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Carmack on NV30 vs R300
Nexxpert writes "John Carmack has posted his thoughts on the NV30 vs R300 (featured via www.bluesnews.com. Highlights some of the shortcomings of Nvidia's next step as well as pointing out what they've done right. Interesting read." In particular the arb2 vs nv30 path differences mean that it's not as simple as saying "ATI roX0rs nVidia" or vice versa.(update: sorry bout the misspelling, don't know how I missed that)
His contribution to the world was good enough to force at least 80% of us to consume unimaginable amounts of our college's T3 bandwidth. It almost cost at least one of us (wink wink) our job. To speak the name of this soul sucking horror....no, tis too dangerous, it makes me "quake".
It's 'Carmack'. Surely you'd get it right, considering how much Carmack worship there is on Slashdot?
Seriously, at least spell the guy's name correctly.
We already know that the Radeon 9700 pro and the GeForce FX will run Doom III, and they are both going to look good doing it.
My concern is what is it going to look like on, lets say, a G4Ti4200 w/64 megs of ram, or the G4Ti4600 w/128 megs of ram. Are those of us not willing to spend 400 bucks on a new vid card (or for those of us stuck with a 4x AGP board, that plus a new mobo) going to have to turn 90% of the features off to run it at a good looking frame rate?
Thanks goes out to Carmack, its nice that he takes the time to give us a run down of the two cards that are battling for supremecy, especially since I like many of you are thinking about D3 when I evaluate my system and its need for being upgraded.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
I was doing ok for the first paragraph or so.
Then my brain went *beep* *beep* *beep*
And I lost everything.
About the only thing I came away with is, if you do it the way a specific vendor wants, it kicks the crap outa the other one, otherwise the ATI may be a wee bit faster.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
This thread was "Doomed" from the start.
it's not as easy as it seems. Carmak makes some well reasoned and vaild points. I can't say I disagree with him about why DX's evolution is somewhat better(esentailly central control of the standard vs vendor squabling leading to dead branches). But he mentioned something about next gen cards having less bandwidth. Does that make sense to anyone?
...is what I'm buying! Blood, gore, death, mutilation, horror... that's what I want splattered on my monitor.
Trolling is a art,
Notice that Carmack has no R300 path. Why is that? I can think of two possible explanations instantly.
One is that ATI has optimized for the standard ARB2 path, and a specific R300 path wouldn't make much difference. In that case, my response would be, kudos ATI for promoting the standard, but speak positively of the performance of NV30.
The other possibility I can think of is that the lack of an R300 path is punishment for ATI leaking the Doom III alpha version. In that case I wonder how much the Radeon 9700 Pro would gain from an R300 specific path.
It certainly isn't a lack of time to develop the ATI path; there is an R200 path for older Radeon cards, and the Radeon 9700 has been available to developers for quite a bit longer than the GeforceFX has.
I'm "Keen" on continuing it.
Its Carmack. How could you get that one wrong?
"The current NV30 cards do have some other disadvantages: They take up two
slots, and when the cooling fan fires up they are VERY LOUD. I'm not usually
one to care about fan noise, but the NV30 does annoy me.
Noise is becoming a big problem. I now putting zalman stuff in all my computers. My guide is a zalman heatsink, a zalman powersupply, athlon 1.2, seagate 40 Gig HD, ATi radeon 9000(whitout fan) and a good motherboard without fan on the chipset.
thank you
louis
Carmak is the equivelent of Einstein for the computing age. He is a genius. His work with BSP, Ray Tracing, AI is usually regarded as the "Standard" or best real life way of doing game engine design in real time.
In other words, he is a god...
While you are a smuck.
~~~
Click here, you know you wanna!
I guess he thought heat and noise are a minor matter that Nvidia could easily take care of. Either that or he's a pure software guy.
My own feelings about the Nvidia card are completely the opposite. I couldn't care less about how it handles things internally. Besides gaming I use my computer as a replacement for a dvd player and TV. During the quiet passages I don't want to hear the little fans and stuff. I like fps but lack of noise is at least as important.
(If you're wondering about this comment see the Tom's hardware review and listen to the mp3s. It was a preproduction unit tho.)
Proper link HERE
$ finger johnc@idsoftware.com
t of Direct-X is the primary reason I have been attending the Windows
[idsoftware.com]
Welcome to id Software's Finger Service V1.5!
Name: John Carmack
Email:
Description: Programmer
Project:
Last Updated: 01/29/2003 18:53:43 (Central Standard Time)
Jan 29, 2003
NV30 vs R300, current developments, etc
At the moment, the NV30 is slightly faster on most scenes in Doom than the
R300, but I can still find some scenes where the R300 pulls a little bit
ahead. The issue is complicated because of the different ways the cards can
choose to run the game.
The R300 can run Doom in three different modes: ARB (minimum extensions, no
specular highlights, no vertex programs), R200 (full featured, almost always
single pass interaction rendering), ARB2 (floating point fragment shaders,
minor quality improvements, always single pass).
The NV30 can run DOOM in five different modes: ARB, NV10 (full featured, five
rendering passes, no vertex programs), NV20 (full featured, two or three
rendering passes), NV30 ( full featured, single pass), and ARB2.
The R200 path has a slight speed advantage over the ARB2 path on the R300, but
only by a small margin, so it defaults to using the ARB2 path for the quality
improvements. The NV30 runs the ARB2 path MUCH slower than the NV30 path.
Half the speed at the moment. This is unfortunate, because when you do an
exact, apples-to-apples comparison using exactly the same API, the R300 looks
twice as fast, but when you use the vendor-specific paths, the NV30 wins.
The reason for this is that ATI does everything at high precision all the
time, while Nvidia internally supports three different precisions with
different performances. To make it even more complicated, the exact
precision that ATI uses is in between the floating point precisions offered by
Nvidia, so when Nvidia runs fragment programs, they are at a higher precision
than ATI's, which is some justification for the slower speed. Nvidia assures
me that there is a lot of room for improving the fragment program performance
with improved driver compiler technology.
The current NV30 cards do have some other disadvantages: They take up two
slots, and when the cooling fan fires up they are VERY LOUD. I'm not usually
one to care about fan noise, but the NV30 does annoy me.
I am using an NV30 in my primary work system now, largely so I can test more
of the rendering paths on one system, and because I feel Nvidia still has
somewhat better driver quality (ATI continues to improve, though). For a
typical consumer, I don't think the decision is at all clear cut at the
moment.
For developers doing forward looking work, there is a different tradeoff --
the NV30 runs fragment programs much slower, but it has a huge maximum
instruction count. I have bumped into program limits on the R300 already.
As always, better cards are coming soon.
--------
Doom has dropped support for vendor-specific vertex programs
(NV_vertex_program and EXT_vertex_shader), in favor of using
ARB_vertex_program for all rendering paths. This has been a pleasant thing to
do, and both ATI and Nvidia supported the move. The standardization process
for ARB_vertex_program was pretty drawn out and arduous, but in the end, it is
a just-plain-better API than either of the vendor specific ones that it
replaced. I fretted for a while over whether I should leave in support for
the older APIs for broader driver compatibility, but the final decision was
that we are going to require a modern driver for the game to run in the
advanced modes. Older drivers can still fall back to either the ARB or NV10
paths.
The newly-ratified ARB_vertex_buffer_object extension will probably let me do
the same thing for NV_vertex_array_range and ATI_vertex_array_object.
Reasonable arguments can be made for and against the OpenGL or Direct-X style
of API evolution. With vendor extensions, you get immediate access to new
functionality, but then there is often a period of squabbling about exact
feature support from different vendors before an industry standard settles
down. With central planning, you can have "phasing problems" between
hardware and software releases, and there is a real danger of bad decisions
hampering the entire industry, but enforced commonality does make life easier
for developers. Trying to keep boneheaded-ideas-that-will-haunt-us-for-years
ou
Graphics Summit for the past three years, even though I still code for OpenGL.
The most significant functionality in the new crop of cards is the truly
flexible fragment programming, as exposed with ARB_fragment_program. Moving
from the "switches and dials" style of discrete functional graphics
programming to generally flexible programming with indirection and high
precision is what is going to enable the next major step in graphics engines.
It is going to require fairly deep, non-backwards-compatible modifications to
an engine to take real advantage of the new features, but working with
ARB_fragment_program is really a lot of fun, so I have added a few little
tweaks to the current codebase on the ARB2 path:
High dynamic color ranges are supported internally, rather than with
post-blending. This gives a few more bits of color precision in the final
image, but it isn't something that you really notice.
Per-pixel environment mapping, rather than per-vertex. This fixes a pet-peeve
of mine, which is large panes of environment mapped glass that aren't
tessellated enough, giving that awful warping-around-the-triangulation effect
as you move past them.
Light and view vectors normalized with math, rather than a cube map. On
future hardware this will likely be a performance improvement due to the
decrease in bandwidth, but current hardware has the computation and bandwidth
balanced such that it is pretty much a wash. What it does (in conjunction
with floating point math) give you is a perfectly smooth specular highlight,
instead of the pixelish blob that we get on older generations of cards.
There are some more things I am playing around with, that will probably remain
in the engine as novelties, but not supported features:
Per-pixel reflection vector calculations for specular, instead of an
interpolated half-angle. The only remaining effect that has any visual
dependency on the underlying geometry is the shape of the specular highlight.
Ideally, you want the same final image for a surface regardless of if it is
two giant triangles, or a mesh of 1024 triangles. This will not be true if
any calculation done at a vertex involves anything other than linear math
operations. The specular half-angle calculation involves normalizations, so
the interpolation across triangles on a surface will be dependent on exactly
where the vertexes are located. The most visible end result of this is that
on large, flat, shiny surfaces where you expect a clean highlight circle
moving across it, you wind up with a highlight that distorts into an L shape
around the triangulation line.
The extra instructions to implement this did have a noticeable performance
hit, and I was a little surprised to see that the highlights not only
stabilized in shape, but also sharpened up quite a bit, changing the scene
more than I expected. This probably isn't a good tradeoff today for a gamer,
but it is nice for any kind of high-fidelity rendering.
Renormalization of surface normal map samples makes significant quality
improvements in magnified textures, turning tight, blurred corners into shiny,
smooth pockets, but it introduces a huge amount of aliasing on minimized
textures. Blending between the cases is possible with fragment programs, but
the performance overhead does start piling up, and it may require stashing
some information in the normal map alpha channel that varies with mip level.
Doing good filtering of a specularly lit normal map texture is a fairly
interesting problem, with lots of subtle issues.
Bump mapped ambient lighting will give much better looking outdoor and
well-lit scenes. This only became possible with dependent texture reads, and
it requires new designer and tool-chain support to implement well, so it isn't
easy to test globally with the current Doom datasets, but isolated demos are
promising.
The future is in floating point framebuffers. One of the most noticeable
thing this will get you without fundamental algorithm changes is the ability
to use a correct display gamma ramp without destroying the dark color
precision. Unfortunately, using a floating point framebuffer on the current
generation of cards is pretty difficult, because no blending operations are
supported, and the primary thing we need to do is add light contributions
together in the framebuffer. The workaround is to copy the part of the
framebuffer you are going to reference to a texture, and have your fragment
program explicitly add that texture, instead of having the separate blend unit
do it. This is intrusive enough that I probably won't hack up the current
codebase, instead playing around on a forked version.
Floating point framebuffers and complex fragment shaders will also allow much
better volumetric effects, like volumetric illumination of fogged areas with
shadows and additive/subtractive eddy currents.
John Carmack
Wow, you rebel you.
What work on AI? Run forwards until shot? Woo...
That is all.
He does in fact mention the noise created from the fan.
Allthough he's not normally annoyed by fan noise, the noise of the NV30 bothered even him, he said. Somewhere at the end of the article I think, but I'm too lazy to look it up.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
(mostly due to the egregious misspelling)
I was holding out on nVidia's new card, but now I've given up on that idea. With more and more people using PCs as multimedia devices (watch DVDs, listen to music, etc), a fan that puts out almost 60Db of noise is unacceptable.
I really wanted to go away from ATI this time around, but it appears I'll have to wait a little longer. I'm sure nVidia will [eventually] release a fanless, 1-slot version. I just wonder if it will be too little too late.
It's working perfectly. I wonder if you can slashdot finger...
The current NV30 cards do have some other disadvantages: They take up two
slots, and when the cooling fan fires up they are VERY LOUD. I'm not usually
one to care about fan noise, but the NV30 does annoy me.
If ATI can release something faster in about 2 or 3 months, before GeForce FX gains total foothold, ATI will keep all the sales. And to me, it seems that ATI is more standards-compliant and will give you a speed boost if you use a standards-compliant game. Meanwhile, you need support for vendor-specific routines to get things going faster with nVidia.
ATI! Go go go! While the drivers have not been so nice in the past, ATI has always produced solid hardware. The 4MB Rage Pro I had on my old system rocked for anything 2D, even did most games at a pretty acceptable frame rate in the year 2000.
I dare you to challenge my statement - let's get some historical info on both ATI and nVidia here.
SIM SIM SALA BIM!
These are both the "new hotness" but with the noise of the nVidia I forsee it becoming "old and busted" quite soon.
Not to mention ATi's next card...
I thought he was named "Carmack" not "Carmak"...
Ah, Wisconsin... Now if you'll excuse me, it is time for another dose of cheese.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
This story states that Bill gates is on the run once again from the Belgian Custard Pie Hurler 'Noel Godin', the famous practical joker who has gotten the MS boss before.
More on the first Attack can be found here.
Ol' Billy now seems to be overly cautious now each time he is forced to visit Belgium.
Well, are they? I've always wondered....
...really need to concentrate on spelling people's names correctly. When they can't even spell John Carmack's name right, something is seriously wrong.
mbbac
I've been running ATI cards on my desktop since the mach64 chip days. When I got my 9700 in August, I NEVER thought I'd still have a chip that was competitive with nVidia's best offering in 3D. I never bought ATI cards because they were best in 3D or driver quality - they never were better. ATI did have superior 2D quality (to my eyes) and Video/DVD playback. Given I spend 90% on my time on a desktop, ATI had the right mix of features. Now they finally are competitive with nVidia's 3D.
After we started to get benchmarks showing matched performance, the remaining questions were left to DX9 and the more complex shaders. From Carmack's comments and the shadermark tests that are showing up, it appears that ATI is anywhere from competitive to superior in the DX9 2.0 shaders, as well. It does look like NV30 can indeed run deeper/higher precision shaders, but we will have to wait to see if games ever do show with shaders deeper than the LCD between NV30 and R300.
Carmack does mention that nVidia promised that "compiler improvements" will increase the NV30 shader performance. (Better scheduling of parallel pipes?)
The astounding bottom line is that as of Jan 2003, the 9700 is not shown to be inferior in any way to an as-yet unreleased flagship product from the king of 3d on the mainstream desktop.3 Cheers for ATI.
Oh. Good. I was worried about that renormazilation thing. Glad it all worked out.
So, just to recap on that, Ati roxors?
finger johnc@idsoftware.com| more
Thats the only way to read johc info.
Preaching maturity while simultaneously trolling a slashdot discussion.
Spectacular, sir!
Imagine how much of a market major printer, digital camera, and scanner manufacturers are missing by forcing their tech support people to say "we don't support it under that lee-nooks stuff". If a company, say Canon, would release a universal supported bubblejet driver for older printers, and a universal PPD for their postscript printers to work in CUPS, they could see massive gains (we do account for like 6% of all users, afterall).
NVIDIA got where they are today by beating 3dfx on their own turf: high-end gaming performance. Remember when 3dfx released the Voodoo 4 & 5? More expensive than the GeForce256 but not decisively better performance. Now I'm hearing similar things about the GeForceFX vs. ATI's three month old Radeons. NVIDIA is getting bigger but they still aren't a huge company. Can they really afford to lose the lucrative high-end sales right now?
One thing NVIDIA does seem to have going well is their motherboard chipsets. The new nForce2 really kicks ass by all accounts. I remember a while back hearing about an ATI mobo chipset based on tech they acquired from ArtX, but apparently end-user mobo chipsets aren't ATI's plan.
Good luck, NVIDIA. Hope y'all can keep up the pace.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
Just in-case bluesnews starts to get chunky. A perfectly non busy server at: .plan.
Doom.AxleGames.com
Has the
The NV30 runs the ARB2 path MUCH slower than the NV30 path.
Half the speed at the moment. This is unfortunate, because when you do an
exact, apples-to-apples comparison using exactly the same API, the R300 looks
twice as fast, but when you use the vendor-specific paths, the NV30 wins.
I'm betting that Carmack assumed NV30 would also use the ARB2 path with NV10/20 R200 for the older cards. When he found ARB2 ran like shit on NV30, he had to do a special NV30 path.
He's already dumped vendor-specific vertex programs. I bet ARB2 would have been the only next-generation fragment processor if the NV30 could have run it fast enough.
Carmack mentioned this, and its important not to gloss over...
There's a big difference between the drivers theoretical output, and the actual acheived output.
In testing at my job, we found that the ATI drivers typically performed very poorly in comparison to those released by nVidia on similar hardware. In addition, we often had more serious issues with bugs in ATI drivers than nVidia. Although the next great thing from nVidia isn't likely to outright dethrone the 9700, nVidia is constantly improving their driver technology, constantly making the layer between software and hardware thinner and thinner.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
What are the minimum video requirements going to be? Are they still up in the air?
the article lays it out like it's nv30 vs arb2, but arb2 is an opengl extension that has nothing to do with ATI.
(Reporter == idiot)
Its Carmack.
It's "It's Carmack.". Why are you such a nitpicker?
Its wonderful to see slashdot celebrating its heros like John Carmak, Richard Stalman and Linus Torvads. I mean, with names like these contributing, who needs editors?
> What I gather from other reviews is that ATI cards render scenes with a shitload of textures and other crap in it faster, whereas NV30 is slower on those scenes.
four words: better memory bandwidth management
Seems to me the shader limits are more important than the ARB2 path. Nvidia can probaly get the ARB2 speeds up, with driver optimization. I can't imagine the limits on shader instructions can easily be remedied. Anyone know how this will affect the ATI? Can it swap in more instructions at a performance loss (Or no loss) or can it just not run the shader if it goes over the instruction limit? In other words does Carmack make large shader programs that ATI can't run or run slower or does he cap the shaders at ATI's limit and get simpler shader programs for both cards?
3 rooms and 4 mobs does not a stress test make
okay I agree with the premise that older cards will do just fine but the Doom3 alpha wasn't pushing the limits like I expect the ifnal release to do.
A couple of dynamic lights and some bump mapping.
You can still get q3 to reach the limits of the Ti4600 128Mb. Heck, even the original Unreal still poses a test with eveything turned up!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
update: sorry bout the misspelling, don't know how I missed that
psst... it's spelled about...
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
Actually, I think you mean:
finger johnc@idsoftware.com|less
I dunno, these Windoze lusers...
Yes ATI did good. I'm still worried about the shader limits though. There are some neat algorithms that use the shaders quite heavely.
BTW I'm waiting for someone to add geometry processors to cards. Download the model, and real-time morph, and other permutations. It could even help with primatives manipulation.
Besides the fact the leaked alpha ran like crap on your friends GF2, essentially your proof comes down to this.
"but you should be pretty good to go I would imagine."
Somehow I don't feel any better.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Ya, Get raped, get married, lose the house and the kids, blow your brains out by the time your 30.
This may be slightly OT, but have any of you ever tried to replace a fan on a video card before? The big issue with Nvidia's new offering is that it is loud, etc - but I don't see that as the biggest problem. I have a case that's fairly quiet on the inside, and the only way I would notice that my video card fan died to is to take the side off and check, or notice that it burnt up. I have a Geforce 2 GTS, and when I did look inside my case, I heard a grinding sound and traced it back to my stupid VGA fan. This tells me it's about to crap out on me, and I need to replace it. I have a found a few good places on the net to replace the fans with, yet every OEM manufacturer of the graphics cards seems to use different methods of attaching the fans. Some have pins, some just use adhesive (I think that's a major problem waiting to happen), and even if you do find a fan that works - the pins on it might not line up with the slots on your board. Oh, another thing - 9 times out of 10, even if I do find a fan that has little pins that line up with the holes on the board, I can't find one that also has matching power connectors. With my luck, I'll find one that has a 3 pin connector when I need 2, or vice versa. So, does anybody know of a good place to get VGA fan replacements for these ultra-hot running video cards???
Tip: babelfish.altavista.com
So does the presence of the R200 path mean that my Radeon 8500LE will do a nearly decent job on Doom3, at least until ARB2 cards reach affordable?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
on getting 15 FPS at 1280x1024 with all options turned on with a gf2.
*MAYBE* in an empty room with very few shadows and no combat..
On my 9700 Pro running on a 2.4 GHz Xeon, at that resolution, I normally got ~40-45 fps, but when anything happened, it dipped under 10. Sometimes in the 1-2 fps range -- when I was shooting, and being attacked.
No way in hell any gf2 is going to push 15 fps when anything is going on. It'd be a freaking slideshow slower than the powerpoint presentation at the meeting I just got out of.
God has abandoned them.
Errr.. not better memory bandwidth management, but just *more* memory bandwidth. The ATI boards have a 256-bit path to memory, the nVidia boards, only 128-bit.
:)
Not quite sure what those nVidia boys were thinking.. but it's not panning out. They've got 1GHz memory (after DDR).. and it still can't touch the much slower ATI bandwidth..
Hehe.. I should check hotjobs.com and see if there's any computer engineers looking for jobs that have their last listed job as nVidia...
Quit "Wolf"ing up the attention, you "Heretic"!
Watch out with this combination. Works like a charm in Windows, and even works decently well in Linux, so far. But under Linux it's not fully capable, due to nVidia's usual documentation/binary driver issues.
1: No GART driver for Linux. The GART driver is integrated with nVidia video drivers, so forget about 3D on an ATI on an nForce under Linux. The nForce is effectively tied to nVidia video for Linux 3D.
2: No APIC. At the moment, I have stuff like SATA, firewire, USB2, AC97 modem, and USB2.0 turned off. Even so, I have an IRQ conflict between the ATI video and USB1.1 that so far hasn't bit me. But I suspect future pain, here.
3: Sound works - in stereo, not Dolby 5.1. I've heard of a $30 driver that will give full capability, though I've heard mixed reports of getting the SPDIF working even with these.
4: Binary-only network driver. There's also a 3com, but something about it requires patching the standard driver to get it recognized. So var nvnet works, so I haven't fussed with the 3com.
Demi off-topic, except that there is a tie between nForce and nVidia video, so I guess that's relevant to the subject. This is also a concern because it's a really high-performance board, where you'd really like to run an R300 or NV30.
Fortunately my mission for this board was largely Win-based with Linux as a dual-boot, or I would have RMA-ed the thing. But I kept the ATI video, and refused to "reward" nVidia's actions with more money.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
This guy is a freaking genius, that's who. He answered riddles that were hermetically sealed in envelopes BEFORE HE READ the riddle! Truly magnificent! erm, wait...
Per-pixel reflection vector calculations for specular, instead of an interpolated half-angle. The only remaining effect that has any visual dependency on the underlying geometry is the shape of the specular highlight. Ideally, you want the same final image for a surface regardless of if it is two giant triangles, or a mesh of 1024 triangles. This will not be true if any calculation done at a vertex involves anything other than linear math operations. The specular half-angle calculation involves normalizations, so the interpolation across triangles on a surface will be dependent on exactly where the vertexes are located. The most visible end result of this is that on large, flat, shiny surfaces where you expect a clean highlight circle moving across it, you wind up with a highlight that distorts into an L shape around the triangulation line.
OK, I did some 3D imaging math about 10 years ago (when you had to code your own drivers to get SuperVGA mode under DOS), so I think I get what he's talking about: the problem of how to show the reflection of one object (or light source) off another object. I've never heard of "interpolated half-angle" or "specular highlights", or the "triangulation line". Anyone know what he is talking about?
Id employee walks by Carmack's office:
Employee: "They're talking about you on slashdot."
Carmack: "Mmm..."
NVidia uses higher precision
Yes, it is unoptimized, but you must also remember that software is not technically 'feature-complete' until beta. So there may be some more eye candy added yet.
And posting John Carmack's email was not a Smart Thing To Do (TM). Please follow the Golden Rule of email. I bet you wouldn't want your email address posted without your permission.
It's...
You are my chattel.
You are my niggah!
You are old and yo'ass-hole busted open by yo pimp_daddy_massa'
There's just no comparision. The 3d card by ATI is much better at game graphics than the leaf-blower from nVidia.
Edith Keeler Must Die
There'a also a slower version of the GeforceFX in the works, sans leafblower. It's reported to run at 400MHz core/800MHz memory (as opposed to 500/1000 for the "Ultra" leafblower version). It will likely get trounced by the 9700 and 9700 Pro in most performance and IQ areas, but it will be an alternate solution for you guys that want one of those nV30 based cards but don't want to risk having your cat sucked into the back of your computer.
The future is in floating point framebuffers. One of the most noticeable things this will get you without fundamental algorithm changes is the ability to use a correct display gamma ramp without destroying the dark color precision.
Can anyone elaborate on this interesting point? I don't understand how color precision is lost for dark color values when using correct gamma, or how floating point framebuffers will restore it. Doesn't this issue only concern matching the card's gamma to the monitor's gamma? I assume that a video card applies the gamma power function only "after all is said and done" and the frame buffer's contents are to be turned into an RGB signal.
Could it be the deafening sound of:
1. The speed of an R300?
2. Carmack's speech, soaring way over my head? or
3. An NV30 cooling fan?
You be the judge.
Then it's your doom.
Get off your rocker. -1 Troll.
Carmack could have been working for NASA or the US military
Besides the fact that he has his OWN rocket company, I wouldn't call studying space dust "furthering humanity" or building bigger weapons "furthering humanity" considering that we can't even figure out how to feed all of humanity.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
John Carmack does what needs to be done so he can make money and make a living. That is something each of us do everyday and will continue to do so.
However, Mr. Carmack is a man who is to be respected, because unlike many others he often takes his hard work and releases it to the general community. How many engine authors can you think of do this ? EXACTLY
Additionally, John Carmack is great for standing on his two feet and using OpenGL while most other lazy developers have sold their souls to Microsoft's Direct X.
I can think of a billion more reasons, why Mr. Carmack will get my highest level of respect. I hope you crawl out of whatever rock you have been living under.
Sunny Dubey
Uh...what do you think hardware T&L does? The T stands for transform...rotation, scaling, limited morphing...a 3d card is in itself nothing more than a matrix processing machine, designed for handeling vectors, vertexes and polyogons...in other words: geometry.
/would/ be neat for any natural graphical effect (eddies in fog, dirt on textures, landscapes, clouds, trees and plants...whatever).
Now, a hardware fractal solution...that
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Oh, I'm a Republican
I got a small schling
I like to bomb niggahs
and make a lot o' bling
I got a bunch o' friends
in high up places
They helps me get dem
government graces.
You think I'm smart
I just know who's who
I couldn't run a fruit stand
without the red white & blue
I'll drop some crap
about Jesus the Christ
You'll buy it all
and vote for me twice
'Fact, Jesus is comin'!
Real soon, now!
So we gotta prop up Israel
That ol' sacred cow
Don't need no history
Don't need no schoolin'
I got my ideology
To keep me a shootin'
Liberals! Faggots!
Commies and queers!
Socialist hippies
Full o' pussy tears
Facts? No! Don't need em here!
We're conservatives! We work on FEAR!
Don't like what we say?
Well FUCK YOU, bud!
We'll shove it down yer throat
and tell ya it's good!
Propaganda's m'friend
But I calls it "fact"
Even though I don't read
'Cept for Chick tracts
RULE Love me two times baby, once for tomorrow once cause I got AIDS!
All Your Memory Are Belong To Java
You use Albert Einstein as example of a talented individual who followed the good road.
However, Einstein laid the groundwork for the atomic bomb (e=mc^2). And I'm sure many more deaths can be attributed to atomic bombs than violent 3d gaming. How do you rationalize that?
I know they're not supposed to matter, and IRQs should be sharable on the PCI bus with modern drivers.
But it doesn't seem that way. I still hear bad stories about shared IRQs, and common advice is to try and avoid it, especially on high-bandwidth devices. Maybe it's possible that they're all related to Creative soundcards, but I more suspect that it's possible that Creative doesn't have a monopoly on buggy PCI design.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
That's cold :P , acutally C / CPP / SQL
You can throw in PHP , Java and Delphi if you want as well but that's more of a hobby.
I suppose I can get slated on only just getting started on learning OpenGL , don't even know why
I bother validating myself to an anonymous coward
though...
HAND