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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 might be true, if they weren't venturing into any other computer market other than graphics. Considering they got one of the hottest chipsets (nForce 2) for AMD CPUs right now, I don't see them going completely downhill in all their computer markets.
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Mike
I'm going to kick the next person that I see with their karma rating in their sig.
For years, NVIDIA was the number one in 3D graphics on the PC. And yet, they did not release any open source drivers as it is considered top secret business confidentiality.
Why do you think ATI will do otherwise?
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;
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.
Looks to me like nVidia provided the test material.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
"I feel sorry for nVidia... it does look like they're going the way of 3dfx..."
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!
Just coz BMW manage to build a car that's better than Ford's competing product doesn't mean Ford goes out of business the next fucking day, does it? nVidia's current range of gfx cards are highly competitive and capable - try and be a TINY BIT reasonable.
That was classic intercourse!
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.
For years, NVIDIA was the number one in 3D graphics on the PC. And yet, they did not release any open source drivers as it is considered top secret business confidentiality.
Why do you think ATI will do otherwise?
Probably because if they don't someone else will come along (maybe even NVIDIA) with open source drivers and kill them off.
Summation 2
That's usually cause the banner ad is pulled from another website.
princesses don't have transparent wings to show off transparancy etc.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
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.
Why, in order to satisfy a few thousand users who demand them?
Get real. I'm as big of a linux fan as the next guy, but money talks. There simply isn't enough of it in the hands of users to cast a meaningful vote. That's the real reason it hasn't been done yet. There simply isn't enough cash coming in from linux users to justify it, regardless of whether or not there's licensed IP or top-secret code in there.
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
One feather that nVidia has added to their hat in the last two years is their beginnings of diversification. No longer are the completely reliant on the consumer graphics market, what with their entry into the motherboard market. They have produced graphics chips for the XBox and have made a healthy entry into the mobile graphics chip realm. A couple (few?) years back they received a contract from the US Gov to produce graphics chips for displays in military jets (if memory serves).
They have much more going for them then being purely a gaming chip company. Given time I suspect that we'll see nVidia and ATi oscilate the leadership position. nVidia, while in the valey, has other businesses to fall back on.
While not always the case, companies with a backup plan tend to be more willing to take risks simply because if the risk doesn't pan out it doesn't spell disaster for the company. I think that we'll see more inovation coming from nVidia yet.
something clever
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.
There are open source 3D drivers for the Radeon. There are none for the Nvideas. Why do you think this is?
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.
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
Also, adding to the reply of the parent post, OpenGL has the huge advantage of being portable. I have talked to one or two games developers who have told me that porting the OpenGL portion of their game to another platform is fairly straighforward. The remaining 5% of the work is usually politics and platform specific configurations and this is what is the hardest. BTW if my two games programmers' opinion is not representitive of the rest of the games developers, please let me know.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Oh, I see....
Now please explain to me the moral difference between nVidia's (or any other company's) proprietary OpenGL extensions and Microsoft's proprietary HTML extensions (both OpenGL and HTML "being an open standard").
Except that the HTML extensions are made by MS and nVidia's extensions are not made by MS.
Have you seen how fast DirectX (or in this case Direct3D) developed compared to OpenGL? Compared to OpenGL, Direct3D is a new technology. How much has the OpenGL 1.x standard evolved, if you exclude the proprietary extensions? Be honest: Direct3D has overtaken OpenGL. OpenGL 2.0 was designed with Direct3D 9 in mind. The OpenGL comitee tried to catch up. DirectX 9 is established now. It's not yet widely used, but established. OpenGL 2.0 is AFAIK not even final yet (I could be wrong).
OpenGL develops too slowly. If DirextX became an open standard, I'm quite sure that the development speed will almost stop - just like OpenGL.
I'm not a fan of MS, but at least MS pushes the 3D development with an unified API on one platform. IMHO that's better that billions of incompatible proprietary OpenGL extensions.