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

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

[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: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: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.

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.