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Rumors of a GeForceFX 5800 Ultra Cancelation?
chris_oat writes "It seems that nVidia's GeForceFX 5800 Ultra may never see the light of day after months of super-hype and annoying delays. This article on megarad.com suggests that poor manufacturing yields are causing nVidia to rethink plans for its (new?) flagship part. Lack of an "Ultra" type solution from nVidia would leave ATI's Radeon9700 uncontested as the defacto performance part."
Lack of an "Ultra" type solution from nVidia would leave ATI's Radeon9700 uncontested as the defacto performance part
The Radeon 9900 is expected out next month, with the new R350 core.
I am glad I don't have Nvidia stock right about now.
I work at Best Buy (unfortunately) and we were instructed to stop selling all Preorder GeForce FX's and destory the boxes and give all the free stuff to the employees or whoever wanted them. Apparently at least the pre-orders will be fulfilled but I don't think the card is going to make it to the stores for quite some time do to "extremely limited supplies" (according to the store memo). At least I got a free Nvida t-shirt and Hat out of it. :o)
-macado
Just a couple of things to add. For me at least, 30 to 40 fps is a minimum requirement. However, that is the lowest it should possibly go. If it gets below 30 fps it starts turning into a slide show.
ALso, aside from just the visual effects, more powerful hardware gives you better performance in game litterally. Example, the quake3 engine. In the quake 3 engine, you can jump much further with 150 fps then you can with 30 fps. The way it was coded if you were to jump, the game checks on a frame by frame basis to see where the jump is going. I think it was designed with a baseline of around 90 fps if I remember right. Which means that if you are going under that, your jumps will be shorter and over it, longer. Also, on Return to Castle Wolfenstein, if you fps ever drops below 30, then you rate of fire actually slows down. So, just FYI, fps can mean more then simply "how pretty" it looks.
But, it's not just a rumor anymore. When it first came to [H], everyone regarded it as BS. It was a rumor posted on a board that spread incredibly rapidly. But, apparently it's been confirmed by either OEMs or nVidia itself to those with good contacts. BFG has stopped taking preorders, AFAIK, because...
"According to an e-mail John Malley sent out a couple of days ago, BFG is concerned that pre-sales may exceed their allocation of units."
So, yes, the 5800Ultra is gone. Oh well. NV35 in June, according to some.
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nV News
Am I the only one that sees how freakin' poetic this is? This card was touted as the first real tangible result of the marriage between NVidia and 3Dfx (one of the reasons for the "FX" moniker, supposedly), and the company's having the exact same problems as 3Dfx did with their Voodoo 4 and 5's. Namely, that they're not as fast as people expected, they use too much power and generate too much heat. And their competition is passing them by.
Still, I don't see NVidia in the same precarious position as 3Dfx was at the time. NVidia likes to point out that after the latest Radeons were released by ATI, NVidia's market share actually went up, not down. The super-performance market is actually a very small market, and NVidia still offers the best value out there for mainstream users in the GeForce 4 Ti4200. For most people, the extra $250 they'd spend on a Radeon 9700 Pro vs. a Ti4200 is just not worth it - the extra few frames per second you'd get in most games are generally not even that noticeable, and there are a lot of better ways to spend that money. I don't really think NVidia's got a lot to worry about, then - unless the performance gulf and manufacturing problems become so pronounced that public perception (or misperception) filters down to even the mainstream products (as has been ATI's bugaboo over the years).
Still, it looks like the GeForce FX has been NVidia's first real dud in some time. No doubt the "stock" FX 5800's will be a good value once the NV35 is released (just as the Ti4200's are a good value now), but at the moment the card doesn't seem to really fit in any niche. Performance gamers will choose the Radeon 9700 Pro, mainstream gamers will choose the Ti4200, and low-end or business users will continue choosing ultra low-cost but perfectly capable cards like the GeForce 2 Ti.
Just to clarify, Quake3Arena wasn't specifically coded to do this, it was actually a bug, and it only affected the jumping physics, nothing else in the game was affected (it was not intentional behaviour, in fact the game was specifically designed to try to NOT have the physics dependent on the frame rate). (You could jump a little bit higher and in some maps this gave a big advantage, e.g. DM13, since you could take a shortcut to the megahealth). The bug was fixed in one of the last patches (I think they made it optional though).
The jumping performance also wasn't proportional to the frame rate, the bug occurred around specific frame rates, such as 120 fps.
Having a physics engine be dependent on the current framerate shows a flaw in the game's design, and it is just one more reason to stop using the sorely outdated Q3 engine to benchmark new hardware.
Just to clarify, again .. this WAS a bug in Quake3Arena. However, it WAS NOT a bug in the "Quake 3 engine". It was a bug in the Quake3 game code. The "Quake3 game" is separate from (and built on top of) the "Quake 3 engine". The engine is the basic graphics and network system, source code NOT available, while the Quake 3 game itself was built essentially as the "default mod" for this game, and the source code is available for it.
The slightly-frame-rate-dependent jumping in Quake3 was a bug in the game code, and ONLY affected the jumping. The bug was fixed in one of the Quake3 patches. The game was intended to be designed so the physics were NOT frame-rate dependent. As you said, this would be a major flaw in a game design.
If the physics in a game were frame-rate dependent, you would see a HUGE difference in physics performance between 30, 60 and 90 fps. These sorts of rates affect (badly designed) game physics in a big way - you would notice it quickly. No major commercial game intentionally has such flaws.