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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."
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.
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
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
-'fester
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 :)
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When I grow up, I want to be a kid again.
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.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
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...
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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)?
.. until the next model P4/AXP is out, that is.
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
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.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
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.
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?
Has anyone ever seen Nvidia Driver code? It is littered with benchmark/Game specific code.
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
"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.
Considering that ATI has a new card coming out soon, I doubt nVidia will get to be king of the hill for very long.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
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