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.

Comments

nvidia destroyed 3dfx

[fluor2]

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!

Re:nvidia destroyed 3dfx

[zeno_2]

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.

Im pretty sure nvidia bought intellectual property from 3dfx, not a contract that said they had to update any drivers. They bought technology, not a promise to support cards that they didn't make. People bought Geforce cards because they were technically better, not because of a big conspiracy.

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.

I have a voodoo 5 card, that card is really only usable under win98. I dont hate nvidia for this, actually I dont *hate* anyone for it (hating someone for that is pretty silly think). Times change, technology changes, and I welcome all of it. Windows XP isn't that good anyway, I would't try to hard to get it to work =).

Re:nvidia destroyed 3dfx

[RatBastard]

3DFX was dead before NVidia bought them. It wasn't NVidia that killed 3DFX. 3DFX did that all by themselves. Between unreasonable product delays and abysmal financial mismanagement, they doomed themselves.

Re:ATI Drivers

[dinivin]

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

Re:Dawn

[Beetjebrak]

Yes she does, she's called Dusk and is your average gothic-esque-urban type. Check the new demos.

Dusk

[jawtheshark]

direct link

Re:OUCH

[Sentry21]

ATI has both closed-source drivers that really expose the abilities of the hardware, and open-source drivers which are quite reliable and not problematic at all (in my experience). Radeon support for DRI comes standard in the kernel too, as does framebuffer text console support.

So yeah, they do.

--Dan

Mirror

[woodhouse]

If anyone wants it, I've mirrored the OpenGL wrapper here (78k).

You can get the dawn demo from here

Re:How nice for them

[dinivin]

How about these.

You want the file glx1_linux_X4.3.zip.

Dinivin

Re:How nice for them

[gamorck]

I think that you should dig a little deeper before making posts like the one above. The fact is that you can get ATI binary drivers for xfree 4.3.0 today right now. Check out the following URL for a download (GLX1_LINUX_X4.3.ZIP):

http://www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_at i. html

If you need more information on the driver - check out (may be slow due to slashdotting taking place):

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=872 f1 8f2e7271a06ab6fca8005df0028&threadid=33685530

Now that having been said I hope you'll feel the need to retract your statement regarding the lack of an ATI provided binary driver for xfree 4.3 systems. I also hope that anybody who modded up your statement here gets tagged in meta moderation as there isn't even the slightest grain of truth in your statement.

J

Re:OUCH

[Fluffy the Cat]

The open source drivers do work with GLX. I'm using them quite happily now. They don't support the 9500 and up, but that's because the DRI team haven't had time rather than because ATI are witholding documentation. As far as graphics cards go, ATI support the Free Software community far better than Nvidia do.

Re:How nice for them

[noahm]

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.

It's your own damn fault, really. I recently bought an ATI AllInWonder 8500, which has kickass fully Open Source Linux drivers. I bought this card because some quick research revealed two things: 1. Its 3d performance is more than enough for my needs and 2. Quality drivers are available. Quality drivers will be available for your 9700 Pro, but maybe not for some time.

Personally, I'm not a bit upset with the way ATI handles their Linux users. I much prefer it to NVidia's binary only crap. While the full programming specs may not always be available for the latest and greatest ATI cards, they are available for stuff that's not far behind (http://dri.sourceforge.net/ indicates that Radeon cards up to the 9200 are supported.) Not only are the drivers available, but because the specs are there, the drivers can be ported to any platform, not just those that some commercial interest feels is worth its money. NVidia won't release PowerPC Linux drivers, so I'm stuck doing software OpenGL on my G4. If the G4 had a Radeon I would not have this issue.

ATI really should be commended for making the necessary info available to the DRI and XFree86 developers to write quality open source drivers.

noah

Re:How nice for them

[Cyno]

Idiocy would be to rush out and buy an ATI All in Wonder card after reading your post. The only features you might be able to get working are 2D and 3D acceleration, if you're lucky.

BTW, did you browse to the links you copied into your reply? There was never a mention of the 9800 series cards. So what makes you think ATI supports Linux with binary drivers? The fact that they at one time released a binary driver that's compatible with XFree86 4.3.x?

I bought like 5 ATI 7x00 cards and got maybe one of them to work. The rest are worthless POSs until XFree86 improves their drivers. I don't trust that ATI cares about this market and I will never buy one of their cards again.

Don't reply unless you can find a driver that enables the same features as the Win2k/XP drivers. If not then just accept that ATI doesn't support Linux yet.

I can't believe you got modded up. Stupid moderators.

Re:precisely

[Fluffy the Cat]

I should clarify. Games are playable using the open source drivers. My Radeon 9000 (which is a cheap, low end card) gives me far, far better framerates with UT than the Voodoo 3 it replaced did. Do you get as many FPS as you do with the binary drivers? No. Do you get a high enough number of FPS to play 3D games at reasonable detail levels? Yes. Do you get the ability to run 3D applications without crippling the system? Yes. Can you do 3D visualisation on the desktop? Yes.

So, it's entirely acceptable for desktop use even if you're using 3D applications on the desktop. Note that "entirely acceptable" only defines the base level of performance. If your primary goal is gaming, then the binary drivers are probably a better bet - if not, then the open ones are fine.

Re:John Carmack explanation

[baxissimo]

I don't think you have it quite right there. ATI always uses 24-bit floating point math internally per component, while NVIDIA uses either 16 or 32-bit floating point, depending on the size of the operands. So ATI isn't really using "full floating point" all the time, it's more like "3/4 full floating point" all the time, whereas NVIDIA uses the precision you ask for which is either "half floating point" or "full floating point".

Here's a quote from a review on xbitlabs

[4]: NVIDIA GeForce FX supports two floating-point data formats: 16-bit per component and 32-bit per component. GeForce FX performs 32-bit floating-point calculations twice as slow as 16-bit ones: its 16-bit ALUs have to get in pairs for 32-bit calculations.

ATI RADEON 9700 PRO supports both 16-bit and 32-bit data precision, but performs all floating-point calculations with 24-bit precision. The result can be then translated into the 16-bit format, or expanded to the 32-bit one.

Re:idea

[Chris Burke]

Yeah, I remember the first time I installed a 3dfx card and played GL Quake. "Holy shit" I think were my first words, followed soon after by "Holy fucking shit". I'm fairly confident that nothing will ever recreate that experience. Going from 320x200, 256 color with speed-optimized (accuracy de-optimized) software rendering at 15-20 fps to 640x480, 16-bit color with all the goodness of OpenGL (transparency, reflections, good dynamic lighting) at 30+ fps was a revelation. It's probably going to be incremental improvements from here on out, and no mere increment will ever have the sheer impact that the first 3 seconds of glQuake had.

That said, I'm still pretty impressed with the graphical improvement since then. Compare glQuake to... Well, anything very recent that uses pixel and vertex shaders. Quake3 became a lot prettier (and faster) when I switched from a Voodoo3 to a GeForce 3. Newer games look even better (rain and water effects with pixel shaders look great). Add more trangle-processing power for more detail and the ability to have dynamic terrain (like waves in water)... I'd say we're progressing nicely.

No, there's no reason to buy a GF4 if you have a GF3. Maybe a GF5 or whatever ATI has at the time. Skip a couple generations so that your new card really -does- have a noticeable advantage over the old, and you'll be much happier.