going in. They're speeding up two dimensional images (yes, I know they're called 3D cards, but they're rendering a two dimensional image). holographic imaging (assuming we figured out the display) would require exponentionally more power than these cards have. If that's what you think these improvements are working towards than in the grand scheme of things this card will be a baby step up from a TNT2.

Re:Hm...

[Pongles]

Hey, why don't we test it with Quake1? Bet we can come close to 1000 fps.
The original Quake engine runs at a maximum of 99fps. Ask Half-Life if you don't believe me.

Re:Hm...

[Anonymous Coward]

"And does the Quake 3 client actually transmit it's own private physics calculations to the server in a multiplayer game? If so, why would the server believe a client's physics over it's own calculations and why have no cheats sprung up to take advantage of this ridiculous security hole? If not, why does the "different physics" matter?"

You are definately wrong. You don't even know what you are talking about, you stupid fool.

Re:Hm...

[ed1park]

The Q3 client probably does not transmit the "physics calculations", but the current position instead. (scalar, not vector)

The physics is prolly done all client side along with the rendering.

Regardless, I've seen this "bug" for myself. I think it was level Q3DM8, there is a ledge with a super health that you normally have to drop down on. However, after changing the max frame rate to 125, I was able to jump onto the ledge.

I learned this after I asked someone after watching others jump onto it, but I couldn't for the life of me.

Has this been exploited? Yes. To what extent, I don't know. Of course, I haven't played Q3 in a long time. May have been addressed in a recent patch.

Re:Hm...

[Danse]

Wow! Another brilliant debunking by Anonymous Coward! How does he do it? And how does he defeat the 30-post-per-4-hour limit? The world may never know.

Re:Hm...

[Vireo]

First of all, I'm not an expert on this matter so I can't answer you definetely. Obviously there are many security holes in the game as demonstrated by the many aimbots available. PunkBuster is a technology enabling the detection of aimbot use, and the banning and kicking out of aimbot users, but does not prevent aimbot use per se. However in my knowledge there is no cheat allowing physics hacks (e.g. high jumping), so that the physics must be computed or checked server-side (?).

However, the rate at which this is done is certainly less than 125 times per second. Given a ballistic trajectory (e.g. a player during a jump), the trajectory could be checked by the server but the actual position occupied by the player along that trajectory is updated at the frame rate. At 125 FPS, given the standard height at which each player can jump in Quake, the player actually is able to be during one frame at the apogee of the trajectory, which is not the case at other framerates. Thus, certain items in certain maps for example are only reachable if your framerate is exactly 125 FPS.

Thus, the physics doesn't really change with the framerate. It's the way the "world" is sampled (trajectories, etc.) that is the problem here. And this is done client-side. You can decouple the two in single-player mode (i.e. position updated at 125 Hz, but screenshots generated at 50 Hz), but in multiplayer, by default, servers do not allow this.

Sorry I can't be more precise... Do a search for "Quake 3 trickjumping" to now more about this, since many "trickjumps" in Quake necessitate the 125 FPS framerate.

Re:Hm...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have just discovered what the rest of the world calls "frame of reference".

Congratulations, you are still a dork.

Re:Hm...

[Spezzer]

Quick note: It has been shown that the 'peak values' of FPS for you to achieve the greatest trajectory are those that, when divided by 1000, will have a whole number.

The most ideal value would be 1000 FPS, since it divides into 1000 perfectly, and once. Other values are 500, 333, 250, 200, 166, 142, 125 ...

You'll notice that if you do com_maxfps of 350, drawfps in quake3 will 'cap it' at 333, and so on for any of these numbers. Thus, the closer you get to these actual values, the better trajectory you will have. 125 is just a popular one that is used since most graphics cards during this discovery could get 125fps consistently. I believe 333fps provides a better trajectory than say, 125fps, but there are webpages out there showing the actual math behind all of this which will prove this.

Re:What's the big deal?

[mattyohe]

Between 30 and 60fps the human eye can not see the difference, this means that if you display 60 different frames per second you can only see the difference between half of them. The ONLY reason to have more than 30 fps, is if you come into a graphic intensive area, it gives you more room above 30fps, thus you can stay at a lifelike playing level, even in heavy graphics.

What you feel is right is the only thing that matters... the rest is just hype.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another misguided fool. The eye can see considerably more than that, up to about 70-90 FPS. You will notice the difference between a game that runs at 30 stable FPS and one that runs at 60 stable FPS. The 24-30 FPS on TV and cinema is only perceived as fluid because of motion blur.

And even in a game, having FPS over say, 70 is useful because the frame rate will vary. When there's suddenly much action on the screen the frame rate will drop...

What I miss in all these benchmarks

[archeopterix]

They never test the number of text lines per second in text mode. Or Nethack FPS. My card does 7.5 FPS in Nethack, if I click the keys really fast.

Re:What I miss in all these benchmarks

[Zathrus]

While humorous, once upon a time it did matter how fast you could scroll text, and cards would be benchmarked based on how fast they could do it in a window (doing it in a FS text session was a non-issue).

I won a Number9 Imagine128 card at Comdex back in the early 90s... I distinctly remember being amazed since for the first time ever it was faster to scroll text in a window than it was full-screen.

Nowadays it's a total non-issue of course.

Oh, and I get far better FPS in Nethack. You're just a slow typist ;)

Re:What I miss in all these benchmarks

[MikeBabcock]

I run SSH to remote Linux boxes on a Windows XP box quite a bit and the fact that my video card drivers don't accelerate scrolling text is very irritating. The scrolling speed more than triples if I cover 3/4 of the window (reducing the screen draw times; meaning its waiting for pixel draws).

I still care about text-in-GUI performance, as do many other people -- we just have nowhere to look for information as to whether it works well or not.

My other complaint is a lack of testing of 3D-in-a-window driver compatibility. I do rendering in a window often enough that I want my 3D speeds to not drop from 60fps to 12 because I'm running in a window instead of full-screen.

Re:What I miss in all these benchmarks

[mav[LAG]]

When I first played Nethack on an XT running DOS, framerate was critical. When you went down a level, it was easy to tell if there was a shop on that level - everything slowed down visibly!

optimized?

[oliverthered]

optimized for what, Quake benchmarks.

I seem to recall a long standing argument about GFX card drivers being 'optimized' to perform well in the standard performance tests e.g. Quake 3.
Couldn't find a link on google though.

Re:optimized?

[Hadlock]

do a google search for "quack 3" and whanot. i think it was actually the ati drivers that were optimized for quake 3. what they did is they took a hex editor with a "find and replace" function and found every instance of quake3 in the executable, and changed it to quack. speed decreased a good 14 fps, and this was back in the day of
too lazy to find a link, though.

Re:optimized?

[idlethought]

When you optimise code like GFX drivers you can only work against a limited number of tests- Some artificial some drawn from real applications.

If you assume that those people running the benchmarks for reviews try to pick the 'mark that most represents likely usage then the card manufacturers will, by using the same benchmarks, generally optimise for the important cases.

Of course there are problems with this- a limited scope in selecting the benchmarks or a mistaken assumption about what is a 'typical' application can cause certain features to perform badly when used in certain ways. But when developing new games and applications the developers will prove against the drivers of popular cards and should change their methods.

Ideally it becomes a virtuous circle, in practise it's more of a meander. The key thing is that the reviewers and the buying public should look at as wide a selection of differing but relevant benchmarks as possible.

Re:optimized?

[Hadlock]

err back in the day of less than 100 fps, so you're talking a good 15-20% speed increase. forgot the less than chevron is used in html. still waking up. really should use the preview...

Re:optimized?

[nautical9]

Yes, ATI was accused of cheating in one of their driver sets, and they did indeed do some "quackery". But since this happened, more and more people are looking for it, so I doubt any GFX card company would dare try it again.

But also keep in mind that optimizing for a specific game isn't necessarily a Bad Thing, so long as it doesn't hurt the visuals or quality. For example, if you know a certain game doesn't need/use certain features of the card, and by disabling them you improve performance, then why not. (ATI, however, vastly cut down on the texture quality in the game itself to get their increases - tsk tsk).

Re:optimized?

[hamburger lady]

do a google search for "quack 3"

strange, no video games came up. some comics did tho.

Re:optimized?

[oliverthered]

Unless you reserve caching/on-chip memory or whatever in a manner that benifits Quake 3 benchmarks, but can have a negitive impact on general performance.

Re:optimized?

[oliverthered]

Idealy a comparison should be made against the benchmark tests supplied by the GFX card manufacturers.

The cards usually come with some demos to show off the cards, the demos should be tweeked to give the best performance out of their card.

Re:optimized?

[Hadlock]

did a google for "quack 3 video driver". 4th link is the article that started it all, on [H]ardOCP, its about the radeon 8500, so it's more recent than i thought.

here's the link

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTEx

Re:optimized?

[Chazmyrr]

I doubt any GFX card company would dare try it again.

It's not like this is the first time for ATI. I seem to recall the Rage Pro Turbo outscoring a Voodoo2 on 3D Winbench. Needless to say real world performance wasn't even close.

Re:optimized?

[bogie]

Talk to people who bought a ATI 8500 when it first came out if there is such a thing as optimizing. The drivers available when the 8500 came out only gave sub GF3 performance, now they give give close to GF4 level performance. Think of how much of a impovement that is, especially since the hardware hasn't changed a bit. So yes these drivers are not optimized yet, and there will be significant speed improvments 6 months from now as compared to the Beta drivers they are using now.

Re:optimized?

[default luser]

The Rage Pro "Turbo" driver was designed to give a %40 increase in Winbench, and it did. But the problem with that driver was it killed performance in games, and the driver's actual performance was revealed by Tom Pabst and the gang.

Quack was a similar situation, except it simply forced the user's OpenGL settings to lower quality without notifying the user. Thus, no other games took a performance hit, and that's the reason the issue too so long to uncover.

This situation is quite different. The latest 3dmark tests actually stress a memory and T&L subsystem much more than Quake 3 can.

So, as we all expected, the higher horsepower Nvidia core can paint more pixels than the 9700, but when stressing the card's best features ( features used by every game released this year ), the Radeon pulls out in front.

Re:optimized?

[randyest]

I doubt any GFX card company would dare try it again.

You say that like ATI mea culpa'd and apologized for the quackery. On the contrary, the official ATI comment, according to hardOCP, was:

John B. Challinor II APR - Director, Public Relations at ATI Technologies Inc. "ATI optimizes its drivers on many different levels, including the application level, the game engine level, the API level, and the operating system level. That is, some optimizations work only on specific games, while others work only on specific game engines or only on specific operating systems. In the case of Quake III and Quake III Arena, we were able to achieve certain optimizations specifically for that game, as we do for other popular games. Our engineering team is committed to providing the best visual experience for the user in all applications, with the optimal combination of high frame rates, image quality, and stability."

To me, that doesn't say "we won't dare try that trickery again," but "yeah, so? It's a feature!".

Re:What's the big deal?

[t0shstah]

Actually, the idea is usually to retain a high rate of frames per second no matter what you are doing.

For example, my old 900mhz PC can do about 70-80 fps on Quake 3 with a moderate level of detail on if i'm just standing still (and looking at a wall, heh). When I start to move around, this fps will drop and rise depending on what is being presented on the screen at the time, such as texture detail, depth of view and other players. This causes me some real grief when trying to shoot people, especially with hit-scan weapons like railguns (ie they hit the instant you fire or there abouts, they don't travel like rockets) because you are introduced to a kind of graphical "lag", with the timing of the graphics on the screen changing constantly in relation to the actual action.

In summary, its usually a lot better to have a card that can pump out a nice steady 125fps using a ratecap than a hypothetical one which could push 160fps but will fluctuate wildly. Obviously the higher the framerate, the less noticable effect, but I at least seem to notice it. Therefore, the solution is to either lower your detail settings (I can get 80fps solid in "Tetris Mode" Quake3) or buy a card that can chuck out silly amounts of frames per second.

Re:What's the big deal?

[martyn s]

Aside from all the other things being mentioned here, another thing to take into account is motion blur. When you watch a movie at 24 fps, or television at 30 fps, motion blur makes sure you don't miss anything between frames. If the action is moving fast enough, it will appear as a blur in a single frame, so you're not missing anything "between" frames. Not so in a videogame. In a videogame, if the action is moving too fast there will be "gaps". So even though, technically the eye can't see anything above a certain frame rate, you can't really directly compare television or movies to video games as far as framerate is concerned.

not reliable

[Anonymous Coward]

the reliability of this source has been seriously questioned. this story has been on tweakers.net for most of the day already.

Re:not as many units?

[Alan Partridge]

who is this mythical PPC?

If you meant PowerPC, they are made by both Motorola and IBM.

You dont. You want a new monitor + video card.

[Viewsonic]

Have fun spending a few grand to get something readable. 75Hz... Man, your eyes must be bloodshot. Too much flicker.

Re:You dont. You want a new monitor + video card.

[Anonymous Coward]

75 hz is plenty fast enough to not see the refresh.

55-65 is too close to the flurescent light bulbs. but if you see the flicker on 75, you are either BSing, have it actually set to 60, or you need an eye exam pronto

Re:You dont. You want a new monitor + video card.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see it but I DO notice it. My eyes hurt after a long exposition to anything less than 85Hz (and after a minute or so of 60Hz).

Re:You dont. You want a new monitor + video card.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fluorescent lights: >= 100 Hz.
75 Hz is sufficient for small CRT monitors with moderately long afterglow, but not for 19" or larger monitors (because human peripheral vision is more sensitive to fast motion / flicker) with short afterglow, which are the majority of monitors in use today. Besides, flicker is a slightly subjective effect and is also influenced by the surrounding lighting.

Re:You dont. You want a new monitor + video card.

[WD]

The refresh rate required to not see flicker depends on a person't persistence of vision. Some may not see any flicker at 60Hz, while others (such as myself) can see flicker at anything under 100Hz.

Re:You dont. You want a new monitor + video card.

[CaseyB]

but if you see the flicker on 75, you are either BSing, have it actually set to 60, or you need an eye exam pronto

Not at all. Just because you have less-evolved vision, doesn't mean the rest of us suffer with the same handicap. I see a noticable difference between 75 and 85 Hz. That's pretty much my upper bound though.

Try looking at the display out of the corner of your eye. The retina's persistence of vision is lower there, and it makes the difference more apparent.

Re:You dont. You want a new monitor + video card.

[MikeBabcock]

I complain about anything under 85 myself.

Just FYI.

Re:You dont. You want a new monitor + video card.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm even weirder - 74Hz gives me a headache like no other, and 60 flickers too much, but everything else is fine.

well what do you know

[Anonymous Coward]

I never thought I would see the day (perhaps a feeling many share on this card, but not this subject) that I would have to point to a tweakers.net article not only for being sooner but also being more in depth. The tweakers.net "news" posts tend to be bad translations of ancient slashdot posts, with believe it or not, even more braindead comments, but the geforce FX benchmark post is even updated citing doubths about the trusthworthiness of these benchmarks! Doubts which I share given the importance of the succes of this card to not only nvidia but also the card manufacturers.

Lets hope someone posts the slashdot distributed x-box private key cracking project posts on tweakers, you may get dump posts there, but the dutch power cows provide great power to such projects [insert statement about brains and brawns here].

Re:not as many units?

[netwiz]

yah, but not every system ships w/ the most uber card out there. Granted, you can order such a system, but odds are it's a top-of-the-line, $3000 workstation (or game box). Most vendors won't put the latest-and-greatest card in the system until there's a lower-cost alternative version of the card. For example, any of the GeForce 4 MX cards, or the Ti4200 64MB. Or for that matter the Radeon 9000/9500.

As for the shipping CPU type, Intel has, by far, the lion's share of the market. PC/Mac ratios run what, 50:1, and of the PC's shipped, some 80% of them are Intel? And I think I'm being conservative. The ratios there are probably much worse (for the little guy).

Quake 3???

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are people still using these outdated games for graphics performance? I am not interested in what it can do in quake 3, but how the performance is with vertex and pixel shaders (both which are WAY cool features.. you can greatly reduce polygon count and do *better* effects than you could before with these babies) and other, more modern things.

Re:Quake 3???

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason Q3 is still used is because it scales well. When it comes down to it, no other games are as fast as Q3. For the most part Q3 (and Q2 to a degree) runs as fast as the hardware can be pushed.

Other games like UT don't scale nearly as well with faster proccessors and graphics cards.

Q3 is a maximum power graphics chruning engine.

UT, et al, are not written down at the bare metal level and suffer for it (performance-wise, the games are otherwise good).

Re:What's the big deal?

[Junks Jerzey]

Between 30 and 60fps the human eye can not see the difference, this means that if you display 60 different frames per second you can only see the difference between half of them.

This myth needs to be put to rest already. It's trivially easy to tell the difference between 30 and 60fps. Period. It has always been this way. And 60fps is much nicer for very high-speed action games (it doesn't matter in other cases). Beyond 60fps, though, diminishing returns kick in very quickly.

And realize that this is a *benchmark*, not insistence that 300fps is better than 290.

Isn't this more complicated than just Hz?

[beezly]

This is far more complicated than Hz. When you go to the cinema, the film is projected at 24fps (I *think*). How many people do you see complaining about flicker at the cinema? Not many.

Remember, XBox, PS2, Gamecube and all the other consoles are designed to output to *INTERLACED* devices (ie, your TV). So whilst they are outputting 50 times a second, they're only outputting half the scan lines each time the scan down the screen.

It's my guess that monitor designers have a hard time calibrating there monitors for the best "non-flicker" effect. A designer never really knows what frequency the monitor is going to be run at. Certainly, if they could guarantee that a monitor is always going to be run at a specific rate, they could design the phosphor so that it only begins to fade (significantly) after 1/74th of a second later. I imagine that would have far more effect on flickeriness (I like the sound of that word).

I'm guessing here, but I'm guessing to convince your brain that animation is fluid, you need around 30hz or so (similar to TV and film). I imagine convincing your brain that something is flicker free is a combination of frequency, phosphor fade time and all sorts of other magic.

Re:Isn't this more complicated than just Hz?

[Alan Partridge]

Nope, in the cinema the 24fps is projected at either 48 or 72 "flashes" per second. All the projectors do is flash each frame two or three time. If you watch a film actually projected at 24fps it is unbearable - headache inducing doesn't begin to describe it.

You're absolutely spot-on about the phosphor persistence, however. therefore you shoud always run your CRT monitor at it's recommended or near maximum refresh rate - I run my Sony G400 at 100Hz, which is nice because it allows QuickTime to sync my 25fps video up every fourth frame. The interlace aspect is wrong, too. certainly, the PS2 generates 50 (or 59.94) full frames every second, the limitations of TV mean that it can only show half of each frame, but it renders them nonetheless.

As for the X-Box and GC, I believe they have progressive output modes in addition to normal 2:1 interlace, and can therefore give you full res frames with a suitable monitor.

Re:Isn't this more complicated than just Hz?

[Viking Coder]

How many people do you see complaining about flicker at the cinema?

That's because people like the Director of Cinematography know what they can and cannot shoot given those 24fps.

As a counter-example, try watching Pulp Fiction again, in the theater, when they first go into Jackrabbit Slims. Tarantino does this camera move from right to left where the flicker is HORRIBLE. Most of the time, they work hard to avoid problems like this - that's why you don't normally notice them.

Also, keep in mind that a TV signal has 2 half-frames per full refresh, so effectively they get 60hz.

Re:Isn't this more complicated than just Hz?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, XBox, PS2, Gamecube and all the other consoles are designed to output to *INTERLACED* devices (ie, your TV). So whilst they are outputting 50 times a second, they're only outputting half the scan lines each time the scan down the screen.

Actually, the X-Box is capable of outputting non-interlaced images (the PS2/GC cannot).

Re:Isn't this more complicated than just Hz?

[SScorpio]

The GC can do non-interlaced, and some games on the PS2 can as well. Also a newer version of the DVD driver for the PS2 has surfaced that allows progressive scan DVD playback with you buying a remote.

Re:Isn't this more complicated than just Hz?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is this new progressive scan dvd playback driver for the playstation 2?

As far as I know, this driver revision was announced a long time ago, but is still not available in any market. (One report I read said that the intended delivery system of the new driver in Japan would be a hardware add-on.)

Re:Isn't this more complicated than just Hz?

[Timmeh]

Could you give me more information about this, or a link or something (or both)? I'd like to learn some more. Why would they flash one frame two or three times when they could flash one frame once for the time it would take two or three frames to flash? I guess I don't have a firm grasp on this because I imagine that would give the same effect (apparently not tho').

Thanks in advance for a reply.

Wow. It's faster.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. It's faster. I'm surprised! It has been 6 months since the 9700 was released, after all.

Never-the-less, It is nice to see news. Everyone was touting this as being the end all, be all video chip. It doesn't seem to be a big deal. How about we see how it performs with antialiasing and some advanced features of MODERN game engines.

Not very fair

[GauteL]

Comparing future products against real shipping products is not very fair without at least keeping this in mind. This article barely mentions it.

ATI might very well ship an improved version around the time GeForce FX ships.

Re:Not very fair

[Anonymous Coward]

It may barely mention it, but it DOES mention it. I don't want to be slapped in the face with continuous warnings about how the GF FX isn't a retail product just some because people can't read right.

The thing is if we continue to get slapped in the face with crap like this, then people will never know how to read right, and pick up facts like that, that they should keep in mind during the rest of the article.

Re:What's the big deal?

[iceman_IX]

The higher the FPS of a card in a current game, the higher it's going to be in later games that might bring it closer to 30 fps. Quake 3 is old...but it's a standard. That's why the benchmark is so high. No one buys a 9700 Pro to play Q3.

Re:not as many units?

[ShwAsasin]

Most major manufacturers (Hp, Compaq, IBM, Gateway...) use S3, SiS, Trident, and other cheap video cards and NOT ATI/Nvidia for their base and average PC's. Only the more mid-level to high-end machines have NVidia/ATI cards in them. I've seen some new Pc's with Geforce2's but there it's is not the mainstream shipping card by any means.

You are neglecting several other key brands of cards which are used in some cases way more then NVidia / ATI. Matrox for instance is used primarily for Digital Editing, and general 2D Graphics work because of it's fabulous image quality. 3D Labs makes great 3D CAD/Imaging (as in Production Rendering) cards which give all sorts of shader/gl extension benefits not scene on regular cards. Evans and Sutherland make good Cad cards. SGI makes good rendering cards, same as Sun.

Nvidia and ATI are good gaming cards, but they are not the only manufacturers of video cards. Their cards are built for gaming. They may work your latest pirated copy of 3d studio max/maya/animation master/lightwave/truespace, but it doesn't mean it's good at it. Far from it actually.

In other news Carmack blames ATI for Doom III leak

[Anonymous Coward]

"AN INTERNAL MEMO from John Carmack, the creator of the Doom series of games, blames Canadian graphics company ATI for leaking the alpha of Doom III.

In a memo to his employees, leaked on the Internal Memos site, he said: "ATI is more likely to be responsible than ever before. One employee from the company has been fired and the situation has been taken care of.""

Full story here

real world vs benchmarks

[CatKnight]

"It seems that the GeforceFX is the clear leader in pure processing power, but in memory bandwidth the 9700 Pro is still king"

or maybe the geforceFX offers REAL performance, while the ATI just manages to cheat on benchmarks? ;)

Re:real world vs benchmarks

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

or maybe the geforceFX offers REAL performance, while the ATI just manages to cheat on benchmarks? ;)

Hmm... I just bought a shiny new Radeon 9700 Pro. It's right here, in my hand, about to go in my new PC. Tell you what: I'll set mine up, you build the best GerforceFX-equipped PC you can, and let's test REAL performance. Fair? ;-)

4xAA

[cca93014]

They need to run the demos with 4xAA. The 9700 and NV30 are so fast as to make FPS irrelevant and eye-candy relevant.

If the game is running at 100 fps people are going to up the eye-candy, right?

Assuming this is the case, I seem to remember the 9700 getting very similar scores whether the card was set to no AA, 2xAA or 4xAA, i.e. the AA processing was almost (but not quite) 'free'.

I know the benchmarks are very very early and it really needs to get the full treatment from a hardware site, but the important figures IMHO are ones where the card is set to run everything maxed out...I have a feeling the NV30 is not going to be in such a prominent position in that instance...

Re:4xAA

[gid]

I don't know about you, but I don't know a single gamer that runs games with AA on, myself included. Almost always you can get a better effect just by cranking the resolution up a notch or two, and getter an equal frame rate.

As a semi serious gamer, I don't think I've ever even had AA on for more than a couple minutes.

Re:4xAA

[Kashif Shaikh]

"I seem to remember the 9700 getting very similar scores whether the card was set to no AA, 2xAA or 4xAA, i.e. the AA processing was almost (but not quite) 'free'."

You also have to make sure games are fillrate-limited. I.e. if they're waiting for triangles to draw.

Price

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you could buy a pretty good computer for the price of the card.

Quake = Geforce's little bitch

[Anonymous Coward]

Quake has always been the little pet of nvidia's cards. If an nvidia card lost in every race except for Quake 3 frame rates, people would still use it as a lame excuse to buy nvidia over ati. Quake 3 is not god, and it is not the only game out there that matters. I wonder sometimes whether popularity has more to do with Quake 3 being used for bench marks, than the game's actual benchmark merit. Not to mention the fact that more often than not nvidia pushes simply for a higher fps rate than actually good quality at high frame rates. Kinda of a similar approach to the Intel strategy, faster clock speed, shittier product.

2x temporal response

[Anonymous Coward]

147 FPS...

That's twice the human temporal response.

Must be that we need to account for nyquist. :-)

AMD have NOT lost the CPU war

[W2k]

I see this alot nowadays - people saying that AMD have "lost their edge", or "been taking it easy for a while" ... that is simply not true. An AMD Athlon XP 2800+ _will_ beat an Intel Pentium IV at 2.8 GHz in most benchmarks (and the 3.06 GHz P4 in quite a few - see the latest ones at THG or AT if you don't trust me), just as it is supposed to. And you can still practically get two Athlons (not 2800+'s mind you) for the same price as one high-end Pentium IV. Surely no-one here thinks that a single P4, HT or no HT, stands a chance against a true SMP system (given apps that take advantage of both CPU's)?

Furthermore, there's no app or game available on this earth, and there probably won't be for at least two years to come, where the speed difference between an AXP/2800+ and a P4/3GHz is big enough to really mean anything to anyone other than the fanatical overclocking crowd, who will spend any amount of money just to have the fastest stuff on the market, only to use it for stuff like playing Counter-Strike, which uses perhaps 20% of the total CPU and graphics card capacity. Well, if you're into that sort of stuff, sure. Get a P4 and enjoy having the fastest CPU there is .. until the next model P4/AXP is out, that is.

For the rest of us, who base our computer purchases on common sense, for speed, stability and price, the obvious choice is still the Athlon XP.

Besides, the Pentium IV still has a pretty fucked up design. See this page if you don't know what I'm talking about. I always laugh at people who whine that Windows is poorly designed, only to praise Intel CPU's in the next breath.

Anyone care to disagree? Remember, modding me down is so much easier than posting an intelligent reply.

Re:AMD have NOT lost the CPU war

[vistic]

No one will argue that an Athlon is more efficient deisng than a Pentium.

But it was really cool when I knew that there was nothing Intel had available that could best the top-of-the-line Athlon of the moment.

I said it seems they're taking it east because they don't seem to be vying for the top performing CPU slot out there today. Of course it's still a better deal and all that. But as it is (at least in a single proc system) the fastest Pentium beats the fastest Athlon.

Re:AMD have NOT lost the CPU war

[mark_lybarger]

(given apps that take advantage of both CPU's)

the only thing that this would help is the actual application performance. typically, people have many applications on a machine. they might not all be trying to get CPU time, but when they are, they're fighting hard for it. more CPU's mean a better and faster over all system. my point is that having multi-processors will help out both the mpeg encoding application that takes 6 hrs to run in the background as it will for a web browser, email reader, etc.

doesn't the OS typically splice up the cpu cycles on multiple cpu's even for a single app?

Re:AMD have NOT lost the CPU war

[JohnFluxx]

The page you linked to says that AMD _have_ lost the CPU war. (Although it took my an hour to read it all heh)

Re:AMD have NOT lost the CPU war

[W2k]

You are referring to the Emulators.com site. The guy who wrote it which considers "winning the war" to be equal to having the fastest CPU on the market. I don't. He and I are talking about different things when we say "CPU war". Also, I was referring to that page because it documents the flaws in the Intel Pentium IV's design, not as a proof that the Athlon XP is a better CPU (though that's essentially what it says - that the Athlon is a better, but slower, CPU).

Re:AMD have NOT lost the CPU war

[Anonymous Coward]

(though that's essentially what it says - that the Athlon is a better, but slower, CPU).

That's the silliest thing I've read all day, and I've been reading Slashdot comments for God's sake.

Re:AMD have NOT lost the CPU war

[sk3tch]

You say the P4 has a "pretty fucked up design"...but this is the "old" P4 you are referring to. As mentioned in the article, the P4 2.4GHz and up are redesigned significantly.

You also argue stability...I tend to disagree with that - AMD is not known for it's stability versus Intel. It may have the performance crown, but stability it does not. If for no other reason than that almost all software is designed with Intel processors in mind. Nevermind the huge heat and power resources required by many AMD processors versus Intel at the same speed...

Re:AMD have NOT lost the CPU war

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone care to disagree? Remember, modding me down is so much easier than posting an intelligent reply.

You're right, I think I'll mod you down.

Re:AMD have NOT lost the CPU war

[Junta]

In answer to your question, it depends. If the application is threaded, then yes. An OS will not divide instructions within a single process or thread. However, many modern apps are threaded, or at least the Toolkit they make use of can take advantage of threading, and there is almost never a situation where only a single, single-threaded application is the only thing running on a system in this day and age.

Re:AMD have NOT lost the CPU war

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have to agree. that AMD has not lost its edge.. While Intel is Just UPing the MHZ.. AMD is going to take it in a totally Differn't Direction.. Instead of playing the One up game like Intel.. They are going to come out with newer faster chipset based on differn't ideas. I am pretty sure that Intel will be the company loosing its edge pretty soon.

Re:AMD have NOT lost the CPU war

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, sounds kinda dumb.

But AMDs are still the pound for pound champs. Then again, match Spike Dudley up against the Big Show and you will have trouble.

Dual DVI

[spanky1]

Excellent! Does anyone know if this card will be available in Dual DVI format? I am currently using a Quadro4 NVS 200 because of its dual DVI capabilities but the 3D is, um, less than stellar.

Re:not as many units?

[afidel]

AMD's share is about 35% of the desktop cpu market so no, 80% for Intel is not conservative, it's way high.

Re:What's the big deal?

[FunkyELF]

then why can i tell the difference in counter strike when it drops from 60 to 30....its choppy when you strafe / walk / move the mouse....maybe your eyes can only see 30, but the majority of us need 60. Also havin 30 FPS don't mean that all 30 are bein shot to the monitor runin at > 60Hz

Re:What's the big deal?

[Hadlock]

i'd agree. the best real world proof i've read is watching a camera pan across a white picket fence with green grass in the background, ran at 24, 30, and 60 fps. at 24 it looks like a freaking strobe light, 30 doesn't hurt the eyes too much, and 60 is pretty decent.

either way, you still know it's a picket fence, and which way the camera is panning, which, in my opinion, is really all that matters.

Another thing to remember

[eviltypeguy]

The GeForce FX has more hardware capability and increased hardware precision then the *CURRENT* revision of the R300. While the ATi card is only 96-bit effective floating point precision through the pipeline. Hopefully, this oversight will be corrected by ATi with the R350 or R400. As Carmack said:

NVIDIA is the first of the consumer graphics chip companies to firmly understand what is going to be happening with the convergence of consumer real-time and professional offline rendering. The architectural decision in NVIDIA's next-generation GPU to allow full floating point precision all the way to the frame buffer and texture fetch, instead of just in internal paths, is a good example of far-sighted planning. It has been obvious to me for some time how things are going to come together, but NVIDIA has made moves on both the technical and company strategic fronts that are going to accelerate the timetable over my original estimations.

My current work on Doom is designed around what was made possible on the original GeForce, and reaches an optimal implementation on NVIDIA's next-generation GPU. My next generation of work will be designed around what is made possible on NVIDIA's next-generation GPU.

- John Carmack, id Software

So even if the GeForce FX is a bit slower for some things, those games that are using full DX9/OpenGL features will get better looking graphics thanks to the increased hardware precision. People using 3D programs like Maya with the Cg plugin will notice the biggest difference especially IMO. And at this point, NVidia's shaders are far better geared to the professional 3D graphics industry than ATi's *current* offering. This might encourage many developers to take advantage of extra GeForce FX features instead of ATi features.

(Source URL for Quote:
http://www.nvidia.com/content/areyouready/ twimtbp. html)

Re:Another thing to remember

[eviltypeguy]

Oh, before I forget to mention it. The GeForce FX has full 128-bit floating point precision throughout the pipeline. ATi only has 96-bit in one part of the pipeline, may not seem like much, but it is when you start mixing layers of blended textures. (Bump Map, Specular Map, Lightmap, Texture Map, etc...)

Re:Another thing to remember

[kmo]

NVIDIA is the first of the consumer graphics chip companies to firmly understand what is going to be happening with the convergence of consumer real-time and professional offline rendering. - John Carmack, id Software

A few years ago, several developers in Pixar's Renderman group (which builds the photorealistic renderer used in many commercial films, including Pixar's) left to form a company called Exluna. They built a competing renderer and Pixar ended up filing a patent infringment suit.

Exluna was eventually bought out by nVidia and now neither BMRT (the free renderer) nor Entropy ( the commercial renderer), are available. But now nVidia has lots of state-of-the-art expertise in photorealistic rendering implementation.

Re:Another thing to remember

[GarfBond]

You'll also remember that Carmack said (in a video no less), and I quote:

"The R300 is an ideal rendering target for the DOOM engine, it can do both our highly complex pixel shaders for light surface interactions and can very rapidly render all the stencil shadow volumes which deal with all our dynamic masking of way light operations"

"3D accelerators are all about performance, quality and flexibility and the R300 breaks new ground over anything thats come before it in all three areas."

Rumor also has it that the GFFX's performance drops substantially at 128 bit precision compared to 64bit. Whether or not this is true remains to be seen (do you own a GFFX right now?), but whether or not the hype is true is something to keep in mind.

It looks like the GFFX will be better than the 9700pro. Will the price premium (rumor has it at $499) over a 9700pro (street price around $300 now) be worth it? That's up to the consumers, and whether or not nvidia even delivers on time.

Re:Another thing to remember

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like the GFFX will be better than the 9700pro, but which one has been on the shelf for 6 months already? It'll be interesting to see when ATI's next VPU comes out, and how that compares to GFFX.

Re:What's the big deal?

[mattyohe]

The only reason you are "seeing" a difference, is because the 30fps is interlaced. It is displaying only half the samples in the horizontal direction per field. The human eye has to integrate out aliasing effects per field, to see the full resolution of the picture. This aliasing is the interline twitter we have all seen. The eye has to try and filter out the 30-cycle flicker between the two fields. In order to save bandwidth, it was decided to refresh alternately the odd lines and the even lines. This means that for a given signal bandwidth the number of pixels in an interlaced standard will be twice the number of pixels of a progressively scanned system, resulting in good static resolution but poorer temporal resolution. The flicker perception of the human eye demands a refresh rate of at least 60 times per second to prevent flicker.

The eye is not seeing a difference, it is what the brain interperets.

Re:Hm... -- 2 words

[selderrr]

Doom 3


it crawls a measly 20fps on my GeForce ti4600. When this gFX comes out, I'll get one right away, even at 500$. I can afford it and it's tax-deductible. I want one cause I want the best.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Viking Coder]

I agree Junks Jerzey - I'm SO SICK of seeing this posted, AGAIN and AGAIN on Slashdot. It's like people read it once, and it sticks in their heads, and they're convinced they're right. The effect is called "pseducertainty" - also known as "being a moron".

I also love reading that "people can't tell the difference between more than 256 shades of grey". Grrrr...

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Put Halo next to Metroid Prime, and you can easily tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps..I assure you =]

Q3 benchmarks of limited value

[B.Smitty]

I don't see the point of comparing the Q3 benchmarks for these cards any more. Q3 is an extremely dated engine. IIRC, it doesn't even use the early fixed-function hardware T&L, let alone any pixel or vertex shaders. It is, in no way, a predictor for how fast newer, heavy T&L, shader-enhanced games will run.

Re:Q3 benchmarks of limited value

[Zhe Mappel]

The UT2K3 engine, you cretin.

Re:In other news Carmack blames ATI for Doom III l

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. The Register and the Inquirer's "leaked memos." So full of bullshit.

Ghosting is a big deal

[scheveningen]

correct. One of the artifacts is ghosting, a form of temporal aliasing.

From sgi:
Ghosting. A true FAQ is why multiple images of objects like trees, house edges, the horizon, etc. are seen as the viewer turns. This is a form of "temporal aliasing" and is an attribute of having a frame rate which is less than the video refresh rate.

The problem is that a single image is scanned out onto the monitor several times before being changed. The repetition of a frame means that the image is temporally inaccurate for motion. Real moving objects do not stay in one place for a couple frame times and then move.

What's actually happening is that your eye is following an object, moving with the same angular velocity, which keeps the image stationary on the retina. Between two video refreshes of the same frame, your eye has moved, but the image on the screen has not. Consequently the image of the second frame appears at a different location on the retina, and you see a "ghost" image.

So a simulation running at 20Hz update on a display refreshing at 60Hz, the object will appear tripled. On large objects such as horizon silhouette, the effect manifests itself as multiple edges.

MOD PARENT UP - INTERNALMEMOS.COM

[barspin]

Mod this up -> internalmemos.com is generally a legit source for memos.

word choice

[Transcendent]

...while the Radeon 9700 Pro attained only 147fps in Quake 3...

Only?!?

4xFSAA, Anisotropic filtering?

[stratjakt]

Without the goodies on, even the Ti4600 can "outperform" the R9700.

Hard to imagine a 'serious review' site would neglect to test these features. I don't give a crap about 400 average FPS in quake, but I do care if it drops to 14 with all the enhancements turned on. But then they were trying to make the GeForceFX look like it's leaps and bounds better.

I'd imagine it's still the case - the 9700 is still the bandwidth king. Personally, I don't care about faster (when its already faster than my monitor can display and brain can process). My next upgrade will be motivated because it will look better.

The GeforceFX isn't something thats going to leave the 9700 in the dust - it's something that should have come out 6 months ago to compete head-to-head with ATI.

At any rate, after putting together a couple of cheap flex-atx pcs with onboard S4s (shared memory - Shuttle FV25 in case anyone cares), I'm surprised at how little GPU horsepower is needed to actually play most games.

Even UT2k3 is playable on these little guys (albeit not 1600x1200 with all the goodies turned on, but playable). I'm pretty sure my "outdated" radeon 64vivo will play Doom 3 when it goes gold.

Anyhow, my point is that cards have been displaying 'fast enough' for awhile - I mean we don't measure a cards performance in polygons anymore. They need to "look better", as in more natural, smoother, more TV-like.

Re:4xFSAA, Anisotropic filtering?

[MikeBabcock]

I have to agree; I like the look of ATI's 16x oversampling along edges better than 4xFSAA in general. ATI's rendering just looks better to me.

I can still tell which arcade machines use 3dfx-derived/built chips; the graphics just look different. I want my games to look amazing; what good is moving grass if its pixelated??

Re:4xFSAA, Anisotropic filtering?

[jjoyce]

That reminds me of a game I was playing the other night: Grand Theft Auto III for the PC. The graphics aren't horrible, but they leave a lot to be desired. It's one of those games where the leaves of the trees are just two textured planes perpendicular to each other. I thought they stopped doing that years ago.

Re:4xFSAA, Anisotropic filtering?

[MikeBabcock]

Plants are probably one of the hardest things to do in polys properly; they take so many vertexes for such a small object :-)

Re:4xFSAA, Anisotropic filtering?

[gid]

Sure you monitor can't handle a higher framerate or brain can't detect it yet. But these are the games of today being run against the video cards of tommorrow.
Sure it may get 400fps in q3, but may only get 60fps in doom3 due to all the friggin poly. If this is the case, then I'm really going to be wanting the faster GPU over the bigger pipeline. It's impossible to tell without proper benchmarks, which will have to wait, as the GF FX isn't retail yet, nor is doom3 (or any other really hardware demanding game).

I spose you could try a bf1942 benchmark or something, as that's one of those most brutal (on the hardware) games I have.

Re:4xFSAA, Anisotropic filtering?

[Robo210]

Hard to imagine a 'serious review' site would neglect to test these features.

I'm sure that they had these benchmarks all nice and ready to publish, however, according to the article, nvida forbade Maximum PC from publishing the results of those benchmarks.

Nvidia Driver Code is the reason, not hardware

[mycal]

Has anyone ever seen Nvidia Driver code? It is littered with benchmark/Game specific code. // if Quake is running, done do these transforms...

So basically what Nvidia has done is do as little processing as possible when certain apps are running, or optimize for those specific apps.

So there benchmarks are good if you are running those apps, but bad if not.

www.mycal.net

Re:Nvidia Driver Code is the reason, not hardware

[EllF]

That's a pretty serious allegation. Can you back it up? How did *you* get access to the code? Can you provide evidence? Moreoever, how does the code detect that the game is running? It can't be simply executable name, given that the Quack3 fiasco took place when ATI tried this stunt.

No disrespect intended, but a claim like that does not stand on its own.

Re:Nvidia Driver Code is the reason, not hardware

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You're right, it is a pretty serious allegation.

Interestingly, though, it's not the first time I've heard it. I haven't seen the code myself, but some of the other people who've suggested similar things to me probably have.

Given the somewhat... ahem... exaggerated claims that tend to appear on nVidia's web site, I find the theory credible, at least.

But as you say, what we need is someone who actually knows either way, for sure, from their own personal experience.

Um. Right....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a damn shame it's in a language the majority of /.ers won't understand right?

Quake 3 is god

[muyuubyou]

If they ever release a FPS funnier than Q3 I'll eat my hat. Tons of eye candy, but no big improvements AFAIK. Counterstrike adds something in the communication model but that's all.

If I bought UT2003 it was just to check those nice effects but I knew I'd end up playing Q3 again.

Re:Quake 3 is god

[Anonymous Coward]

You found Quake 3 funny? Jeez, even Counter-Strike is funnier with all the bodies being left hanging through doors, walls, etc.

I found Quake 3 to be simply shallow. The best part about it was that the engine was used in some really good FPS games, like Medal of Honor.

Re:Quake 3 is god

[jedrek]

If you mean 'funner' than I'll take issue with you. Counterstrike/Tactical-Ops: AoT are totally different games. Sure, you run and you shoot, but that's about where the similarity ends. Completely different strategies, completely different gameplay. No rocket launchers, jump pads, power ups, respawns, etc. If it was all the same, deathmatch killers should rule the CS/TO:AoT worlds - and they don't.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Big_Breaker]

This is a great explanation of why high refresh monitors and high fps gfx cards improve gaming.

I'd mod up but have no points.

So what is the problem?

[noitalever]

It seems that I've read this a lot in video card reviews.
"It seems that the GeforceFX is the clear leader in pure processing power, but in memory bandwidth the 9700 Pro is still king."
What is stopping the companies from putting the best of everything on one card? Is there some underlying process that i'm missing? It's been this way for a while, on will have the best memory, and the other a faster processor. I can just imagine some engineer explaining to the pointy haired boss that if we just put the fastest processor AND the fastest ram on the board, we'll dominate the market. The PHB then replies "good, do it, but with only half those things..." and so another card is born...
It's obviously more compicated than that, but it seems to follow a pattern...

Re:So what is the problem?

[nuggz]

What is stopping the companies from putting the best of everything on one card?

Money.
There is still a limited market for high end video cards.

Complexity.
It is much easier to run through a simplistic GPU at high speed (and higher memory speed), or use a slower speed, but more powerful GPU. Doing both is more difficult (RISC vs CISC anyone)

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that there is absolutely _no_ benefit to FPS exceeding the refresh rate of the monitor. Therefore a minimum OR constant 75FPS is imperceptibly different from 200FPS if your monitor refreshes as 75hz.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

if you can give me a video card that NO MATTER WHAT will produce a solid 30 fps... then you will be the richest person on the planet.

my geforece2 can produce insane framerates in a q3 room that is 4 walls a celing and floor only.

put in 90,000,000,000 objects and now it's a very different picture.

get a clue you idiot.

What you describe has already happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

... with the death of Origin.

IMHO, *no* game developer, id included, pushed PC hardware more than them. Virtually all the Wing Commanders, Strike Commander, etc. ran horribly on anything but the highest-end hardware (when first released). I think what the PC games market needs right now is the exact opposite of what you describe - a company like Origin. By "forcing" people to upgrade, PC's might get some of the companies that switched to consoles back.

I do agree with you partially - my current gaming addiction is to Natural Selection, a Half-Life mod - gameplay is still very important.

-chris

Quite the difference...

[MrEd]

...Did anyone test the cards running quack3?

Re:Quite the difference...

[Jerz]

He's serious! There was a case where driver checked a name of an executable and performed some 'optimisations' acoording to it. When you renamed exe file, benchmark results dropped.

dx8 vs dx9

[gedanken]

"GeforceFX ... 41fps in 3dMark Game4 demo, while the Radeon 9700 ... came back with 45fps in the 3dMark test."

Who cares? 3dMark test is designed around directX 8, while both of those cards are designed to take advantage of directX 9. Wait until the next 3dMark release then you have a valid test.

Re:dx8 vs dx9

[Sepherus]

As there aren't any DirectX 9 games out at the moment, DirectX 8 tests are still important.

Stupid Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you ever need more than 24 (film) or 30 (video) frames per second anway. Can humans actually preceive the difference between 30 fps and 156 fps? Can monitors display these frame rates?

Wouldn't a measue of how many polygons or textures rendered per frame at a give frame rate be a better measure of how much value a video card actually provides?

Great!

[ActiveSX]

Now all I need is a monitor that can refresh at 209Hz!

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, this still cannot fully explain why all movies about auto-racing are so terrible...

New technology rocks!

[NivenHuH]

I love when new technology (such as the GeForceFX) is released... It means older stuff (like the ATI 9700) will be cheap enough to actually buy.. =) I can live with 140-whatever fps... I get maybe 45 fps on my gpu now.. =)

Photoreal Potential

[TomClancy_Jack]

Although it is important to see how a Video Card can perform with current-day games, I think the beauty of NV30 is it's potential for near photo-real renders with future software. Has anybody seen Nvidia's demo they showed at that Australian developer's conference? The real-time Fairy model was amazing; it was a extremely high polygon model with convincing animation and excellent lighting with several lights. The quality of her face was on par with the Final Fantasy movie (the Spirits Within). The sooner people start buying a card with these capabilities, the sooner game developers will start utilizing the features and horsepower.

Re:Photoreal Potential

[MikeBabcock]

... but I want a room with 14 people in it, all with that many polygons :-) ... I'd be interested in someone doing the polygon equivalent of mip-mapping; showing characters with more and more polys as they get within appropriate ranges of the camera.

There's no need, for example, for individual hairs to show from 100' away, but up close, make it flow like real hair.

That would be impressive :-)

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming the eye can only process about 30 fps, unless your eyes are perfectly synched with a monitor, you'll see the difference. Having the monitor have a much higher refresh rate (and the card displaying a high fps as well) will pretty much guarantee that you see everything without flicker.

As someone else has said, games at lower fps will not have fluid motion of objects, and they'll jump around. Making it as smooth as possible prevents viewing things like that.

About MPC's claim about AA...

[Guspaz]

MaximumPC states that they think the Radeon 9700 will likely close the gap when anti-aliasing is cranked up. However, the Intellisample compression will supposedly vastly increase the speed of anti-aliasing on the GeForce FX (see Anandtech article). I would think that this would push the GeForce FX even further ahead of the Radeon.

The biggest thing to remember, and this has been said again and again, is that this is beta silicon and beta drivers we're seeing. Not only does the performance from early beta drivers of a card to final increase substantially as we've seen with releases in the past, nVidia has proven time and time again that they can get a hell of a lot more performance out of their cards with new drivers (See Detonator XP release and Detonator 40.xx release, both of which gave something like 25%+ performance increases to the top-level cards at the time)

Re:About MPC's claim about AA...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The biggest thing to remember, and this has been said again and again, is that this is beta silicon and beta drivers we're seeing. ... nVidia has proven time and time again that they can get a hell of a lot more performance out of their cards with new drivers...

But the thing is, how long do they take to arrive? If you're looking at bleeding edge technology, perhaps because you're buying new this week, the FX isn't an option yet. If you're saying it'll be much better than a Radeon 9700 Pro in a few months, you have to ask what ATI will have by then? The Radeon 9000 series has been around for several months already, after all.

No GigaPixel!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not GigaPixel technology (deferred tile rendering). Just plain old immediate mode rendering. In a souped up, uber programmable, all floating point version. With an embarrassing bandwidth bottleneck.

FPS is great but.......

[spurton]

The whole point of the FX is not for high FPS on older games(which you can't even tell the diff after 100 fps). It is about the multiple pixel shader fx and cg support. This chip is made to bring cinematic "FX" to the desktop. When newer games start supporting this, ATI will be far far behind when FX owners are able to play games that look as good as the Final Fantasy movie did. Just look on Nvidia's site to see what this means.

Re:FPS is great but.......

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

When newer games start supporting this, ATI will be far far behind

Why? What do you think the FX can do that the 9000 series can't?

Re:FPS is great but.......

[Anonymous Coward]

looks like someone bought the marketing hype. the 9700 has a similar, if not better feature set than the GFX.

Fast, but not fast enough

[Aqua OS X]

Considering that ATI has a new card coming out soon, I doubt nVidia will get to be king of the hill for very long.

It *is* a nice screwdriver

[Wee]

I've unsubscrubed after the 'must-have-gear of year 2001' suggested $100 screwdriver (with lifetime warranty!). I wonder how much they got paid (the MaxBS magazine) to say that.

I actually own one of those Snap-On screwdrivers. I got it years ago as a repayment for a favor I did for a mechanic friend of mine. At the time I thought the repayment was not, shall we say, commensurate with the debt owed. But then I started using it and realized that he was actually giving up something terribly valuable. It is the best scrtewdriver I've ever used, hands down. I've had it for like 10-12 years now and can't deal with other drivers. The grip, in particular, is what does it -- it works so well that it's very easy to strip threads and actually break screws if you use cheap hardware. But if you have to drive a deck screw into a 2x4 by hand, there's no other tool. It's wholly unsuited for PC uses, however.

The only problem I had with MaxPC recommending it was the fact that the tip is *incredibly* magnetic. Like, lots and lots for a plain old screwdriver. You can shove the driver into a bucket of screws and the thing will come out absolutely festooned with screws. It will do the Jedi force screw pickup trick from about an inch away, which is annoying until you get used to it (and then it becomes handy). It's probably got a real rare earth magnet in the tip to make it so strong (and expensive). And it's the last tool I would use to screw a motherboard into a case with. Even it the tip wasn't very magnetic, it's just not a good driver for really delicate work.

As far as MaxPC getting paid to shill them, I don't think so. Snap-On has their target audience pretty well sewn up and probably doesn't need the handful of PC owners willing to pay $100 for a tool to increase/maintain their sales. They have trucks that drive around to mechanics and they have drivers/sale people that know their routes and they protect their customer loyalty fiercely. Because they haven't really set up their distribution model as a "normal" retail channel, courting a couple hardcore PC geeks is definitely not their market and doing so through a computer magazine would not be a wise decision for them to make.

Besides, I've seen MaxPC absolutely trash a product whose ad is on the facing page. They're notoriously cruel, in fact, and I think they tend to err on the side of being a little too mean (eg, they'll ding a perfectly decent video card because it doesn't have like a TV out port -- forgetting that this features might not be something everyone wants or uses and brings the price of the card down). I've never seen them with an obviously bum recommendation and I'd trust their review over those of any Ziff-Davis publication in a flat second. I was a little amazed at their recommendation at first, but it was not because of their jounalistic integrity.

-B

Film/TV is blurred by camera lens...

[Anonymous Coward]

You get by with 24 fps because the camera shutter is physically open for some time, blending the incoming content over that time. It's like mixing consecutive CG images together. This effect is called temporal anti-aliasing (in contrast to spatial anti-aliasing what video cards already do) or motion blur. Cameras just do this naturally. If you look at (still) film footage, you'll notice that none of the frames are perfectly sharp or clear.

You'll need 60+ fps of the crisp, sharp computer graphics images to create the same smoothness. (As an aside, TAA would be a t'riffic thing for old slow LCDs -- 20 fps could look like 60!)

Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

> It seems that the GeforceFX is the clear
> leader in pure processing power, but in memory
> bandwidth the 9700 Pro is still king."

Or rather it seems that drivers need tuning up for this particular benchmark. Remember, FX is not officially out yet so drivers have much field for improvement.

Refresh rate and frame rate aren't the same.

[Kjella]

I'm pretty sure the film is redrawn much faster than 24 fps. Most people consider less than 72Hz to be flickering. But if you redraw each frame three times (3x24=72Hz) it'll still look flicker-free and smooth for anything taken with a camera. If you want to see why it doesn't work for a rendering I suggest you go here:

http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/graphics/ x_ motion.htm

and check out 2: Temporal anti-aliasing (Motion Blur). It's kinda hard to explain without pictures. It makes a lot more sense if you think of "reality" as having infinite fps, and your camera only 24fps. The result is motion blur, and without it, it just doesn't look real. Compare 24 of the rendered images compared to 24 motion blurred one and you'll understand.

Kjella

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your eyes can see up to 200 fps. The people posting this garbage are misinformed twits.

Do a search on google on fps and quake 3. Its like some bad urban legend that gets trotted out everytime there is a discussion on frames per second.

When you actually know something on a subject and then read the posts, it makes you realize what a bunch of fucking morons most slashdotters are.

Re:not as many units?

[strictnein]

HP and Compaq now only use Geforce 4 MX 420/440/460s on their higher end machines (HP 763N, 863N, 873N, 883N, Compaq 6370US).

The rest of them use either Intel Extreme Graphics (which are ok (HP 753N, Compaq 6350US)) or a lower grade intel card. They also use cards like the S3 ProSavage (HP 523N, Compaq 6320US)).

Sony uses crap S3 (or is it SiS?) video cards in all of their desktop computers. Which is disappointing. For their laptops they use mainly ATI Radeon derivatives.

Suprisingly, you are much more likely to find an ATI or nVidia card on a HP/Compaq/Toshiba laptop than a desktop, probably because their is still some profit margin left in laptop computers (unlike desktops). Compaq's mid-range 1500 series is all ATI Mobility Radeons, as is HP's mid-range 4000 series and high-end 5000 series. Toshiba's base 1410 series uses Geforce 4 420 Go chipsets, their mid-range 1900 series uses the 440, and their high-end 5200 series uses the 460.

And yes... in case your wondering, I do currently sell computers =)

Greeaaat....

[MImeKillEr]

...maybe I should've held off on getting my Ti4200..

ATI? I'll never buy another one of their cards.. nVidia is the shiznit, baby!

Re:Photoreal Potential-Keeping up with the...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The real-time Fairy model was amazing; it was a extremely high polygon model with convincing animation and excellent lighting with several lights. The quality of her face was on par with the Final Fantasy movie (the Spirits Within). The sooner people start buying a card with these capabilities, the sooner game developers will start utilizing the features and horsepower."

Which tells you that the rest of the computer has to be able to generate those high-poly count, not just for characters, but other things in the game as well. Kind of the schism one sees between CPU speed and Ram speed. Oh! Did I mention the improved physics engines we'll need to keep our eyes from glazing over looking at the pretty pictures? Or did you just miss the article slashdot had about the present state of games, and the game industry?

Re:Good opportunity for a little question :)-No!

[Anonymous Coward]

" You won't have any problems with an Nvidia card under Linux using XFree86 4.x.x. "

Wanna bet? XFree86-4.2.99.3-1.20021223.3mdk and kernel-2.4.19.19mdk-1-1mdk. Nvidia's latest and previous driver lock up the system so tight, only a hard reset works. I'm using the 'nv' driver until Nvidia (1) Goes open-source (Ha!), (2) Releases a version that works with both. (Sounds like Windows World DejaVu doesn't it?).

Re:What's the big deal?

[evilmonkey_666]

GTA3 has an option to add motion blur. I don't like it though, things appear much sharper when it is off. But on a lower end card maybe I would see the benefit.

I don't believe this...sorry...

[waltc]

These benches are more of the same passed-around mush that nVidia's been handing out since October. Wake up and smell the coffee, people--these are the same programs nVidia handed out in the October handouts for benchmarking. Did the reviewer have a gun to the back of his head, so that he couldn't mange to run *anything* else? How convenient.

By the author's own words, this was no review. There are no 6x, 8x FSAA tests, at all, although these are supposed capabilities of GF FX--there are no screen shots for comparison--in otherwords, there is absolutely nothing to prove this ever took place. There are no anisptropic filtering tests, we don't know what cpu system the Radeon 9700 benchmarked on--nothing--absolutely nothing of interest that you would normally see in a real review is present. Even if you believe the author--he says unapologetically he was under direct duress by nVidia as far as what he was permitted to show AND SAY.

Already people on the Rage3D forums are talking about how much slower the 9700P speeds are in this promotional propganda piece than they themselves can get with their systems at home.

Also....what, pray tell, would Alienware be doing with a NVIDIA beta prototype? As a small OEM I would expect that if anything Alienware would have an OEM beta version of the card--possibly. Certainly not a nVidia version of a prototype card! If nVidia needs Alienware to beta test its upcoming card this must mean nVidia hasn't even finished the prototype reference design yet and nVidia's OEMs haven't even begun production!

Here's what I think it is: a paid-for promotional piece which is designed to deter people from going ahead and buying an ATI 9700 Pro. What it most certainly is not is an actual review of the product--by the words of the author himself. What I still can't get over is that these are the very same benchmarked programs nVidia was handing out in October!

When nVidia starts sending out cards to reviewers with driver sets and saying, "Have at it--review it any way you like!" that's when I'll start listening.

Re:I don't believe this...sorry...

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that the GF FX drivers haven't been thoroughly optimized for benchmark cheating yet, and nvidia doesn't want its card to look bad due to ATI cheating left and right. That's not to say that nvidia doesn't do the same if it can get away with it.

Re:I don't believe this...sorry...

[Anonymous Coward]

"and nvidia doesn't want its card to look bad due to ATI cheating left and right"

How would it be ATI cheating??? if a game refuses to run, or crashes left and right, they could just say it was the drivers fault, or leave those tests out entirely.

Re:I don't believe this...sorry...

[ajayrockrock]

As someone who has subscribed to the Maximum PC magazine for *years*, I belive the preview (not review). Maximum PC is an magazine that prides itself on not letting companies influence their content. I have several issues where there's a huge double page ad for a product and then 10 pages later it's getting totally ripped up for being an inferior product. The last time I remember this happening was when they reviewed some new crappy Iomega drive.

So this preview is real and Nvidia did not allow them to publish their own benchmarks. I'm not buy either card anytime soon (I can get a whole new system for 400 bucks!), so I can wait for the real Maximum PC review...

later,
ajay

Maximum PC, Minimum BS

Re:I don't believe this...sorry...

[Ars-Gonzo]

I'm the author of the story you're talking about, and I generally don't respond to criticism like this, but I think it's important to here.

We looked at this board during the second week in December. It was a very early board, and simply didn't run a large number of applications. The situation is a pretty common one for print pubs. Since we have a lead time that ranges from 2-6 weeks between the time we write stuff and the time that magazines get to readers, we occasionally take a look at preview hardware with special terms negotiated with the the vendors in advance. Unlike some other mags, we ALWAYS make it abundantly clear that this is a preview, not a full review. Furthermore, we always make it clear when a vendor specified we run specific benchmarks in these previews. Naturally, in our full reviews, we run whatever benchmarks we please at whatever resolution we like.

Anyway, Alienware wanted nVidia to get this sample in time for our preview story, but the drivers were very raw. In order to make our deadline and get an early look at the board, we agreed to only run a small subset of benchmarks, with a big huge disclaimer that said "Hey, nVidia would only let us run these benchmarks", which we did.

A nVidia rep hand-delivered the board up the same day that the Alienware system arrived, watched me install it, installed the drivers, watched me set up and run the benchmarks, then pulled the card, obliterated the drivers and went on their way. After that, we restored the pre-nVidia hard drive image and benchmarked the Radeon 9700 in the exact same machine.

We don't run other people's benchmarks in Maximum PC. If you see a number on the website or in the magazine, it was run by a staff member in our lab. Period.

I can't understand why you'd think this is a positive thing for nVidia. The overall tone of the story was that the performance is a little weak for something that will cost an arm and a leg, and take up two PCI slots. Heck, it doesn't even beat the 6 month old Radeon 9700 in the programmable shader test, which is the only one that really matters in my eyes. I don't care about 30 more fps in Quake 3. I want a card that will be fast in programmable shader games later this year, and the GeForce FX doesn't appear to be that.

Will Smith

I don't need that kind of frame rate...

[TerryAtWork]

When I show my pr0n at 209 FPS, it just spoils it!

Re:What's the big deal?

[martyn s]

Not that kind of motion blur. I'm not referring to smudgy video. When I say motion blur, I just mean combining multiple frames into one, as a way of "temporal resolution" (framerate) with the limited refresh rate a monitor or television screen can offer.

Motion blur in GTA has nothing to do with the kind of motion blur I'm talking about.

Re:What's the big deal?

[martyn s]

Sorry, that should say "...as a way of adding 'temporal resolution'"

Framerate jokes and VisSim vs. PC Games

[GoSpeedRacerGo]

(ooops)...

One quick point to address all the 150 fps in Quake jokes:

Frame rate consistancy is what is most important (by far). A game that runs at 30 fps solid will also feel better than a game that runs at 60 fps some of the time but then bops back and forth between 30 fps and 60 fps.

The VisSim industry has done a better job of saying "we only need 60 Hz (fps) but we better never ever see you dip below that or you are out!" This forces hardware and software to be optimized for locking at 60 fps. I can tell you that a 60 fps Air Force flight simulator will always feel higher performance than a soupped up PC running Quake at 100 fps but dipping down to 50 fps or worse when things get hairy.

The biggest evidence of this issue being unimportant in PC gaming is the number of people or games that run with vertical blank (vblank) synchronization turned off. This is wrong wrong wrong in my opinion but most gamers are willing to live with enormous visual artifacts from partially completed frames to get that max fps and lowest input latency when things tough on the system.

So, to all those that mock high fps benchmarks, I challege you to post information on a recent 3D game, gfx card, system, and config that allows you to play with all the gfx features on (or those that are important to you) with vsync on using a 60 Hz display and only double buffering which locks at 60 fps solid without ever dipping below that.

That is when things have become fast enough for _that particular_ game.

Products like the NV30 and R300 help push the bar but are still not overkill. Take the above challenge and now turn on 16x multi-sampled FSAA (same as an SGI Onxy/IR), 8x anisotropic filtering (often more important than FSAA), 1600x1024 (the native resolution of my DFP), 128bit pixel depth (which NV30 can do before scan out), and include very complex vertex and fragment (pixel) programs. With all of that, turn Vsync on (as it should be) and have this entire combination run at 60 fps per second regardless of what is going on in the game at any and every given moment.

When we can do all of that, we are finished. :-)

The problem then becomes the content creators who continue to push the envolope. GeForce FX is launching with a demo that has Jurasic Park/Toy Story quality rendering tied to real-time dynamics and feature film quality animation. However, it is not quite to the level of Gollum in LOTR: Two Towers. Imagine Doom4 with 50 characters on the screen that all look like Yoda or Gollum. My point is that there is always room and applications for higher performance.

100 of these running around locked at 60 fps is the new goal: http://notendur.centrum.is/~czar/misc/gollum.jpg

10g eyelids?

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy cow, you must have estimated based on Oprah Winfrey's eyelids, or some other hippo like Star Jones.

1-2g at most.

DX 9

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Hate to break it to you, but having just spent some days researching this, I concluded that there is nothing that the GeforceFX will support that the Radeon 9000 series won't. nVidia's web site may say differently, but that doesn't make it so.

The FX may do it faster (though this remains to be seen, of course) but it probably won't do it with better image quality. If anything, I'd say ATI cards have historically produced nicer output where there's any difference at all.

Hell, even the drivers for the Radeon 9700 are getting good reviews. I thought the season of miracles was a couple of weeks ago. ;-)

Re:DX 9

[Ninja Master Gara]

The problem with this kind of discussion is that everything really remains to be seen. But from my own research, and of course, like yours, this has to be based on very beta cards and drivers, I'm convinced the FX will pull ahead in both regions. The FX goes beyond compliance with DirectX 9, and is overqualified in many areas while the 9700 for the most part sticks to spec.

to upgrade or not to upgrade

[theGREENzebra]

And then there's me, with my voodoo2/12M. You can buy them for $10. It even runs games at a playable framerate, along with all the other opengl software I run on it.

My card has open source drivers, and even if it's 5 years old, it works. =] I'll upgrade someday.

No, Carmack has said $(own games) $(licensing)

[Szplug]

I don't have the quote but it was in one of his .plan updates in the last 6 months; Id makes more
money on its own games than from licensing the engines.

OR THEY COULD...

[Anonymous Coward]

just slap a huge cooler on top of it and add 150+mhz to core speed. Oh wait. Nvidia may have patented that technology.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Animixer]

When you watch a movie at 24 fps, or television at 30 fps, motion blur makes sure you don't miss anything between frames. If the action is moving fast enough, it will appear as a blur in a single frame, so you're not missing anything "between" frames.

Not to be too picky here, but your statement is not necessarily correct. Exposure time of the film is not locked to 1/24th second for 24fps 'movie' film, or 1/30th of a second for TV. It is possible to lock your exposure at, say, 1/24th...but you'd have to change your arpeture (and thus depth of field) so that your exposure is still spot-on. I'm guessing that in pro-level equipment, there's also some sort of filter that can vary quickly in the lens assembly so that if you NEEDED 1/24th second exposures AND f/1.8 arpeture with an outdoor scene with varying lighting, it would be possible to do this.

But anyways, you can display film at 24fps which was only exposed per frame at 1/1000th second.....I've seen this disturbing trend in some recent movies and especially music videos. Kindof freaks me out sometimes. =) Still, controlling motion blur to produce a specific effect is just as valid as any other technique to give a piece a specific 'feel'.

Sorry if I went off on a tangent....just had to state that a 24fps movie isn't necessarily (or even often?) exposed at 1/24th second per frame.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are some animated games that incorporate motion blur (not smudgy video as you pointed out to the opther poster).

Play Capcom vs. SNK or any of Capcom's other fighting games (starting with Super Street Fighter II, I think). If you pause the game in the middle of some moves, you will see blur frames, where characters are drawn with distorted appendages (for example) to add the illusion of movement, while still keeping the game speed high.

Another thing to remember

[Anonymous Coward]

He said that in a Video interview about the R300 *before* he said what he did about the GeForce FX AFAIK.

Another thing to remember

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to break it to you, but having just spent some days researching this, I concluded that there is nothing that the GeforceFX will support that the Radeon 9000 series won't. nVidia's web site may say differently, but that doesn't make it so.

Hate to break it to you, but there are things that the Radeon 9700 won't support. And can't support in the current hardware revision. 128-bit floating point precision in shader output is one of them. The Radeon 9700 is limited to 96-bit from all the technical documentation I've read. The Radeon 9700 *CAN* increase it's support of other things that NVidia does through software upgrades (driver), but 128-bit support isn't one of them, that's a hardware limitation.

There are a few other things too, but I don't have the time to expound on those in great detail.

And BTW, if I'm wrong about the 96-bit, by all means please show me how I'm wrong.

Re:not as many units?

[TheCrazyFinn]

Maybe 3 years ago.

Now the most common PC graphics chips are the Intel Integrated Crap, Ati Radeon 7000/7500/9000 and NVidia MX/NForce stuff.

ATi and NVidia are big players in the Workstation Graphics area as well, NVidia's Quadro chips are the default for low-mid range cards and ATi's new FireGL is the performance lead inb sub-$5000 cards.

Re:What's the big deal?

[martyn s]

I'm aware of all of this, but I'm trying to avoid being confusing. I'm just trying to lay down the basic concept. Sure, you're absolutely right though.

The problem is the VIA chipset AMDs run on...

[ssstraub]

Doesn't anyone know how many issues this thing has? Most people fear the dreaded VIA 4-in-1 driver problems and incompatibilities. There have been numerous mentions of VIA problems on sites like tomshardware.com and anandtech.com.

The AMD cpu's are great, but who wants to deal with the problems of the VIA chipset?!

fps

[Funkeriffic Toad]

Yeah so I'm not a gamer and I'm not an animation expert, and I'm really far too lazy to actually read the article. However, I have a general question, that I think is on topic.

If I remember correctly, movie projectors run at something like 24 fps, no? And not many people have epileptic seizures at the movies because the image is "too jumpy". In fact, I would go so far as to say that movies, even animated ones, look better than the animations in Diablo II or Warcraft III, even viewed on my little brother's (admitedly long-since outdated) GeForce card.

So my question is, What gives? What the hell is this 147 fps business? Can humans even detect that many frame changes? If so, do +/- 20 or 30 fps matter that much, at that level? And why do movies at 24 fps look fine to me?

-Toad

Re:fps

[GoSpeedRacerGo]

Actually, movie projectors run at 48 fps.

The content is on film at 24 fps and the projectors double-shutter the film to have it flash at 48 fps, reducing the flashing of yester-year.

BTW, It is only when the camera pans to you REALLY notice the 24 fps content.

I hate the fact that the new digital projection standards (and HDTV for that matter with 1080-24p) are designed around this ancient frame rate.

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true

GeForceFx?

[Anonymous Coward]

GeForce + 3dfx = GeForceFx?

Does this card incorporate any 3dfx technology or is it just a name?

dedicated graphics processor?

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one will be very happy when the bandwidth is made to be utilized (i.e. by the card) to allow the rendered product to go from the card to the system memory and harddrive. What would be nice would be the ability to use the video cards dedicated features for geometry calculations for various programs. Oh well.

Other features

[Anonymous Coward]

Will the geforce fx have hardware dvd playback like the radeon? Will it have great tv out quality? If so, I'll get the geforce fx mx or whatever they call their budget line of cards.

MOD UP PARENT PLEASE

[Nazmun]

MOD UP PLEASE! Right now I don't have any mod points to give but this guy is the only one who got the ATI story 100% correct.

Not only that

[Nazmun]

But Nvidia's new cards use a more complicated memory setup so i wouldn't be surprised if the driver updates have dramatic improvements for the fx as well.

NFORCE 2

[Nazmun]

NFORCE 2 is shaping up to be an excellent chipset, stability wise and more (I won't argue against the fact that intel may have better working drivers). Also AMD will be integrating more chipset features (memorty controllers) into the processor in the future because of problems like this.

So don't use VIA!

[SaDan]

I'm perfectly happy with my SiS equipped motherboard (ECS K7S5A). I've had no issues with it, or the chipset, and I've run all kinds of operating systems and software on this machine.

I even went out and bought a $30 SiS AGP video card (SiS 315 chipset, 64Megs onboard) that works great for the MechWarrior 4 series of games, the Delta Force series of games, Empire Earth, etc. I typically play with high graphics detail at 1024x768 (all I have is a 17" monitor at the moment, anything higher is wasted on this POS). I get decent frame rates.

I spent less than $100 for both the motherboard and the video card, and I've been extremely pleased with the performance and the stability of my system.

I'd definately recommend SiS based hardware to anyone. I'll never buy another VIA based motherboard again.

only 147fps?

[Anonymous Coward]

attained only 147fps in Quake 3

"only 147fps?"

"only 147fps?"

I think we need some new games to push the hardware.

The GeforceFX

[KewlPC]

I personally cannot wait for this card.

I know, I know, "But what about the lower framerate and memory bandwidth than ATI?"
Read the recent article about the GeforceFX on Tom's Hardware, and you'll see why this doesn't matter.

Besides, I'll take real-world benchmarks like average FPS in Quake 3 than benchmarks in programs like 3DWinMark.

And with the extremely advanced support for programmable shaders in the GeforceFX, I expect it to kick ass when Doom 3 comes out.

Re:No, Carmack has said $(own games) $(licensing)

[randyest]

. . . because so many people know they can get scads of free mods (or the tools to make thier own!) out of an id game. You get more, and more diverse, bang for your buck from q3 than sof2.

And if they don't know first hand, their ]<ewl friend is admant that they get q or q2 or q3 (soon Doom3).

And, of course, by definition the engine game (q[1-3]) is released first. First always helps :)

Re:What's the big deal?

[mandolin]

You will notice the difference between a game that runs at 30 stable FPS and one that runs at 60 stable FPS. The 24-30 FPS on TV and cinema is only perceived as fluid because of motion blur.

I *wondered* why I couldn't seem to focus on the background in The Two Towers' panoramic scenes until the camera stopped moving.

No, no, NO!

[iie1195]

LalalalaI'mNotListening!

Just got my 9700 Pro, and I'm sticking with it!! ;)

Actually that's horse plop

[aztektum]

Behold PC Gamer December 2002 Volume 9 Number 12

A behind the scenes interview with the "id" staff (not ID, Id...etc), page 74, paragraph starts...

"Over the past couple of years Carmack has openly admitted his waning interest in games. (Though since id derives its greatest revenue from its games - rather than licensing engines - it's likely he'll be building games for years to to come.)..."

Console tweaks

[olivaw]

I got the impression you meant that the video drivers for console don't change much. I disagree.

Just to see an example, get the games launched for playstation at the beginning and then compare them to, say, Final Fantasy VIII, you will see a HUGE difference in performance!

Of course some of the people who develop to the system eventually can't use the libraries anymore, because they are pushing the system to the limits, and start hitting the hardware manually.

That's one of the things that I always liked in consoles and old computers (MSX, Amiga), you can hit the hardware directly and you will _probably_ be safe.

I know it is not possible today, because the hardware is much more complex and the engines too, but I like the appeal!

Text Mode DEMOS!

[afxgrin]

Well, I guess we could do a little bit of code hacking and start using Text Mode Demos to benchmark text lines per second. :-)

When you start benchmarking text, and people are coding ridiculous things like raytracing in text mode, you know you can't go wrong.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most NTSC video cameras produce 60 fields (all independent) per second. 30 frames per second (odd and even fields always representing the same moment in time) would look much more like film footage; in fact some directors (if the footage is intended for video and not theaters) shoot on film at 30 frames per second to keep that filmed feel but with smoother telecine (3:2 pulldown, the way 24 frames are copied into 60 fields, is fairly ugly).

Re:What's in your AGP slot ??

[LPetrazickis]

Everyone is the result of incest by children of Adam and Eve!

Actually, we are all descendants of Cain and Eve. Cain got his specified but unnamed wife from somewhere and the only woman available at the time was his mother. Naturally, this only applies to (and explains) fundy Christians.:D

BTW, do you think Adam or Eve have a navel?;)

RAM Runs at 1ghz, not 500mhz

[Seves]

Their benchmarks are already flawed. If you watched the launch, they said it SEVERAL times, RAM is running at 1ghz.

Here's the link, it's a 1.5 hr video with slides, but was worth EVERY minute. Some NICE examples of how powerful the card is.

Click Here to see presentation

Wrong

[waltc]

It's DDR II running at 500MHz (x2 = 1 GHz.)

It's exactly the same thing as "DDR 400"--the ram runs at 200MHz actual speed, the "400" is its "effective" speed versus SDR SDRAM (which would have to run at 400MHz to equal the throughput.)

The problem is it is setup on a 128-bit bus, which gives it a theoretical max throughput of ~16 gigs/sec versus ATI's 9700P theoretical max throughput of ~19 gigs/sec (because the width of ATI's dram bus is 2x as wide as nVidia's, at 256 bits.) To equal the 9700P's current dram throughput the GF FX's DDRII ram bus would have to be clocked at 620MHz (x2 = 1.24GHz.)

Last Post!

[alpg]

Well, he thought, since neither Aristotelian Logic nor the disciplines
of Science seemed to offer much hope, it's time to go beyond them...
Drawing a few deep even breaths, he entered a mental state practiced
only by Masters of the Universal Way of Zen. In it his mind floated freely,
able to rummage at will among the bits and pieces of data he had absorbed,
undistracted by any outside disturbances. Logical structures no longer
inhibited him. Pre-conceptions, prejudices, ordinary human standards vanished.
All things, those previously trivial as well as those once thought important,
became absolutely equal by acquiring an absolute value, revealing relationships
not evident to ordinary vision. Like beads strung on a string of their own
meaning, each thing pointed to its own common ground of existence, shared by
all. Finally, each began to melt into each, staying itself while becoming
all others. And Mind no longer contemplated Problem, but became Problem,
destroying Subject-Object by becoming them.
Time passed, unheeded.
Eventually, there was a tentative stirring, then a decisive one, and
Nakamura arose, a smile on his face and the light of laughter in his eyes.
-- Wayfarer

- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...