Rumors of a GeForceFX 5800 Ultra Cancelation?

bloody 'leet gamerz' by RobertTaylor · 2003-02-09 06:50 · Score: 5, Funny

Glad to see that the difference between 2467 and 2550 frames per second is still very important...

fp?

Important? by Amsterdam+Vallon · 2003-02-09 06:53 · Score: 2, Insightful

Of course its important.

I'm sick && tired of reading that people say "oh, well the human eye only sees 30 fps, so anything else is over-kill".

That's a bunch of boloney (pardon my language). People want *clairty* and *SMOOTHNESS* in their gaming performance, and although 30 fps delivers clarity from frame to frame, the transitions of frames only achieves a good smoothness above 60 fps.

Most Linux apps aim for >= 60 fps. Go checkout Sourceforge for more details.

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Re:Important? by Patrick+May · 2003-02-09 07:03 · Score: 5, Funny

I agree that it's important. When I'm MUDding, I need to see that next line of text come up instantly! Otherwise, the next thing I see will be You are looking down at your body from above....
Re:Important? by Jugalator · 2003-02-09 07:06 · Score: 4, Insightful

It's said that you stop seeing the difference at around 30 fps, but so far I've only heard comparisons with movies and TV. Other "rules" might be in effect when you display the same graphics on a screen much sharper than a movie, where each frame is clearly transitioned to another without any blur inbetween, like on a movie (at least I assume the transitions between frames on a movie screen isn't as defined as on a monitor).

Would be interesting to know if 30 fps *is* enough (of course only *minimum* 30 fps) or if monitors need an even higher frame rater for humans to not see the transitions.

What I'm more annoyed about is those who must run games in 1600x1200 and not 1024x768 on a typical 19" monitor, and then complain that a gfx card sucks since it doesn't perform good enough in 1600x1200. It's not like you have enough time to spot the microscopic pixels anyway. :-) And then there's FSAA to remove the pixelation even more.

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Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Re:Important? by Camulus · 2003-02-09 07:30 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Re:Important? by ergo98 · 2003-02-09 07:33 · Score: 5, Interesting

It's said that you stop seeing the difference at around 30 fps

And 16 million colours is more than the eye can see, and 44,100 samples per second is more than the ear can hear. Throughout the march of technology we've heard these ridiculously arbitrary "limits" of our senses, and invariably they are discounted at a future time. In essence you can consider them a sort of justification.

but so far I've only heard comparisons with movies and TV

Actually I've been paying attention at movies having heard the "well movies are 24fps and they look perfect": MOVIES LOOK LIKE TRASH. Seriously the next time you go to the movies pay close attention to any large movements on the screen and you'll be surprized how horrendous 24fps really is. For instance, my wife recently dragged me to see "Two Weeks Notice" and there is a scene where the camera pans laterally across a shelf full of shoes at a rate of about a screen width per 1/2 second-- It looks absolutely atrocious. For fast action most filmmakers either resort to the action taking a small portion of the screen, or they use slow motion effects, again because the action simply looks terrible at 24fps.

However when you get down to it the root of the "X FPS is more than anyone can see" is people's astoundingly self-centered claims that no-one else can see more than 30fps, or some other metric. This can be disproved instantly via the Q3 command cg_maxfps. Set it to 30 and it looks like a horrendous slideshow. Set it to 45 and it looks like a 1998 computer. Set it to 80 and it feels smooth with a bit of jaggedness. Set it to 90 and it feels nice. You'd think this would disprove the 30fps'ers in an instant, but amazingly they persist.

and then complain that a gfx card sucks since it doesn't perform good enough in 1600x1200. It's not like you have enough time to spot the microscopic pixels anyway. :-) And then there's FSAA to remove the pixelation even more.

1600x1200 on a 19" monitor is hardly "microscopic" pixels, however to consider this in a forward thinking manner consider the heavyweight video-card required to do 1080p resolutions on a HDTV set? 1920x1024.

FSAA, BTW, is tremendously difficult for video-cards to do (because they're actually rendering at 2x or greater resolutions): There is no current video card that could dream of doing even Urban Terror (a Q3 mod) at 1600x1200 with FSAA at acceptable frame-rates.
Re:Important? by nunofgs · 2003-02-09 09:04 · Score: 4, Funny

HAH!!! between all your wisdom I found an error!!! the proper q3 command for capping the frame rates is actually com_maxfps! :)
Re:Important? by JebusIsLord · 2003-02-09 09:17 · Score: 2, Informative

Actually the reason 60hz is hard to view on a monitor while 24fps on a movie screen is fine, is that the entire movie frame is drawn at once, while each of those 60hz consist of a tiny dot drawing the whole screen. Flicker is therefore much more pronounced on a TV or monitor. LCDs by contrast do not do line-drawing and therefore look smashing at 60hz.

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Jeremy
Re:Important? by Dr.+Spork · 2003-02-09 09:17 · Score: 2, Interesting

Just a simple question: What is the refresh rate of your manitor? If you can do 1600X1200 at more than 85Hz and notice the improvement, I'll be impressed. The difference you report between 80 and 90 fps almost certainly has to do with the fact that your monitor refresh was set so that you show exactly five "dead" screens per second. When you set it above 85, each of your screen refreshes shows a different frame, so of course it looks better, but it's not for the reason you think. Try running at constant 75 FPS and set your refresh to 75, and you will see it also looks great.
Re:Important? by The+Baron+(nV+News) · 2003-02-09 09:18 · Score: 2, Interesting

"FSAA, BTW, is tremendously difficult for video-cards to do (because they're actually rendering at 2x or greater resolutions): There is no current video card that could dream of doing even Urban Terror (a Q3 mod) at 1600x1200 with FSAA at acceptable frame-rates."
No. This is bogus. The Kryo2 chip, along with the GF1/2, had a form of FSAA where it basically rendered the image at a much higher res than it was going to be displayed, but these don't exist anymore (at least not in the R300/NV30/NV25/R200). I BELIEVE this is called supersampling--don't quote me on this, I'm not a coder and don't care too much about FSAA modes (I have a GF3. I can't use AA in ANYTHING but the oldest games.). Supersampling takes a much larger performance hit, but a lot of people regard it as looking better than the newer method. This newer method is called multisampling--it actually renders the image multiple times, offsetting it each time. This is why color compression has become so important. 4x MSAA COULD take up to four times the memory bandwidth of normal rendering, but with adequate color compression, you could get it down to two times or 1.5 times the bandwidth. This is part of the reason why nVidia went with a 128-bit bus on the GFFX--it thought it had good enough color compression.
Anyway, moving right along, there are two forms of MSAA (multisampling antialiasing)--ordered grid and rotated grid (once again, do not quote me on this).
So basically, FSAA ain't as simple as rendering at 3200x2400 and reducing that to 1280x960 anymore.

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nV News
Re:Important? by Rothron+the+Wise · 2003-02-09 09:54 · Score: 2, Informative

I'm sure it doesn't look as bad as 24fps on a monitor. Again, perhaps the only reason movies are watchable at all is that the bluriness at the frame transitions might make it easier for the brain to "add in" the extra information to interpolate

Actually, one of the reason why movies are so horribly jerky is that the actual refresh rate is 48fps, even though the frame rate is 24fps. Each frame is projected twice. The reason for this is to reduce flickering and to protect the film.(projector lights are HOT). Unfortunately, this double exposure messes up the brains visual prediction system, much in the same way a 30fps game on a 60Hz screen, only more so. Since there is a tangible delay between capturing an image in the optic nerve and feeding it to the brain, a lot of prediction is carried out to predict what things are going to look like when you receive the visual stimuli.

I agree that even a monitor at 48Hz would look worse than a movie theatre, but I expect this has something to do with the relatively low contrast movie screens have. A darker image takes longer to "see" than a bright one, not unlike how a photographer needs a longer exposure to take a picture in a dark environment.

Ever seen "3d-glasses" that have one dark glass and one perfectly transparent, instead of the normal red and blue/green? Those work on that principle, and the effect is best when the camera rotates clockwise around an object or pans across a landscape from right to left. If you reverse the direction, the 3D-effect is also reversed.

But i digress:

My point is that the human vision is incredibly advanced with a lot of special adaptations. There is no framerate of the eye. Fighter pilots have been shown to be able to not only see but also correctly identify a picture of a plane even when the image is displayed just in a 200Hz flash.

The ideal frame rate is the same rate as the monitor refresh, and to have a constant framerate. I'd much rather have 75fps at 75Hz than 80fps at 85Hz.

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A witty .sig proves nothing
Re:Important? by CircaX · 2003-02-09 10:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

If a higher framerate allows a player to jump farther, run faster, or shoot more rounds per second in a game, it means that the programmers have no clue as to how to properly implement a physics engine. Frame rate ought to be completely independant from any other function the game engine has to handle; a player should jump the same distance no matter how well the graphics card can keep up with the game's world environment. 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 imagine if this 'physics tied to framerate' applied to connection speed: people with Radeon 9700s would have gigabits of bandwith to play around with, while people stuck with a RagePro would have to deal with 28.8K rates.

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There's only 1 kinds of people in this world, those who understand balanced ternary, and those who don't.
Re:Important? by error0x100 · 2003-02-09 11:57 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Re:Important? by error0x100 · 2003-02-09 12:06 · Score: 3, Informative

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.
Re:Important? by error0x100 · 2003-02-09 12:15 · Score: 4, Insightful

One reason is that Quake3 suffers far worse at 24 fps than a movie is that your camera pan rate is typically MUCH quicker than you'll ever see in a movie. When playing Q3, you often need to pan your camera up to 180 degrees horizontally in less than a quarter of a second (I'm being generous, thats if you're slow). So thats a camera pan rate of 720 degrees/sec. At 24 fps, that means a delta of 30 degrees per frame; those are pretty big jumps, each image will be quite different, and your brain has to work pretty hard to perceive the motion. I doubt you'll ever really see a camera pan that fast in a movie, except in very rare and particular cases.
In Quake, your brain is also trying to do a lot more work to analyse the image its getting, while in a movie you are normally fairly relaxed and don't concentrate that hard on the image.
Its easier to pick up image "choppiness" in your peripheral vision. If you sit fairly close to the screen in the cinema, and you're looking at the center, you can fairly easily pick up jerkiness in motion at the sides of the screen (out of the "corners of your eyes").

...and...? by ottffssent · 2003-02-09 07:02 · Score: 4, Interesting

I see lots of comments predicting doom and gloom for nVidia already. The GFFX has been somewhat of a disappointment, both for consumers and for NV - it's too slow, too hot, and too hard to make. nVidia is not going to go into bankruptcy because of this however - they will still sell a few and will work madly on the next generation aimed for smaller design rules and will learn from their mistakes this time around. The GFFX isn't the death knell for the company, it's just an unpleasant reminder of what minor manufacturing difficulties can do in a nasty business like video card manufacture. They're already hard at work on the next-gen part, and I'm sure they've learned a lot with this one.

Meanwhile ATI will enjoy higher profits and will have a bit of breathing room. Hopefully, they will use this time to extend their product offerings viz the R350 core, continue pouring money into driver development, and keep working on R400 or whatever their next-gen core ends up being called. In any event 6-9 months from now we will see these next-generation parts coming to market, and they will be just that much better.

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High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)

Re:...and...? by fault0 · 2003-02-09 07:16 · Score: 4, Interesting

> nVidia is not going to go into bankruptcy because of this however - they will still sell a few and will work madly on the next generation aimed for smaller design rules and will learn from their mistakes this time around.

People said this about 3dfx right when it released the long delayed, big, noise, power hungry Voodoo 5 5550 (while Nvidia had long taken the lead).

Same thing seems to be have happening to Nvidia, only this time with ATI taking the lead.

Hardly surprising... by MarcoAtWork · 2003-02-09 07:05 · Score: 4, Funny

I mean, the Geforce 5 6000^H^H^H^H^H^H5800 while having A LOT of drawbacks (noise, takes up two slots, probably lots of heat) doesn't seem to have very much going for it over the ATI's offerings. The only thing right now is driver quality, but as far as I am hearing ATI is getting better at this lately...

Note, I'm not an ATI fanboy (actually I'm running a GeForce1 right now) but I'm really appalled at what 3dfx^H^H^H^HNVidia was thinking when they created this card...

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-- the cake is a lie

In Business News Today... by Quaoar · 2003-02-09 07:07 · Score: 2, Funny

Video card giant nVidia officially changed it's name today to 3dfx. Five minutes later the company declared bankruptcy.

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I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!

It gets worse... by waytoomuchcoffee · 2003-02-09 07:12 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Best Buy stores only fulfilling pre-orders by macado · 2003-02-09 07:25 · Score: 5, Informative

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

Remember the Apple Lisa? by Chordonblue · 2003-02-09 07:29 · Score: 2, Interesting

nVidia's plans for the FX were greater than what actually happened. If this had been released with support for 256 bit memory, I think it would've stomped ATi big time.

Sometimes it takes a brilliant failure like this to catapult R&D to the next level. Let's hope that happens here.

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"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."

Visiontek jabs from beyond the grave by doormat · 2003-02-09 07:30 · Score: 5, Funny

http://www.visiontek.com

Make sure you have your speakers on..

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The Doormat

If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.

Vendor Confirmation by l33t-gu3lph1t3 · 2003-02-09 07:31 · Score: 4, Interesting

[H]ardOCP has confirmation that GeforceFX5800 Ultra graphics cards will not make it to retail, and are available as pre-order items only, for a limited time. However, the GeforceFX5800 non-ultra model *will* make it to retail, sans the elaborate cooling mechanism, and running at 400MHz GPU / 800MHz RAM.

Additionally, it seems the "Radeon9900" information at Xbitlabs might be less accurate than it appears.

This isn't the greatest news for Nvidia, but it doesn't exactly break the bank: Nvidia still has the lion's share of the graphics market, and will probably continue to keep that market simply due to Tier 1/2 OEM sales, as well as their reputation - even though ATI has faster hardware, Nvidia has had a history of rock-solid drivers 4 generations back. Although ATI's driver quality has improved significantly in recent times, they're still not up to par with Nvidia's. And be sure that Nvidia will capitalize on that, since they don't have bragging rights for their hardware currently.

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------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------

What is the yield problem caused by? by kludger · 2003-02-09 07:48 · Score: 2, Insightful

Does this have anything to do with the Low-K dielectric yield problems that many (all?) fab vendors have been having in their .13u processes?

not good for nvidia by MagicMerlin · 2003-02-09 07:49 · Score: 4, Interesting

NVidia's future looks quite uncertain. It appears they might be headed for a free fall. You can blame their problems with some bad business decisions, like backing AMD, but the real problem is that ATI's tech team is pulling ahead. The 9700 simply had a better designed core. Their position is remarkably similar to that of 3dfx during the introduction of the tnt2. The handwriting was on the wall, and there was nothing they could do about it, having sunk millions into technology consumers were just not interested in.

Re:"Ultra Cancelation" is lame by Jugalator · 2003-02-09 08:03 · Score: 3, Funny

lol, this is funny dammit :-)

I actually had to read the topic a few times before I got that the "Cancellation" wasn't part of the product name.

"Rumors of a GeForceFX 5800 Ultra Cancelation?"

Wow, that's an innovative product name. I wonder how good it is? lol

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Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!

Re:Who cares about a video card when... by Hieronymus+Howard · 2003-02-09 08:33 · Score: 2, Informative

I guess that most /.ers would care more about the video card. The URL you posted didn't work. Try this:

http://www.megarad.com/modules.php?name=News&fil e= article&sid=1270

Or this:

http://www.globalcomment.com/science&technology/ ar ticle_4.asp

It's a spoof article unfortunately, but a pretty good one.

HH

About the loss of that PCI slot... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-09 08:34 · Score: 3, Interesting

Everyone and their brother seems to be bellyaching about "losing the PCI slot" to the cooling system, and how horrible this is.

How stupid.

On practically every motherboard out there today, PCI 1 and the AGP slot share resources, so you're crippling your system performance by putting a card in each.

As I remember it, PCI has four specific special IRQ channels allocated for it, and thus the original spec is for one IRQ for each. Modern motherboards get away with this by having different slots share the bus mastering, so that two devices can piggyback on one slot. Usually, the onboard IDE controller piggybacks on one slot, and the last two slots (usually PCI 5 and 6) are often coupled together. By the same token, the AGP slot often shares an IRQ with PCI 1.

So, in short, if you're going to complain about the cooling system, complain about it being loud. You weren't losing anything on your motherboard that you could even use to begin with.

Yes, it's real, but NV30 lives on by The+Baron+(nV+News) · 2003-02-09 08:40 · Score: 3, Informative

Yes, 5800 Ultra is gone. 5800 will be for sale, but at 400/800, it's not going to win any speed awards (unless drivers manage to improve its performance by 20%, which won't happen by the time R350 (successor to the Radeon 9700) comes out). The chips used for the Ultra will still be used, however, in the QuadroFX 2000. ATI's R300-based FireGL cards are still poor performers, and even with relatively poor drivers from nVidia, the FX 2000 will beat it handedly (the Quadro4 is beating the FireGL cards as well, according to Tom's Hardware).

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

Gaming resolution. by Christopher+Thomas · 2003-02-09 08:49 · Score: 2, Insightful

1600x1200 on a 19" monitor is hardly "microscopic" pixels

Wow, I'd like to have your eye sight. :-)

I use 1280x1024 on my 19" usually and even then the pixels are pretty small to me. :-) Sure, they are noticeable on a static display, but I wouldn't notice them if they changed at a rate of something like 70 fps.

In first-person shooters, you're typically looking for small visual details in known locations (when you're not just in a twitch-reflex situation). In Tribes 2, at least, it's nice to be able to spot an enemy without having to pick out the one off-colour pixel in a grainy mountainside texture map, and even better to see what kind of gun he's holding, or that he's repairing something.

Features like zooming help you with the latter case but not the former (noticing the enemy in the first place).

While high-resolution displays aren't vital, they definitely are helpful.

Hardly 3dfx by Namarrgon · 2003-02-09 09:02 · Score: 4, Interesting

3dfx alienated their OEM customers, and had no other income apart from their consumer gfx cards. When that was delayed & out-competed (again), it was inevitable that they'd go under.

nVidia are a larger company with a string of huge successes to date. They have a much more diversified income, including some very popular OEM chips, the successful nForce2 (and less-successful Xbox) chipsets, a well-regarded pro card line, and a significant share of the Apple market too. Not to mention quite a bit of cash in the bank.

A single high-end chip(which is a small % of their total revenue anyway), even if it failed completely, is not going to impact their bottom line that much. It'll have more impact on their image as graphics leader, but they have the resources to learn, move on, redesign and try again.

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Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?

Limits to human perception. by Christopher+Thomas · 2003-02-09 09:07 · Score: 2, Informative

And 16 million colours is more than the eye can see, and 44,100 samples per second is more than the ear can hear . Throughout the march of technology we've heard these ridiculously arbitrary "limits" of our senses, and invariably they are discounted at a future time. In essence you can consider them a sort of justification.

These limits aren't arbitrary. You can test them the same way you proposed that frame rate limits be tested.

For colour gradations, make a picture that has a very gradual colour ramp from 0-255 in each colour (or one that sweeps across colour tones, but that changes at most one component by at most one between adjacent bands).

When I tried this with an old VGA card that used 18-bit colour, I could see banding. I had to stare for a while to let my eyes adjust, but I could see it.

When I try it on a modern card with 24-bit colour, I see no bands if the monitor's gamma correction is properly adjusted.

A monitor without gamma correction will end up expanding some brightness ranges and compressing others, with the result that gradations will not be visible at all in some areas and will be (barely) visible in others. Check your configuration before complaining.

The 24-bit argument applies to distinguishing colours. Similar experiments (not performed by me) have shown that you get about 10 bits of depth in greyscale, as humans have more sensitive black and white vision than colour (which is why everything appears in shades of grey at night with poor lighting; go for an evening walk and look for badly-lit stop signs some time).

You can do the same kind of tests with sound. It's actually more difficult with modern sound cards, as they have low-pass filters that cut off everything above about 22 kHz (nyquist rate of 44 kHz), but a PC speaker works. Or use a piezo buzzer and a signal generator if you're worried about the speaker efficiency dropping at high frequencies. My hearing, last time I tested it (and last time it was tested by a doctor), dropped out about about 18 kHz.

The reason why higher frequencies are relevant at all is because of nonlinear behavior both in the speakers and in the human ear. Beat frequencies between high-frequency tones can turn into audible frequencies when interacting with nonlinear systems (this is how that two-tone ultrasonic speaker linked to a while back worked). However, the key is that the final tone you hear is in the audible frequency range. This means you can duplicate the sound perfectly by using a microphone that acts more like the human ear when recording (i.e. that has similar nonlinear effects), or by recording at high frequencies and applying appropriate transformations before downsampling.
The fact remains that if I played a 20 kHz pure tone at you right now, you wouldn't hear it. And this is easy to verify by experiment.

In summary, while you're most definitely right about frame rates, your other objections about limits are unfounded.

nooo by handsome_robot · 2003-02-09 09:20 · Score: 3, Funny

Damn! I had several dozen of these things on pre-order, too.

My plans to build a hovercraft are smoot!!

*shakes fist upwardly*

These are just rumors by X-Guy · 2003-02-09 09:28 · Score: 2, Insightful

Nothing but rumors. Sites like the Inquirer post every rumor they hear, even when it's ridiculous. Remember when they were saying NV30 was definitely a two-chip solution. Remember people saying it definitely had a 256 bit memory interface? All it takes is one bozo posting to a forum and claiming he has inside information and the Inquirer will post it and you get dozens of fan sites acting like it was true.

Pure poetry by badasscat · 2003-02-09 10:25 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

Canned milk for canned cows by Graymalkin · 2003-02-09 11:39 · Score: 4, Insightful

If this rumor mongering is all true, as I'm not convinced, it is yet another eerie 3Dfx parallel attached to the GFFX (E3DP?). Since the Radeon 9700 was released I've been really anxious to see what nVidia was going to answer with in the form of the NV30. I'm not one to buy the high end obsolete within a week video cards but I really want to know what chip I'm going to see in discounted cards in six months.

I was seriously unimpressed with the GFFX. This is an odd feeling as new nVidia cards have in the past been truly impressive and something to lust after.

"I sense something. A presence I've not felt since..."

While 3Dfx was not in the exact same position as nVidia is market penetration wise and financially it seems nVidia is pulling a technological page from their book. The GFFX 5800 Ultra Megazord seems a great deal like the Voodoo 5. It is a power hungry beat of a video card that doesn't live up to all of the hype that's been surrounding it since August when the Radeon 9700 needed an answer by nVidia.

Of course the GFFX will improve and in six more months they'll have a GFFXMXKY that comes as the toy in a box of Count Chocula. Sharing many similarities with the Voodoo 5 isn't going to necessarily Doom the card (get it?) but it is giving ATi a huge shot in the arm. They've got a 5 month old card that performs about as well as nVidia's latest offering, that is something they haven't been able to boast before. All ATi has to do is not screw up and they will get back a bunch of users who abandoned them when the GeForce smoked the Radeons like fat chronic blunts with a mere driver upgrade.

Even though ATi has the advantage now I think nVidia will come back with a really strong chip PDQ. They aren't going to accept defeat because their card requires an onboard RTG to run decently. If ATi keeps their momentum going they could top even the next NV chip nVidia will release. Do I care one way or the other? Hell no. I don't want to see either of them lose out, I want as much competition as possible to I get more frames with excellent visual quality for the buck. It will be great to be able to enable all of Doom 3's visual effects with AA and still be able to play the game, especially after people like Raven or Rogue license the engine and build the next Jedi Knight or Alice with it.

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I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.

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