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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."
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!
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.
I'll still bet money the GF FX will be the dominant card come final release.
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When I grow up, I want to be a kid again.
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.
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....
Tournament Management Online &
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.
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.
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.
jh
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
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.
Why bother.
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.
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.
That was classic intercourse!
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.
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.
Education is the silver bullet.
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.
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
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.
Game... blouses.
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
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
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.
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.
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.
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. ;-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
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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.
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?!
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.