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The Fastest Video Card You Can Buy
Mack writes "OCAddiction takes a look at the fastest video currently on the market. Here's what they say."With the release of Doom III pending, both ATI and nVidia are scrambling to show their very best product on game day, this we can count on. But as it stands now, the OCSystem Enhanced Radeon 9700 Pro Level III SE is simply the best card your money can buy today.""
This is why I'm still playing games like Steel Beasts, Civ III, Counterstrike and Combat Mission. I don't need to spend ludicrous amounts of cash.
Falcon 4.0 for life, yo
"With the release of Doom III pending, both ATI and nVidia are scrambling to show their very best product on game day"
Did the day of release of Quake 3 cause a surge in video card sales? O_o
I can understand Doom III being the standard benchmark, but why's opening day such a big deal?
Why do they sell this thing when winter is about to end? They're supposed to sell it by mid November last year... It would be a perfect time to play WarCraft 3 and keep yourself warm.
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And its all about the Hype
Jesus christ, just beat us over the head with it. 9700 PRO jackoff edition.
/.
In other news, this is funnier than goatse.cx
If you're not reading StileSux by "Cave Deli" you are socially unfit for
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Look here:s /simfus ion/index.aspi on+6000+ds+.pdf
http://www.es.com/products/image+generator
http://www.es.com/resources/simfus
Of course it is a bit beyond budget of an average gamer.
Is here.
I suppose $459 price tag doesn't warrant the additional 10-15% performance increase...
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Error 500: Internal sig error
Does the "Average" Hardcore Gamer think that $459 is too much to pay for a video card? I don't game enough to justify spending any money to upgrade what came with my box.
the best card your money can buy today
Shouldn't that say ALL of your money? Video cards nowadays are BLODDY expensive!
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
...unless you run an OS other than Winsucks. In that case, you're better off with an NVIDIA card.
PGA
What is really amazing to me right now is that games are driving this huge industry of video card development. Both ATI and nVidia are scrambling to deliver faster frame rates pushing more and more triangles that appears to be developed for games. Now, I like a good game as much as the next guy, but I wonder if there is anyone out there that is using all of this triangle processing power for purposes other than games? Simulation of course was the original driving force for computer graphics with companies like Evans and Sutherland and more GPU power is great for moving around molecules and proteins as computers can model progressively larger structures, but I am wondering what novel uses out there are being implemented?
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Videocard fanboy masturbation... why bother reading it? It'll be just like the 500 other video card reviews we've seen this year. You know the ones: "The BadBoy XXTerminator SpanKKAss 50K VX Turbo beat out our standard test rig with a whole 0.7 FPS!"
Big deal. Wake me up when there's some *real* news.
ZZZZZ...
I mean, honestly. I used to overclock because a 300MHz CPU just wasn't enough. I mean, it helps that a celeron 300A was so damn easy too - but now that they are getting better with speed-sorting, and things are getting so fast and cheap, I really sees no need and it's not worth the trouble for that 10% increase.
Heck, I play UT2k3 on my LAPTOP, which is a measly 1GHz with 64M video ram.
A 459 video card just so I can pluck down another 70 dollars for D3 collector's edition just seems unjustified when you can get a whole computer for that much (I'd know since I GOT ONE for about 400 - and not even the walmart Lindows ones either - 1.8P4; half gig RAM, etc).
I mean, this, yes *THIS* is the true definiton of compensating for something, because there is absolutely no need for it. (especially since the game isn't even out yet). It's like buying a Ferrari and let it sit in a garage for half a year before I get a driver's license. - or possibly a more adequate analogy is buying a same car to drive in the parking lot for half a year before they build a road on which I can properly have fun with it.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
NVidia shipped an engineering prototype of the forthcoming GeForce MX to an artist I know. It turned out no box in the office was sufficiently macho to run this studly MX board. You need a -- wait for it -- a 350-watt power supply. So NVidia shipped him a computer specifically butch enough to run this thing. I looked in the next day; he still hadn't got the thing running right. Some kind of driver issue. Now and then the board would unpredictably heat up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Also, it roars like a vacuum cleaner. It takes up two PCI slots, not that this is a big deal for most gamers. And, oh yeah, it's gonna cost something like $4-500.
Wish I'd got to see the beautiful graphics. I can only assume that they must be super-duper mega-cosmically spectacular, because if they're not, this card sounds an awful lot like "four strikes and you're out."
I can see why I would want it, but I just can't see why I'd need it. It would take several years for a game to come out that would even come close to harnessing the power of that card.
I take it you haven't seen Hackers (http://us.imdb.com/Title?0113243)... I can't wait for the day when I can browse my recycle bin in full 3D!
It's pretty useful for 3D modelling/animation (I do this with 3D Studio Max). Use a good video card and you can have fast viewports that render pretty much everything. Makes work a lot faster/more accurate since you can get a better idea of what the thing you're working on will look like once rendered.
Hopefully Longhorn on the Windows side will take advantage of it.
Quartz on the Mac side might take advantage of it.
Nothing it appears on the Linux side, as far as GUIs are concerned.
Modern GPU like R300 is very fast SIMD machine with great memory bandwidth. At last SIGGRAPH it was demonstrated doing realtime raytracing. You can harness its power to do video decoding, encoding and postprocessing or image filters. Audio processing seems doable too. I can also imagine you could use it for physical simulations. Its uses are unlimited.
I only wish that we had something to drive processors the way good games drive cards. You know, besides SETI@Home and corporate greed.
Gryftir
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
that link almost crashed my machine. Way to much movement for one browser to handel :). Maybe if i bought the card it would work better eh?
Remember when you could veiw a web page on a 386?
(sigh)
We substituted the coffee Slashdot normally drinks with "Sandoz Crystals", Lets see if they notice the difference
I mean, really. With my GEForce 3 + P3/800 = I can play anything I want. Eg: Command & Conquer Generals, Unreal Tourney 2003, Warcraft 3, Battlefield 1942. Maybe not with all the options turned on and at a "mere" 800x600 - but still, so long as the game is fun... right?
Game makers know that the lower their system requirements the fewer copies they will sell - which I bet is why Counterstrike has been doing so well.
If you don't need one, don't buy one. Everybody has an addiction, and computers happen to be addictions for a lot of people.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
i think you can get quite the (complete) linux based pc from walmart for that sort of money .. i thought i was a gaming addict until i stopped caring about the difference between 60fps & 230fps .. who cares, the tv looks smooth @ sub-30 fps ..
rant*rant*rant*
a $20 light kit will impress more ppl. @ the lan party anyways.
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
It has been a while now since video cards became the driving element in box specs. HD's don't push....MB's don't push, and heaven knows USB2 isn't doing anything worth mentioning. High performance video cards push development of many other components. Much like a bigger engine in a car needs better handling and more fuel, etc.
The video card has been the alpha male in the component arena for some time, and I'm surprised to hear people proclaiming shock over a $500.00 price tag.
As usual some people would complain if their computer was free.
If you don't like it, don't buy it....if you can't afford it, don't whine...if something works better for you, smile and be happy.
"First you bitch about the baby, then you bitch 'cause we're not married!!"
Well, I'm currently using my card for 3D modeling, which works really well because of NVIDIA's stable drivers. In the future, stuff like Longhorn and EVAS will bring 3D accelerated to desktops. If you've seen the EVAS demo, you're already impressed!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I would wait until DOOM 3 is actually out. Test demo or full version. =)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Think of the chances you'll have to sit in that car with a leggy 20-something bimbette who doesn't care if if you even have the keys! What happens after that depends on how well you smile.
Yep, its about "penis envy". A $100 or less card will run all the games you really want to play right now with essentially full quality (ok, so you might not be able to turn on every performance killing feature from the driver control panel but the increase in visual detail is negligible). Also, even when games do come out that finally use the power of a card more powerful than you have, they may not be games you really want to play. Take Unreal 2, for instance. While not a "bad" game per say...it was good enough for me to finish it...it certainly wasn't worth spending money on a video card to play it, if I didn't already have one. It offerred nothing new, basically the sterile non-interactive environments of Quake 2 (all you can do is shoot monsters and flip levers, and every lever must be flipped. Dialogue makes no difference, characters die in the plot but you cannot save any of them) dressed up with better graphics. I want more to DO in the game, like Deus Ex had. For instance, in the game there's an entire level of the inside of your spaceship that gets revisited periodically. You can wander around, even going into maintenance sections. But you cannot touch or interact with the environment in any way! Nothing you say to characters makes even the slightest bit of difference, and you cannot do anything but open doors.
Its rare that a game comes out that both has system destroying graphics prompting an upgrade AND is actually a game you want to play. While Doom 3 may look good, it is yet to be seen whether its even as good as half life single player. Also, its unlikely it comes even close to a classic like Battlefield 1942 or Half-Life mods for multiplayer.
I did research under a professor who specializes in bioinfomatics. One particular goal of his research group is in visualization. Specifically, how the f*** do you graphically represent gigabytes of genetic data in a meaningful way? And how do you do it so that you can get useful information from it, like repeated patterns and whatnot?
The answer to the above is to do it in 3-D. One of the (mad-skilled, overachieving, indian) grad students wrote a program which renders DNA base sequences into a 2D plane, and then looks for important sequences (such as functional groups). When it finds one, it raises it out of the plane. All of this could be shown on our ImmersaDesk, but not everyone has an SGI Onyx. For that project, having a lot of processing power on individual PCs was a life-saver.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I had an interesting couple years dealing with Linux gaming and 3Dfx cards. I got a little gun shy, and learned to hate compiling X and/or waiting for drivers.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Seriously, its ridiculous.
30 some posts, a dozen complaints.
People who are car aficionados will glady throw down 12,000$ to turbo their cars or 130,000$ for a ferrari. I know people with multi-million dollar homes and the house is all to themselves. Is it crazy to pay 800$ for a PDA when you can get one that does the same for 99$?
If people have the money then let them spend it on what THEY want and quit complaining because YOU have a problem with it. If you think it's too much money, then it's not for you.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
It's like buying a Ferrari and let it sit in a garage for half a year before I get a driver's license
Maybe not with an actual Ferrari, but 13 years ago, I collected 300 music CDs before I got around to actually buying a CD player. I was gonna do it when I had 50 of them, but I kept procrastinating. I couldn't bear to part with my much listened to 8-track collection and player.
But regarding the ATI, well Papyrus has put out their last game in the series, NASCAR Racing 2003 Season. The developers claim (to enhance the staying power of the title) they threw in more GPU intensive graphics options than usual, that there isn't a system available at the moment that can run the game with every option turned on to the max. I believe it, I can't turn on 2/3 of the options with my Athlon 1 gHz/Ti200 128MB combo.
Some of those goat man posts are getting pretty large...
That's why I'm still playing NetHack...well that and because it's still the best game out there.
Seriously though, can these super cards be used for anything other than the generation of display output? As they are doing so much 3D processing so much faster than any CPU can, I'd like to see the ability to use these GPU's as coprocessors for rendering images back to software/files rather than just to display output. Something like using it as a hardware accelerator for POV-Ray or Renderman. Does anybody have any insight into potential non-traditional uses of these super cards?
the "quartz extreme" rendering engine for the mac os x desktop uses opengl to draw the desktop (I think windows become "textures" that are handled by the card directly). to make it fly you need AGP/16mb VRAM minimum, and more ram/faster cards are highly recommended.
It's pretty slick, it gives you lots of eye candy for "free": transparent windows, shadows, goofy "genie" minimization effects, etc. iirc, apps like Keynote (powerpoint-killer), imovie, final cut pro etc can use the quartz-extreme layer to do fancy compositity/blending in realtime, which can be very nice.
So for the first time, having a nice graphics card makes a big difference for daily non-game operation.
...they have terrible resellerratings. Also, the card ships with a nice and quiet Zalman heatpipe, which, though quiet as the fanless nature of it implies, probably cuts the life of the card to a year or so. I'm sure anything close to the heatsink is in serious danger of melting (be careful of PCI cards around it). Besides, this isn't anything you couldn't do with a retail ATI 9700 Pro which isn't very loud in the first place.
Does anyone have a handle on when Doom3 actually IS comming out?
the "quartz extreme" rendering engine for the mac os x desktop uses opengl to draw the desktop (I think windows become "textures" that are handled by the card directly). to make it fly you need AGP/16mb VRAM minimum, and more ram/faster cards are highly recommended.
Actually, yes, you are correct. The laptop I am typing this on now is running OS X with Quartz Extreme. This is certainly an innovative use that I completely spaced. Prior to Quartz, the video card in computers simply sat there doing nothing most of the time. Quartz extreme brought the GPU in and helped out with text rendering and windowing in a manner that many other companies are now starting to look at. (read Microsoft)
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Welcome to 3 months ago.
We've got to go back.. back to the future!
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
What with him buying up all those PS2's a while back. Unless of course he really was in Santa Claus mode. Of course we know that wasn't the case, we all saw this years South Park xmas special. =)
Umm, they could easily do this- most professional rendering sw supports OpenGL. OTOH, there are far, far superior video cards for doing rendering work than a Radeon or GeForce. That's like saying that the P4 is so fast it should be used in supercomputers.
"OCSystem Enhanced Radeon 9700 Pro Level III SE"
This is too good to resist. They must've hired some Japanese marketers or something for this card. I can't imagine the NEXT release:
OCsystem Super Hyper Mega Ultra Happy Enhanced Radeon 9700 Expert Pro Level IVc SE XP 2.0 Edition
Is it too hard to simply notch up the model number by a few points?! Sheesh!
They had to pay the guy who named the thing by the word.
KFG
but I wonder if there is anyone out there that is using all of this triangle processing power for purposes other than games?
Nvidia at least (and quite possibly ATI too...I'm not sure) slightly tweaks the chip design of its GeForce gaming chips, and then severely tweaks the driver design, and sells them as 'workstation' graphics chips, ie: the Quadro line of chips. They are becoming competitive with more traditional (and expensive) workstation chipsets and video boards. In this application, obviously the user is more focused on doing things like rotating highly complex wireframe and rendered models (eg: in CAD or industrial design) than they are with pumping out textures.
Don't know if this is what you'd really call 'novel' though...Nvidia is just trying to take advantage of their work in the gaming area in the premium-priced graphics workstation area.
Wasn't there a test a while back that shows the AGP bus has little bandwidth back to the CPU?
The fact that the AGP bus was always intended as a one-way street will limit the options avalible to hackers.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Actually, QE is a bit of a sham. It does do windowing effects, but unlike Longhorn or EVAS, doesn't actually accelerate *drawing*.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Why do you want to read it back?
For rendering usually you want to see it.
For offline rendering of complicated stuff readback time will be neglible compared to rendering time.
For some calculation you sometimes get result which is not that big and easy to read back.
Last, you can always render or blit last pass of your processing to render target in AGP space and read as fast as from sysmem (rendering will be much slower though).
I don't think anyone still overclocks their video card. Some people may do it just for a day to see how it is, and you probably have several people with older cards. Outside of that, there is no real need to overclock.
I try to buy a card every year or so. Usually about one generation back from the top of the line. I also upgrade processors every 2 years, agian, a few models back from the top of the line. But I have found that staying too far back really limits the enjoyment I get out of gaming. No, the graphics don't make the plot any better, but I hate steping into a room of bad guys and having my game turn into a slide show.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Yep, I'm using a Quadro4 for 3D modeling of architecture.....the higher the polycount I can display in real-time, the faster my workflow
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
...the person who wrote the article is clearly a long-time /. regular.
One of the best examples of gpu being used for something other than a game.
With the release of Doom III pending...
Will I get more than 25 fps on my Radeon64DDR/ViVo (P4/2266MHz) ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
...the GeForce FX, which is the fastest card you CAN'T buy!
first, their rating on resellerratings.com is pretty abysmal. basically, the product you get may or may not what's been advertised.
be doubly cautious of buying anything from them that isn't the $500 model. like any other chip the gpu on the radeon has some variations in their yields. as every overclocker knows, some just run faster than others out of the box. what these guys are doing is to try overclocking each card they get from ati, and sell those that will clock higher for significantly more money. throw a fancy heatpipe on it, and charge lots of cash. if you just buy the plain vanilla 9700 pro from them, you can be absolutely certain that it's the "bottom of the overclocking barrel". but don't take my word for it, check the user reviews from people that actually purchased it as opposed to models shipped for free to overclocking websites for promotional purposes.
..and worst drivers!
Is it possible to use the processing power of these super graphics cards for math computations? They use simd instructions. I would think they could compete with regular CPU's in floating point.
You may get a better price/performance ratio on an ordinary x86 Intel or Athlon. Granted they are not as superscalar as a cray, but I'd imagine they are more so than a graphics card CPU. And oh yah, they're cheaper than a high end graphics card
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
How'd you like to go home tonight and tell your Mama that Socrates kicked your pimple ridden ass?
"Son! Oh my God!! What happened to you?" "Some guy named Socrates kicked my pimply ass..." "Socrates? Why, he's hundred of years old...my, my, my, you are such a shameless wimp. Next time, try making fun of someone on TV...they can't hear you and you just might not get your puny adolescent ass kicked so badly. Now go to your room and I'll bring you your glow-in-the-dark Gamegirl so you'll have something to do while you get 'betta."
or... you get a real workstation and have a sweet hardware accelerated desktop right NOW...
give OS you one X guess Mac.
-a
"With the release of Doom III pending, both ATI and nVidia are scrambling to show their very best product on game day"
Geez, this is quite rediculous. Anyone inferring that this card release has anything to do with Doom III really needs to quit accepting pocket-money from NVIDIA and ATI. id recently announced that Doom III won't be finished until 2004, meaning that there will be at least one, if not more iterations of graphics chips in the meantime.
This article is praising six-month old technology as if it were a godsend. Yes, there seems to be up to a 15 to 20% increase in performance over a generic 9700 Pro, but when compared to the advancements that will be made between now and when Doom III is actually released, I don't think that it makes a lot of difference.
The hype machine rolls on.
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
Not only will M$ be about three years late in introducing 3D acceleration to the desktop, they will make the GUI look like a horrible eyesore (have you seen the preview shots)?
Times like this make me happy I run OS X
Considering the marketing dollars spent on consoles (X Box, PS2 etc.), not to mention the rental availability of games for these (but not for PCs) it strikes me as odd that so much effort goes essentially to the PC Gaming field when there must be similarly valuable enhancements geared to home, business, digital video, mobile users etc. Myself, I toggle between an array of different video adapters via KVM switch, and in general use other than games, cannot visually tell the difference between a Radeon7000 and Radeon9700 (always 1280x1024x32). There is so much horsepower on these top cards we ought to see (visually observe without benchmark hair-splitting) the results in a wider range of everyday uses. What I would like to see the video card manufacturers deliver: 1. Easy driver upgrades (Hint ATI...you guys ever let Windows Update update your drivers??? ) 2. Wider range of screen sizing/positioning options in driver utility.(Big help for KVM users) 3. Better TV output adjustment options and ability to read the info in the broadcast overscan areas (even the ATI AIW8500DV delivers a poor screen geometry at the edges compared to other signal sources...tuner is great though) 4. Incorporate monitor .inf in driver utility in an editable format to allow closer match than with the typical "Default Monitor" Perhaps "User Settings? Let user set min/max refresh parameters from owners manual or even a series of tested configs such as GAME, PHOTO COLOR, TEXT, SPREADSHEET which can be toggled between.
5. Continuous micro-adjustable refresh rate slide bar to optimize flicker reduction (no Apply necessary until you hit the one you want to keep)
6. Landscape/Portrait/Invert/Rotate/Mirror settings
7. Color calibrator hardware option (Print out a test pic on your color printer, scan corresponding paper and screen areas and make screen reflect what your printer is going to generate)
8. DVD direct-connect mode...ought to be able to watch a skip-free DVD on a $300 card if you can on a $45 Apex DVD player..we already plug the optical drives to the sound cards)
9. A new connector that doesn't stick out so far (Gotta love the size of those DVI-Analog adapters)
10. Temperature monitoring output (either to a front panel display or to an unused chassis fan header on the mobo)
11. Despite all my wishes for more features, I'd love a huge crate of these cards to fall off a truck in front of my house!'
I read the article expecting to be told this is the card that I can't live without because it's a whopping .002% faster even than it's nearest rival. This seems to be 10%-20% better depending on the test. Kind of impressive.
Do I need it? No.
ATI has started providing a Linux driver with full 3d support. Unfortunately, it is closed source (Linux drivers for ATI have traditionally provided somewhat limited functionality but open source)
The problem is that programming "interactive" environments is a royal pain in the butt. There is barely enough time and money to build the graphics engine, do the modeling, program the AI, write the story, etc, etc. Making the environments "active" is a luxury developers just don't have--especially if it adds little to the actual gameplay. Making the TV turn on or the phone dial or the microwave cook is a 5 second "gee that is cool" type thing. And once you get into RPG-like scripting and dialog that opens another large can of worms.
Deus Ex was cool because it was gave the illusion of a non-static environment. Your choices made little difference except with the ending. The levels had a choice between using stealth/hack/or fight or mixture--but the stealth wasn't exactly Thief and the hacking wasn't exactly detailed.
What Deus Ex did well IMHO was put the player in non-combat environments as well as combat ones. Instead of one big bloodbath sometimes you had to walk around and explore a little bit. Two I remember off the top of my head were a hospital clinic and a nightclub.
Why are they calling it a Radeon?9700 ?
Is it questionable that there is a Radeon on it?
Funny to have a question mark in a product name...
A $10 FM radio will give you all the sound you need. Sure, fancy stereos have lots of buttons and knobs to twiddle, but the difference in sound quality is negligible--especially since all we really do with our sound systems is listen to talk radio, right?
If Tenebrae catches on it may be the next hit game.
It has similar functions to Doom3 with dynamic lights etc. And it is GPL'd and based on the the Quake1 engine.
Tenebrae2, soon to be released, will even work with Quake3Arena maps.
Check out the screenshots!!!
The name of the program escapes me right now, but when I interned at a large conglomerate the builds nuclear power plants (not named here, but how many are there?), we used this sweet 3-D model of THE ENTIRE PLANT to navigate, take virtual "pictures" to show where our project fit into the grand scheme, and also for placement of parts (like, say, walls).
My desktop needed a pretty hardcore video card for this, and it still chunked. When you have a model of something as complex as this, that includes all the piping, metal supports, reactor parts, hell even the valve controls were in there, you really need fast drawing to screen just to make it usable.
Is this a vid card or an aircraft carrier??? Good god thats huge!
This is more of a question out of ignorance, so please bear with me: The article compares the R9700 Pro to the OCS R9700 Pro Level3 SE with Unreal Tournament 2003. At 1600x1200, the results recorded were 81 and 101 FPS, respectively, higher with lower resolutions.
And then there's your monitor... unless you want to get quite spendy, there aren't many monitors that does 85Hz+ at 1600x1200.
May be I am completely wrong, but I thought the "refresh rate" of a monitor refers to how many times a second the screen is redrawn from top to bottom.
So, given my ficticious monitor can go 85Hz at 1600x1200, does it matter if my card dishes out 101fps all day long?
That most of you have put your head between your legs.
The latest CPU "no i dont need it, i already
have 2gh" or GPU "my card plays everything fine"
GET A LIFE!
We all know you are envious of this L337 hardware, your just putting on a "i dont need this" face, because you cant and wont ever be able to afford it.
i agree with the 'i dont need it' argument with the FX, but this card is stunning. i would buy one see, but this card costs MORE than a xp1800 box with 256mb ddr and a radeon9000 so why bother?
Have you even seen star wars?
as long as I live, no freaking way. I went through
a living hell with them over some ram. They sell
this ram called "Expeditious Gamer". It looks like
something fabulous. I read a few very positive
reviews on hardware sites. Whether they are paying
a fortune for false positive reviews, or cherry
picking samples for reviewers, I have no idea. All
I know is memtest for the first stick of pc2700 I
got showed more errors than the early 90's era
dumpster printer ram that the assholes at computer
shows sold. And that was at pc2100 speed because
the ram refused to run at pc2700. I figured it
might be a fluke and tried a second stick and
it actually tested WORSE than the first stick.
It was more than a little interesting that the
ram comes with copper heat spreaders installed
with stickers over the links that say your
warantee will be voided if you remove those
stickers. It's obviously so you won't remove
the heat spreaders so you can see what kind of
ram it actually is. After a ton of phonecalls that
were never answered, and emails that were never
replied too, I ended up sending them a bunch of
faxes. I got my RMA numbers, but was still charged
a restocking fee. So in the end, I was out 20
bucks and had absolutely nothing to show for it.
If you don't believe me, try reading the reviews
for this "company" here:
OCSystem's 3.77 rating out of 10
These guys are consumate rip-off artists. Do not
trust them. Also, seriously doubt the quality and
ethics of ANY company that gives ANY product of
theirs a positive review. There is a lot of
money changing hands for positive reviews.
I hope this helps someone. Read some of those
reviews. Read how they have seriously fucked a
lot of people out of a lot of money. After you
get screwed, order from a REAL company like
newegg.com or mwave.com that actually cares about
their customers. In closing, let me state
emphatically that you are OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND
if you order anything from these bastards.
Thank you.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
Your reasoning is sound, but then comes along the issue of minimum frame rate. Yes, your game might be averaging 101 fps, but there is a certain variance that accompanies an average. At times your game may run faster, and as well run slower at times. Even with an average this high, it's every easy to drop into mid-40's or upper-30's during a big cluster*uck.
When your screen is redrawing this slowly, it can make aiming more difficult, hence the need for increased graphics power.
Yes - but with your TV at sub-30FPS - are you controlling the display in any way? Games at 30FPS are noticeably choppy to the average twitch gamer - we can process visual input and turn it into mouse output at a rate higher than 30FPS, so to a point - increased framerate = faster reaction time.
Most games don't even use the AGP capabilities of the card. They basically do what would be done with a PCI accelerator card: dma transfer data to the video card, and render. That's why you still see games using limited amounts of texture memory. If they exceeded the capacity of their target card, then the AGP slowness would come into play and make the game unbearable.
Remember 6 years ago when ATI was just another company marketing driver promises that never happened? Does anyone remember the ATI RAGE line of products?
ATI Rage
ATI Rage II
ATI Rage II+DVD
ATI 3D Rage
ATI 3D Rage Pro
ATI 3D Pro Turbo
ATI 3D Pro Turbo + PC2TV
ATI NimbleCannuxFuckfest
Don't receive this as flamebait...i'm watering my pink flamingos as I dictate this to my garden gnome...
Now that ATI is king of the hill, we will see nothing but crappy products from now on. Why? Because ATI has clearly scaled the Radeon to the maximum potential and we will now hear all kinds of product releases with exaggerated features masked under marketing hype and the same stretch-marked graphics technology...for a whole 'nother product lifecycle because nVidia its only competitor is having difficulty competing on *feature-biproduct-waste*. Why do we need unnecessary framerate and why haven't we seen any awesome low-power full-featured graphics chipsets? Speaking of HIGH-power, nVidia is obviously meeting the ceiling of their design too; the technology scales by power usage: pump-up the power, sell it as an *advanced* product.
A real innovation would be somthing as low-power and with clever drivers (PowerVR's Kyro2) that yields highest performance (ATI's Radeon) with most precision (nVidia's GeForceFX). Yes, here comes 3DLabs' VPU...Oh, and look...3DLabs continues its legacy as the cadillac of graphics accelerators by-their graphics accelerator weighing as much and is equal in length to: a CADILLAC!
The world has no shame...give me efficient power usage or give me death. Just because some of us are on a nuclear reactor doesn't mean we need to operate at full capacity of the nuclear reactor.
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
Why don't you go fall down that pit with the blocks hovering over it leading to the flag in world 8-3, freak.
i think the problem with today's technology lies in the bus; the agp bus can deliver the info to the card, but the scenes it renders is an order of magnitude larger in size (uncompressed) than the bus supports. 60 images of 1600x1200 at 32bit color per second across a bus, continiously forever... that's alot of data one way. more than the agp bus was designed to send back to the system. there was a slashdot article about this a ways back.
moox. for a new generation.
Oh wait, they just mean untill next week. Then that $459 will look hella well spent. ::In the not so distant future::
Why the hell did I buy that video card? I couldve : gone on a trip, bought 100 hits of acid and gone on a hundred trips, taken my girlfriend out, went out and bought a girlfriend...... Thanks but no thanks, Ill stick to my VooDoo3....
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Those of us that have use of DRI's accelerated openGL on computer platforms other than X86 will finally receive possibilities! But wait, the Tenebrae project maintainers stated they will only be builing Tenebrae version 2 for nVidia graphics accelerators. Back to the darkage... ATI Radeon was the only graphics accelerator with reasonable DRI support. The initial Tenebrae, with its Quake1 support, will work fine. Yet, looks as if the rest of us may need to wait for ID Software to release the Quake3 engine under the GPL, just to receive capability of support on the higher computing and rendering platforms that are superior to X86 (/shameless plug).
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
ya, 30fps isn't ideal for twitch play, but the difference between 100+ & 200+ cannot be noticed, nor can i justify dropping the money for almost a complete 2nd system for just a few more fps ..
maybe it's because i cut back on the caffiene pills ?
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
mailto:pater@slashdot.org
Anyone notice that this article is more of a plug than anything else? Also, the poster is mack@ocaddiction.com (OCSystem's reviewer and parent company).
it's so sloppy that it had to be accidental
yeah yeah i know, flamebait. but i thought it should be said.
I was intending to target this post or was it a slashdot bug?
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
Or wait a year when this will be $84 a best buy, and won't even be worth that compared to what's avail then.
Wasn't there fps called Virus years ago, where levels were created after your directory structure?
Nice way of doublechecking whether you really wanted to delete all that porn...(it used images found in directories as textures for the walls)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
CPUs got something just as good - sustained competition. Ok maybe finally ATI is catching up with nVidia in the GPU department, but Intel/AMD have been pushing eachother since AMD released the first Athlon in 1999.
General CPUs are being pushed to the very limit, but they're also limited by having to be "general". For GPUs you can do things *smarter*, like pipelines, texture compression, multiple textures per pass, z-buffering, shaders and whatever else they've invented lately. The attempts to be "smart" when it comes to CPU instructions, like SSE2 and EPIC hasn't really pushed them to any new level. One of the few new things that look interesting is the PIV hyperthreading, but it's still about filling the same pipeline better, not doing things fundamentally different.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If you are going to do pro graphics and precise color of every pixel matters, then use a pro card. Quadro is a fine choice, Fire*** (forgot)
is another. Basically souped up versions of
consumer grade cards. If you are not trying to
do a precise job then consumer cards are just
fine. We are using Radeons to render our
scientific data. For us having a 128 Mb card vs.
64 Mb makes a huge difference but we wouldn't
win from going to pro level cards.
Anything from 3DS to Matlab will notice a fast
rendering card.
Hmmm... knowing their penchant for bloatware will Windows one day start competing with Doom in pushing Video technology?
1. Buy Expensive Video Card
2. Play Video Games
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those. . .
I need the karma. :p
Dictionary.com's conspiracy:
1. An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
2. A group of conspirators.
3. Law. An agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.
4. A joining or acting together, as if by sinister design: a conspiracy of wind and tide that devastated coastal areas.
I don't remember "conspiracy" being applied under any of these elements other than a stretch of element 1. Anyone else notice this? And what is dictionary.com smoking on the definition/element 3: "...accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action"? That's like me clubbing-to-death my immediate relative and receiving inheritance as defined in "the will". How is that illegal when it is obvious she died of *natural* causes? Fractured skulles are natural, no?
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
I bought an athlon thoroughbred B 1700+ almost a
month ago for 49 bucks shipped to my door. By
increasing the voltage from the stock 1.5 to 1.7,
I was able to increase the bus from 133 to 174
and the multiplier to 12. That gives me a fsb of
348 with both my memory (kingmax pc2700 TinyBGA)
and my processor so they are running the same speed
on my Epox 8k5a2+. I'm overclocking my pci bus, but
only to about 34-35 at 174, so practically not
at all. With a processor speed of 2088 at that
fsb, I essentially can outperform an athlon 2600+
and nearly match the 2700+'s performance. For
cooling I'm using a thermalright slk-800 heatsink
with a 80mm to 120mm adapter, and an AOC(evercool)
30db 80fpm 120mm aluminum fan. I have arctic
silver 3 heatsink compound very thinly spread
between the heatsink and the processor. It's a
very very silent setup. At idle lm_sensors shows
38c. Under very heavy load, I might hit 44c, but
usually never see anything much higher than 41c.
So lets add that up:
one tube arctic silver: 7 bucks
one slk-800: 35 bucks
AOC 120mm aluminum fan: 12 bucks
Athlon XP 1700+ tbredB: 49 bucks
According to pricewatch...
One Athlon XP 2700+: 270
With my Geforce3 ti500 (ebay, 70 bucks)
overclocked to 260/540 with a thermaltake cooler
upgrade and the rest of my rig, I'm pulling well
over 200 fps at 1280 by 1024 with every goodie
pumped up the whole way on quake3. ut2003 looks
and performs flawlessly. I'm not really worried
about Doom 3 at all. Also, this is completely on
Gentoo 1.4rc2. Using nvidia's latest drivers.
It's been running like this for 2 weeks with no
problems, failures, anything. I'm using kernel
2.4.21-pre4-ac4. So I'd have to say that
overclocking is still very viable, and serving me
quite well. The whole point to me was to put a
system together for the express purpose of
preparing for Doom 3. I accomplished that for a
lot less money than I thought possible. I just
hope they release the linux version at the same
time as the windows version as promised! I don't
agree with your argument about "compensating" for
anything. It's a hobby. Some of us truly enjoy
building a sweet system. Just like some people
go crazy putting turbo's and lights and ground
effects and lowering springs on their cars. If I
put together a system for 700 bucks that's going
to outperform a 2000 dollar store-bought system,
and I'm set to play games for the next few
years, What did I do wrong?
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
I believe they are going to release a Renderware->CG translator for the NV cards, so yes, you'll be able to use them for graphics processing.
I've been wondering about that for a while. Considering that Geforce 4 cards have more transistors than a Pentium 4, and with all those programmable vertex and what-not shaders, there's gotta be a way to put it to a good non-gaming use. ATI's latest Radeon drivers for example added hardware DivX decoding support, MPEG decoding has been hardwired into graphics chips for a while.
The original posting being from an article in OCAddiction? Listen, I get my news for nerds from nerds, not OxyContin Addicts.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Calling the card "OCSystem Enhanced Radeon 9700 Pro Level III SE" is certainly bucking the trend in video card naming.
Consider various past offerings: ATI Rage, Rage Fury, TNT, TNT2, Annihilator, 3D Blaster Annihilator, S3 Savage, etc.
We're kind of lucky the OER9700PL3SE wasn't called something like the Violator 3D Ultra Face Blaster Nuke Domination Rip-You-A-New-One 9700.
Any real geek knows that if it's not rackmounted, it's just a temporary solution.
Therefore, I think I'll wait until someone comes out with a 3U rackmount video "card" with its own dual hot-swap power supply and quadruple redundant cooling fans, linked to the AGP bus with a kind of fibre channel setup.
Let the LAN parties come to me, dammit!
I find it interesting that mack@ocaddiction.com
is the person that submitted this story. Makes you
wonder what ocaddiction gets out of it. I find it
interesting that ocaddiction appears to have a lot
of very positive gushing reviews of ocsystem
products, including claiming they are using
the "Expeditious Gamer" line of ram in some of
their test systems. I "personally" would take about
anything that ocaddiction has to say about hardware
with a grain of salt at this point. YMMV
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
That's utter Bull. Pure and simple. Often I'm astonished at what rubbish a supposed geek site like /. posts on stuff that should lie within it's 'area of expertise'.
Aside from the fact that this piece is offered by somebody infamous for pushing the envelope in crappy hardware, I seriously doubt that it beats all-time, all-star leading edge GFX hardware like, for instance, the FireGL 4 or the newest Wildcat.
Gawd, I hate these n00by statements...
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Since when does bleeding edge equate to 'best'? Perhaps 'buggiest' or 'shortest life span'. I am an owner of a Radeon 9700 Pro and the bugs are yet to be worked out of this card and the AGP 8x implementation.... so overclocking it will make it better?
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Review is at gamesdomain. I'm afraid the only way to describe this game is that THEY FAILED IT.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
Will this improve my Minesweeper score?
IAAL
Yeah, I checked some reviews in the meantime and it looks like it's really bad. Quite a shame, considering the originality of the idea, IMHO. I'd love to stroll around on my harddisk, especially if there was support for a wider variety of files. Just imagine killing that bugger eating parts out of that source code you spent so much time coding late last night ;-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
You can read from the frame buffer in OpenGL with glReadPixels() so you could render a scene with way beyond real-time complexity and then read it out and write it to disk.
However, if you are not constrained by speed, and are after quality, you are better off doing ray-tracing, which you do on a CPU.
I think I'd rather have a 3dLabs Wildcat4 7210, thanks.
Having an overclocked gamerz card is a bit less impressive than a professional one - a bit like an x86 weenie with an overclocked celery comparing his computer to an Alpha SMP box...
as for compensating, I (and you too, I hope) can imagine that people who will pluck down money for the 459 dollar video card is not exactly looking at a 700 dollar system.
compensating, methinks, is when you are pursuing something so rediculously until the costs outweights the benefits. like people who have to put up with noise and / or a lot of trouble for their "faster than the fastest" computer which few programs can take advantage of, or the riceboys who deck out their civics and integras so much that it scratches everytime they pull into a gas station. similarly, I'd say that paying THAT MUCH for a video card simply to get that 10% edge, before it's even useful, is a definite sign of "compensating," and such people (especially if they are actually cutting back on other departments to afford this) really need to get a life and a different, less stressful, perspective on life.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Yes, there is graphics programs for video mixing post production and visual effects that use the OpenGL card to render output.
Here is one, particle illusion:
http://www.wondertouch.com/default.asp
There are also just starting to emerge programs for VJ's that use OpenGL or direct X to do realtime video mixing by treating movies as a texture stream mapped on polys.
Search www.audiovisualizers.com or www.vjcentral.com and you'll find lots of info.
..or did you get the feeling this reviewer guy, was sitting there with his cock in hand while he was testing this gizmo. Jeez, I like playing with new toys but when I've tested it I'd like to send it back without being all sticky!!!!
"I kill you! You no good 56'ing!"
I'd like using it as a hardware accelerator for POV-Ray [povray.org] or Renderman [pixar.com].
This idea has come up many times before, but unfortunately these programs require a whole different set of operations than these cards provide.
Although opengl previews can get faster with these things, the size of a usual texture file found in professional level 3d quickly exceeds the size of the onboard memory and the memory bandwith even sooner. Cards like the Wildcat series from 3dLabs are much more suited to this.
Cinema or even video quality renders require things like full screen ray-tracing, BIG textures, complex shaders etc. which these cards simply cannot do in one or a few passes.
Having said this, there have - and may still be - dedicated ray-tracer boxes which do this exact thing. And I've heard of some development to break down those complex Renderman shaders into small opengl instructions for a battery of 3d cards to chew on. But I haven't heard of any actual deployment of this idea.
I think the latest craze is underclocking in the hopes to get by without a cooler and achieve a truly silent PC.
That's also the main thing that's interesting about that card: no fan. I wonder how many other cards in that category have that feature?
I would wait a couple of weeks for the ati r350 to come out. it'll be at least this fast and you could buy a non-tweaked card. Plus, it sounds like the next version of the nvidia gffx will be out in the summer some time (it should be alot better than the version you've seen reviews of). Its even possible that the ati r400 could make it out before doom3, if there's a delay by id.
On the subject of doom3, there's a good reason why many people love id -- they seem to have control of their company and release pretty stable games. Heck, the pirate-leaked-alpha-e3 version of doom3 was more stable than many released games are nowdays. Plus, to gaming geeks, the communication by JC does more for the company than any cheesy marketing company could.
FYI for those looking to buy this card, there seems to be a known issue with refresh rate distortion. I recently purchased the 9700 AIW but cannot seem to clear up this problem even with the work-a-rounds:
Google
Google
but lets turn your retarded pointless post into
something worthwhile.
NewEgg.com's 9.77 out of 10
Sidewinder's 9.77 out of 10
Dealsonic's 9.69 out of 10
GoogleGear's 8.37 out of 10
Mwave's 8.42 out of 10
ALL companys I've done business with that made
small mistakes and fixed them at NO COST TO ME
AT ALL. Mwave was even nice enough to mail me
a prepaid shipping label when they accidentally
shipped me the wrong memory, and cross-shipped
the correct ram OVERNIGHT at no cost. There are
businesses willing to go the extra mile to make
sure they have an excellent reputation. Even with
an economy this bad. Companys like OCsystem have
NO EXCUSE for the way they treat their customers.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
xbox= $150
ps/2 = $250
Ludicrus indeed.
Unless of course you love 3d studioMax, lightwave, Maya, and adobe photoshop I can't find a justable reason to buy one. My geforce 4ti 4200 according to these benchmarks is close to half the speed of the new card in games like ut2k3. I typically get around 45-60 fps on my geforce4 and athlonXP+1800 as well as 9650 on 3dmark. Even on an athlon like mine I could expect 3d benchmark scores of 15k!
This turbo charged ATI is one fast mutha. But still is way too much.
This card no doubt is very very fast but unless it actually brings you money( your a graphics designer for a living) it serves no purpose other then an ego enhancer for a small ****.
http://saveie6.com/
People are activly researching exactly what you are talking about -- making programmable hardware perform ray-tracing operations.
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/rtongfx/
-S
I remember when we paid a GRAND ($1000) for a video card to use in a CAD system. It took up two ISA slots and probably had a whopping 8M of RAM. But we had to have it because it took forever to redraw on a 486/100.
I'm not convinced we have hit the wall on video cards yet. The Next Great Thing is just around the corner. It's ridiculous for us to be waiting on the video card these days when processor and RAM are so cheap.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
What is really amazing to me right now is that games are driving this huge industry of video card development.
;)
And I think it's amazing that MS Word is driving this huge industry of CPU development.
Now, I like a good game as much as the next guy, but I wonder if there is anyone out there that is using all of this triangle processing power for purposes other than games?
Don't forget the visual FX industry for movies and television. They really push their cards hard when modeling the amazing scenes we've come accustomed to seeing in movies and to a lesser extent on TV. This industry gobbles up the most powerful hardware they can get their hands on. Paying top dollar for a video card/CPU is much cheaper than paying an artist to wait on their maichine over time.
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
Anyone have any reccomendations?
Just wait until you are out living on your own, supporting yourself with a cushy "retail sales" position at the local Wal-Mart, and you have to determine which is more important to you: a fancy video card, or more food so you don't, y'know, die.
Then we'll see who can't afford what.. More ramen, anybody?
If you are really interested in pro work, 3DLabs offerings are miles ahead of both ATI's and nVidia's offerings, and the Wildcat VP870 is even cheaper than the GF Quadro4 900XGL, and at the high-end, the Wildcat IV series is quite good, the top-end model having 128MB Frame Buffer and 256MB texture buffer. Also, the image quality is great.
I've tested the cards under Maya and SoftImage XSI, as well as SolidEngineer, and all I can say is that the Wildcat VP870 is definitely worth it's price if you're interested in pro-level graphics, and don't care about games, and the Wildcat IV 7210 is a wet dream. Wish I could afford the latter one though =(.
Actually, movies don't require full screen raytracing. Most special effects are STILL rendered with raycasting, and if raytraced effects are thought to be needed, you use a special rayserver, as it's called, to render only the shaders that have the raytracing flag set.
Yep, there's a similar effort at my university. Check out the Ray Engine: http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~jch/papers/rt2/
Whoops... Haven't noticed that 3DLabs has released the VP970 also...
Gotta get my hands on one of those to test it.
Wasn't "OCSystem Enhanced Radeon 9700 Pro" enough? Why add "level III SE"? is there a "Level II" avaliable? I assume the "level I" is the off-the-shelf radeon 9700 pro. And SE? Why not DX or LX or SSEi or Vtec or VVTi? ;-)
Man, the video card market is beginning to look like the car market: over-marketed. Soon, you will be able to order cards colored from a selected palette, or get bucket seats as a "Deluxe" option! There will be "the video card for the discriminating buyer", the "all-terrain video card for the outdoorsman in you", and other punch lines direct from this place!
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
Due to our high call volums we might missed your call.
All calls are answered in the order its received.
If you have reach a busy tone, please call again.
Actually, QE is a bit of a sham. It does do windowing effects, but unlike Longhorn or EVAS, doesn't actually accelerate *drawing*.
Speaking as one who uses Quartz Extreme, I can say yes, it *does* accelerate "drawing". Windows render faster, text documents scroll faster (and look much better than anything I have seen on *any* other platform), and it allows for compositing effects that really do make a difference allowing for better usability.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Six years ago ATI started to fumble with their Rage chips, but for all the rest of the 90's ATI was the shit. Matrox took the crown there with their Millenium, but the Mach64 was the gold standard of video card quality.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Many computer animators buy cards that are even more expensive than those cards. These cards aren't nearly as popular as game cards, though. And honestly they aren't all that great for games. Game cards tend to use a lot of corner cutting, delivering a less accurate image and more artifacts. Professional cards also tend to support some things that would be either useless or simply overkill for games (3d textures, 256 megs of texture memory, etc.) Examples would be the NVidia's Quadro FX, ATI's FireGL X1, and 3DLabs' Wildcat4 7110. There cost-cutting computer animators (like me) usually use game cards. I have a GeForce Ti4200 with the soft quadro hack (forces the card to act like a quadro.) I need a fast card so I can view my animations in at 24 FPS and actually be able to create a detailed sub-d model without pulling my hair out waiting for the computer to update, not so that I get some ungodly number of FPS in Quake 3 (my monitor only goes at 60 Hz at 1280x1024 anyway.)
-Derick
that its already outdated - so [www.letsplaychess.com]
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
i read somewhere that transferring images back to the system via the AGP bus is REAL slow, about 8fps max
i want a standard AGP card with a little cable or something that connects to a PCI slot that enables me to download from the card at high speeds. i'd do animation and stuff. i'td be cool.
Jag pratar lite svenska.
If you mean "fastest on a PC", then say "fastest on a PC"; don't just say "fastest". Personally I'd rather have an XVR-4000 or an InfiniteReality4 than one of these.
I like what I see on the ABS pc website.
Any recommendations from /. on where to buy a nice new system with some lights and stuff will be appreciated. (My old system is a white box, and my workhorse laptop is black. I would like some colour this time around.)
Sorry, this is super-secret OTS Scientology stuff. Knowledge of this type of information is grounds for a lawsuit.
Your friendly neighborhood OSA agent.
Looks like they should have gotten "fastest server you can buy" down first.
"But as it stands today"
Actually, as of the last time I clicked on the link, it was on its knees.
"the OCSystem Enhanced Radeon 9700 Pro Level III SE is simply the best card your money can buy today."
Good for graphics, not so hot for web servers?
Slashdot effect once again turns premium hardware into molten piles of PCB and silicon.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
(Score:5, Not Funny)
If I'm correct the Amiga was able to use its graphics unit for computing. I think it was a hack or something that coders did. I read once about a sound dsp used for manipulating graphics on the amiga. You know add fancy effects to the image.
Just saying it has been done before. To bad all that knowledge is getting lost now.
-- I don't buy it, I grow it.
If you're willing to step away from a pc-architecture, you can one heck of a video card from sgi. Some cool features:
- drives up to 8 displays at once
- up to 80GB frame buffer, 8GB texture memory, 65 Megapixel resoultion, and 8 pipelines.
- 48 bit RGBA
- wicked fast with lots of hardware acceleration
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I think the new Enlightenment uses OpenGL for rendering widgets, but I may be talking
out of my ass here.
cheers
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
you tell em
From Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on February 7th:
"The U.S. $cientology organization, denounced by German politicians as a
criminal cult and kept under political surveillance since 1997, was
granted tax exemption by the Federal Finance Office on Monday. The office
said that it had based its decision on an agreement between Germany and
the United States governing double taxation. Scientology is exempted from
taxation in the United States as a non-profit religious group. To avoid
double taxation, the German authority said Scientology thus does not have
to pay taxes on gains repatriated to the United States from license fees
for film material in Germany.
--xenu.net has more--
Yes actually, you damn idiot, ther are level II and level I cards, they are both overclocked, but not to the extreme of the ones after it. The SE is put on because the board is a limited edition, meaning that only a certain amount will be sold, making it special. Maybe you should do little research before you go ranting like a jackass.
Ok, Site is slashdotted, but I am wondering, I was under the impression that Doom III uses OpenGL. If that is the case, does the Radeon support opengl better than Nvidia? That, I have a hard time believing. I thought ATI was all about DirectX.
TODAY at least
Tomorrow is another story
Even Faster Fastest Video Card You Can Buy!!!
moo.
a href="http://www.d3-genetic.de/Forum/showtopic.php ?threadid=61&time=1043952136">This is the kind of graphics we will see soon. These shots apparently come from a mod based on a soon to be released graphics engine, but my russian is not very good (i.e. not existing).
GeForceFX or Radeon 9700 Pro or better seems required.
Quit your whining. I used to do 3d modeling in Windows95 with a 2mb Matrox Millenium, 16 megs of system memory (72pin EDO), and a 133 mhz Pentium (no MMX or other extensions).
AND I WAS HAPPY. Upgrading to 32 megs of ram was a nice boast, though.
Even with an average this high, it's every easy to drop into mid-40's or upper-30's during a big cluster*uck.
Oh no! That's only twice the framerate of motion picture film!
I'd really like some info on how a card like the ti4200 and 9700 will improve games when I only have a p3 700.
CPUs can still bottleneck a GPUs potential I assume? Even if a game does ALL of its processing in the GPU (forget AI in multiplayer games). I'm sure a p2 400 will run ut2003 at less than 15fps even with a 9700. Do I upgrade my p3 700first? or my geforce2 first?
tis a big fucking mystery to me.
I had posted some inquiries to parallel processing newsgroups about exactly this, and the general answer is no. The types of operations the card does in hardware are not all that useful, and secondly the gpu registers are not designed to be read back from.
I still think it could be done though.
I tought so.
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
Looks like the site was slashdotted, but somehow I doubt that even if I could get there I could find information about Linux performance. This is one area where nVidia's reigned ever since the release of their 1251 drivers almost two years ago. I know ATi has their own drivers for Linux now, but do those drivers actually give ATi an edge over nVidia in Linux?
>I finally got sick of playing games on substandard hardware, deciding to buy top notch goods the next time I built a machine. I paid around $650 for my G4 Ti4400 128mb
:)
:)
The same card is currently available for less than $200 delivered and runs about a third slower than the current generation of video cards (Toms, UT2003 1024x768 32bit, 119fps vs 177fps for a 9700Pro.) In two years you are going to look back and wonder what the hell you were thinking (I still wonder what the hell I was thinking when I paid $325 for a Voodoo 2/12M on Day-1. Frigging three hundred dollar paperweight, that is what I now own in that card.) For the $650 you spent for your single card running at 2/3rds the speed of current generation cards you could get TWO 9700Pro 128M 8x cards delivered (Pricewatch) - one for your machine and one for your grandfather's machine, or you could get a 9700Pro and a 17" LCD monitor to replace your 19" Viewsonic.
Disclaimer - I'm not bagging on you in particular. I am just pointing out that yes, you sort of do have to be hardcore to justify spending copious amounts for Day-1 hardware. I can go out and get three G4 Ti4400 128mb cards today for what you spent on yours and put them in three of my systems and guess what, not only will my systems be as fast as yours, I will have three of them (for what that is worth : not much.)
Personally I am holding off buying / building my 'Doom III' machine until D3 actually ships - the $2500+ I plan on spending will be best spent on whatever is two steps down the ladder (in terms of CPU, Video card, etc...) at that time, rather then going Day-1 hardware a few months ago, and still come out ahead.
Is your machine still going to be a beast in 6 months when D3 ships
If you are happy with what you got, then be happy. You can't justify expenditures on a game machine to anybody, don't even try. Three thousand dollars to play a game - hell for three thousand dollars you can go to a farm and root around in his barn and fields with a real shotgun and shoot real pigs and wolverines and other mean creatures. All in quadraphonic sound, superduper UXGA+ graphics and even real smell.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Dumbass. A Ferrari will be worth the same in ten years time (probably more). It will still look great anyway. A video card is just a piece of plastic and metal in ten years time.
I did find a picture of the enhanced cooling for the NV50 though:
http://www.aerotestoperations.com/reactor.jpg
I hear it comes with a special virtual reality jumpsuit:
http://www.mesosystems.com/gfx/blue_suit.jpg
Hope they come in other colors besides blue.
Isn't that why the CPU doesn't render the scene and send raw images across the AGP bus, it sends vectorized compressed data to the VC which then renders it and puts it on screen. There are now "Raw" images going acress the bus, so to speak, only the data needed for the card to form its own interpretation of the data. I say interpretation, because every brand of card will look a bit different, depending on precision, color depth, and detail settings. Its also why you CAN do 4x antialiased 1600x1200 gaming at > 60fps on the top-end cards. You are right though that the AGP bus wouldn't be able to transmit all that data if it were raw.
today is spelling optional day.
Don't forget to wait for the "Type R" version
This card was not named by ATI. The name was made up by OCSystems. It's still just a overclocked Radeon 9700pro
You are wholly uninformed if you think that 3d gaming at 1600x1200 involves transferring every image at 60fps over the agp bus to the AGP card. Texture and bump maps are loaded in advance and updated regularly, model geometry is loaded, and then the camera position and position of the various models is updated for every frame. The scene is wholly rendered within the video card itself, stored in the memory of the video card, and sent out to the display without ever going back to the CPU or main memory. In fact, the main reason that AGP is helpful is to speed the loading of new objects into the card's memory from the system memory as you move through a scene or prevent a horrible bottleneck if you run short of memory on the card and have to actively use the main system memory (time to get a new card if this happens regularly).
Modern video cards get very little use of the CPU other than being told what to draw. It's quite easy to setup a scene that will bring the video card to it's knees, while leaving the CPU and AGP bus at less than 5% utilization. In newer games, the CPU is running AI, physics, user input and loading new models to memory.
I believe the article you are thinking about referred to the problem of rendering 3d scenes in real time at high resolution and recording the final stream to disk. The article stated that the rate AGP transfers data back to system memory is horrible relative to it's ability to take data in, and thus made gaming cards a poor solution for hollywood production needs.
i read somewhere that transferring images back to the system via the AGP bus is REAL slow, about 8fps max i want a standard AGP card with a little cable or something that connects to a PCI slot that enables me to download from the card at high speeds. i'd do animation and stuff. i'td be cool.
Can someone tell me why you would want to record a high resolution video to your hard drive of something that you can normally run on you machine at 30+fps? Recording frames for playback is really only useful if you are rendering a scene that is too complex to be run in real time. i.e. Hollywood shite that takes an hour or more to render a frame, and hence you don't give a damn if it takes you an eighth of a second to get it from the video memory to the hard drive. If you just want to make a movie of you playing UT3k, just record the scene geometry for later playback through the graphics engine.
What about using the cards for general image processing? What about morphological transforms? Image segmentation? How about FFTs? Convolutions? Multi-dimensional integrals? Matrix math? I would think a lot of general calculations could be could be isomorphic to some video operation on some contrived image. For example, take a large vector dot product. Could that be implemented using OpenGL calls to a video card? Would it be faster than using the main CPU?
think if it could work. not bad having another fpu .
One would think that CPU's with their higher clock rates and greater number of transistors would be far better then GPU's at general math processing.
I'm pretty sure a CPU processes a lot more then the GPU.
Hmmm... Pie...
I would think they could compete with regular CPU's in floating point.
IIRC, CPUs use 80bit floats in their computations. GPUs use 128 bits, but they are split up four ways (RGB,alpha), so they are really only accurate to 32bits. Makes for very pretty pictures, but wholly inadequate for scientific application.
BTW, any $460 computer would make an ass gaming machine. A low to mid level gaming rig will run you about $1000. Then add about $500 per year in upgrades to keep it current.
Please go read up on the differences between exposure of moving objects on film vs. the output of a 3d rendering device and you'll see why 24fps is 'tolerable' for movies. Even at 24fps, I still walk out of a theater with a headache from the 24hz flicker of the movie and the 60hz flicker of the display (nevermind the heterodyning of the two!). If you look at each individual frame, you'll see that there's inherent motion blur in the moving objects which happens to coincide with the amount of time that 1 frame is displayed. This gives the appearance of smooth motion, but its not perfect.
Most people who play these games have visual acuity much higher than average. If you truely believe in the age old "24hz-is-good-enough-for-everyone" bs, then why buy a monitor capable of greater than 60hz? After all, its MORE than twice that of a motion picture film. Your logic is fatally flawed.
Yes, it is possible, to use the GPU for non graphis operations. Using NVIDIA's Cg programming language to write vertex and fragment shaders is fairly simple. As long as your result data can be encoded into a 1,2,or 3 dimensional array (i.e. texture) you can read back the result easily.
I have not done anything completely non CG related but I just wrote a little app that uses the GPU to do image processing. It has convolution filters and non-linear filtering implemented as fragment programs (pixel-shaders) and runs completely on the GPU.
Gauss-filtering a 1024-768 image takes less then 1/10 of a second with a r=2 Grauss kernel.
30 FPS (or lower) would probably be acceptable if the video card rendered motion blur.
I started learning 3D animation using Maya. I even modified my GeForce3 card into a Quadro DCC (basically resoldiered two resistors to change the id of the board). Didn't make much of a difference though. :)
However I have done quite a bit of research, and the only power house I would want is one of them new SGI workstations. All these various video cards have their good points and bad points, but they still cost a good penny.
Now ATI came out with the 9700 Pro, which is the best card for gaming, but does horribly at rendering (mainly due to drivers). Not too far afterwards they released the FireGL Xl1. This card is quite expensive (over a grand), but my thought is if the 9700 Pro is so awesome at gaming, I wonder how this card will do at rendering performance versus the Quadro4 980 XGL. As it stands, you can get a 900 series Quadro4 for a tad more than $500.
My big question is.... how will it compare to the WildCat cards?
Rob
-----
Got something on your mind?
Post it.. we want to hear it!
www.bboombotz.com
Actually, there are research efforts going on right now to do a lot of the things you mention. Start poking around on various CS department websites at some research-oriented universities. However, it is not easy because graphics pipelines are designed to process individual elements. As soon as you start working on problems with inter-data dependence, it is no longer appropriate for processing by a graphics pipeline.
This is both true and misleading. The AGP bus is perfectly capable of transferring full-screen images from the graphics card to the host CPU at 30+ fps. After all, it can transfer images from the CPU to the graphics card at that rate. How do you think pure-software DVD decoding happens? The problem is that the main graphics card manufacturers (nVidia & ATI) make gaming cards. Games transfer large textures from the CPU to the card. They do not transfer images from the card to the CPU. Therefore, the vendors do not spend any time optimizing that operation. (This has a lot of research students very frustrated.)
There have been tests run to verify this. I remember seeing one test where someone streamed images from the card to memory as fast as possible using several methods in both OpenGL and Direct3D. Most of the methods produced about 8 fps. One of them, just one, managed 178 fps. (I think it was a vendor-specific extension.) The hardware can do it. But no one is interested in making it happen.
I'll take perfect colour fidelity, and resolution over polygon fill rates any day. 2D performance is more important for real computor usage. For some of us, computors are a tool, not a toy. Why compramise the capabilities of a system just so it excells at one activity, a minority activity at that. Card reviewers, and review readers need to get a clue!
It won't. 3DLabs doesn't bother writing decent DirectX drivers. Though OpenGL works like a dream! Too bad 3DMark uses Direct3D.
Hardware based renderers are allready available, for example from ART, but they use their very own RIB renderer.
www.art.co.uk
if the graphic card companies want a another selling point they could make some modifications to their gpu's for mathematical&scientific purposes. Having a HUGE vector graphics processor would be very cool.
Wah! POV-Ray on an abacus. I win.
> A Ferrari will be worth the same in ten years
> time (probably more).
Thats right, its not a car...its an investment. Now the stock market is crap, everybody should go out and buy ferraris...
To bad Apple's own tech documents don't bear that out. Just read the PDF. All 2D is rendered by the CPU to a texture using Quartz2D, and all the window textures are composited via OpenGL. QE is a misnomer. It's not acceleration for Quartz2D, but a replacement for QuartzCompositer. The performance improvements you're seeing come from the fact that the CPU isn't having to composit all those windows anymore, so it has more power free to redraw faster. It's kind of a dubious improvement, because Quartz Extreme simply speeds up the compositing step, which is a step other graphics systems don't even need. Compositing of all windows is necessary to achieve window shadows and real transparency, but don't be fooled into thinking that you're not paying a *huge* performance price for those two bits of eye candy.
In Longhorn and EVAS, OpenGL is used for actually drawing window contents. This could be a big improvement. For example, somebody did an SVG viewer that used OpenGL. There was a huge performance improvement. Current GUI's are all still largely bitmap based (OS X more so than most others, ironically). Icons are bitmaps, widgets are mostly bitmaps, text is bitmaps, etc. This is due to the fact that newer "shinier" GUIs require gradients and other effects that current 2D engines simply don't accelerate. However, with accelerated vector drawing, we could theoretically make all icons and widgets SVG images, allowing them to be more dynamic and scalable.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Please. My dinky (well, maybe not so dinky :) laptop runs circles around any OS X costing twice as much. And I don't have to pay a company that represents everything I think is wrong with the country (sub-par products driven by marketing and style gimickry). Besides, OS X DOES NOT HAVE A HARDWARE ACCELERATED DESKTOP. Quartz Extreme should be "Quartz Compositor Extreme." QE just accelerates window effects like transparency and shadows. All Quartz2D drawing is still done on the main CPU. This misconception is funny as hell. Even Apple's own documents show this clearly, and the Quartz Extreme webpage has the "compositing" qualification litererally written all over it.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Surprised? - games have driven the PC hardware market for many years now. CPU manufacturers know this (thus the AMD vs Intel wars). Graphics card manufacturers are almost entirely aimed at the gaming market - business users (in general) don't care about video performance!
Ever since the first graphical cult-games (think Wolftenstein 3D and Doom), hardware sales and growth have both been focused on gaming.
The following is my personal opinion, please do your own research on this company.
These guys are notorious for setting up review sites to promote their own products. They use employees to falsely promote their products on different message boards. Resellerratings has had to clear some of this companies sites reviews because they were getting too many fraudulent positive reviews mixed in with the negative reviews.
If you notice this article was submitted by one of their employees. When did /. start taking ads?
IMO, this is one of those companies that gives Internet commerce a bad name.
You have now been warned.
ResellerRating's OC System
OCZ Memory: Are they able to regain consumer trust?
Update on 'OCZ EXPOSED'
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
A lot of comments on this thread (and pages linked from same) seem to indicate that OC Systems are rip-off artists. While I have no way of knowing whether this is true or not, I am rather disheartened by the "Yeah, I got ripped off, but I'm just going to suck up and take it and never buy anything from them again" responses I've seen. If you've been ripped off, COMPLAIN. Complain to the company first, but if they don't give you any satisfaction, have the charge blocked on your credit card. If that isn't enough, or that isn't an option, then you need to bring out the big guns and rat them out to the feds! And here are just the websites to do it on:
a udComplaint.htm: The US Postal Inspector's Mail Fraud Report Form. I've used this for a few small value (less than $50) items I've returned to ebay merchants who then didn't send the refund despite repeated e-mails and phone calls. After complaining to the USPS, the rip-off artist got a letter from them and paid up darn quick. And you CAN follow up if no action is taken. I have a lot of criticisms of the U.S. Snail, but this is one area where government action actually seems to work.
http://www.usps.com/postalinspectors/fraud/MailFr
https://www.ifccfbi.gov/cf1.asp: The FBI's Fraud Complaint Form. The FBI seems a lot less active in prosecuting small cases than USPS, but i get the impression that if they get a LOT of complaints from people on the same company, they start to look in on it. Worth a try.
Remember: Every time you let someone rip you off without calling them on it, it makes it that much easier for them to rip off other people down the line.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
haha - oh, get a clue!! I'll take my "subpar" Apple laptop over ANY wintell machine you can suggest. Thanks.
yelling doesn't change the fact you don't know what you're talking about. The windows are the UI and the UI maketh a desktop. The windows in OSX are openGL objects rendered by the VIDEO CARD, via quartz extreme.
I'm almost certain that QE offloads it's alpha needs to the card as well. Why wouldn't it when the window is already buffered as a texture wrapped over an object... In OpenGL it would be simple to give that object an alpha channel.
-a
Sigh. We were talking about workstations here. Apple makes very nice laptops. I don't use one because I need workstation power, but I'm space constrained. But Apple's "workstations" are really not worth how much they cost, especially since I really don't like OS X (Linux person myself). Anyway, you're dead wrong. Windows are not the UI. Scrollbars, toolbars, icons, text, widgets, etc, are the UI. Just read Apple's own PDFs. They clearly show that OpenGL is used only for compositing (certain apps like FInal Cut also use OpenGL for transparency effects). However, actual drawing (Quartz 2D) is most definately not accelerated. You'd think it would be, because Quartz 2D is vector based, and the imaging model is pretty easy to support via OpenGL, but it isn't.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It is, albeit in a illegal leaked alpha form. No link provided, understandably.
When their numbers dwindled from 50 to 8, the dwarves began to suspect Hungry.
You brought up the laptop bit. Remember:
It sounds like you know what you're talking about, but it just doesnt gel. check out
http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/quartzextreme.
here's a quote:
that when I play DOOM ]I[ on Athlon 1800 XP with 512 MB RAM and a geforce 4 mx, my frame rate will be reasured is seconds per frame, rather than frames per second?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Yes, SGI's are nice when you work with huge scenes or datasets, especially when you work with cad and similar, and absolutely need that 8x8 supersampled antialiasing. Unfortunately, they cost a little too much.
/. at least) is actually in favour of 3DLabs cards, if you do pro-work. If you're an amateur, who also do a lot of gaming, and want DX9 support, go with the ATI. If you as an amateur want good OpenGL-support, and want to play games, buy the nVidia card.
Compared to the GeForce, the FireGL X11 will do quite well. And, well, games are also rendering, it's just more optimized for fillrates, and also DirectGFX, while the real pro-cards are aimed at OpenGL(For example, the Wildcat 4 series supports DX7, and the Wildcat VP's support DX8.1 and pixel shaders 1.1 and 1.2)
Against the Wildcats? Depends on what models... Against the VP's... Well, they would still be slower, especially since ATI focuses on DX, and their OpenGL-drivers are, well, crap. One example: I still haven't got the entire SpecViewPerf to run all tests without crashing on a computer with an ATI card. The so highly vaunted price/performance(On
And, neither ATI nor Nvidia has anything that compares to the Wildcat 4's, other than in marketing drivel and clueless peoples imaginations.
Bah, I'll need to show my age here, but so what...
The Amiga had several coprocessors, with the Blitter being used for block image transfers, hence the name Blitter. Anyway, IIRC, he could not only move memory from one place to another, but also apply logical ops, using the source and destination. In this way, you could essentially do simple SIMD instructions. Nothing fancy, mind you, but still faster than the processor...
Hell, with today's graphics cards you could do gigantic matrices of cellular automata faster than with the CPU, as these are mostly memory-bound.
and still slashdotted. Did anyone happen to grab a mirror? Google's cache has the first two pages only.
"with today's graphics cards you could do gigantic matrices of cellular automata faster than with the CPU, as these are mostly memory-bound"
Actually that was one of the blitter hacks. A version of life that only used the blitter.
I brought up my laptop to say that my laptop runs circles around an OS X workstation. I forgot to write workstation at the end. The OS X laptops really aren't meant for workstation-level use.
Logically, windows are the central aspect of modern UIs. But in terms of computing power, windows aren't the major burden. It's the stuff *inside* the windows that takes a lot of CPU to draw. Let me see if I can explain the model:
OS X without Quartz Extreme --
Each application has a chunk of memory for it's window. It draws, via the CPU, into this memory using Quartz 2D. The graphics card is largely used for quickly drawing bitmaps. It does not accelerate drawing of any of Quartz2D's vaunted vector graphics. Quartz Compositor then takes all of these windows, and with the CPU, does the shadow and transparency effects, and draws the final result into the screen.
OS X with Quartz Extreme --
Each application has a chunk of memory for its window. It draws, via the CPU, into this memory using Quartz 2D. The graphics card is largely used for quickly drawing bitmaps. It does not accelerate drawing of any of Quartz2D's vaunted vector graphics. Quartz Compositor then takes all of these windows, turns them into textures. Then it sends them to the graphics card, which does the transparency and shadow effects, and draws the results onto the screen.
Now, Quartz Extreme is a big improvement in OS X, because previously, it was the CPU that had to recomposit all the windows everytime one of them changed. However, in the computing world overall, it's not really a big deal. Other window systems don't do the compositing step (which is useful only for window-transparency and shadows) so something like Quartz Extreme wouldn't have any effect at all. Now, Longhorn and EVAS (Enlightenment 17) are actually hardware accelerated desktops. In EVAS, everything is done via the GPU. Take a look at the AGG-2 page. Look at the screenshots. In EVAS or Longhorn, those drawings could be accelerated via OpenGL (which was designed for vector graphics!) In OS X, they would have to be done via Quartz 2D on the CPU.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You CAN buy an XBOX and PS-2, but then people would make fun of you for being a console gamer...
Sorta like this:
"Aww... widdle baby's got his pwetty pwaystation."
Be a real man, spend more money on your computer... You know you want a water-cooled system (I know I do)
heh
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
Fuck off bitch!