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NVidia Fight Back Against ATI At Editor's Day
Thanks to FiringSquad for their feature covering NVidia's recent editor's day, discussed in context of the graphics card company's continuing rivalry with ATI. The writer suggests: "It's become rather trendy to bash NVIDIA lately. People like winners and people love underdogs. ATI is both right now - they've climbed their way out of the abyss and even disregarding the NV30 production delays, their timetable was catching up to NVIDIA's." But, after an interview with Tim Little at Ion Storm Austin and technical questions answered by Tim Sweeney of Epic, the writer concludes: "What the benchmarks have proven is that NVIDIA's hardware is as fast as ATI's, depending on the game. Yes, it does take more work - NVIDIA admitted as much. The NV3X platform isn't as easy to program fast as R300 and R350 are."
argh, original article /.'ed.
NVidia got some very unexpected competition while sitting on their laurels. I think that this was a real wake-up call and lesson for them, not in the realm of technology so much, but in the realm of promotion and advertising. Their FUD actually got turned on them, and hard, when drivers were shown to be tuned for benchmarks and such.
However, once they accepted ATI as a real contender, it seems they started working on their technology again, instead of whiny press releases and bad pr.
And though consumers took a hit with hastily-released drivers and hardware, it looks like things are turning around for the good of us.
Does anyone really have a justification for more than 50fps?
People try to justify it, saying they can notice a difference, but personally I think that's a load of bull.
There is a reason for those hyper-powerful graphics cards, though. Go play a game like Final Fantasy XI at full detail in 1600x1200 with full antialiasing and ansiotropic filtering - simply breathtaking. You need one HELL of a lot of hardware to back something like that up, though.
With the push on modern hardware, I'm surprised there aren't more stereoscopic LCD shutter glasses in use. You'd need to do a consistent 150fps to give each eye 75fps.
But, as someone else has already mentioned, sometimes it's the pure scope 1600x1200x(full features) and not just the framerate.
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*beware the cute-bunny virus
Does anyone really have a justification for more than 50fps?
50 is sort of a silly number - most people have their refresh at 60 or 72. To a seasoned FPS gamer, 60 is distinguishable from 50. Whether 130 is distinguishable from 120 is another question - the answer to which is definitely no, even if you had a monitor capable of such silliness.
However, these numbers are really not what we're worried about a lot of the time - we're worried about absolute minimum framerate. Often a game will be chugging along at 51, then hit 11 right when the player wants fine control. It sometimes takes a rather large average framerate score to yield a game that plays smoothly at all times.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
The latest catalyst drivers, 3.8, break 2d rendering in Empires: Dawn of the Modern World. This wouldn't be such a big deal if the 3.8 didn't ship after we went gold but before we hit shelves. Users tell us it has happened in other games, but I can't confirm this.
The ______ Agenda
The article also made a few other things fairly clear, though:
1) nVidia has fewer hard-wired limitations on the complexity of the code being run and the accuracy of the calculations being made, though each could come at the cost of speed if used heavily
2) nVidia might be easier to develop for under OpenGL because you have better access to the hardware, whereas DirectX9 in certain areas tends to more closely follow the ATI hardware (which was available to developers and MS before DirectX9 was complete)
3) As the two companies progress, the performance difference will diminish as nVidia's drivers are more heavily optimized and both manufacturers release new hardware which, on nVidia's side, means more speed to throw at the existing feature set, and on ATI's side improvements in the feature set to better leverage improvements in the speed of the hardware.
In other words, this is the closest things have ever been in this particular race, and neither company is out of it yet. The winner won't be determined by the current crop of games or hardware, but instead by what developers (and the 2 manufacturers) do after UT2004, Doom 3, and Half-Life 2.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
To be fair, it was their turn I guess. Next year it will be NVidia's turn no doubt. The person that busted them this time was Tom at Tom's Hardware Guide.
The accusations leveled against ATi at NVIDIA's Editors' Day two days ago thus become that much more serious. Epic's Mark Rein confirmed that in some cases, high-res detail textures were not displayed in some areas by ATis drivers and that standard, lower-res textures are used instead. Randy Pitchford of the Halo development team also mentioned that there were optimizations present in ATi's drivers which are detrimental to Halo's image quality.
The relevant link is here.
Now that NVidia seems to be the image quality kings and owning the mid-range card market again with the FX5700 Ultra, It makes me wonder how the ATI performance would measure up if they didn't cheat.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
As I recall, visual research indicates that humans can successfully discern fluid motion from frame based motion up until about 400fps. Of course, no one has a monitor that goes up that high, but still, the point stands.
I did try to find a cite, the closest I could find was this page which notes that framerates of 220fps have been proven distinguishable.
An excerpt from ATI's Response to recent allegations of benchmark cheating
AquaMark3: We are currently investigating our rendering in AquaMark3. We have identified that we are rendering an image that is slightly different than the reference rasterizer, but at this point in time we are unable to identify why that is. We believe that this does not have any impact on our performance. Our investigation will continue to identify the cause and resolve it as soon as possible. One point to note is that we render the same image using our latest driver (CATALYST 3.8) as we do with a driver that pre-dates the release of Aquamark3 by almost six months (CATALYST 3.2). Also, in all of our dealings with the developer of Aquamark3, at no point have they advised us that they are unsatisfied with the images that we are rendering. We do not have any application specific optimizations in our driver and we are not cheating in this application.
As many are aware of, Tomshardware is the "Weekly World News" of the computer world. The only consistent factor in their reporting is the misleading nature of their articles. Furthermore, describing any Geforce FX as an "image quality king" is an outright lie, as image quality is noticeably worse than a Radeon even on the games that ATI supposedly "cheats" at. Go look at some screenshots for yourself if you doubt this. nVidia has still not stopped cheating, as their cards still will not enable Trilinear filtering, even when requested by the game and enabled in the drivers. nVidia's recent driver upgrades that purported to increase Pixel Shader 2.0 performance merely drastically reduced image quality, still failing to achieve performance parity with ATI products.
Nice try, though.
nVidia chose not to go to the initial meetings on DX9...That was their loss. DX9 has Y amount of features...designing in any more are just wasted space because the chip is out-of-date in 9 months anyway! In a sense they got bit by their own gringing machine. ATI was catching up, and nVidia management lost the chance to keep pushing the specs...ATI turned down the heat just enough for them to come out on top RIGHT NOW...
But this is just 1 round...Aside from what nVidia did to 3DFX, ATI is just gaining some turf back. What NOBODY is saying is that it's not R350 & GFX duking it out anyway...it's the built in stuff [compaq, HP, etc] the el-cheapos that are still buying TNT & 128 [should be banned I say!] where both companies sell their units. The stuff we play with is just icing on the procuct lines. This is just one round in the long-term match...but it serves to keep nVidia honest...and that's a good thing!