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ATI vs. NVIDIA: ATI Steals the Show
(54)T-Dub writes "Apparently a group of MIT engineers made an OpenGL wrapper for the NVidia Demo of 'Dawn.' (a fairy with high sex appeal) Even though the wrapper adds more overhead the demo still runs faster on the 9800pro and creates higher quality images." Yet another reason it's good to have engineering students on your side.
That's gotta hurt... I feel sorry for nVidia... it does look like they're going the way of 3dfx... Maybe I should buy an ATI card next. nVidia do have good linux driver support, though - does ATI have that too?
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Just goes to show you what quality products can do when put to the test.
Of course, you have to have quality test matter, which is what the students provided.
It's just too bad that with my current video card, I really can't view the demo.
I mean if you're going to have medieval fantasy characters in your demos, might as well go the whole way and have a proper Princess.
Until nvidia has (or gives specs for) opensource drivers its no nvidia for me....
I don't consider releasing a binary only x86 driver to be 'supporting' linux.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
You know, when a page gets slashdotted, isn't it just coincidence when the only thing that will load is the banner ad!
1) Get to the top of the video card market.
2) Get lazy.
3) Competitor gets to the top of video card market.
Rinse, lather, repeat as necessary.
Didn't NVIDIA learn from 3DFX? Hell, they bought them. I'm hoping this is a driver issue and that subsequent optimized releases of Detinator will speed it up. If not, it is a sad day for NVidia.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
...does she have a sister?
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
Sure, the card is faster so you can now play your existing games with anti-aliasing on all the time (well, mostof the time...) but unfortunately your games won't look any different.
Remember the first time you installed your 3dfx card (inc pass-through cable) and played GLQuake? Amazing! High res smooth graphics on your P166, the envy of consoles everywhere. Then nVidia brough our their TNT cards which did 32-bit colour... nice. But since then, what's changed? Answer: not much. There are only a handful of games which use 50% of the features offered by a Geforce 3. I have a Ti4600 and a Ti200 and it's nigh on impossible to tell them apart.
Why the Sam Hill should I buy ANOTHER new card when there's simply no compelling reason to upgrade?
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Summary of next 500 posts.
nVidia is dying...
No their not..
ATi linux drivers suck..
Ati Windows drivers suck..
No they don't....
Benchmarks mean nothing...
Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah
Stop wasting your time...everyone buys their graphics cards based on what features are important to them. Whether it is raw performance, quality, driver stability, support, supported OS's, cost, availability etc... it is most likely a comprised mix of all of the above.
"Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
So I take it you won't be buying the newer ATi cards either, since their latest cards are only properly supported by binary-only drivers.
nvidia practically destroyed 3dfx. They bought 3dfx and refused to update any drivers (e.g. nvidia refused to update the windows xp 3dfx-driver when microsoft contacted nvidia). Thus many people had to buy a new geforce card.
i fear we all (we who had to buy geforce cards to get windows xp working/or people that heard about this story) have established a real HATE relationship against nvidia.
go go ati. best wishes!
I guess I too follow these stories closely, as I'm a fairly avid gamer. However, all this tugging between which graphics chipset company is better is likely to go on for some time. People say that NVidia is now the clear cut loser. Well, I wouldn't be so fast to judge that. I believe that like many other industries, there are two or more powerful companies that have good years and bad years when compaired against their competitor.
It seems that NVidia is having a bad year or two right now. But they're a big and resoucre rich company, hopefully know what they are doing, and were just caught off guard by ATi pushing the technology in the 9700 of last year to market so soon. I think they are operating in a "catch up" mode, desperately trying to caputre back the coveted crown of the graphics wars. And it is that preoccupation that is deriding them from true technolgical innovation.
Once NVidia resumes its roll as a technology innovator, much like ATi is now, the race once again will be on for the true champion of the graphics wars.
And when that happens, I think that is a definate signal that graphics will again become sort of the arms race of the cold war, each side battling to be "best". But better, because when you have two free market companies battling it out, it usually comes down to as much blistering performance avalible for the dollar.
And that is excellent for all gamers, and the general computing public at large.
But maybe that's mumbo jumbo, it sounds good 5 hours past my bedtime. nighty night.
The last 3 cards I have purchased have been by NVidia, 2 G3's 32 megs and a G4Ti4200 64 meg. I recently built a new rig, and after months of comparing the latest and "greatest" Nvidia cards to the 6 month old 9700 pro, there was NO contest. The 9700 pro "pwnz" everything the GFX can throw at it. I'm a little dismayed by this, seeing as NVidia's driver support is outstanding compared to ATI's.
My advice if you dont want to spend too much on a vid card: buy a 9500 pro, its light years beyond the 9600 pro, and AFAIK, discontinued.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Where does that article says that ATI cards runs demo faster or produce better quality images? There isn't any benchmarks facilities in the Dawn demo.
Does anybody have any mirror/BitTorrent URLs for that wrapper? Good ol' Slashdot effect at 7.22 AM...
I can't speak for their FreeBSD drivers, but ATI's 3D linux drivers for the Radeon 8500 and up work incredibly well. I get better framerates with UT2003 under linux than I do under Windows with the OpenGL renderer.
Dinivin
ATI vs. NVIDIA: ATI Steals the Show
I dunno if you guys heard about this one but nVIDIA actually had a e3 party then went pretty wild(some topless pics). Not only did they have Smashmouth perform at their E3 party but they also had some porn star make an appearance to(she was eventually kicked out for dancing topless on a table). Check google its all fact
Sounds more like they aren't 'supporting' you. Fortunately for all the NVidia/Linux users, your opinion doesn't really matter here.
Oh sure, you and others with similar beliefs about the situation should make them known. And if that includes not using someone's product because you don't like the way they do business
I'd like to run the demo just to see it
---
I support spreading santorum
Are you Implying ATI bought MIT ?? If so That is Big News indeed.
So I take it you won't be buying the newer ATi cards either, since their latest cards are only properly supported by binary-only drivers.
That's correct. As long as I have the option, I'll buy what has open-source drivers available. If that means not getting the top-of-the-line card, then so be it - I don't need it anyway.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Why? Do you only use opensource Windows drivers too? good lock.
I wonder when a graphics card company will have the GUTS to release a demo that can run on ALL hardware and not just their own. Of course the company in question would need to have hardware greatly advanced from whatever else was available. Perhaps ATI could have done this when the R9700 was launched???
Cheers,
_GP_
Good to hear! :)
Yeah No kidding .. Windows is Dead, ATI should know by now that Linux is where the Big time Gameing market is.
Although its engineers need to learn to ignore their marketing dept. the management of nVidia is pretty good
expect them to regain the crown at the NV40 marker, ATI has indicated they'd be slowing their innovation cycles, whereas nVidia has made no such statement.
Yes, yet another reason. The other reasons I can think of are:
Any other reasons to have them on our side?
Why the Sam Hill should I buy ANOTHER new card when there's simply no compelling reason to upgrade?
Ah ha!
Here in lies the challenges of Sales and Marketing departments all across the land.
Unfortunately, they will find a way to convince you that you MUST get the new Happy Graphics 10,700 GF5x Twin-Turbo Platnium card.
I think it is the extra LEDs or the fancy new second generation heat spreader that is there to cool the PCB.. because umm, that's uncooled so far!
But really, if you want to make a conspearacy or something, it is the old Wintel routine. Build faster graphics cards, so you can design fancier games, which require faster graphics cards, which push the development of games, which..... allow you to sell these things for mucho dinero (much money).
Well, you see how it works I'm sure.
Your Ti 4600 won't seem so adequate in 3 years I'm afraid.
And then Sam Hell will convince you to upgrade to that Happy Twin-Turbo!
Good move at the time, and a good move now as it will allow them to bridge the poor comparative performance of their graphics unit vs. ATI.
I got a Dell with the Radeon 9800 card because I wanted the dual monitor support. However xfree86 does not seem to support it at all. Does anyone know of a driver or any plans for a driver to be released for this card? I really do not want to run XP at work any longer than I have too ;)
Finkployd
I recently spent a lot of money on a 9700 Pro, which is currently sitting atop my machine, useless. The reason? ATI won't release a driver that works with xfree 4.3.0, and after several mails told me to just keep an eye on their site for updates. I know there are open source drivers (2d only) for the card, but those gave me really nasty rasterline flashes whenever the card did anything - so were next to useless.
Anyone else stuck in the same situation? If you look up drivers for the firegl cards on their site , you find a newer version of the drivers (same as the 9700 - why aren't they listed on the 9700 page??), but again it's compiled only for 4.1.0 and 4.2.0, and will refuse to work with 4.3.0.
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
Myabe they never should have purchaced 3dfx :P
Seriously though, I do have faith in nVidia, I'm sure they'll be able to engineer their way out of this. Eventualy.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Okay, I've got a Linux box here at work with a GeforceFX in it - I'm going to have a go at running it under WINE, but I won't be holding my breath... I'm assuming Dawn is an OpenGL demo?
direct link
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The more nerds, er engineering students, in the world, the better chance that I have for a date with that hottie in Chemistry class!
The proper name for an ATI fanboy is "fanATIc".
ATI was FAR behind NVidia (and even 3dfx) performance-wise until the Radeons were released.
Previous ATI cards sucked. The first one to have even acceptable performance was the Rage 128 - And that was at least two generations behind NVidia when released. (It was worse than the original TNT, wherease NVidia already had the TNT2 Ultra on the market and was very close to releasing or had already released the GeForce 256.) ATI sucked until the Radeon, and their driver quality is still abysmal.
I'll stick with NVidia - I'll take a little performance hit for the added reliability of their drivers. NVidia is not going the way of 3Dfx - One of 3Dfx's Achilles heels was their abysmal driver support. (Glide anyone?)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If anyone wants it, I've mirrored the OpenGL wrapper here (78k).
You can get the dawn demo from here
TEst against those instead of the GeForce if you are going to use OpenGL as the benchmark.
Well maybe they got better, I have a radeon mobility 7500 in my dell laptop, I get good fps running at 1400 x 1050 but its got a flaw at lower resolutions.. the bottom of the screen is all messed up. nVIDIA's drivers I use with my geforce 2 mx, easy as hell to install. Just run the script and hit enter a couple times, then restart X. Maybe I'll check out their 9800.
the quality of spelling and grammar on Slashdot of late has slipped from "surprisingly" to "shockingly" bad.
That was classic intercourse!
Is this using the ATI supplied, XFree86 drivers or the dri.sourceforge.net drivers?? I am ploping down some $$ this week for either a 8500LE or a 4200TI and I only run linux (Well, windows in vmware for the wife) and I do some sci-viz stuff so I need 3d..
THanks
Matt
http://www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_ati. html
You want the FireGL 8800 driver from that page.
That's using ATI's drivers from:
http://www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_a
I have an 8500LE that works great with those drivers.
Dinivin
So in otherwords, a "nymph". ... "-o"?
You'll have to pay 20% more for it: Pricewatch currently shows GeForce FX 5800 running for $326 and up, while you won't find the Radeon 9800 for less than $394. So either way you're basically just getting what you pay for.
Again, this proves the superiority of Direct3D over OpenGL and the 'schism' between ATI and NVIDIA. Programming for OpenGL is not compatible, unless you handle all render path for all targets (take time). Such things wouldn't happens if the Dawn demo was Direct3D.This also proves that ATI could write drivers which can handle all the Nvidia OpenGL proprietary extensions (not what they doing actually). They are supporting a couple of extensions , but for example GL_NV_occlusion_query for example, is supported on my Radeon 8500. But I like to see GL_NV_point_sprites for examples (actually you can't do point sprites on ATI (ie particles) under OpenGL, except in Direct3D).Theses students should contact ATI and give the source code of their modifications for the next ATI driver.That, would be really nice and legal. These extensions are approved by OSI anyway. Sadely, for 'policy' reasons, it won't be accepted by ATI (I've already tried that in fact).
----------------
I need a Sino-Logic 16. Sogo-7 data-gloves, a GPL stealth module...
I know I'm not the only person out there building a new computer in a few months for the launch of doom3.
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
The John had a .plan update before which pointed out that NVidia's card is actually cranking out more precision by default compared to ATI. That could explain why ATI runs faster by default. When he used an NVidia-specific rendering path (where the precision is more or less the same as ATI's), the NVidia card actually ran faster.
Is this somehow related to the discrepancies in this fairy demo?
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
On some other forum (here) they talk about renaming some file to get rid of her erm.. cloths/leaves.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
UT2003 is known to have a slow OpenGL implementation over the Direct3D one. Compare Direct3D vs OpenGL and you will see. See http://www.happypenguin.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t =223
"Nevertheless, it is clear that the OpenGL renderer is significantly slower than the Direct3D one--not that that's a big surprise. That's basically what Epic's been saying from the beginning"
I need a Sino-Logic 16. Sogo-7 data-gloves, a GPL stealth module...
Are you using XF4.3 glibc2.3 or lower.
Thanks for the advice...
I had the same problem with my Radeon 8500 when it first came out. Nothing from ATI, and the rotten open source drivers caused my machine to lock up solid more often than not.
My solution? Get a GeForce 4 Ti. I could care less if the drivers are "closed"...at least they work, and work well (which is more than I can say for any of the machine-locking "DRI" drivers).
XFree86 Version 4.3.0
glibc-2.3.1-17
Dinivin
Maybe those will work on my laptop? I've been having a hell of a time getting OpenGL enabled on this thing. It's got an ATi Radeon 9000 M, the xfree4.3 radeon driver works well, but glxgears returns 250fps...should be about 2000 for any decent 3D.
I see these are FireGL drivers, how do I determine which one I need to try? I know I need the xfree4.3 ones at least...I see only one for 4.3 but not sure if my card falls under this..
Fire GL X1
Fire GL Z1
Fire GL E1
Fire GL 8800
Fire GL 8700
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
I think he's cheating.
He uses a fragment program to do some extra processing, thereby optimizing the demo.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't NVidia do the same thing and speed up the demo?
Anyway, NVidia still is the one that looks at their customer (drivers...), which is more important than slightly better performace imho.
Cool, new toy next week :)
Thanks
Matt
If your laptop is supported (and I have no idea if it is), it'd be supported by the 8800/8700 drivers.
Dinivin
From what I understand, the FX5800 is a crap card. A review at tom's hardware, however, shows the FX5900 pretty much beats the crap out of anything ATI has right now. I'm sure this will change with the next iteration of hardware, but hey - it always does.
;-)
Either way, we should stop talking smack about nVidia when the best card on the market pretty much depends on when you're looking for it
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I simply don't use windows :)
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
If you have seen the full 20-minute video of their E3 demo then you'll know what I'm talking about. I'm already budgeting for a new top-end graphics card, CPU and motherboard. Also maybe another half-gig of memory. There are some awesome games on the horizon.
Take the red pill
I am terribly sorry to say that, but I find your sexist jokes highly offensive. You might consider being a little bit more intelligent next time. Thank you. What is this? Slashdot or a bunch of bored kids with to much time on their hands?
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Yeah, those rock solid Graphics APIs and fantastic drivers really show Windows who's boss.
NEWS FLASH! These companies are never going to release open source drivers. They have no interest in releasing the source code so a bunch of village idiots can hack the drivers and fuck their cards up.
Besides, the unified driver arch is their flagship. Why on earth would they release the source to that? There's no realistic business reason to do so.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
I may be new here, but it doesn't make my point any less valid.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
3D graphics are still very much a niche on the PC. This may change with Microsoft's plans to do something like Apple's "Quartz Extreme" in a future version of Windows, but at the moment there are still only a relative handful of games that even require a hardware transformation pipeline (available since 2000), and there are even fewer that do anything at all with programmable shaders (available since 2002). At the same time, the slide in the PC game market continues. A lot of people, including myself, expected it to turn around a bit by now, but no dice. What the PC does have is a couple of games that will be hig with hardcore gamers: Doom 3 and Half Life 2. In a lot of ways, nVidia and ATI are designing cards specifically for those games, and not the perceived 3D market in general.
In short, the race for the high-end video card market is increasingly meaningless, especially with the growing shift away from desktop PCs and the ridiculous power consumption and level of cooling required for high-end cards. If GeForce 2 class chipsets start shipping in an all-in-one, cool running, silent PC, then the real goal has been achieved. Gamers and CG people who want or need to blow $400 on a new video card + 10lb heat sink combo every few months can still do so. That's not a mass market industry any more, though.
The speed of Nvidia is *much* better with Nvidia in linux (x86). I have an Nvidia card in my x86 machine and I'm happy. I have an ati card in my PowerPC machine and I'm happy. Unfortunately, if I swapped the cards between the machines I would be very unhappy because the ATI card simply doesn't have the horsepower of the Nvidia card with the linux drivers.
And I'm wery happy with NVIDIA graphics...
For many years, ATI had problems with their drivers. I do not change my Nvidia choices on my Linux machines. (including home build servers). Because of the quality of Nvidia, For more than 5 years I haven't got any problem with Nvidia on GNU/Linux
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Give 'm transparent clothing... _THAT_ would make an impressive demo I would download immediately
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
The modding on the above post is wrong.. it should be "5,Funny"
If anybody wants to do something actually useful they can get rid of those frigging fig leaves!
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I do not think the NV40 will be out any time soon as they are marketting the NV35 as the card built for Doom III.
ATI on the other hand has the R400 coming down the this holiday season. I've been wowed by the R300/350 based cores and can't wait until laptops start getting Mobility 9600's. ATI could drop the ball of course, just like Nvidia did with the NV30, that would be an interesting race at that point. ATI would have to hope their R450 could beat out the unreleased NV40.
Either way, we can only benefit.
-- taking over the world, we are.
You misunderstand.. he meant that Slashdot *is* a bunch of bored kids with too much time on their hands :-)
Sorry I have to mention this. But everytime I ever asked a question relating to 3DFx to nvidia they would give this response so it's now etched in my skull.
"Nvidia never purchased 3DFx. Nvidia acquired the assets of 3DFx corp. as the result of the lawsuit filed on blah blah blah....."
Yeah, I know, ends up meaning the same thing. But had to mention it.
-B
http://www.googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q1=A TI&q2=Nvidia&B1=Make+a+fight%21&compare=1&langue=u s
Original site was /.'ed. Hoorah for good ole Pipex. :)
Why did you drop several hundred dollars without researching if it would work with what you wanted?
It's like a person with a Mac bitching that the new Game they just got doesn't work because they assumed it was Mac compatible.
-- taking over the world, we are.
dude, you be kidding. right?
/. mods.
linux gots some cool games like xbill.
windows don't even come close in gaming.
seriously though, the way the parent comment is moded is definitely a joke. shows the linux-wing conspiracy of
come on seriously, name me one commercial 3D game released that runs better on linux then on windows?
Oh, I see, thanks, now I understand. :-) Sorry!
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
...posting links to a sit with high-res pics of a hot virtual babe, and the server got slashdotted? I'm a-fucking-stounded. Didn't see that coming.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
My install of Mandrake 9.1,which comes with XFree4.3, works out of the box with a 9700 Pro. It says so on the Mandrake site, which is one of the main reasons I use a 9700 pro and Mandrake.
I think you need to poke around a bit more to find what you need.
I wouldn't say pitiful (...) You probably lose out somewhat for gaming, but for desktop use it's entirely acceptable.
:-) So any driver that gives a similar performance for a "real" (non-integrated) 3D chipset is indeed pitiful...
even my integrated Mini-ITX video chipset is "entirely acceptable" for desktop. And the whole motherboard is cheaper than one of those 3D cards.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
I agree.
I usually purchase cards that are roughly 2 model generations behind. When the GF4600 came out I started shopping for the 4200 I have currently. Bleeding edge is for bleeding edge people. For the majority of people purchasing cards for games and applications, the slightly 2nd rate card is more than sufficient.
Sure it does make a difference if you get the latest and greatest, but if you took careful notice of some games, you can see where developers expected certain resolutions to be common. Frames, buttons and borders are misaligned or difficult to use on some of the resolutions you can run smoothly on the brand new cards.
People whine all the time about cards not being powerful enough to run their games, then turn around and complain that games don't take advantage of the new cards features. Check the flip side of the coin before you start crying. There's a lag between development of hardware and development of software.
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
Seriously. Nobody's going to get rich from them and they're well, not sexy.
Bring back the teapots!
Once they get environment maps optimized to where they're doing reflection off curved surfaces, I guarantee that you'll be seeing a lot more of that Utah teapot.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Check out the hair on this NVIDIA shot
and compare with the hair in this shot off the ATI.
The zoom on the NV example isn't quite as close-up, but you can still see how the hair feathers away at the tips, while the hair on the ATI is all jaggy and uniform thickness right out to the tips. Like some kind of Raggedy Anne yarn hair.
So does the ATI not support alpha-to-coverage? Or did these guys making the wrapper just not translate it properly? The hair looks pretty bad without it.
I seem to remember when I saw the NV guys give the demo that they made a point of how expensive the hair was to render. Each hair is a separate GL_LINE_STRIP, there are thousands of them, and if you turn off the complicated blending and smoothing on each one of those little hairs, that could maybe add up to a large savings. I don't know, but I wonder if that would account for most of the speed-up they see running it on ATI.
Still a neat hack. It would really rock to have complete NV<->ATI compatibility dlls that would work for all apps and not just this demo.
While they may have made some slight improvement to one aspect of image quality by improving normalization, which I guess makes the lighting a little more accurate, I really doubt the improvement is all that noticeable. Maybe I could tell given a side-by-side comparison, but I doubt I would notice if only shown a version normalized one way or the other. On the other hand, that ugly hair is pretty obvious. To me that makes the NVIDIA sreen shots look better.
>I mean if you're going to have medieval fantasy characters in your demos, might as well go the whole way and have a proper Princess.
[Elyse Keaton] But what about the Proper Penguin? [/Elyse Keaton]
3DFX destroyed themselves.. Basically turned from a technologically innovative company to "16 bit is enough for everyone." IMO 3dFX shot itself in the foot with the voodoo3, and then in the head after management/marketing had the gall to insist they knew what the public wanted better than the public itself.
Poster#1"Dawn...does she have a sister?"
Poster#2" Yes she does, she's called Dusk and is your average gothic-esque-urban type. Check the new demos."
So you can have your fairies from Dawn to Dusk.
**Badum**
Thank you. Thank you, I'll be here all week.
UT(1999) runs faster and better under the NVidia Binary Driver and Linux than it does on the same hardware with Windows. I kid you not, it's true. Since I really don't play any other games on a serious level, I'm a very happy gamer. (I would say "happy camper" but j00 kn0w th4t t3h c4mp3rz r l4m3rz ^_^)
Anyway, compare this to ATI on Linux. UT (again, the original 1999 edition, GOTY version) will not run with hardware acceleration and the DRI drivers with a Rage128 32MB. However, boot the machine with Windows and it is perfectly fine. It won't do the kind of resolution and the kind of framerates I get on my Athlon with a Ti4200 128MB, but it's evolution, baby, as the song goes. The DRI drivers for Rage128 are very, very sad. They also lock up on occasion for no good reason.
This isn't FUD, it's reality. I have no vested interest in NVidia. I don't own any stock, much less NVidia stock. I'm not a zealot. I'm on the pragmatist side. Whatever works.
The NVidia binary drivers work so well under my chosen distro of Linux that I am going to yank this Rage128 card very soon and replace it with a GeForce 4MX 64MB. (lower power consumption and better bang/buck ratio than the rest of the NVidia line) Once I do that, I will be able to run UT as it should run...under full hardware acceleration.
The DRI driver guys have had enough time to make a solid driver for Rage128. I mean, my G3 Blue-and-white came stock with a Rage128 16MB PCI vid card, with ATI Cinema hardware accelerator daughter card. That was bought in 1999. It's 2003. Four years to come up with a decent open-source driver for Rage128, guys! Four years! You would think that they'd get it right by now. And ATI is not supporting such an old card with their binary drivers.
I used to really, really like ATI kit. It's still mega-solid under Windows 2000, and it's pretty much the only game in town for Macs. But in the x86/Linux world, NVidia still just works.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I am not sure if this is even applicable to this situation, but here goes. Stocks. When you buy stocks, a lot of times you get some pretty decent benefits on presenting your views to a company. The rules and details vary of course, but I am wondering-always reading about these driver issues, if perhaps the people who always drop the hundreds of dollars twice a year to get the latest and greatest video cards, if they were to all purchase a few shares of the stock in these companies, then use their proxy votes and influence at the shareholders meetings to get some of these policies changed? Usually even as low as one share is enough to at least allow you to attend the meetings. Imagine 1,000+ concerned geeks & gamers and graphics developers all attending and demanding a change in the drivers policy. It might not do anything, yet again it might show you are REALLY serious about it. A concerted effort with an organized coalition might result in even a takeover. Something interesting to think about, yes?
I have a friend of mine a long time ago,he inherited a wad of stocks, sold most of them to purchase his home, but retained one or a few of each JUST to be able to go to the stockholders meetings, as he was a community/political activist and wanted his views on corporate policies heard. he said it was fun, he got to get up and kvetch about stuff. Usually, any "outsiders" to a corporation, even customers, aren't listened to as much as real stockholders are.
Just a thought, like I said, no idea if these companies are even listed or anything.
Hey folks if you didn't remember, the reason people (smart people at least) like Nvidia better is because they make very good drivers, at least compared to ATI. ATI's cards may be faster on paper and demos, but in the real world where its cards would be used, for games and such, Nvidia pulls ahead because the games are better able to harness the power of their cards.
One major reason 3dfx died was their introduction of SLI to the consumer marketplace.
Prior to this, only Obsidian had been using SLI for their Voodoo Graphics based boards and arcade setups.
SLI unfortunately promised the world to consumers, and they got it. But it killed any profits for their upgrade cycle, because EVERYONE already could see what the upgrade cycle was and how well it performed. Voodoo 2 SLI was so much better than a single Voodoo 2 that most people considered it an upgrade, rather than an option at purchase.
Most people bought a single Voodoo 2 board, and added on the second 6 months to a year later at cut-rate prices. 3DFX never placed a premium or restriction on SLI, any regular board could do it, so people were more likely to wait for the prices to fall on regular boards.
Furthermore, consumers feel hurt when you take away a fancy doo-dad from them. Consumers were fairly irate when they heard that the Voodoo3 series would not feature an SLI upgrade path of any kind. They were even more pissed off to learn that only the Voodoo3 3000 outperformed a set of Voodoo 2 12MB boards in SLI.
SLI softened the market for the Voodoo3. If 3dfx had simply released a single-board Voodoo 2, it still would have been faster than anything else out there for 6 months, and would have reached parity with the TNT. Then, they could have simultaneously released the Voodoo 3 ( twice as fast as a single Voodoo 2 ), and offer a 'special' Voodoo 2 upgrade board for SLI ( priced fairly high, of course ).
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I was excited to try this out last night, and it runs beautifully, but after readon the comment about the hair (how its not shaded to kind of fade out), i also noticed that Sawn has no eyelashes, and aparently does on the nvidia cards. Having seen the demo on boh cards, i cant say technically why the ati does in fact seem to have a nicer overall image (is it the gamma, is it actually what rage 3d mentions?), but nonetheless, this is still a really, really cool hack. Now if we get the hairs back, can have an even match up~
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
I don't have an ATI card, so I haven't been paying attention to the driver support. How often does ATI release drivers that provide practical updates, or bug fixes? I've found that nVidia is not too bad. Any thoughts?
It's easy to outperform the NV30 when you aren't doing all the work. I'm not trying to detract from what the students at MIT did, because it's very cool, but the ATI version is clearly not rendering all pixels the same as the dawn demo on an FX. So the performance increase as stated must be taken with a grain of salt. In particular, it appears the aniosotropic shading in the hair is not being done wit the same level of quality.
To be fair and truly unbiased, the site should post identical images side-by-side from a run on the FX.
When is XFree going to make a proper setup wizard instead of this XF86config shit??
And include some drivers for non-obsolete harware in there!
Yeah that sucks, if I was buying for Linux games I'd have to go with Nvidia, always had no problems with their drivers for linux. They won't beat out ATI imho for windows games and such, but if linux is your thing always go with nvidia.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Interesting, everyone thinks the community would do a better job of linux drivers for nvidia....seems they should focus their attention elsewhere.
You cannot see the screenshots withou having F***G IE. So I really wouldnt give a shit, they cannot even make a decent web page
The opensource drivers in XFree86 work with my 9700 PRO, I assume the 9800 would work too. If not, there's always the vesa driver :-).
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I purchased a Radeon 9800 when it came out and am very pleased with its performance. It makes a huge difference to be able to run with 4xAnti-Aliasing and 8x Anisotropic Filtering. Seeing this article is good sign too. And yes, the demo looks great :-)
..not only because the graphics are amazing but because it's unnatural to girl be so skinny and still have so big breasts. This only puts more and more pressure on girls. Not good when bulimia and other eating disorders are very common. I hope that we would stop adoring skinny girls. I'm not saying that being fat is good, it serious risk for health.
But yeah, amazing!
think of it this way:
you are the head of IT for a small startup. you've just found your office, signed a lease, when you find out another company in the building is going out of business.
you go upstairs, find out there's an auction, and buy up most of their chairs, and a heckuva lot of their servers. you see a sexy looking woman at the door, she's their receptionist, soon to lose her job, you hire her as well.
two weeks later, someone starts knocking on your door, and calling, saying "you bought up company X after they went bankrupt! i want you to support the software i bought from them!".
remember, you just bought their servers, you didn't care about the code on them, or their customers, you have your own business to run.
see now? nvidia bought up their assets, and their r&d, maybe even hired some of their employees (always nice to hire smart gfx card builders if you are a gfx card company). they didn't buy up the customers, and they didn't want to have to.
I'm moderately ignorant on the subject, and NVidia always seemed to be the leader to me. All I ever hear about is how NVidia's still ahead. (Though the recent discovery that they rigged their scores for at least one benchmark certainly throws a monkey wrench into things)
On Slashdot, when it comes to video cards, I usually only read the headlines and editor blurbs. Those have usually been pro-NVidia.
I'd like to put forward that the majority of people are at least as ignorant as I am, and that whoever majority opinion favors, that company is probably the recipient of the most sales.
What's this Submit thingy do?
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030512/inde x.html
This shows that nVidia is back on top with thier new card. Yes the 5800 was flop, but this new one fixes most of the glaring problems with the 5800.
As far as image quality, this explains why it has poor quality and how the new driver comes with preferences that will fix that.
Most people don't take screen shots of a video game they are playing. Nvidia came preconfigured to display moving animations better instead of focusing on making still images better like ATI.
Here.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Too bad Nvidia does not have a solid gold pair enabling them to open source that API...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Most 3D developers nowadays are still writting simplistic, low-poly, engines that don't work any worse on single-pass, single-texture cards. A lot of computer games have very high sounding system requirements, but play fine on older hardware. Similarly, a lot of multiplatform titles are written for the PS2 (the weakest of all consoles), and shoddily ported the GCN, Xbox, and PC (Enter the Matrix).
I only know of a few developrs who are targetting hardware that does single-pass, multitexturing, proper dynamic lighting, pixel shading, and so on. At least most of the games that come out that aren't super-awesome looking have good gameplay, unlike most of the worst LCD offenders.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
It seems that all the driver discussion above has been related to games and linux. Let's not overlook the fact that for years, Nvidia's drivers have worked nearly flawlessly with high-end 3D programs like Alias|Wavefront Maya. Meanwhile, by all indications, ATI's hardware while powerful enough, has remained useless to anyone wanting to use a consumer card for Maya because the of the sketchy drivers. For this reason, my next video card upgrade will be to an Nvidia card.
or what about the fx5600?
for those of us not buying the best, whats the best price/preformance mix.
I want 2D games back.
I will stick with Nvdia as long as it continues it's official linux drivers. The hacked ati ones don't get nearly as much of the performance out of the hardware as the official nvidia ones do.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
that's actually kinda funny, d00d... :)
Dawn can "render" me, ALL NIGHT LONG!
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Mensa?
S-M-R-T
What are you wearing right now?...
you mean you were serious???
icanotboleeeeeedat!
you have GOT to be a very subtle Troll. Congrats to you....
http://members.shaw.ca/tylerv2/dawn/
He's supposed to be getting more all the time. Check back regularly!
You're welcome...
"nVidia chips will live or die by OEM sales and having decent support for Windows gamers. All else means nada. And as for Linux users being opinion leaders... ROTFL. Really, could you be any more full of yourself?"
Gee I'm replying to an AC. A couple things you forgot. First of all Nvidia's (and ATI's for that matter) chips aren't just used in gaming cards but in the (as large if not larger) professional OpenGL market. The trend there is people moving to Linux with open and closed apps on top. Since a lot of Linux users (the one's you're poo-pooing) are in the OpenGL market as well as the ever growing gaming market. I'd say the original poster is more correct than your narrow (just windows) view of the world.
" If you were smart, you would use Cg which is ATI and Nv compatible, but no luck, it's Win32 only. No Linux or MacOS X version. "
Really!?
Oh come on. This one is actually funny.
I know for a fact that nVidia was contacted by Microsoft because Microsoft *wanted to fix the drivers for free*. But still nVidia refused. They wanted the 3dfx platform dead. I think the nVidia company is unethical.
Right... but the HTML that points to said banner is loaded from the slashdotted server.
...and the top of the page loads first.
usually the ad is on the top of the page.
So there is some selectivity on what the server will send...