120+ GeForce FX Reviews Collected

Peter writes "We just finished at 8Dimensional our list of GeForce FX reviews. It tries to show all reviews of these video cards currently online, 120+ are listed at the moment." Hmmm, time to upgrade from an Xpert@Play98 ...

Comments

To bad they will all have to be redone

[Megor1]

3dmark released a patch today that avoids nvidias cheating in their benchmark, so all the reviews that used 3dmark need to rerun their tests.

Re:To bad they will all have to be redone

[Goalie_Ca]

It's true a lot of reviewers have relied on futuremarks benchmark. For me and others it means nothing because its "too" synthetic and uncharacteristic of current games. But for others this means everything but then again, they've probably already know that. It's not everyday your "favorite" gpu drops 24% :P

It's worth to note that ATI also "cheated" but they still correctly rendered the scene. All they had done was re-order the shader instructions so they were optimized for their architecture. It only boost their performance by 3% IIRC.

Re:To bad they will all have to be redone

[Performer Guy]

ATI did not cheat (although they have cheated in the past), they reordered the instructions in a shader but it remained mathematically and functionally identical. This is what optimizing compilers do all the time. It's called optimization, not cheating, and it is legitimate, they looked at the shader INSTRUCTIONS to see if they were suitable for this optimization. It made about a 2% difference, and IMHO ATI should leave this optimization in and broaden the scope if possible.

If it was a really narrow path optimization then it's borderline, but far different from the wholesale cheating of NVIDIA who: rewrote shaders with completely different results, didn't clear the screen at certain points and added hidden clip planes to eliminate pixel fill. All very underhanded and why you would make excuses for this I don't know. Sure it's a synthetic benchmark, but if it don't matter then don't cheat.

Re:To bad they will all have to be redone

[Distinguished Hero]

If it wasn't cheating, and they were only looking at shader instructions, then why did the results change when they renamed the file from Quake3.exe to quack3.exe? It is also important to note that the Quake3.exe results were of less quality than the quack3.exe results.

Um... he was talking about 3dMark, not the Quack issue (btw, there are no shaders in Quake3), which although people insist on constantly bringing, up was most likely not a cheat; ATi not only fixed the 5 problematic textures, but also increased the performance past the level of performance attained using the "cheat," in the next driver release.

Re:To bad they will all have to be redone

[OzRoy]

The thing that doesn't make sense to me is from the couple of reviews I have read the new NVidia card outperforms the Radeon card on almost all the game tests. Not by much, but still a little bit.

And yet when it comes to the 3D Mark test ATI Creams NVidia when that new patch is applied.

To me that makes the 3DMark benchmark Very sus. The two possibilities I can see are NVidia's original complaints against the benchmark are justified, and yes they cheated to boost the score. OR 3DMark are bitter at NVidia and decided to release a patch that deliberatly made NVidia cards perform badly.

Now I doubt it's the second, and maybe there is another possibility that I missed, but in the end I think that the new NV card does perform Extremely well in real world applications no matter what 3DMark says.

Re:To bad they will all have to be redone

[Kaldaien]

Actually... This is easily explainable.

John Carmack released a document YEARS ago explaining to hardware vendors how to optimize their OpenGL implementation for the Quake 3 engine. Such things as Vertex Array Client States (i.e. GL_VERTEX_ARRAY) never changing (always enabled), specifics for multi-texturing, vertex structure size, etc...

Given that anyone who cares to search Google for a minute or two can pull up this document (The original doc is gone :-\ - Still fun reading material though :)), I'd hardly call using it cheating. The performance DOES relate to real-world situations, as the majority of people playing Q3 Engine games don't change the name of their executable :)

What would be nice, however, is if developers had some access to this driver layer. I'm not saying anything as major as Q3's optimizations, but if a developer could tell the drivers that it won't be making any state changes to a particular attrib stack subset (i.e. GL_ALL_ATTRIB_BITS wouldn't actually push the entire stack), it'd increase render-time without any fancy 1st party vendor magic.

Also, using languages such as Cg, shader optimization is possible at run-time. I've never used it myself, I'm biased to hardware specific ASM at the moment.

And they all prove...

[da3dAlus]

That the GeForce FX sounds like a leaf blower...

You know, slashdot itself would be more useful

[The Terrorists]

to us if it contained such review compendia in itself, rather than making me go to 100 different sites to see them. It'd also be a way to counter the various technology zealotries that arise here. I'm willing to see these ads if the value of this site goes up commensurately.

is it really an upgrade?

[User 956]

Hmmm, time to upgrade from an Xpert@Play98

Hmmm.. I don't know if a GeforceFX is actually an *upgrade* from the Xpert@play98. What benchmark are you using?

Re:is it really an upgrade?

[Evil-G]

What benchmark are you using?

The "decibels produced by the video card" benchmark.

uhhh

[Tweakmeister]

"We just finished at 8Dimensional our list of GeForce FX reviews." ...and? now what?

While the idea of a site that shows all the reviews in one place is noble...unless you have huge amounts on content it's easier to search google for the reviews. The good ones usually end up being on top as well.

[snicker]

[A_Non_Moose]

/obligatory sniping

quote: "...120+ are listed at the moment".

So, production quotas went better than expected, huh? /end sniping

I have to admit, I knew the horse-power game was one that Nvidia was going to trip over eventually when the Radeons were *really* pushing the Z-axis occlusion.

Face it, Nvidia became top dog by pure horse-power, and to some extent, deeper color depths and kick ass drivers.

ATI finally got their hardware on track not by being able to "outshow" Nvidia's muscle, but by outclassing them by being smarter with the bandwidth and 'getting a clue' with drivers.

(witness the Dawn demo on a 9800 running *faster* than on the FX series.)

Speaking of the Dawn demo, does anyone else remember that this was to showcase the power of the FX, yet the 5200 is a *SLIDESHOW*?

Final thought: Did they use 3Dmark in all the benchmarks? (/low blow, sorry)

.

Re:[snicker]

[Distinguished Hero]

I have to admit, I knew the horse-power game was one that Nvidia was going to trip over eventually when the Radeons were *really* pushing the Z-axis occlusion.

That is faulty logic; just because ATi was using Z-axis occlusion and ATi beat nVidia (which is also using z-occlusion nowadays) does not mean that that is why they beat nVidia. The Kyro II used tile based deferred rendering which was far superior to the z-occlusion ATi and nVidia were and are still doing, and look where PowerVR is today.

ATI finally got their hardware on track not by being able to "outshow" Nvidia's muscle, but by outclassing them by being smarter with the bandwidth and 'getting a clue' with drivers.

If being "smarter with the bandwidth" was all that was required, we'd all be using Kyro IIs. Making a successful GPU is not so black and white...

time?

[buddha42]

Hmmm, time to upgrade from an Xpert@Play98 ...

Nope. The most stressful video application most users do is DVD playback, and even that is loooooong past the point where hardware-assistance is needed.

The video card market has gotten absolutly rediculous in the last 2 years. Its strange, when Intel and AMD fight it out, prices plummet. While nVidia and ATI have been fighting it out prices have skyrocketed. Sure, so have features, but they're so random and game or api dependant that most people don't even know how to turn them on in different games or in the drivers advanced settings.

Up until UT2K3 it was completely absurd, because anything with DDR could play any game just fine. Now with the new crop its even worse because modern cards still can't play the very-new and upcoming games well. So buying a high-end card now is overkill for older games, and underpowered for upcoming games.

Re:time?

[Pulzar]

Try Ut2003, new Wolf demo, Splinter Cell.. Well, any relatively new FPS game, in any resolution over 1024x768, with any kind of image-improving feature (AA, AF).

Do you honestly believe that a million people bought R9700 in the first few months after it came out just to get "extra 20fps", or to win a "pissing contest" (another slashdot favourite)?

Re:time?

[BrookHarty]

Actually, I had a GF3ti500, and U2K3 and BF1942 really started to drag on the FPS at 1024x768+ Res. And then if I turned on AA/AF it dropped to sub 20's. Time to upgrade.
Picked up a ATI 9700Pro, and it has been about 9 months of great use for about another year before I need to upgrade.

BTW, to see if your system is worth an upgrade, check out future marks online browser, you can search for a CPU near yours and then check to see if a faster video card will improve your FPS. Good reference.

Re:time?

[Jeremy Erwin]

IIRC, the Radeon 7000 doesn't support shaders and the GeForce4MX only supports vertex shaders to a limited extent. Neither card supports pixel shaders. Games that take advantage of these (admittedly esoteric) features won't look as nice, or will run more slowly on these cards.

The GeForceFX and Radeon 9700 support the latest incarnations of DirectX 9, and therefore appeal to rich Windoze gamers.

BTW, If you want an example of why the Radeon 7000 and GeForce4MX are considered obsolete by some, check out this table of results from Tom's Hardware.

Personally, I still use a Rage128 chipset (I have an iBook). T&L would be nice for Data Explorer, though.

Re:time?

[evilviper]

While nVidia and ATI have been fighting it out prices have skyrocketed.

Just a while ago, I was looking for an Nvidia card with TV-out (nothing else is even likely to work under Linux/FreeBSD). Searched pricewatch and found one for $20... Do you really need a videocard to be creaper?

There is PLENTY of blame to go around for videocard prices:

Stores try to only stock the most expensive items, because that means higher margins. You don't walk into Best Buy/Circuit City and see SIS videocards, because they make them very inexpensive, which means less profit for the stores.

Game developers almost seem like they are getting funding from ATI/Nvidia... It seems that they needlessly require incredibly high-end videocards. Come on, do you really need 5 billion Frames Per Second to play a first-person shooter? They also seem to intentionally deny gamers the ability to operate at lower quiality modes, as if they want to force people to upgrade their systems... Which seems counter productive to me. No wonder consoles kill PCs when it comes to gaming.

ATI and Nvidia can get away with raising prices because everyone along the lines (except consumers) wants the prices as high as possible, and consumers have just gotten used to bending over. If major stores stocked SIS videocards, equivalent to their ATI/Nvidia counterparts, prices would drop dramatically. If videogame makers stopped forcing number-crunching monsters upon the public, most people wouldn't need a faster videocard, and would couldn't tell the difference between their $10 videocard, and a top-of-the-line card.

120 reviews...

[Capt'n Hector]

Are you guys telling me that every single person with a geforce fx wrote an online review?

120+ reviews?

[earthforce_1]

Nice piece of research, but I don't think I have time to read 120 reviews on anything, even the next vehicle I plan to buy. Can they just put up an executive summary?

120 reviews in one place...

[nickgrieve]

But why... give it a month and they will be out of date... and for fucks sake... hardware is _cheap_ just but the thing and be done with it.

Xpert@Play98

[tunabomber]

I'm using an Xpert@Play98 and I love it. Yeah, it doesn't support OpenGL very well, but look how fast it can display B's in a /. post:

BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB BB BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB

Wow, that's some card!

Fastest card in existance?

[rmdyer]

Everyone knit picks about a few percentage points here and there when comparing Nvidia and ATI cards. But, for people with money to spend, there are more expensive CAD Pro level cards out there. I am wondering, what the fastest card you can purchase is for the PC AGP bus? Anybody know? And, how much faster are they than the FX or Radeon?

Another annoying thing... Looks like Nvidia and ATI are now price tiering cards. Up until recently, the most you would pay retail for the best consumer level card was around $400. Now it looks like Nvidia and ATI want to push us into the $500 card level. What is next year card $600?

Re:Fastest card in existance?

[paradesign]

try at 3d labs theyre wild cat series is amazing for high end apps that take advantage of it. i have many friends that use fire gls and quadros, and i hear that they are not the best gaming cards, but they destroy gaming cards where they need to, in DCC apps and other specialized apps. features like hardware overlay planes and line anti aliasing arent needed by gamers, but developers would surely cry without them.

i believe there are some sites that use gaming benchmarks to review these cards, try highend3d.com, they usually are a good place to start looking into it. if not, google is your friend.

Re:Fastest card in existance?

[murgee]

If memory serves, the difference is the Quadros and FireGL (etc.) cards are better for CAD/CAM because they're more exact, whereas your Radeon and GeForce series chips are engineered to be fast. You don't care too much if a wall in QuakeIII is misrendered for a second, but it'd be a big problem if you were rendering something like an office building or such. There was an article on Slashdot semi-recently that covered the differences, in fact. Gist is, you might be able to render things fine on a GeForceFX , but if you're doing it for your livelihood, then it's a Nice Thing to know that the rendered result is accurate, and that's what the workstation cards try to provide.

This is news?

[Xtro]

Who cares if someone found 120 reviews to link to, how is this helpful to anyone? Will anyone now go and read all 120? Go use Google, you'll get reviews of ANYTHING, and the best ones will probably rise to the top.

Now if they had really 'collected' them they could have perhaps summarised all the conclusions into one short conclusion to give an overall 'world' view or something.

This page could have been written by a dumb search robot just as easily as a human, where's the human value in it! Where's the humanity !?!?!? This is how the Matrix started you know.