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GeForce FX Architecture Explained
Brian writes "3DCenter has published one of the most in-depth articles on the internals of a 3D graphics chip (the NV30/GeForce FX in this case) that I've ever seen. The author has based his results on a patent NVIDIA filed last year and he has turned up some very interesting relevations regarding the GeForce FX that go a long way to explain why its performance is so different from the recent Radeons. Apparently, optimal shader code for the NV30 is substantially different from what is generated by the standard DX9 HLSL compiler. A new compiler may help to some extent, but other performance issues will likely need to be resolved by NVIDIA in the driver itself."
haha yea I guess so. It'll be awhile before it's considered "okay" for any sort of media to say that an nVidia board has sucky performance.
It keeps getting excused away by "archetecture changes" or "early driver issues" or "the full moon."
Go go ATI! You brought competition back to the consumer 3D board scene, thank you!
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Know that there are many ways to do one thing and there are pros and contras in each of them. In this case, it seems that NVidia's is not chosen and the way DX9 handles things undermines NVidia's method. It's not necessarily because NVidia sucks. Remember that there are politic struggles among Microsoft, NVidia, and ATI during the inception of DX9? I think NVidia now falls victim of it.
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Error 500: Internal sig error
I agree, this sounds like a big ati vs nvidia brewhaha with microsoft choosing who they want by getting both of them to get the crap 'in silicon' and then choosing which standard to use.
It sounds like a monopolist helping out whoever they want to and then making the 'other guys' get screwed. Suck.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
The fun thing about HL-2 is it'll likely be the first game where you WON'T have to install a patch or updated Catalyst driver to actually play it with your ATI. WOOT. Go driver development...
By default "whois" won't show registration for ANY .org's--remember, .org has a different registrar now, and whois uses "whois.internic.net" by default, which only serves .com and .net. For .org, you need to do a query at whois.pir.org:
whois 3dcenter.org@whois.pir.org
Maybe I'm just blind, but I can't tell the difference between my Matrox G400 Max, ELSA Gladiac 920 (nVidia GF3), and ATI 9700 Pro. IBM P260 Monitor.
Matrox may have had an advantage a while back, but it's nothing conclusive now days.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Sounds like you forgot to play games. I know at least Never Winter Nights is still not working well, as well as a few other games as of late.
http://www.rage3d.com
-]Phreak Out[-
Well, it makes sense, when you consider the following facts:
... and I'm sure there are some other things in there too, such as NVidia buying out 3dlabs, which made voodoo cards, which resulted in the adoption of Glide - the 3d structure that caused DX to not be adopted during the early stages.
- NVidia makes drivers for linux, and they don't suck
- NVidia works hard on making sure their cards support OpenGL, which is the only means through which linux can really have 3D, AND it's the only 3D alternative to DirectX
- John Carmack (and the rest of id) develops some of the best games in the industry, and he develops using OGL, as well as for multiple platforms
- ATI has traditionally been a very compliant OEM-type company that loves to bundle it's stuff with anything it can to make a buck.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Competition here being determined by choosing features to mesh best with whatever Microsoft specifies?
Yeah, right.
(Puts on tinfoil hat) My theory is that MS was annoyed with NVidia after the negotiations over XBox v2 broke down... so they communicated a little better with ATI than NVidia over DX9.
deus does not exist but if he does
Do you at all realise you were very lucky?
The 9700 was meant to have an R300 with 8 PS pipelines. (The Pro with faster clockspeeds, both with 256-bit memory bus.)
The 9500 was meant to have a "half-broken R300", with just 4 functional PS pipelines. (The PS pipes take up more silicon area than anything else in there, so a fabbing flaw is statistically likely to appear there -- ATI anticipated that.) (The Pro with faster clockspeeds and 256-bit memory bus, the non-Pro with a 128-bit memory bus.)
They didn't get enough half-broken chips from the fab to satisfy the 9500 demand, so some times they had to insert fully functional R300 chips in the 9500 cards. Exactly those are the ones that can be software converted to 9700 cards. The other 9500 cards just can't be software/hardware converted.
I'd say you were more lucky than 1337 there... supposing you didn't start with the non-Pro 9500, in which case the poor memory bus cripples your card regardless.
Of course, I'm also slightly jealous.