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

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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..

[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..

[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..

[tshak]

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


I think you answered your own question, sir.

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

[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.

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....

[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....

[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....

[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....

[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?

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

[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

[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

[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

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.

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

[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: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.

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: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

[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

[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.

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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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: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.

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.

[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: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).

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.

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 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.

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

[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.

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.

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

[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

[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: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?

[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: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...

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.

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.

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

[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.

Quite the difference...

[MrEd]

...Did anyone test the cards running quack3?

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.

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)

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.

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

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 :-)

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: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!

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...

[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

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

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.

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? ;-)

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?

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?!

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.

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.

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.

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.)..."

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.