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GeForce FX Reviews Roll In
Defender2000 writes "GeForce FX NDA lifted today, reviews are up at ExtremeTech, Tom's Hardware, and HardOCP. So far, it is indeed better overall than the 9700Pro, but not enough for it's price. Perhaps NVIDIA has something up its sleeve for the long term?" There's also a review at Anandtech, about which reader StrongBad writes "Unlike the rest of the reviews, however, wonderboy
gets down and dirty with the FX's antialiasing and anisotropic filtering methods
using some nifty on mouseover java commands."
He probably means javascript rollovers instead of java effects..
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It seems such a short time ago that TNT2 was a chipset to be proud of... [sigh]
Not only that, but the number of games which actually utilise a Geforce 3's features (let alone a Geforce 4) are few and far between.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
I got my 9700 in the last week of August, and I simply can't believe that as of Jan 2003, NVidia has no compelling response.
Extremetech even points to the 9700 AS BEING FASTER when the eye candy is ramped at the high resolutions.
I can only imagine the puckered rectums and sleepless nights of Nvidia's engineering crew when the 9700 first came out. They must have really been caught by surprise. I suspect the last months have been spent furiously tuning their drivers to remain competitive. Which they have done - barely.
I've been telling the fence-sitters to stop waiting and jump on ATI. No reason to wait anymore, even for an Nvidia fanboy.
A month ago, I did something I hadn't done in years. I bought a new gaming console system. This is the first console system I've bought since my Colecovision. I have been, for the past twenty years or so, a die hard PC gamer. I turned my nose up at consoles.
For the last month, I've been having a blast. I picked up a few games, and all of them have been fun. I haven't touched a computer game in a month, other than nethack and zangband.
I'm now of the opinion that computer gaming is just a waste. Are there some good computer games? Yes. Do the very best computer games have better graphics than consoles, if you have good hardware? Yes. No console is beating out unreal tournament 2003 at 1600x1200 resolution. The console systems do have very nice graphics, though. More than good enough. And more importantly...
For the first time in 20 years I don't have to worry about whether my hardware is good enough to run the game I just bought.
PC gaming hardware is getting completely insane. $400 for a new 3d card? You can buy *two* console gaming systems for that! And a year from now, there will be a new $400 video card out, with endless articles about how it makes the $400 card you just bought last year look like garbage.
Who needs it? I'm enjoying gaming again more than I have for a long time. I don't have to run an OS I don't like by a company I don't like just to play some game that won't work under winex and doesn't have a Linux port. I don't have to mess around with installing anything. I don't have to sit in a stupid office chair at a desk. Just pop the game in, turn the console on, chill on the couch, and have fun.
I'm set til 2005 or 2006 when the new consoles com e out. Upgrading every 4 or 5 years to a new console, and then not having to sweat it again, is looking really nice.And the computer I currently have will be more than powerful enough to read web pages, send email, and write code on for a long, long time.
Since when did anything new in computing become affordable? Or a car, a t.v set - the list goes on. When there is competition and new stuff always coming out prices will always come down (barring external factors). You'll always get some stupid rich kid going out and buying all the latest and greatest. But as long as there is a demand prices usually stay high.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Anyone else think this name really sucks? The average Joe is going to think FX sounds a little too much like MX to be the new top-of-the-line model. I read that they got the name because this is the first card to use technology from the purchase of 3DFX. Anyway, regardless of where it came from, it's a bad name. Especially since the GeForce4 MX line is horrible, even worse than a GeForce3...
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Is it all that amazing? Yeah - the frame rates and such are impressive but I can't help but think nVidia finally dropped the ball with this product. It is several months later than the ATI product and doesn't perform that much better than the ATI part overall to justify the delay or cost. If you read some of the reviews you'll see there is a lot of questions around manufacturer's ability to actually hit the $399 price point nVidia has set due to memory, layered PCB design and heat management concerns. Not to mention the expected price drop ATI will put on their part now that they have competition at the high end. Doesn't seem to me that anyone but die hard nVidia fanboys will be too impressed by this release. Six months ago it would have been something else.
Instead of buying a bad game, try renting it first.
Get a free ipod.
The problem I had the ATI and thier drivers was that they would always drop support for a card once they released something new, and for that reason I would take a long, long time before I will look at one of thier products again.
If nvidia was doing as ATI does(or maybe did if they have improved) with the announcement of the FX they would have dropped support for all cards below the GeForce 4.
This is a pre-release card with brand new drivers.
Give nVidia a month or two (when the FX will go general availability) and you can expect the new drivers to give the FX a ~15% performance increase at least (thats what happened with the GEForce 4 Ti 4x00's).
If you read the article on Tom's Hardware it states the car is a pre-release evaluation (fan et al). You can be sure nVidia have got their pre-release drivers up to a level that is as good as (if not slightly better than) ATi's for the previews, but once it is released properly and the OFFICIAL REVENUE benchmarks come out, this thing is going to rock.
New stuff is expensive. But new stuff makes old stuff be cheaper. Right now, a GF4 Ti 4200 can be had for just over $100. It's a great buy, and at that price, you can afford to upgrade much more often. Of course, there are people that actually do need this kind of power (the vertex and pixel shaders are amazing, just from a programming point of view) and they're willing to pay for it.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
First, as mentioned the last time the FX came up, manufacturers can put any kind of cooling they want on the FX. I've heard there are production models that look just like any other graphics card.
. pd f
And this card is ALL finesse and no brute force. That is why it loses in traditional tests. PROGRAMMABLE PIXEL SHADERS. The Radeon 9700 can only do a tiny fraction per pass that the FX can do per pass. This is what most of their R&D was spent on. Look it up
http://www.nvidia.com/docs/lo/2413/SUPP/Shaders
It will vastly improve the effects possible in consumer graphics.
It's kinda useless to speculate on what their next-gen cards can do. Let's face it, we haven't really even seen what the 9700 and FX can do yet. I am starting to feel like Rodney King while reading all the posts here, though. I just keep thinking to myself "can't we all just get along?!?!"
I never understood why people get so up-in-arms about graphics cards. I mean, I have my preference in cards, but that's based on feature set and power. I think a lot of ATi's technology will be adopted by game makers (because it's just so damned neato... just look at the demos), and a lot of nVidia's technology will too (because nVidia still holds the crown and you always program toward the common standard).
That said... unless I get a huge influx of cash, I'm sticking with my Radeon AIW. Y'know... that first powerful card ATi put out that's compatible with roughly 85% of games.
But that's the risk you take when you buy computer hardware. Sometimes you have to guess based on the specs (I bought it because it outperformed the GeForces on low-end PC test-beds, which was a lot more similar to my comptuer than 1.5+ GHz testbeds where the GeForces shine). If it's not so compatable, meh, deal with it.
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I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
1. ISDN card
;)
:D
2. Sound blaster AUDIGY
3. Wireless D-Link 22mbs card
4. Intel Pro 10/100 card
5. Adaptec 2940 SCSI card
6. BlueTooth card
I use all these cards at some time. OK, I could rationalise the network cards as I only use 1 at a time, but I don't really like opening up my case and swapping cards and stuff when I goto a LAN party (ethernet) or visit my parents (ISDN connection) and go back home (wifi).
Also, I dont use the bluetooth card all the time - it's mainly to connx to my Palm and transfer pictures rarely to my phone for caller pictures
Even rarer I use my SCSI card as I'm now using IDE disks and CDR for backup. But I may need to plug in my external DDS-2 tape drive for an old file.
I like all the cards there when I need em and dont want to be messing about changing them.
So, yeah, I use all 6 slots. Guess I'll be sticking with my 9700 Pro
"So far, it is indeed better overall than the 9700Pro, but not enough for it's price."
What?
Anandtech said of the FX, "A card that is several months late, that is able to outperform the Radeon 9700 Pro by 10% at best but in most cases manages to fall behind by a factor much greater than that."
And I like Tom's hardware comparing the card to the Voodoo 6000. True, he was referring to the snazzy looks of the card, but I suspect there was a bit of a dig in there as well. After all, that was one of the last cards 3dfx made before they went under...
1600 AMD XP GeForce 3 Ti200 512 MB DDR RAM XP Home I run Quake III @ 90 fps and UT 2K3 @ 80 fps at 1024x768. I can't imagine needing a faster machine for today's games. Running the Doom III Demo, I got a whopping 5 fps. Now, when that comes out, I may decide to upgrade to a 4200. But, I simply refuse to drop $300+ on a freakin video card. That's simply ridiculous.
> Give nVidia a month or two (when the FX will go general availability)
Give ATI a month or two, and the Radeon 9900/Pro will be announced.. (R9700 with a bump in speed from 300 to 375-400 mhz). AND, it will likely ship for 100$ less than FX Ultra, as it has significantly less manufacturing costs than the FX (0.15 vs. 0.13 micron process, and 9 layer PCB versus 12 layer PCB).
Ok everyone do me a favor, after you've read the Tom's review PLEASE read the Anandtech review.
I started to feel sick to my stomach when I realized how sloppy and shallow Tom's review was done. Anand truly is "the wonderboy"; he reveals some highly critical issues and has some sweet rollovers comparing the antialiasing and anistropic filtering of each card. He reveals that at the same visual quality settings, the 9700 Pro tops the FX in almost all the benchmarks. "NVIDIA takes the crown! No question about it..." Oh paaleease Tom, research the product before you post! Kudos to Anandtech.
This statement is false.
These numbers don't mean what you think they mean. Perf vs. Price is good, when you don't have a video card to begin with. When you already have a video card, you have to figure out what your Improved Perf. vs. Price ratio will be. A GF4Ti4200 has excellent price-to-performance ratio, but if you're coming up from an original GF3, then your 3DMark performance will probably sit somewhere between the GF3's on the chart. In a case like that, the Radeon 9700 Pro would probably be an ideal investment, since (off-the-cuff calculation) it would offer the best added bang to the buck.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."