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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 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 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.
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.
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.