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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."
Glad to see that the difference between 2467 and 2550 frames per second is still very important...
fp?
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.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
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....
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...
-- the cake is a lie
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).
:-) And then there's FSAA to remove the pixelation even more.
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.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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
http://www.visiontek.com
Make sure you have your speakers on..
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
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.
[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.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
It's said that you stop seeing the difference at around 30 fps
:-) And then there's FSAA to remove the pixelation even more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
HAH!!! between all your wisdom I found an error!!! the proper q3 command for capping the frame rates is actually com_maxfps! :)
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.
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.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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.
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").