New 3D Graphics Card Features in 2006

Ant writes "This Tom's Hardware article says that in the latest generation of graphics cards, PixelShader has become mainstream. Version 3 features 3D effects like HDR rendering for bright light sources, and parallax mapping for even more vivid features in walls and stones. The brand-new ATI Radeon X1000 series and the NVIDIA GeForce 6 and 7 master these improved graphics features. It looks at today's newest computer games (e.g., F.E.A.R.) and compare the 3D effects."

Comments

Awesome!

[matr0x_x]

The complexity of the parallax mapping in the X1000 is simply mind blowing - thumbs up to the engineers who designed it!

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

The X1x00 series is a joke. Nvidia has supported shader model 3 for over 2 years, then ATI finally decides to "support" it, but even now their x1800 does not fully support Shader model 3.0. I am sick of having to program around ATI's limitations: Lack of certain depth texture format support for shadows and textures not accessible in vertex shaders to name a couple.

ATI has fallen way behind and now it's simply lying to try to get back in the game. "Shader model 3.0 the way it's meant to be," that couldn't be further from the truth.

h.264 accelleration in geforce 6, 7 gpus

[enrico_suave]

To me the media features in the silicon is what's getting cooler and cooler.

The fact that they added h.264 accelleration support to both the 6xxx AND 7 series is pretty cool, imho. Not leaving the previous generation card owners behind.

e.

Re:h.264 accelleration in geforce 6, 7 gpus

[Breakfast Pants]

To me the coolest stuff that is becoming possible is using 3d accel for 2d. As soon as we can generate and composite 2d vector graphics on the chip quickly and in a standard way we will see things such as resolution independent desktops, etc. come full force.

Re:h.264 accelleration in geforce 6, 7 gpus

[ergo98]

To me the coolest stuff that is becoming possible is using 3d accel for 2d. As soon as we can generate and composite 2d vector graphics on the chip quickly and in a standard way we will see things such as resolution independent desktops, etc. come full force.

? Graphics cards featured 2D hardware acceleration for things like bezier curves, vector fonts, lines, fills, gradients, etc, a long long time ago. I still remember getting my first Speedstar 24x, which heralded a new generation of 2D graphics.

Re:h.264 accelleration in geforce 6, 7 gpus

[NMerriam]

Oh wow, the Speedstar. Nostalgia overload!

Re:h.264 accelleration in geforce 6, 7 gpus

[fozzy1015]

My first accelerated video card was the Diamond Speedstar 24x as well. It featured a Western Digital chip. Included a fast bit-block(blitter) but wasn't as fast at vectors or line drawing as S3's 911. I'd say the 911 was the first mainstream accelerator for PCs. What kept me and others away from it was that it required expensive VRAM and the bus transfers when the card was in standard VGA modes were incredibly slow so some DOS games would run like a dog even with a fast processor.

Re:h.264 accelleration in geforce 6, 7 gpus

[Breakfast Pants]

Its a shame such capabilities (which today are extreme cheap to provide in comparison with the rest of the graphics chip) never caught on in the form of an (accepted by the public) standard. With software fallbacks of course.

Re:h.264 accelleration in geforce 6, 7 gpus

[raehl]

To me the media features in the silicon is what's getting cooler and cooler.

It's actually the 5 lb copper heat sink that makes it cooler and cooler.

Re:h.264 accelleration in geforce 6, 7 gpus

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually the 5 lb copper heat sink that makes it cooler and cooler.

You mean - two coolers?

Re:h.264 accelleration in geforce 6, 7 gpus

[tigersha]

What exactly do you think The Windows Graphics Card API and X windows are? A software layer with a standard interface to the hardware accelerator perhaps?

Re:h.264 accelleration in geforce 6, 7 gpus

[NVP_Radical_Dreamer]

Oh are you talking about Pure Video? You mean the same Pure Video that took 8 months to actually "work" after it was advertised as being a key feature? Surely you cant be talking about this http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2305

OR THIS http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20515

Yes I am bitter since I was one of those GF 6800 Ultra owners

Re:h.264 accelleration in geforce 6, 7 gpus

[Breakfast Pants]

I just don't see anyone implementing their vector graphics through such an interface--they just do it all in software and blit to a bitmap surface.

Here is a feature I'd like to see....

[Anonymous Coward]

...cheaper graphic cards...

Re:Here is a feature I'd like to see....

[Anonymous Coward]

CheaP? You feature cheap talk.

2D cards (ie ligth-3D cards) are quite cheap already. On top of this, many motherboards have integrated graphics. How's 0$ for cheap? While we are at it, let's notice how all-integrated motherboards tend to be cheaper than enthousiast ones.

But if you want a cheap video card for excellent graphics in intense 3D games, why not look at: 6600GT, X800XL, etc. We are talking pretty cheap for such performers. Not to mention that older generations such as 9600/9800 still perform OK in a number of cases.

Now, it's true that top of the line is getting more and more expensive. Sometimes over 800$ for 512MB cards. But if you're ready to pay a lot, there is nothing wrong having the option to spend.

So my point is your comment, while seemingly insightful, is pretty baseless since there's lots of good and cheap video cards.

Graphics are one important aspect of games

[BadAnalogyGuy]

No one can doubt that Quake wouldn't have been any more a rehash of Doom than this morning's pizza omelette save for its vastly improved graphics. However, the FPS has essentially hit a playability wall like Dale Earnhardt with the advent of cooperative team play. At this point, the genre is at a standstill, playability-wise. The only thing getting better about these games is the graphics, and though I suppose that increasing resolution is not something that is bound to hinder games, it's about as beneficial in the long-term as replacing your worn out horsewhip.

Re:Graphics are one important aspect of games

[Wordsmith]

The above post uses similies as loosely, um, a really loose thing.

Re:Graphics are one important aspect of games

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I'd sooner have expected a Peter Jackson fan to menstruate than see a Wordsmith trip over words.

Re:Graphics are one important aspect of games

[Wordsmith]

I just noticed your handle. Funny.

Re:Graphics are one important aspect of games

[TerranFury]

> ...as loosely, um, a really loose thing.

If the joke isn't obvious to you already, it should be.

Re:Graphics are one important aspect of games

[Lord_Dweomer]

I don't buy it. Yes, it takes a while for new concepts to pop up, but I'd hardly say the genre is at a standstill. BF2 didn't appear overnight.

People are making good strides with fantasy FPS, and couple that with things like the vastly improved PVP in WoW and peoples obsession with that...I think we're just on the verge of seeing a good MMOFPS that will be what Planetside SHOULD HAVE been.

Re:Graphics are one important aspect of games

[ScuxxletButt]

I agree. Games have gotten pretty boring and predictable. Now they're prettier, boring a predictable.. ...it's about as beneficial in the long-term as replacing your worn out horsewhip.

I just replaced my cat-o-nine tails and my girlfriend is so greatful... I would have replaced the horsewhip, but Julia Roberts is no longer available for dates.

Re:Graphics are one important aspect of games

[DrSkwid]

Quake is a 3d game with 3 axes of movement and 3 models.
Doom is a 2d game in a 3d environment with 2 axes of movement and sprites.

They are literally worlds apart.

Quake4 has introduced a few new concepts : projectiles are proper 3d objects that bounce such that bullets will richochet, grenades will use jump pads etc.

Not mind blowing but definitely evolution.

Re:Graphics are one important aspect of games

[KrisW]

However, the FPS has essentially hit a playability wall like Dale Earnhardt...

Nice one.

Re:Graphics are one important aspect of games

[Prophet of Nixon]

Projectiles were 3d objects in Rune, many years ago. The multiplayer was sort of a melee Quake, but you could throw any weapon at any time (at the risk of not having a weapon afterwards). It was pretty neat to kill someone by bouncing a sword off a jump pad and skewering them, too. You should check it out sometime, it was a fun game.

There was also a mod for the original Quake that made rockets use teleporters, though I don't know that they considered walls or anything. If you want to see some amazing stuff done with the original Quake engine, look up a total conversion called Malice. It was actually a commercial release, like a third party expansion pack, but it was pretty awesome. It was also the first FPS I can remember that tried to tell some form of coherent story through cutscenes and scripted sequences.

price

[ShaneThePain]

its unfortunate that top of the line cards are getting more expensive. I have an X850XT Platinum Edition myself and its great. but it cost me 470 dollars. These new cards are over 600 dollars. I would hope that top of the line cards would get LESS expensive. Also, my card has been chugging on lowest settings for BF2: special forces, but i can run regular Battlefield 2 max settings smooth as glass. whats up with that?

Re:price

[Lehk228]

doesn't BF2 have horrible performance issues? or was that something else

Re:price

[ShaneThePain]

Standard BF2 runs great for me. Tends to lag a little on 64 player servers but other than that its great. When i got the expansion pack, I get less than 5 fps on average and thats on absolute minimum settings. Also the lag seems alot worse, but with FPS that low, i cant be certain.

Re:price

[bersl2]

Allow me to give you a suggestion:

Stop buying the very top of the line!

I picked up a Geforce 7800GT for a little over $300. There surely exists an ATI card at about the same price-value point.

Re:price

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is: why not spend a couple hundred dollars every 1-4 years on a new card instead of spend a metric assload every time? The amount of money you spend doesn't usually greatly increase game performance or playability, and in 6 months that same card is worth almost half of what first adopters were buying it for because there is always yet another newer, faster, bigger and more expensive card.

People who must spend the most they possibly can are fueling this fire, and it's only going to get worse the more people go for it. I don't see why it's so hard to understand. Manufactuers make a killing on people who have to have the latest and greatest. They LOVE it, and they love charging for it. If you're addicted to hardware, that's one thing, but one should realize the costs associated with technolust.

It's entirely possible to build a very capable gaming computer for a hill of beans, especially if it's an upgrade to an older system. You don't NEED that card, or that processor, to have a blast and not drown in debt, or have regret for blowing your credit only to have your system obsoleted in a month.

Re:price

[kfg]

The real question is: why not spend a couple hundred dollars every 1-4 years on a new card instead of spend a metric assload every time?

Shhhhhhhhhhh! I frickin' love early adopters.

KFG

Re:price

[sqrt(2)]

The problem was EA's decision to not support older pixel shaders. In short, they artificially increased the games requirements to scratch nVidia's back.

I boycotted EA when they bought West Wood and killed the CnC franchise.

Re:price

[NanoGator]

"Shhhhhhhhhhh! I frickin' love early adopters."

I know this was presented amusingly, but I would have modded it insightful. Early adopters are the reason the technology field is progressing so well. It helps offset the high cost of R&D.

I realize I'm stating the obvious here, but I'm still amazed at how barfy people around here get when new things come along at ridiculous prices. I mean, it's one thing to say "I wouldn't pay that much so I'll wait until the price comes down..." but often I hear "This product will instantly fail!" That's the way it works. Supply and Demand and all that guff.

Re:price

[timeOday]

$300 for a graphics card is still way too much for me. Isn't that exactly the MSRP of the baseline XBox?

Unless PC gaming has changed drastically since I quit about 3 years ago, it's still a pain in the butt. Now that my son is getting old enough to play, I just want something we can have fun with together, with some good shared-screen multiplayer games, and which actually functions properly. I don't plan to get back into sitting alone in a darkened computer room playing games for hours on end, ever.

Re:price

[XFilesFMDS1013]

I don't plan to get back into sitting alone in a darkened computer room playing games for hours on end, ever.

Then I hate to break it to you, but I think you're on the wrong message board...

Re:price

[gaspyy]

And $300 for a graphic card seems reasonable to you???

Is it me, or have the prices been going up for quite some time?

I certainly didn't pay $300 for the first GeForce when it was the hottest card on the market...

Re:price

[djdanlib]

The trend has *always* been (refer to Intel CPU pricing, or different sizes of LCD monitors, for example) to introduce the new hardware at the same price point as the last generation when it first came out. So, the top of the line always costs the same, except for those brief couple months before the new top of the line comes out. Remember 3DFX? Yeah, they charged a lot for their top-end cards too. You're completely out of luck if you're hoping for the trend to change. (Sorry)

Re:price

[be-fan]

I don't know if you remember correctly. Back in the day, the Voodoo 2 came out at the astounding price of $200. Same for the Voodoo 1. I remember Canopus released a really expensive Voodoo 2 bundle for $250. Back then, you could spring for an SLI Voodoo 2 rig (with an astounding 16MB of net graphics memory) for $400. These days, $400 won't even buy you a single 7800GTX.

Re:price

[NeMon'ess]

Big yawn over here. A $200 card will still run todays and tomorrow's games just fine, just not at 1600x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anistropic filtering.

Re:price

[Hast]

Consider that a GPU today is as big (or bigger) than a CPU and then consider if it's really all that expensive.

Naturally high-end stuff carry a bit of a premium price too. You can get good cards for below $200.

Re:price

[Anonymous Coward]

> Isn't that exactly the MSRP of the baseline XBox?

The baseline XBox is about as powerful as a 733mhz P3 with a GeForce 3.

Re:price

[Anonymous Coward]

Message board? Wrong? What? I believe you took a wrong turn someplace around HardOCP. Please go back.

Re:price

[Jasper__unique_dammi]

Im ok with people buying top of the line.. covers development costs.

PS im not for capitalism, but thats how it works currently

Re:price

[Anonymous Coward]

My policy is to spend no more than $150 dollars on a video card, and I buy a new video card when I can't run a new game I want to play. Which is about every other year.

My Radeon 9600 is still going strong.

-Graham D

Re:price

[Carnildo]

Another suggestion:

Stop being so impatient to play the latest games!

There's something to be said for playing older games on hardware that's much faster than they were designed for:

Morrowind GOTY edition with a ton of graphics-enhancement plugins, running at 2048x1536 with 8xS antialiasing, 16x aniso, smooth as glass.

Re:price

[djdanlib]

Ah... it's always possible. Thanks for the correction.

Re:price

[ildon]

I would hope that top of the line cards would get LESS expensive.

They do. Only at that point, they are no longer top of the line.

Unreal Engine 3

[nacturation]

Take a look at the next Unreal engine. Many of these advanced features are already there. The demo video is quite incredible. There's also Project Offset which I'm eagerly awaiting as well.

Re:Unreal Engine 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the opensource Ogre3D engine that supports parallax mapping, pixel shading, and even HDR.

Did I mention it's used in the Realmforge GDK, a cross-platform .net/mono based package that includes a sound engine, a physics engine, and an input engine?

If I wanted to start a development studio and didn't have the cash to license out Unreal3 (at over 250,000 clams) or the project offset engine, Ogre3D is where I'd go. And it's these small development houses that tend to release innovative games. Do you really think that the games developed on a scale where they can afford a quarter to a half million dollar game engine will break new ground? The publishers wouldn't spend the money on the engine if they weren't sure it would sell - and by being sure it would sell, I mean making a game that's iterative and trite.

Meh

[HMS Cheesemaker]

Meh... Increasing emphasis on super-duper graphics decreases emphasis on gameplay and fun. Give me the classics any day of the week!

Re:Meh

[mabinogi]

no. actually it doesn't.

There's no formula that says "gameplay = 1 - graphics"
It is entirely possible to have a game that looks good and plays well.
It's also very possible to have a game that looks bad and plays bad. And plenty of old games were bad. The classics are classics because they were good, not just because they're old and don't have the same graphical quality as modern games.

Quite a lot of classics actually did have excellent graphics for their time, and it was one of the things that contributed to their classic status in the first place.

Re:Meh

[kfg]

The classics are classics because they were good, not just because they're old and don't have the same graphical quality as modern games.

I believe that was exactly his point.

The newest game I play is about 5 years old now. The one I play most often 7.

I can't really remember the last time I bought a game, because I don't need to for gameplay. And I haven't bought a new video card for 5 years.

Because I don't need to for gameplay.

KFG

Re:Meh

[HMS Cheesemaker]

Well, when you portray it as a zero-sum equation as you did then it is certainly not true. I'd agree with you there. It isn't like that and there are no doubts that crap graphics games can have crap gameplay. But in today's industry the vast majority of investment is on graphics rather than gameplay so overall we see great strides in graphics yet less pronounced strides in gameplay. Thus, one is more drawn to the classics where whilst the graphics are dated the gameplay is much less so. Well, that's my impression anyway.

Re:Meh

[HMS Cheesemaker]

Oops, I should learn to proof-read before I post. This is what I should've posted: Well, when you portray it as a zero-sum equation as you did then it is certainly not true. I'd agree with you there. There are no doubts that crap graphics games can have crap gameplay. But in today's industry the vast majority of investment is on graphics rather than gameplay so overall we see great strides in graphics yet less pronounced strides in gameplay. Thus, one is more drawn to the classics where whilst the graphics are dated the gameplay is much less so. Well, that's my impression anyway.

Re:Meh

[nacturation]

I can't really remember the last time I bought a game, because I don't need to for gameplay. And I haven't bought a new video card for 5 years. Because I don't need to for gameplay.

You're like the guy who goes around mentioning that he doesn't watch TV, only for you it's games.

You have a point, in that a game should stand or fall on its gameplay rather than how pretty it looks. No matter how much you dress up chess, if you don't enjoy the actual game you're not likely to find something like Battle Chess much more than a novelty. I guess there's a certain truth if one were to argue that any gameplay element that exists today can be replicated in text mode, but with richer visuals comes the ability to have all the tried & true gameplay presented in a way that is really engaging.

Re:Meh

[ergo98]

Give me the classics any day of the week!

Why don't you go out and get those classics, and after playing them again tell us what you think.

I did just that, grabbing MAME32 and all of the old greats that I was sure laid waste to anything created today. Boy was I surprised to learn that not only the graphics were crappy, but the gameplay really was crap as well. It was only entertaining then because it was novel, and of course we have a fancy way of remember things much better, or much worse, than they really were.

Re:Meh

[kfg]

You're like the guy who goes around mentioning that he doesn't watch TV . . .

I can't remember the last time I turned on my television, but it's not something I'd go around mentioning. It's not an "issue" for me. I've been more interested in other things. Games, music, engineering,literature, they're all just more interesting at most given moments.

. . .if you don't enjoy the actual game you're not likely to find something like Battle Chess much more than a novelty.

No, my point is that it is because I enjoy the game that I find something like Battle Chess nothing more than a novelty.

I guess there's a certain truth if one were to argue that any gameplay element that exists today can be replicated in text mode . . .

Nonsense. I like sims. They are highly dependant on grapics. They are not, however, dependant on photorealism. There's this stuff called "art." You can do a lot with it with comparitively little.

If you're an "artist."

KFG

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

You're like the guy who goes around mentioning that he doesn't watch TV, only for you it's games

Man I hate those guys. I beleive I should be allowed to puch them in the name of self defense when they bring it up. When the situation allows, I like the response "You must spend a lot of time masterbating then. I'm not visiting your apartment!"

Re:Meh

[Billygoatz]

I still play "E.T." on my Atari.

Truly a Classic.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Man I hate those guys. I beleive I should be allowed to puch them in the name of self defense when they bring it up. When the situation allows, I like the response "You must spend a lot of time masterbating then. I'm not visiting your apartment!"

You seem to have some issues. Maybe you should consider spending more time masturbating, or you might end up with testicular cancer.

Re:Meh

[Overly Critical Guy]

The problem is that the game industry today isn't the same game industry I fondly remember from the early to mid 90s. It became commercial and MTV-ized, and now giant publishers demand flashy graphics on a rushed deadline, so substance takes a back seat because publishers are counting on sales based on the "ooh" and "aah" factor from high school kids with too much money to play with from Mommy and Daddy to spend on freakishly expensive gaming rigs and $600 video cards.

There's so much effort being put into 3D engines now that the added effort of making an innovative game makes it all the more expensive. Publishers and hardware companies have chosen their priority, and it is the visuals. That's why we get to have $400 consoles like the XBox 360 and upcoming Playstation 3, geared solely toward hardcore freaks.

That's why I love my Nintendo DS and Gameboy. The graphics are just enough to facilitate pleasing visuals without requiring a team of 3D programmers, so the rest is all about the gameplay. And hey, Nintendo might actually have a shot by targeting the mainstream audience with the Revolution and not the upper echelon like the other companies who think it's some amazing thing to see sweat effects on a basketball player model. And have you seen the Revolution compared to the other systems? It's got the form factor of a Mac mini but even thinner. I had no idea the thing was so small. It's great.

Anyway, I think gaming has shifted toward consoles because you don't have to deal with things like Pixel Shader 2.1 and 3.0 or "X1000 series" or other things. You just buy for your system. And obviously I think Nintendo is the most likely to keep things fun and not obsessed with visual effects that look dated 12 months later (remember when Doom 3 looked cool? Two months later I was totally bored with its dated ugliness).

Re:Meh

[Overly Critical Guy]

Well I'll grant you that the old arcade games were really meant for people to walk up to the machines and play for 10 minutes, so they're not that deep. But give me home console games like Super Mario Bros. 3 any day. More gameplay than F.E.A.R.'s got (note: I loved F.E.A.R....but every level was a dark, abandoned warehouse). The last 3D shooters that really made an impression on me were Half-Life 2 and, before that, Deus Ex. These gems are far and few between these days. Remember back in the 90s when PC gaming was packed with multiple genres of good games, with SimCity 2000, Monkey Island, Descent, Doom, Commander Keen, Theme Park, Space Quest, and so on? Good times.

At least there's Civilization IV. Maybe the 3D was slight overkill for that type of game, but they made it work well, especially after the 1.52 patch.

Re:Meh

[bigman2003]

No, I have not seen the Revolution in comparison to other systems.

By 'other systems' I assume you are talking about the 360 and the PS3.

Well, the PS3 and the Revolution haven't been released yet. I am sure that very few people have actually seen the Revolution AND the PS3. Are you one of them?

The 360 is not 'geared solely toward hardcore freaks.'

Xbox Live Arcade- check into it.

Re:Meh

[Overly Critical Guy]

Well, I consider $400 pricing to be geared toward hardcore freaks. I will never pay that much for a game console, and most families won't, either. If the Revolution is $200 or less, it will see a lot more mainstream sales.

Shots of the consoles
Clearer comparison of all the consoles from multiple angles, side by side

As you can see, the Nintendo Revolution is slightly wider than the width of a DVD, much like the Mac mini. In fact, it's about the size of a PC DVD drive. The other systems are quite large in comparison. I'm surprised I hadn't heard more about the very small size of the Revolution until recently when those images came out.

Re:Meh

[m50d]

There's no formula that says "gameplay = 1 - graphics"

How about the one that says "we have x developers and have to ship by y"?

Re:Meh

[Negatyfus]

I can't remember the last time I turned on my television, but it's not something I'd go around mentioning. It's not an "issue" for me. I've been more interested in other things. Games, music, engineering,literature, they're all just more interesting at most given moments.

He's right! You sound exactly like that guy in the Onion article! :)

Nonsense. I like sims. They are highly dependant on grapics. They are not, however, dependant on photorealism. There's this stuff called "art." You can do a lot with it with comparitively little.

Pretty graphics don't need to be photorealistic. They're art. Better graphics cards offer a bigger palette to create this art. Photorealism is something some people strife for, because it's interesting for creating highly immersive worlds. Gameplay is totally separate from this.

Simply put, better graphics allow better presentation of art. Better graphics, in most cases by far, will not negatively affect gameplay (unless you dislike pretty graphics for some obscure reason).

Re:Meh

[BorgDrone]

I believe that was exactly his point.

The problem with this "it used to be so much better" crap is that just because it's old, doesn't mean it's good. The thing is: the crappy old games are long forgotten.

It's just like with 'old' music. "There is so much crap right now, music in the 60s/70s/80s/whatever_period was so much better". No it wasn't, there was just as much crap around then as there is now, only the good songs 'stuck' and are still being played.

Another example: "Oh, this $OLD_DEVICE still works after 20 years while my $NEW_DEVICE broke down after 2 years. They don't make 'em like they used to". Bullshit, it's just that the stuff made then that broke down after 2 years got thrown away 18 years ago.

People have very selective memories.

Re:Meh

[kfg]

He's right! You sound exactly like that guy in the Onion article! :)

I've got a lovely Sony about two feet from me. I've been out looking at and lusting over wide screeens. I can't remember the last time I turned it on, but I do remember times when I've left it on for days at a time, because at that time it interested me that much.

. . .better graphics. . .

Are, like art, subjective.

KFG

Re:Meh

[nath_de]

Too bad my Modpoints have run out. Your post is the most insightful I read this morning.

Re:Meh

[Negatyfus]

I've got a lovely Sony about two feet from me. I've been out looking at and lusting over wide screeens. I can't remember the last time I turned it on, but I do remember times when I've left it on for days at a time, because at that time it interested me that much.

Was this before or after your girlfriend left you and took the TV with her? :)

". . .better graphics. . ." Are, like art, subjective.

Of course, but as I said, better graphic cards and faster computers up the possibilities of what's possible. You could, for example, recreate old 80's graphics. You can also recreate the feel and make them beautiful at the same time. Several games have done this, but I can't remember their names (I don't play them, neither). Some modern games' art will attract you, others will not. A good consideration might be World of Warcraft, with it ultra-unrealistic graphics, versus Everquest 2, or whatever. You can even do 3D cartoons these days! Gameplay need not suffer, but of course every game these days is 3D and you might not like that and prefer your platform games. You have these too, but not as much as in past years I admit.

Re:Meh

[mabinogi]

thank you, that was kind of what I was trying to say.

It's not graphics or lack thereof that make a game good, it's the fact that it's a good game.
The reason why some people think that old games were better, is because they only remember the good old games - not because "back then they had to rely on gameplay".

Re:Meh

[mabinogi]

I bought a PS2 on launch day here in Australia.
I, along with thousands of others payed $AU750 for it.

Go and do the exchange rate conversion and tell me again that no one will buy a console that costs that much. In fact, I got the impression that people very much _are_ buying the 360, and Microsoft isn't really mouring the loss of your dollars.

When I bought the PS2, I could have payed much less than that and bought a PSOne, a Dreamcast, or an N64, but I didn't want one of those, I wanted a PS2. So did the thousands of others that bought it.

People will, and _have_ payed that much for the latest console. Those that won't will buy it in a year's time when the price has dropped - and by the time the PS3 and Revolution are out, you can guarantee the XBox360 will be ready for a price drop, and will remain competative.

The interesting thing though, is that when the original XBox was introduced in Australia, it was actually cheaper than the PS2 was at launch time, and people still thought it was too expensive - the PS2 had dropped in price a little by then, and it had a whole library of games (not to mention the PSOne games that still worked), and as a result, Microsoft ended up slashing the price by a huge margin very soon after launch - they even refunded those customers that had bought it at the higher price.
By the time the Gamecube finally reached Australia (it arrived last by a long way), no one was interested in it at any price, and as a result it's done very poorly here.
When you hit the market first, you get to set the price, and people _will_ pay it. (within reason, and $US400 is within reason).

The Revolution is going to be a hard sell, it's probably going to _have_ to be $US200 or less for anyone to want to buy it - the new controller might generate enough interest to keep Nintendo in the game, and will probably win them plenty of acclaim (or could possibly have the whole platform written off as a gimmick - who knows?), but they're not going to crawl out of third place.

Re:Meh

[Overly Critical Guy]

People will, and _have_ payed that much for the latest console.

Yes, hardcore people. Nintendo is right that a lot of people have dropped out of gaming and that it's dominated by the hardcores now who buy expensive consoles on launch dates. People aren't interested in flashy graphics anymore. They want something different, and Revolution gives that. While you're playing on an old school gamepad, Revolution gamers will be using a 3D input.

In fact, I got the impression that people very much _are_ buying the 360, and Microsoft isn't really mouring the loss of your dollars.

The Xbox 360 missed its projected sales mark in the States. It also sold less units in Japan than the original X-Box.

Re:Meh

[kfg]

Gameplay need not suffer,

I have never argued that graphics makes gameplay suffer. That would be, well, stupid.

. . .of course every game these days is 3D and you might not like that and prefer your platform games.

I have no use for platform games, and oddly enough, it is the 7 year old game that I play that is 3D, not the 5 year old one. However, in the right context good 2D art is superior to mediocre 3D modeling.

KFG

Re:Meh

[ultranova]

The problem is that the game industry today isn't the same game industry I fondly remember from the early to mid 90s. It became commercial and MTV-ized, and now giant publishers demand flashy graphics on a rushed deadline, so substance takes a back seat because publishers are counting on sales based on the "ooh" and "aah" factor from high school kids with too much money to play with from Mommy and Daddy to spend on freakishly expensive gaming rigs and $600 video cards.

Small publishers and individuals are publishing games all the time, from Nethack to Combat Mission to X-Plane to the Ur-Quan Masters (Star Control 2 remade for modern machines) to Princess Maker 2 (DOS game, but works fine under Dosemu). Those games don't get big, shiny packages and big, shiny add campaigns because big, shiny things are expensive. However, they are getting produced.

The old games industry didn't go anywhere. It's still here. All that happened is that there is now a big, shiny industry besides it producing big, shiny games. This is advantageous to even those gamers who don't care about big, shiny games, since it drives processor and 3D card development at furious speed, and obsoletes (read: makes cheap) older ones just at fast. And of course sometimes those big, shiny games turn out to be pretty good too :).

Re:Meh

[mabinogi]

But the point you're missing is that the 360 won't be $400 forever - you've labled the 360 as a console for hardcore gamers, but that's true of any new system. There's always an early adopter phase, then the price goes down and more and more people buy it.
Sure, it's unlikely to ever be as cheap as the Revolution, but Nintendo are effectively taking themselves out of the competition - they're creating themselves a new category where they can't be compared directly to the 360 or the PS3.

> While you're playing on an old school gamepad, Revolution gamers will be using a 3D input.
Or I could be using 3D input too....having just looked in to it, it seems that people are expecting $150ish to be the Revolution's price. If Nintendo can make money on that, then they might well have found their place - by making a console that you could quite easily justify buying _as well as_ a 360 and / or PS3, without being "hardcore".
I know I'll be considering it strongly if there's any games that appeal to me in its lineup.

Re:Meh

[Negatyfus]

However, in the right context good 2D art is superior to mediocre 3D modeling.

Heheh, that's pretty obvious. How about good 2D art vs. good 3D modeling? That's a question of taste, especially since 3D modeling today has become pretty detailed (as has 2D art, of course).

Re:Meh

[MrBandersnatch]

Meh to you too ;)

Sure some of those old "classics" were played just because there was nothing else to do but some of them hold up rather well. I can still easily lose a couple of hours to Kung Fu Master, Magic Drop, Amivar, Hypersports and others, but then Ive invested in a decent arcade controller which makes a HUGE difference in the "feel" of a game. In fact Ive played the above more than I did F.E.A.R or Resident Evil 4 since I cant help but get bored by FPS's (even FPS's with zombies and Dragons Layer elements).

Damn...now Im itching for a go on Wizball though......

Re:Meh

[gears5665]

I can't remember the last time I turned on my television, but it's not something I'd go around mentioning. It's not an "issue" for me. I've been more interested in other things. Games, music, engineering,literature, they're all just more interesting at most given moments.

Its hard for me to believe that your life is anything more than /. You, KFG, post more than any other sn. (Analysis over 2 years) I don't think you have time for any of those extraneous things that you've mentioned.

Re:Meh

[DrSkwid]

I'll take both, thanks.

You stick to the stick and rock game

Re:Meh

[kiddygrinder]

I'm sure there's still a couple of independent games around

Re:Meh

[Tony Hoyle]

It's not the same as music etc. There is good music now and a lot of dross.. there will always be.

OTOH I look at the games available today and can't think of a single one that isn't 100% pretty graphics and 0% gameplay. It wasn't always like that - there used to be games you could pick up and keep playing.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no formula that says "gameplay = 1 - graphics" Actually, there is. It goes something like this: Gameplay budget + Amount of contents budget + QA budget = Total budget - Graphics budget. I'm looking forward to breathtakingly beautiful games that takes one hour of mind-numbing gameplay to finish them and are full of bugs. This is gonna kick ass. We're almost already there anyway.

Re:Meh

[rufty_tufty]

Surely it's more like:
Gameplay = budget - effort put into graphics + inspiration

so if you have a great idea, but little money you can build tetris; if you have loads of money, but no ideas you can still build an immersive environment to give good game play.

Re:Meh

[BorgDrone]

I look at the games available today and can't think of a single one that isn't 100% pretty graphics and 0% gameplay.

The 'Prince of Persia' series has great gameplay IMHO. One of the few remakes where the remake actually does justice to the original AND is a great game by itself.

Re:Meh

[spectrumCoder]

Here's an idea - write new games that everyone can run, working to the lowest common denominator. No more competing to bring out the game with best-graphics-ever, and cheaper overall to bring out a game. Then all that time previously spent building the graphics engine can be spent making the game good.

Yeah, I know it's not going to happen, but nice idea?

Re:Meh

[bigman2003]

Oh.

I really thought that 'Overly Critical Guy' would have enough critical thinking to figure out that most pictures show of consoles before their launch are fake. Or stand-ins. Or not representative of the final product in some way. Usually size, shape, and color.

The fact that an Xbox 360 is priced at $400 makes it geared toward 'hardcore freaks'?

Maybe a lot of people don't worry about spending $400 on something like a console. Maybe someone grew up, and got a real job.

If I drive a Mercedes, does that make me a hardcore freak driver? Or does it just mean that I have enough money to afford a Mercedes, and that is the car I like...?

Re:Meh

[leoPetr]

I can honestly say that today's Civilization IV is a better and more engrossing game than yesterday's Civilization II. And its 3d graphics are awesome.:P

Re:Meh

[Belial6]

So, why is it that cartoons produced now are of so much better quality than those produced when I was a kid. Even the ones I still love are obviously inferior to modern cartoons. ---Stra W. Man

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

If I drive a Mercedes, does that make me a hardcore freak driver? Or does it just mean that I have enough money to afford a Mercedes, and that is the car I like...?

If you are an American, it probably just means that you DON'T have enough money to afford a Mercedes, but it IS the car you like, so you sold out your financial future so that you could look cool today.

Re:Meh

[C0rinthian]

We're talking about a graphics card. What the hell else do you expect it to do?

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. There are weeks in the pop charts in the 60s where every track is a recognized classic. These days you're lucky to get one "classic" song a year. It's not just old fogies with rose-tinted glasses. It's actually a statistical fact that music was better in the 60s.

And modern devices do last for less time than they used to. This is also a fact. NO ONE bought TVs in the 1960s that broke within 2 years. Sure, they went wrong but they could be fixed. Now when the audio goes, if you didn't buy the extended guarantee you are shit out of luck because no-one fixes TVs any more. The TVs are designed this way now. They don't make 'em like they used to. FACT.

Re:Meh

[Overly Critical Guy]

But the point you're missing is that the 360 won't be $400 forever - you've labled the 360 as a console for hardcore gamers, but that's true of any new system. There's always an early adopter phase, then the price goes down and more and more people buy it.

Nintendo systems have always been at most $200 at launch.

Sure, it's unlikely to ever be as cheap as the Revolution, but Nintendo are effectively taking themselves out of the competition - they're creating themselves a new category where they can't be compared directly to the 360 or the PS3.

Yes, this new category is called the "mainstream."

> While you're playing on an old school gamepad, Revolution gamers will be using a 3D input.
Or I could be using 3D input too.

Nintendo plans to fiercely protect its controller patents. No ripping off Nintendo this time around like Sony did with the analog stick.

having just looked in to it, it seems that people are expecting $150ish to be the Revolution's price. If Nintendo can make money on that, then they might well have found their place - by making a console that you could quite easily justify buying _as well as_ a 360 and / or PS3, without being "hardcore".
I know I'll be considering it strongly if there's any games that appeal to me in its lineup.

$400 versus $150. Which do you think the mainstream public is going to buy up? When Mommy's out shopping for Joey's birthday, that $150 Revolution is going to catch her eye. When the poor college kid is wanting a small game console to fit in beside his TV, the $150 Revolution is going to appeal to him or her. Not the $400 mega-hardcore premium version of the XBox 360 with hard drives, faceplates, giant power supply, etc.

I don't see how you could disagree that console gaming has become focused on hardcores. The games are difficult to play and only hardcores can get good at them, the consoles are insanely expensive, and even the commercials are weird and geared toward the hardcore gamers who would care--like the "cheese you can listen to outside" PSP commercials or the sweat on the basketball player commercial of the XBox 360. Nintendo wants to make a system you can pick up and play, and immediately get to provide more input feedback than some archaic gamepad ever could.

Re:Meh

[Overly Critical Guy]

The fact that an Xbox 360 is priced at $400 makes it geared toward 'hardcore freaks'?

Yes, the fact a game console is $400 means only hardcore gamers will buy it.

Maybe a lot of people don't worry about spending $400 on something like a console. Maybe someone grew up, and got a real job.


Thanks for proving my point that the XBox 360 is geared toward the elitist hardcore gamer, like yourself.

If I drive a Mercedes, does that make me a hardcore freak driver? Or does it just mean that I have enough money to afford a Mercedes, and that is the car I like...?

Well, it does mean you're in an upper echelon elite of drivers and that your car isn't geared toward the mainstream, which is my very point about the XBox 360. $400 is TOO MUCH. That's almost as much as my apartment rent.

Re:Meh

[bigman2003]

Or the converse of that, is that you are poor.

$400 is almost your rent?

Where do you live, Alabama?

Re:Meh

[NialScorva]

Yeah, they make them with color and remotes these days.

Re:Meh

[Krid(O'Caign)]

Care to cite studies into this? Oh, I'm sorry, did you just say you cant? If one song becomes a classic per year, that's damn impressive. Do you know why? Because the test of any classic is time, and time is something that is distinctly lacking when you compare a restricted sample length to an unrestricted one. Those 1960s songs weren't classics until the 1990s, when the people who listened to them at college had their own kids and wanted to hear songs from their youth on the radio. One day people will look back with fondness on early 00s music with the same nostalgic bent, and the likes of Mariah Carry will join the ranks of The Who on 'KWFT, your one-stop shop for all the classics from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and today!'. Want an interesting tidbit? Only idiots buy the two year extended warantee, because the chances of the device breaking are so low that it's a waste of cash. Do you honestly think that they would try to cram an extended service plan down your throat if it DIDN'T end-up making them a profit? Are you actually trying to say that the house is putting down odds that AREN'T in it's favor? Want to know what else? In two years, most of the market will have replaced the part for a better one for reasons that have nothing to do with reliability - the old part still works the same as always, but there's a new, better part out to do the job. But you're right on one point - they DON'T build them like they used to. They used to build TVs with energy-wasting vacuum tubes, but they don't do that anymore. It's nearly impossible to get a TV with a UHF/VHF antenna input, because they don't make them like that anymore. It's nearly impossible to get a TV that doesn't support closed captioning and content lockouts, because they don't make them like that anymore. Technology has improved, and they don't make them "like that" anymore because "that" way yields a poorer product.

Re:Meh

[spoco2]

Here Here (or is that Hear Hear?)... I hate posts that scream "Yadda yadda yadda... FACT!"... with nothing to back it up.

I'm not entirely sure that the argument that the way they used to build things resulted in a poorer product though... poorer by the image quality etc. but things like tvs etc were built then with a longer intended lifespan. These days it's assumed by the manufacturer that you will be wanting to upgrade in x years due to technology moving on anyway, so why spend more money making it last longer than x years.

I don't know what the magic x is that various manufacturers use... it'd be interesting to know.

Re:Meh

[Overly Critical Guy]

Southeastern New Mexico. My rent is $650.

Please, continue proving my point that a $400 console caters to condescending elitist hardcore gamers and not the mainstream public.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Kevin. :O

Re:Meh

[robnauta]

Here's an idea - write new games that everyone can run, working to the lowest common denominator. No more competing to bring out the game with best-graphics-ever, and cheaper overall to bring out a game.

Did you see the article, especially the last pages ? Games do that, although it's probably not obvious. People blasted Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 before it was released, critisizing them for forcing people to buy $500 video cards. But talk is cheap and meaningless, especially on slashdot, and those people never revised their opinion, despite the fact that those games (and others released since) all have smart feature-detection systems that turn off features and use different shaders depending on the hardware. There's a tremendous difference between an 8500 and x850, or a GF3 and 6800GT, yet you can play on all of those cards with acceptable framerates. It just looks a little bit different, shadows and reflections might be missing on older/cheaper cards. But you have to draw the line somewhere, you cannot support ancient stuff like the TNT1.

The time you describe has already happened. The Quake 3 engine ruled between 1999 and 2003, with dozens of games released which were based on that engine. They just treated all cards as really fast TNT cards, with just 2-texture rendering (a texture and a lightmap), not using lighting features of the card. DirectX 8 cards like the Radeon 8500 were introduced in 2001, with vertex and pixel shaders, yet nobody actually used those features, thanks to the 'Hey I can get 250 FPS in Q3 with this card!' junkies.

Luckily the game industry finally dumped the ancient Q3 limitations and started releasing games like Far Cry that actually used shaders.

Re:Meh

[spectrumCoder]

Draw the line before 3D graphics. Civilization (number 4 excepted) is a prime example of how good games can be without requiring your users to have brand new PCs and your investors to risk millions on you. Everyone forgets that it's the non-GPU number crunching game mechanics and AI that make or break a game.

If advances in graphics technology had made games better (i.e. more enjoyable) everyone would be having far more fun playing games now than they did five years ago. I don't think that's the case.

Re:Meh

[Lord Kestrel]

Civ4 (and Civ3 before it) is definitely much better than Civ2, especially because Civ2 sucked compared to Civ1 :)

Re:Meh

[bigman2003]

Southeastern New Mexico?

Just by geography, it is clear that YOU are not representative of the average American.

Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

And the best graphics card with good open source drivers are still R200 series, line the radeon 9200.
So HDR should work great under linux, in about 2010.

ayup

[Travoltus]

$500 for a card that can handle today's games, and $700 for next year's games, is not something a lot of people can afford, especially now that NVidia has CANCELED all AGP production and that means AGP computer owners have to shell out several hundred dollars for a PCI Express system and perhaps also migrate over to the 64 bit arch which is going to present unavoidable breakage of some obscure legacy software that is very important to someone out there.

What I'm getting at is these $500-$700 cards will majorly propel PS3 and Xbox 360 sales...

Re:ayup

[gbobeck]

Hey, I love using my $500 video card to play nethack.

More seriously... current AGP users can simply buy 'generic' brands of video cards which will be not only cheaper, but guaranteed to be sitting in smaller computer shops for years to come.

Re:ayup

[yobjob]

PC upgradability is a myth. Whenever I've come to need a new piece of hardware, there's always been some snag that results in me having to upgrade my entire system.

CPU requires a new chipset.

Now I need a new motherboard.

Oops, now I need new memory.

Oh, my power supply doesn't support this new hardware.

Damn, the PCI slot is in exactly the wrong spot - now I need to get a new case... or remove the drive cage...

Goes on and on and on. I don't factor upgradability into any system I buy, there's no point.

Re:ayup

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, and that is why console sales are going at a fair clip. People want a system that will be current for a few years, and if they can't get that then they want to pay under $2000 for a new system in 3 years or longer.

The 360 and the PS3 will represent close to $500 apiece for a gaming system and will last 3 years or more.

A PC? $2000 almost every year.

On the bright side, MicroSoft Windows is no longer the most annoyingly expensive part of your gaming rig.

Oh and by the way, exactly what power source now can handle a single NV7, much less a SLI setup? 500 watts? 600 watts?

Re:ayup

[AuMatar]

2000 every year? Not unless you're an absolute graphics whore. You can play every game out there by spending about $1000 every other year, at most.

Consoles sell well because a lot of companies make games only for them. But if you buy all 3 consoles each generation, you're spending abut as much for the PC, and not getting the side benefits of a full computer.

Re:ayup

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess this means that the resale value of my Geforce4 Ti AGP card will go up for a little while.

Re:ayup

[oddfox]

If you think "a card that can handle today's games" costs ~$500 then you're sorely mistaken. Take a look at the prices sometime please before you decide to go on a rant about expensive video cards, because only the extreme high-end models cost more than 200 bucks tops, and my GeForce 6600GT, which can play any game on the market today, cost me $150 and is now about $180 for the AGP version and $150 for the PCI-Express version.

Whoever modded you insightful has as much a clue as to what the current market looks like as you yourself, which is to say not much.

P.S. -- All the x86_64 processors on the market today are perfectly capable of running 32-bit, nobody's being forced onto the 64-bit OS bandwagon that will leave a lot of old software behind as legacy. Again, research something before you attempt to make an informed post.

Re:ayup

[Firehed]

Indeed. I bought a 6800GT for around $350 shortly after the first nForce4 boards were out (around Xmas 04), and it's serving me fine today. I have to turn things down a shade in FEAR, but most games aren't at all a problem. As much as I'd like to move up to a 7-series, I've mostly been playing CS:S recently and it sounds like the NEXT gen cards aren't far off now, which will raise the performance bar at the $??? mark and/or lower the price of current cards. Meanwhile, I'll be saving for a comptuer chair that doesn't instantly throw out my back.

And remember also with consoles, the hardware doesn't change over time. It's one set level for a few years. So while your Xbox 360 might look t3h pwn right now (which, IMO, still doesn't hold a candle to PC graphics), it'll be left in the dust a year out. It seems to me that overall value of a PC is far better too. Tack on the cost of a 1080i HDTV to your new $400 console (plus another $100+ on a couple games), and it suddenly doesn't seem as attractive compared to the PC option. Don't get me started on spending $6k on a 60" screen that runs at a lower resolution than a $850 24" Dell widescreen - come back when the pixel pitch of TVs is at least somewhat comparable to that of comptuer screens.

Re:ayup

[be-fan]

You don't need to spend $500 for a card to handle today's games. I just got an X800 GTO for the princely sum of $185 (and that was the more expensive fanless model). It plays F.E.A.R just fine. These days, the best deals to be had are to buy the previous generator's high-end cards once every year or two. Buying a $150 card every year will get you a lot better average-gaming-experience than buying a $450 card and replacing it after three years.

Re:ayup

[NeMon'ess]

It's unfortunate you didn't time your computer purchase better. You could've bought a DDR mobo with an Athlon in 2002 and later upgraded the mobo and chip while reusing the RAM. Your power supply would've worked fine with it too. It wasn't until the last year or so mobo's with Power Supply 2.0 power connectors came out. The ATX case lasted from what, about 1997 until 2004/5? That's plenty of time. The power connector standard that was recently replaced lasted for 5 years. AGP lasted for 5 years. My friends and I have upgraded lots of components in the past decade without having to completely rebuild systems.

Re:ayup

[DrSkwid]

When you say "just fine" do you mean "without any of the special effects that make F.E.A.R. slightly more interesting than othe FPSs" or does it have the full particle system and 3d space deforming weaponry ?

Re:ayup

[F_Scentura]

"I don't factor upgradability into any system I buy"

"I make poor hardware choices, therefore I have poor hardware choices available to me".

Re:ayup

[WuphonsReach]

2000 every year? Not unless you're an absolute graphics whore. You can play every game out there by spending about $1000 every other year, at most.

Agreed. You could probably even shave that a bit more (down to around $300/year). You'll need to start with a good case / PSU, but after that you can upgrade in $300-$400 chunks that will last you 2-3 years.

MB/RAM/CPU bundle one year. Better gfx card the next year ($200-$300, buy at least 12 months old). Beef up the RAM in the 3rd year. Go back to start (replace the MB/RAM/CPU bundle). Or cruise for a year or two.

The rate at which CPU speeds increase has flatted quite a bit in the past few years. A system with enough memory (the biggest defect in most systems) from 3 years ago is still a moderately competitive rig.

Business machines can easily last 5-7 years now before needing to be replaced. Gamer machines are changing from a 12-18 month cycle to a 24-48 month cycle.

Re:ayup

[TheRaven64]

A friend of mine did buy an Athlon and motherboard with DDR in 2002. The RAM was DDR266. The newer Athlons have a different pin count. Upgrading it to a modern CPU would require a minimum of a new CPU, motherboard and new RAM (probably DDR2, but at least DDR333 or DDR400).

Re:ayup

[ceoyoyo]

I've upgraded some systems, but on the whole I've found it's usually better to sell the old system and buy a new one. It's hard to sell a motherboard, but you can usually find a someone to take your old system off your hands. The exception has been monitors (I think I've owned four).

Nowadays I just use a notebook and a (usually) headless server.

Re:ayup

[be-fan]

The only thing you'll miss with an X800-class card is some of the more advanced features like parallex mapping. All the particle stuff and deformation stuff is in there in PS2.0.

2006?

[pookemon]

Ah these "features" are already available and present in the current generation of cards. They've been around since at least 2004 - and viable on hardware from then (ie. 6800's etc.).

The first example I saw of Parallax mapping was actually something done in DOOM 3 (I can't find the post on the OpenGL forum). So why are these "new features" considered "New". Looks like an advert for current gen Hardware to me...

Re:2006?

[Nightspark]

Yep. The "brand-new" Radeon X1k series was launched in October, and the GeForce 7 series was launched in August.

Re:2006?

[Kevon]

I'll agree with this...I was hoping to get a glimpse at DirectX 10 or something similar.

Instead, this article seemed to focus on what the R520 and G70's could do.

I saw a few screenshots of Flight Simulator 10 the other day and would like to know about some of the tech behind it and other things that will be out this year.

Re:2006?

[sysrpl]

I believe this is the link you were looking for:
http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/ubb/Forum3 /HTML/011292.html

IIRC this was the first public discussion of the technique.

Re:2006?

[pookemon]

It wasn't the one I was thinking of - but it does show how "out of date" Tomshardware is...

The article I was thinking of was actually based on "Relief Mapping" (which AFAIK is better than parallax mapping). The link is here. Unfortunately the link to the zip is broken. But the more recent post on the subject relates to Quake 4 which can be seen here. The links (for DOOM and Quake 4 are both working).

Can opengl.org stand the /.?

Re:2006?

[pookemon]

Bollocks - forgot to paste in this link for the Quake 4 relief mapping. What a numpty...

$500 for a graphics card for these effects?

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost every one of the highlighted features in TFA are used in Metroid Prime for the Gamecube... released in 2002, mind you, for a $99 console.

Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of everything being too dark, now, thanks to the power of HDR, I won't be able to see because of the blinding light in my eyes!

It's all good but....

[Bullfish]

Looking at the difference in graphic quality between the older generation of cards and the newer generation of cards, there is a jump. But the real question, is it enough of a jump to warrant the cost of a new card over one you bought last year (assuming you bought a good card last year). And that being said, how much of a jump will you get with the generation after this? These companies put out new product every year with the hope they will sell like hot cakes because of what they added. Myself, I tend to upgrade every second generation, and sometimes three.

While these advances are all fine and good, how much of a jump would be worth say, a $500 dollar (assume you can get deals) outlay each year? While the new graphics are great, I can't say they are 500 smackers a year greater.

Re:It's all good but....

[Anonymous Coward]

Pet peeve of mine:

a $500 dollar outlay

Read that out loud. "$500" == "five hundred dollar". "$500 dollar" == "five hundred dollar dollar". So it's a five hundred dollar dollar outlay?

Re:It's all good but....

[kfg]

. . .assuming you bought a good card last year. . .

I bought a good card last century.

KFG

Re:It's all good but....

[Solr_Flare]

I agree that I tend to skip a generation or two before upgrading(I'm still on my ATI 9800xt as a matter of fact). But, I think the primary reason people upgrade these days isn't simply for new graphic "goodies". A lot of people are moving into the high resolution LCD market as the prices plumet on these screens. I myself run a 1680x1050 resolution screen. My primary concern when I decide to upgrade is when the tradeoff between running a game at native resolution and sacraficing visual quality/fps gets too huge. So, in the case of my ATI 9800xt, it's reaching the end of it's life span in my computer because it's starting to have to work harder on some of the newer games out there and still run at 1680x1050.

Re:It's all good but....

[dAzED1]

almost all the games I'm interested in still runs on my p3 850 laptop, with integrated graphics from 1999. Starcraft, Masters of Magic, Civ3, XCOM, etc.

Warcraft3 doesn't run that great on it, BUT - for that, I have a couple other laptops ;)

Maybe I'd be more excited about all this if I played games for more than an hour total per week.

Re:PUPPIES!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I see scarf, boots and gloves.

Yes!

[syousef]

*sarcasm*
Please bring back flight simulators with stick figure planes, and one dimensional games that could be mastered in an afternoon.

Also please bring back the golden age of radio. All those damn moving pictures get in the way of me using my imagination to visualise the story.

In fact take away the nasty computers. I want to hand draw every frame of the game myself.
*end sarcasm*

I'll stick to Flight Simulator 9 until I get more movement and better sound in Flight Simulator X. You can go back to playing pong if you like, but leave me my improving graphics.

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

MS flight simulator?

The graphics are great, but it's almost as bad as that train simulator that came out a few years back. that's right.. someone actually made a *game* to simulate driving a *train* and the graphics were pretty bad if the screenshots are anything to judge by.

But if you're going to keep feeding the beast to pretend you're an airborne bus driver, why not get a real pilot's license and experience the thrills as well? It's not like you're saving that much by buying the simulator instead.

Re:Yes!

[KDR_11k]

Yeah and get this: There's tons of car simulators, too! And apparently people buy them as well!

Train and flight sims are popular and fun to many people. Same as model trains or planes. Saying you should just pilot a real plane instead is like saying you should be joining the Army instead of playing Battlefield.

A guess

[earnest murderer]

You are right, but now in 2006 you'll be able to buy hardware that will actually allow you to turn all of those features on and still have a playable game.

Everquest 2 for instance, if you want to play with all of the options turned on, you'd need 2 gig of ram an uber video card with at least 512MB ram and it still doesn't run that great. 2006 may bring those people viable performance on the settings you see in screen shots.

Re:A guess

[Jarnis]

Which is due to utterly buggy and horribly unoptimized engine.

Sure, it has some reasonably high res textures, meaning it does use 512MB texture ram, but otherwise the engine sucks.

I mean they haven't been able to fix the pretty shadows to actually stay on for the past year - they always vanish/bug out as soon as there is a bit more spell effects going around you. And if they can't even get the damn shadows to work right, one has to wonder what other things are totally buggy in the engine

(also funnily their pre-release EQ2 stuff was MUCH shinyer, but they suddenly toned it down bigtime because framerate was low, and they couldn't code their way out of a paperbag and release was approaching... EQ2 is pure crap)

including cheaper power usage.

[Anonymous Coward]

The cost of running these overclocked from the factory energy leaking chips is no small sum.

Re:including cheaper power usage.

[hairyfeet]

I just wish they'd do something about the "space heater" problem.I'm just running a FX5200 with a 2.6 celeron and 512 ram with 250 gigs worth of hard drives and had to use my bosses old trick to just keep it from melting.If you want your machine to run nice and cool and don't mind it looking "fugly"(which if there are really folks building oil tanks to cool their rigs some must care about temp more than looks) here is the cheap trick he taught me

Take the side off-go to your local wally world and buy one of those $10 box fans that poor folks use and set it about an inch an a half from the open side of your machine.After 6 hours of divx encoding and 5 hours of Swat 4(great game,Btw) there isn't a single piece on my machine that isn't cool to the touch-HDDs,GPU,CPU,Ram all of them nice and cool.And that is with the fan set on low.Plus it's a HELL of a lot quieter than the four case fans I was using before.

And I doubt it does any harm to your rig as he has been running his that way to cool his old P4 1.5 with 8 SCSI drives in it for 5 years without a bit of trouble.Of course your room might get a little toasty but that's why we got AC now,Isn't it ;-)

The feature I want

[rsilvergun]

is a decent card for under $100. I shouldn't need a $150-$200 card to play 8 month old games.

Re:The feature I want

[earnest murderer]

is a decent card for under $100. I shouldn't need a $150-$200 card to play 8 month old games.

The chintzy integrated video will play all of those games well enough. But you're going to have to back off from "11" on the display options.

Re:The feature I want

[gad_zuki!]

>The chintzy integrated video will play all of those games well enough. But you're going to have to back off from "11" on the display options.

I don't think that's true. A lot of the integrated video I see is whatever intel has laying around. They don't have enough video ram to even start up Battlefield 2 and the games these chipsets do support tend to be supported at 'low' which means 800x600, low textures, and no AA. Console games look better than this stuff.

The grandparent is right, there are no real affordable options. Either you pay 150-250 or you deal with the next to useless integrated video on your mobo. Something decent that will play most of the popular games at 'medium' without massive frame loss at around 75-100 dollars is needed. That really should be the price point the industry shoots for, but gamers seem to have an endless supply of cash, or at least credit cards.

Re:The feature I want

[efuseekay]

you might want to check out nvidia 6150/430 int. GPU. Mobos for these got for sub90 bucks a pop. You get what you pay for, as long as you are not going to play your games at 1600x1200 at "uber" settings.

Re:The feature I want

[balthan]

I just upgraded from a 9600XT, a card that can be easily had for under $100. It can play all the lastest games, just at a lower resolution and/or without all the bells and whistles. If you want all the bells and whistles at 1600x1200, you have to pay.

Re:The feature I want

[DrSkwid]

affordable ?

$250 is 1-2 days work. I think I can stretch to that for 1 years use !!

Re:The feature I want

[bckrispi]

The grandparent is right, there are no real affordable options. Either you pay 150-250 or you deal with the next to useless integrated video on your mobo. Something decent that will play most of the popular games at 'medium' without massive frame loss at around 75-100 dollars is needed.

Not true at all. With a 1300x, I can crank up most of the effects to "high" (or even "very high") at 1024x768 and still have a smooth experience.

Lowering power usage

[Anonymous Coward]

I was reading in a previous story about how using Flash memory can lower power consumption because the card can be turned off while idle and not lose state.

Let's talk money...

[__aaclcg7560]

The only thing I'm interested in new graphic features is when the card cost only $50 USD. All the video cards that I got over the last few years (Geforce 2 64MB, Geforce 4 Ti 4200 128MB, and Geforce 6200 128MB) were all for $50 USD each. Before that, I paid $150 USD each for earlier cards (Geforce 32MB, TNT2 16MB, and 3Dfx Voodoo Rush). Why pay a premium for a feature-rich card that most games don't even support yet?

Re:Let's talk money...

[Chimera512]

because when you pay 500 dollars for a video card you want it to be ahead of the curve, you want it to support all the new features 6 months from now.

Re:Let's talk money...

[zippthorne]

I think the question was really, "why buy a $500 card now that will support all the new features that come out 6 months from now, when you could buy a $150 card right now, and another $150 card in 6 months when the programs that use them actually come out?"

Re:Let's talk money...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because nVidia and ATi both cripple their budget and midrange products. Unless you like playing with mediocre framerates buying two $150 cards is a waste of money. The only saving grace is that you can probably sell off the previous card in a For Sale forum if you upgrade often-enough.

The best time to drop money on any a card for any of these games, is probably 6 months to a year after they're released. That is at least if you want to play them the first time with all of the bells and whistles, while not dropping below 30fps in complex regions of the game. Since you're probably not going to manage to pull a total of 24 hours out of an FPS on the hardest setting, you might as well make it the most beautiful less than 24 hours you can get for the cost of whatever hardware you end up buying. Plan for multiplayer, or skip buying the game altogether and just play at a friend's. Make them pick up the cost of that $500 video card and $60 game.

People really need to decide when they're dropping a lot of money on 3D accelerators if they really plan on playing a lot of high-end sim/fps games. Every $150-500 you drop on a piece of hardware you don't use much, is $150-500 you aren't investing into your future. But then they probably waste more on $5 lattes than that in a year, anyway.

Re:Let's talk money...

[Anonymous Coward]

You got a GeForce 6200 for $50? That's a pretty sweet deal.

Re:Let's talk money...

[zippthorne]

Yeah but you ignore the fact that if you wait 6-months to a year, you can buy what WAS the top of the line card at mid-of-the-line prices. Same card, just at "driven-off-the-lot" pricing.

The GFX features are great but games still suck.

[xwin]

More advanced (and expensive) 3D hardware is coming out but the gameplay still sucks. There is almost nothing that UT2004 added to UT2003 except the new game types which could have been implemented on 2003. Doom3 despite all it's graphics glory is mediocre game.

More and more money is pumped into the game and less and less imagination. Just like Hollywood movies.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for progress in the graphic cards. But graphics do not make the game. When I am playing UT, I have no time to look at the special effects, I am more concerned with staying alive. Game must have a good gameplay not just good graphics.

nothing to see here, move along.

[Truekaiser]

this is not a preview for any new technology that will be apearing in graphics cards that are coming out this year. it's just a long winded reveiw of what apeared last year.

price-GNUware.

[Anonymous Coward]

"its unfortunate that top of the line cards are getting more expensive. "

Yeah! The invention of magic should have brought the cost down.

"I would hope that top of the line cards would get LESS expensive."

Like F/OSS?

"Also, my card has been chugging on lowest settings for BF2: special forces, but i can run regular Battlefield 2 max settings smooth as glass. whats up with that?"

Give me your credit card number, and I'll give you an answer.

Games? What about the basic OS?

[Skippy_kangaroo]

It's not only games that demand these new uber-graphics-cards. Consider what is happening with operating systems. In a couple of years I'm sure the OS will require today's uber-cards.

Core Image in OS X offloads a lot of the GUI stuff to the graphics processor. To get all the eye candy (sorry, usability improvements) you can't have a particularly old card. Vista is doing the same thing.

Now we are really putting the G into GUI.

Re:Games? What about the basic OS?

[mclaincausey]

Core Image in OS X offloads a lot of the GUI stuff to the graphics processor. To get all the eye candy (sorry, usability improvements) you can't have a particularly old card. Vista is doing the same thing.

That's not exactly true. Core Image provides the real-time framework for certain filters to execute on pixels. This includes, for a GUI example, the ripple when a widget is added to Dashboard, but it could also include filters in a Cocoa image manipulation program. Developers can trivially add the built-in effects to video and image manipulation packages. Similarly, Core Audio can easily be incorporated by developers into their own apps.

What you're describing sounds more like Quartz Extreme, which renders 2D screen elements as OpenGL textures. The idea is to offload as much of the drawing process to the graphics card as possible by using the often idle 3D hardware.

Re:Games? What about the basic OS?

[DrSkwid]

Dude, they aren't "Operating Systems".

Re:Games? What about the basic OS?

[TheRaven64]

Quartz 2D Extreme (added in Tiger, but not on by default) does a bit more. For example, each character in a font is rendered as a single texture and then composited on the GPU. On even a moderately modern card this gives a huge performance increase. Newer GUIs are starting to move all vector drawing operations into OpenGL display lists. Have you looked at Exposé? You get some nasty aliasing effects if you look closely, since it rasterises the windows before scaling them. If the windows are display lists then they can be scaled first, then rasterised very quickly. Imagine if every character in a font was defined in this way - you could zoom in and out with almost no CPU involvement.

I don't care, until

[mi]

FreeBSD/amd64 is adequately supported by the drivers.

Oh, radeon appears to be supported by Xorg, but it does not seem stable at all.

With the feature set of the modern graphics hardware, the drivers ought to be maintained by the manufacturers with access to the hardware and the specs.

NVidia is doing a good enough job with the Linux and FreeBSD on i386, but they don't have anything for FreeBSD/amd64 (despite posts begging for it on their forums for the last 2 years) and I am greatly disappointed...

Re:I don't care, until

[KrisCowboy]

they don't have anything for FreeBSD/amd64

Nvidia's amd64 drivers are pretty stable too. Been using them for a year now - since I got my 64-bit athlon. Never had any problems running Xorg on it. The Xorg shadows and transparencies behave as expected.

Re:I don't care, until

[Neo-Rio-101]

You're right about the instability of the Radeon Drivers on Xorg. I have such a setup and I run Debian testing on it with with an AIW Radeon 9700 Pro. Using the latest ATI drivers from Dec last year, even when I'm not running a graphics intensive application, X often seems to hang heavily and without any warning. The system crashes so bad that I can't even switch consoles to halt the machine properly.

I can successfully crash the Xorg every time just by trying to run prboom though. Don't ask me why.

Re:I don't care, until

[Fweeky]

Apparantly nVidia are awaiting Page Attribute Table support before they can release a FreeBSD/amd64 driver.

Re:I don't care, until

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Radeon 9250 driving a Samsung TFT via DVI and an old Mitsubishi CRT via DB15. Rock solid stable on amd64, OpenGL, Xv accel for movies, you name it. Nvidia? They can take their proprietary POS hardware and shove it up their arse.

Re:I don't care, until

[Billly Gates]

Aren't the drivers for FreeBSD over a year old?

I assumed it was an abandoned platform but I could be wrong. This and the lack of java is why I left FBSD behind. It pisses me off.

Re:I don't care, until

[mi]

Apparantly nVidia are awaiting Page Attribute Table support before they can release a FreeBSD/amd64 driver.

Yes, there is a rumor, that something in FreeBSD is missing for them. But that is a lame excuse. A driver without the feature, that requires PAT, is MUCH better, than no driver at all, even if the PAT (whatever it is) could make it a whopping 10% faster.

Re:I don't care, until

[mi]

Aren't the drivers for FreeBSD over a year old?

?! The i386 drivers are updated regularly -- as often as the Linux ones...

This and the lack of java is why I left FBSD behind.

Well, the first reason was wrong, and the second is wrong too. There are jdk13, jdk14, and jdk15 ports for FreeBSD.

It pisses me off.

Well, good riddance then...

Oh dear.

[labratuk]

This guy is clearly quite confused about a lot of aspects of computer graphics. I think it's a fair bet to say he's not a graphics programmer. Is this a typical quality article from tom's hardware?

He continually mixes up the significance of the capabilities of the shading languages, the 'quality settings' of random games, and just the sheer speeds of the cards.

Doesn't have a great grasp of english either (not that my german is that good to be fair).

Re:Oh dear.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's pretty typical of Tom's Hardware. They're almost decent at simply reviewing and benchmarking stuff, but as soon as they try to get into anything technical they tend to make fools of themselves.

Nethack on $5 video cards :-)

[billstewart]

Oh, wait, you said "$500", not "$5.00" :-)
I did most of my game obsessing back when a 9600-baud modem made playing Nethack marginally faster compared to 2400, and Solitaire wastes just about as much time on WinXP with 2.4GHz CPU as it did on Win3.1.

It's nice to have enough graphics horsepower to watch DVDs, and whatever H.264 uses is theoretically useful as well, but mostly I just want a graphics card that can pump as many pixels as my monitor can handle at a speed that won't flicker, because I want good-looking text.

Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

but do these new cards work with Duke Nukem Forever?

Direct3dlicious

[autopr0n]

Does anyone use OpenGL anymore? Is it still up to date with all of these features?

Re:Direct3dlicious

[Lobais]

The Linux people use it, and maybe the mac people too.
I think it is very up to data, probably even better that direct3d in some ways.

Re:Direct3dlicious

[be-fan]

Most of the new advances these days have to do with shader support, and glslang (GL shading language) is quite a bit more general than pixel shaders 3.0.

Re:Direct3dlicious

[Jasper__unique_dammi]

hmm I am wondering how opengl is going to get into vista properly without games-industry support. EA is microsoft too..

DOOM3 mod with parallax

[Anonymous Coward]

No idea if this is the one you mean exactly, but the results match. They call it relief mapping.

On a side note, it is fun to see how demo images can have error (bricks do not match in the corner of the burning barrel image). Please, if you want to show how cool is hot air distortion... make sure other graphic details are fine too.

Cost for production is cost for production

[bradleyland]

When you look at the hardware that's on a graphics card, the cost makes more sense. You've got a GPU with 304M transistors (G70 [7800] core), then you've got up to 512 MB of very, very fast memory (bus speeds in excess of 1000 MHz). That's heavy duty. By contrast, a San Diego core Athlon64 has 114 million transistors, but costs $245 or so. Throw in 512 MB of RAM that will run at a 1200 MHz clock speed, and you will approach the cost of a graphics card, but the GPU's aren't manufactured on the same 90nm process as the A64, so the production costs must be much higher.

Of course, this doesn't factor in R&D costs, but there's a lot more growth going on in graphics processing than there is in x86.

I'm not in any kind of position to make judgments (because I'm not an expert on either industry), but it seems to a laymen that the $400 price tag might just be justifiable for a 7800GTX.

Re:Cost for production is cost for production

[Kjella]

When you look at the hardware that's on a graphics card, the cost makes more sense. You've got a GPU with 304M transistors (G70 [7800] core), then you've got up to 512 MB of very, very fast memory (bus speeds in excess of 1000 MHz). That's heavy duty. (...) I'm not in any kind of position to make judgments (because I'm not an expert on either industry), but it seems to a laymen that the $400 price tag might just be justifiable for a 7800GTX.

Only on slashdot is someone who only knows the transistor counts, GPU core codenames and bus speeds a layman...

Re:Cost for production is cost for production

[dAzED1]

eh, laymen can look up white papers ;)

Better graphics might actually decrease realism

[Skowronek]

There is also the problem of having too much realism. When everything is almost perfectly realistic, the brain concentrates on finding imperfections - inaccurate lighting, tiniest BSP flaws, misaligned textures. This happens because in the Real World those cues are used for determination of spatial relationships (surface quality, shape intricacies etc.) so when one of them is just slightly incorrect, you get this feeling of "wrongness".

So, actually, increasing simulation quality doesn't mean more subjective realism.

Re:Better graphics might actually decrease realism

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how this runs contrary to actual artistic experience. This sounds suspiciously like the application of the idea that robots become less friendly the more humanoid they become, while still being imperfect. It does not at all sound like the experiences people have with paintings, movies, or video games. No one that looks at FEAR is going to feel more out of place than if they were playing Doom. The problem is when things are not real-enough and are juxtaposed with real things. CGI that has unrealistic lighting that's superimposed upon a real scene. That looks fake and jarring. But an entire semi-realistic CGI experience, or even one that with an accurate model of lightning and depth, seems perfectly natural and preferable to an inferior one.

Not really...

[Inoshiro]

"But if you buy all 3 consoles each generation, you're spending abut as much for the PC, and not getting the side benefits of a full computer."

I buy myself an Xbox (200$), PS2 (180$), and a GameCube (120$). That costs me $500. A GeForce 6800 GT costs the same amount.

Then I look at the games. Between the GameCube, Xbox, and PS2, I own (easily) over 100 games. Have there been over 100 PC games in the past 3 years that are worth owning? We do have representatives from the real-time strategy crowd and the FPS crowd, but what of the musir rythm games, platformers, party games (Mario Party on a computer would be considerably more constrained!), J-RPGs, etc?

I should mention I've never had to patch Super Mario Sunshine. When I bought it in 2002, it worked bug free!

Re:Not really...

[aaronl]

I'd be willing to say that there isn't a very good reason to own 100 new games over the last three years, at all.

While you were able to own those three systems for ~$500, you did forget additional expense for network capability, multiple controllers, etc. You also still don't get all the real benefits of a computer (ie: internet, document processing, development, etc).

The next crop of consoles will set you back a lot more than a PC, though. 400$ for the XBox, 400$ for the PS3, 200$ for a Revolution... and then you get to buy controllers, AV adaptors, and games. And you still don't get to do any of the useful PC things.

Also, you seem to forget that genres like platformers and RPGs are better on a PC anyway. Using a gamepad for many of those things is constraining, especially if you've played PC games in those genres. The music games and other party games are only nicer on a console because you don't have to worry about anything. As the XBox shows, a PC plugged into a TV is all you really need, and if it's a real PC, you can do a lot more than just games.

Re:Not really...

[KDR_11k]

That costs me $500. A GeForce 6800 GT costs the same amount.

You should shop around a bit more. The 6800GT was available for 350 when it was new.

Re:Not really...

[be-fan]

PC RPG's suck goat nuts. If I wanted a game so damn non-linear as to have no particular storyline, I'd go outside and wander around...

Re:Not really...

[Tychon]

Except for the whole anal pillaging after you're arrested for trying to slay everyone in town with a glass sword, of course.

Re:Not really...

[Tim C]

I buy myself an Xbox (200$), PS2 (180$), and a GameCube (120$). That costs me $500. A GeForce 6800 GT costs the same amount.

I bought a 6800GT shortly after they were released here in the UK; then, it cost me about £250. Right now, a year later, a decent XBox bundle will set you back about £200. I have absolutely no idea how you managed to pay so much for your GT - even the new 7800GTs can be had for less than that...

Re:Not really...

[m50d]

I buy myself an Xbox (200$), PS2 (180$), and a GameCube (120$). That costs me $500. A GeForce 6800 GT costs the same amount.

I can build a whole PC for that, with a geforce 6200. Not the very best of the best, but good enough - as others have said, if you're going to compare the current top-of-the-range graphics card you should compare buying the consoles when they were new.

Then I look at the games. Between the GameCube, Xbox, and PS2, I own (easily) over 100 games. Have there been over 100 PC games in the past 3 years that are worth owning? We do have representatives from the real-time strategy crowd and the FPS crowd, but what of the musir rythm games, platformers, party games (Mario Party on a computer would be considerably more constrained!), J-RPGs, etc?

It's my experience that you see more "wacky" games for the PC, since it's so easy to develop for.I should mention I've never had to patch Super Mario Sunshine. When I bought it in 2002, it worked bug free!

I've had many PC games I don't need to patch. The difference is if there is a bug, you *can* patch it.

Re:Not really...

[L0rdJedi]

I buy myself an Xbox (200$), PS2 (180$), and a GameCube (120$). That costs me $500. A GeForce 6800 GT costs the same amount.

A 6800 GT might cost that at the extreme high end, but you can easily get one for well under $300 (just checked NewEgg). Hell, my dad picked up a 7800 GTX 256 MB for $500 just before Christmas, so there's no reason to spend that much on a 6800. I managed to get a 6800 for under $200 (though, it's not a GT, but it does play all the latest games with no problem).

Re:Not really...

[bitkari]

I buy myself an Xbox (200$), PS2 (180$), and a GameCube (120$). That costs me $500. A GeForce 6800 GT costs the same amount

You don't need to spend $500 on the latest video card to play current games. You can get a more than capable video card for under $100.

We do have representatives from the real-time strategy crowd and the FPS crowd, but what of the musir rythm games, platformers, party games (Mario Party on a computer would be considerably more constrained!), J-RPGs, etc?

*Rhythm games - How about stepmania?
*J-RPGs - Final Fantasy XI should keep you busy until Phantasy Star goes online.
*Platformers - I recommend the excellent Psychonauts.
*Party games - I wouldn't wish Mario Party on my worst enemy, but when my friends come over we sit down in front of the TV and play a few dozen rounds of Mashed.

I should mention I've never had to patch Super Mario Sunshine. When I bought it in 2002, it worked bug free!

Consoles certainly win out there, I hate patching. Although, if things aren't kept under control, we might see consoles slipping into patch fever.

Re:Not really...

[omeg]

RPGs and platformers are, in my opinion, and that of many other gamers, not played better on a PC. I can understand it if you can play some PC RPGs better on a keyboard, but platformers?

Take a look at the amount of RPGs and platformers that have been released for the PC and any console!

Re:Not really...

[ruiner13]

Just FYI, But the PS2 has USB ports right under the controller ports that accept various USB devices, including keyboards and mice. Not all games support them, but ones that do (Red Faction comes to mind) are very nice and much the same (usually) as playing on a PC.

Re:Not really...

[Anonymous Coward]

I buy myself an Xbox (200$), PS2 (180$), and a GameCube (120$). That costs me $500. A GeForce 6800 GT costs the same amount.

I'm not sure where you do your shopping - but 6800GT's cost half that here.

Also, shouldn't you have a 360 in that list instead of the previous generation?

Re:Not really...

[dAzED1]

if you spend 3 hours a day playing games (2 too many) playing 3 different games 1 hour each, it would take you over a month to cycle through your games. That's dumb.

How about getting maybe 5 or 6 that you really like, and playing them? Then it doesn't matter a hill of beans. Also note that in theory, a PC can be used for other things (writing a resume', doing school work...) while you'd be hard-pressed to do such on an xbox.

There are simple reasons (that have been gone over and over here) why PCs as gaming platforms are still around. Nevermind the fact that you have to get a TV to go along with that game console, which is another big cost...

Re:Not really...

[randyest]

That costs me $500. A GeForce 6800 GT costs the same amount.

No it doesn't. In fact, it never cost $500 (we're talking US$, right?) -- it was released at $350 retail.

Please start over with your point using reality as a basis. Thanks.

Re:Not really...

[aonaran]

Since when do PCs come with extar controllers and AV adapters?

Re:Not really...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, you seem to forget that genres like platformers and RPGs are better on a PC anyway.
I hope you actually meant FPS' and RTS', otherwise id be worried you're not just smoking crack, you're smoking 5-MEO-DMT laced salvia

Re:Not really...

[aaronl]

Sorry, I meant it as they would be better on PC, not that they are *currently* better. If the console studios released on PC, they could be better than they are on consoles. You could eliminate disc swaps, control annoyances, and have better graphics, among many other things.

Re:Not really...

[oneils]

He's probably not from the U.S. Mine cost $550 canadian when I got it(two months after release). Tab after taxes...$630. With the exchange rate at the time, that's $530 U.S. (or $460 U.S. before tax).

Re:Not really...

[oneils]

And yes, I did shop around for that 6800Gt. But, by the same token, the original xbox cost $700 (before tax!) when it came out here (much like our australian friend mentioned above - the us dollar was worth much more back then) and the ps2 was over $500.

Does it run on Linux?

[renrutal]

One feature I do wish from the hardware makers are good drivers for non-Windows OSs.

And yes ATI, I'm looking at you, all your cards are no better than onboard ones on Linux. Please don't wait until the games are here, 'cause by then NVidia will already completely own this rapidly growing niche.

Immersion

[Aqua OS X]

As an interactive designer I would tend to agree, yet I do believe that graphics become an important element of game play when simulation and or immersion are goals of a game's designer(s).

If you're simulating a real world that people have preconceived notions of, detailed virtual environments become a very powerful tool.

Re:Immersion

[kfg]

. . .detailed virtual environments become a very powerful tool.

How about virtual environments that are highly suggestive of detail?

The brain's ablility to fool itself is the most powerful tool of virtual reality.

KFG

Re:Immersion

[KDR_11k]

What do you think polygons, textures, normalmaps, etc are?

Your brain can add details but only if it thinks the details belong there. And you never get close enough to see the lack of detail.

Re:Immersion

[kfg]

What do you think polygons, textures, normalmaps, etc are?

Exactly.

Your brain can add details but only if it thinks the details belong there. And you never get close enough to see the lack of detail.

How much detail is there in a Seurat?

KFG

Re:Immersion

[Aqua OS X]

Of course... 3D games, by their very nature, fool the brain into thinking an environment is detailed. Look at the oldest trick in the book.... the creation of a wall. If a developer never needs to show you the back or the sides of a wall, they'll simply show you a plane that looks like a wall :shrug:

Moreover, that plane will totally disappear and won't even draw itself once it's out of your line of site. If you can't see it, it doesn't exist.... literally ;) (well, maybe the bounding box)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Cool!

[Eightyford]

I just upgraded to the new intel Extreme graphics thingy. The Bestbuy guy said it was the best on the market. Is that true??? I mean EXTREME!!!

He did say something about them breaking easy though. So I bought the extended warranty, of course.

Re:Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is sarcasm right...? I'd be sure it was sarcasm but it's just so... Out of Context...

Re:Cool!

[Khoa]

I hope to God you're joking.

Re:Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not EXTREME unless it involves snowboarding down a mountain while wearing pants that jack you off and being chased by pirates who want to rape you.

Graphics = Icing, Gameplay = Cake

[shoolz]

We all get lost in graphics. Graphics don't make a game, good gameplay does. Good gameplay = tasty cake, Good graphics = icing.

Quake 1:
Gameplay=cake, Graphics=sprinkles
Result: Tastes like nice cake

Half Life 2:
Gameplay=cake, Graphics=icing
Result: Tastes like premium cake

Doom 3:
Gameplay=shit, Graphics=icing
Result: Tastes like shit with a hint of sugar

Re:Graphics = Icing, Gameplay = Cake

[Randle_Revar]

Nice analogy, but personally I play games for the gameplay (not graphics), but I eat cake mainly for the icing (that is not to say that I would eat shit cake with icing, though).

Re:Graphics = Icing, Gameplay = Cake

[2e]

"Tastes like shit"
I know what cake tastes like.
I think I know what premium cake tastes like.
But I will have to take your word on what Doom 3 tastes like!

PCIx

[Daysaway]

When the technology is available to fully take advantage of the two-way bus communication on the PCI express cards, we will see the biggest jump in performace.

It is great that these cards are supporting great features such as parallax mapping however being able to offload algorithms for collision and other extremely processor intensive functions will be the biggest boon for not only games, but all kinds of graphical simulations.

Until then, the best we will get is the same quality games rendering prettier than before. Not faster.

Re:PCIx

[Randle_Revar]

I think you mean PCIe. PCIx is something else.
See http://www.pcisig.com/specifications/

Re:PCIx

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right, fat fingered that one.

Re:PCIx

[heinousjay]

You fat fingered an x for an e? What the hell kind of keyboard are you using?

Re:PCIx

[Anonymous Coward]

Laptop, and my middle finger went down, not up. This thread is starting to sound like something you would read on IGN.

No news for grown-ups

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be bigger news if "games" actually came out for adults instead of kids in adult clothing.

Re:The GFX features are great but games still suck

[AaronLawrence]

But, the thing that UT2004 added was gameplay! So that seems to be exactly what you want. And in UT2007 it sounds like they will do that again with the Conquest mode.

In my mind, UT2004 was exactly the right kind of sequel, adding several new and interesting game play options, including Onslaught, vehicles and new weapon types. UT2003 tried, but unfortunately produced gameplay that was not popular (bombing run, sports style).

Alongside that they are upgrading graphics. They probably do spend too much time on graphics still, but I don't think it's so terrible.

Doesn't look too good.

[rsilvergun]

I've read some reviews, and hell it can't even do doom 3 at 800x600x30fps. For integrated video I'm not complaining, but is still outperformed by my 3 year old Geforce 4 TI 4200; a midrange card at release for God's sake. The trouble is companies don't want a low end, there's not enough profit. I guess I can't really blame them (cheap super fast Voodoo 3s basically killed 3dfx), but it still sucks to be a cheapskate pc gamer right now. Oh well, that's what my ps2 is for I guess.

Re:Doesn't look too good.

[Kagenin]

In all fairness, my older radeon 9800 doesn't even do Doom3 @800x600x30fps.

As far as being a "cheap-skate" pc gamer, you can get by with agp8x, and older componants. My system has been holding up just fine for the time I've been using it; but then again, I upgrade fairly frequently, and build my own systems.

Oh, and 3dfx killed themselves when they bought out STB and started making their own boards. They lost too many allies in an industry where you are defined by them (Canopus, Obsidian, Creative, etc..). NVIDIA was awful sore about losing their favorite OEM buddies, who became 3dfx's manufacturing arm (and source of lucrative OEM deals... that proved to be not enough in the long run). ATI wasn't even really a force in the gaming arena in those days... and the GeForce was just a glimmer in a marketing exec's eye.

You should've seen the price tag on Obsidian's Single-slot SLI Voodoo2 board when it came out... and that was still on the PCI bus, no 2D acceleration at all...

Bottom line is the top of the line always costs more. At least you know what your getting with hardware reviews. If you want to save a few more bucks, try to find a used or refurb'ed one ebay or something (I've found some great used & refurb'd gear over the years...)

Advertising

[caitsith01]

And you have to wonder about the gratuitous link to the F.E.A.R. website - what does that have to do with ANYTHING? I notice this a lot in articles posted by Zonk - he leaves in lots of misleading and pointless links and his grammar and sentence structures don't make it clear which link is the actual story and which are just window dressing/kickback-funded advertorial content.

If ./ readers want to know about high end games they can use Google. News should be news, not commercials.

Newest?

[Shark]

It looks at today's newest computer games (e.g., F.E.A.R.) and compare the 3D effects.

Pffff, the author is soooo '2005'...

Thjat will look soooo cool

[JoeCommodore]

As I see my guts splattered on that highly rendered wall for the umpteenth time! Thanks for improving my game experience! (how about some better games to go with it?)

Re:Thjat will look soooo cool

[be-fan]

The slashdot cynicism about improvements in graphics is getting old. Have you played F.E.A.R? I'm not much of a gamer (indeed, I'm not a gamer at all --- aside from the occasional Halo match, the last game I played before F.E.A.R was Xenosaga a couple of years ago) but it really it really is an example of new technology (graphics, physics, AI) being used to create a better gaming experience. The F.E.A.R graphics and animation engine really does a good job of reproducing the weight of people and objects, making them realistic and making the story that much more engrossing. The flying shell casings and special effects really do add to the gun battle scenes, and shadows and lighting are used to good effect to create a creepy mood.

Re:Thjat will look soooo cool

[Overly Critical Guy]

I disagree. Every level in F.E.A.R. was a dark warehouse. Think of what could have been added to that game. Haunted caves, creepy abandoned houses, etc. Nope, everything was a factory or warehouse for the entire game.

Don't get me wrong, I had a fun time, but it wore thin to the point I played in hour-long spurts. In Half-Life 2, on the other hand, all the constant variety had me up all night playing.

You missed the point.

[Inoshiro]

"The next crop of consoles will set you back a lot more than a PC, though. 400$ for the XBox, 400$ for the PS3, 200$ for a Revolution... and then you get to buy controllers, AV adaptors, and games. And you still don't get to do any of the useful PC things."

Well, if you're going to jump in at the beginning of a console life cycle, it's going to be expensive. OTOH, let's sit back and do some real thinking. An Xbox, PS2, and GameCube would have been (respectively) 300$ USD + 300$ USD + 200$ USD (800USD!). The 500$ I quoted earlier was CAD. Now, at the same time, all the really cool games that I would've paid lots of $$ for back a few years ago are available for not really much (20-30$). I know what's bad and what's not bad.

Plus, PC gaming involves Microsoft. I have to pay 120$ USD for the OS and how much for Office? No thanks, I'd rather save all my money for console games (when doing entertainment), and run Linux on my PC. Linux doesn't tether me to MS, and doesn't cost me anything for the tools to do my job.

If you're really anal about it, I'm sure I can generate a nice fancy spreadsheet that shows how staying behind on consoles costs far, far less than PC games (since you can't get a Ti4400 easily, but for about the same money, you can get a GameCube with a game), and how it amoratizes better since I have no evil troubles playing Mario 1 on my NES (while Space Quest 1 VGA is not easy to run and play).

Re:You missed the point.

[NeMon'ess]

Office? You mean StarOffice? That's free. You don't have to pay MS for it. After all, you're content to use something non-MS for Linux.

I'll also point out that it's pretty foolish to buy a Ti4400 when 6200's are available for $60 or 70.

Re:You missed the point.

[sdyson]

I recently bought a 6600 GT for about £120 (about $200?) and can easily play Doom3 and Quake 4 on high video settings. There's no need to buy the absolute best and most expensive cards to play the latest games. This card will do me for about a year at which point I'll buy whatever card is around at the time for a similar price.

You also mention having to pay for a MS Win license but both the games I mentioned above work with very little effort in Linux. Hopefully this will become increasingly common in the near future.

Re:You missed the point.

[stonecypher]

To amortize is to spend over time. To look at money well-spent in terms of not needing to re-spend is equity, not amortization.

Re:You missed the point.

[raygundan]

Space Quest 1 VGA was perhaps a poor choice of example, since it *is* easy to run and play. Easier than when it was new, in fact. Rather than the old IRQ/Highmem/Soundblaster/blahblah DOS config nightmare, I just installed NAGI and copied my old game disks into the folder. See also FreeSCI for later Sierra games, and ScummVM for the lucasarts games.

You're right about hanging back on the lifecycle, though. I bought all of the last generation of consoles with a pile of controllers for a sum total of $180. It can pay to wait.

How easy it is for you to find old PC bits probably depends on your particular circle of friends. In this regard, it pays to know a couple of those "buy the latest all the time" guys, because they are perpetually unloading last years' gear at cut-rate prices.

Re:The GFX features are great but games still suck

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true. There's a crisis in creativity in games, cinema and music too. You have said it all. They make "effects" but not the "state of art".

That's not a fair comparison.

[raehl]

You could still play Space Quest 1 VGA easily if you had kept your computer from 1988 as well as your NES.

A $500 jump is it really costs $1000

[raehl]

You can't just take a computer, swap out your old graphics card, and put in the $500 one. Well, you can, but it isn't the most effective use of your money. Your old processor/MB/memory likely isn't going to be able to feed that $500 card optimally, or drive the non-graphics computations going on. If you want a $500 graphics improvement, you might need a $500 processor improvement, maybe more.

offtopic...

[jpardey]

but does anyone else seriously crave a pizza omlette right now?

There's still plenty of improvments to be made.

[raehl]

FPS has been continually improving. We take individually movable objects for granted now... what about maleable materials? What if every wall crumbles when you hit it with a rocket?

The two things that are still missing from FPS:

- Multisession persistence - the only character stats that improve over the course of a game are guns, and somewhat health and armor. There's especially a lack of persistence in multi-player FPS. What if I were to play an FPS today, and improve my character, log out, and log in tomorrow with those improvements? FPS Diablo for example.

- Worldspace - FPS are still limited in "level" size. It takes tens of seconds to minutes on comuputers to load a map, and once it's loaded, you're stuck within the confines of that map. What if, instead, you logged into a world and the world area around you was loaded, and the world continued to be dynamically loaded as you moved around? In current games, you can't play a map much bigger than a few buildings; what if instead you could drive from New York to LA (Or at least New York to New Haven?)

It's easy to not realize when game play is improved - movable objects, breakable glass, things you can see through and not shoot through, things you can shoot through and not see through, the ability to be above another character, those do make a difference on game play.

Re:There's still plenty of improvments to be made.

[Loonacy]

- Multisession persistence - the only character stats that improve over the course of a game are guns, and somewhat health and armor. There's especially a lack of persistence in multi-player FPS. What if I were to play an FPS today, and improve my character, log out, and log in tomorrow with those improvements? FPS Diablo for example.
You're talking about Planetside. As you level up, you get new skills to use different weapons, vehicles, etc.

- Worldspace - FPS are still limited in "level" size. It takes tens of seconds to minutes on comuputers to load a map, and once it's loaded, you're stuck within the confines of that map. What if, instead, you logged into a world and the world area around you was loaded, and the world continued to be dynamically loaded as you moved around? In current games, you can't play a map much bigger than a few buildings; what if instead you could drive from New York to LA (Or at least New York to New Haven?)
Not exactly an FPS, but the latest few Grand Theft Auto games are like this. The only thing missing is building interiors; when you walk into a building, it has to load in that "level".

Re:There's still plenty of improvments to be made.

[NeMon'ess]

Look into WWII Online. Create an account and go fight for the axis or allies in Europe on foot, in a tank, or in the air. Folks looking for a fast-paced Quake or Counterstrike experience with lots of action resetting every five minutes should look elsewhere. Wasn't that other kind of game supposed to be Planetside?

Re:There's still plenty of improvments to be made.

[DrSkwid]

One of F.E.A.R.'s sections has walls that do that.

You fight a robot guard thing that's too big for the place (some old housing).

Both your explosives and it's robot arms will smash away the partition walls.

It was quite effective and an excellent surprise and not one of those "smash your way through 100 walls so we can show off" features.
They guy I was watching play that bit didn't even notice that his grenade blew the walls out.

What I Want is an FPS that is truly hard to defeat.
We (my friend above and I) were saying "it's going to get real tough in a minute" and then it ended.
The last boss was uber lame, bring back Duke and shitting down the last boss's neck !!

Re:There's still plenty of improvments to be made.

[Junks Jerzey]

What if, instead, you logged into a world and the world area around you was loaded, and the world continued to be dynamically loaded as you moved around? In current games, you can't play a map much bigger than a few buildings; what if instead you could drive from New York to LA (Or at least New York to New Haven?)

This has been common on consoles for years (GTA 3, for example). There's no reason it couldn't be done on PCs, other than that developers aren't willing to.

Re:There's still plenty of improvments to be made.

[Fallingcow]

This has been common on consoles for years (GTA 3, for example). There's no reason it couldn't be done on PCs, other than that developers aren't willing to.

The GTA games were released for the PC as well.

Also, Morrowind was doing this (IIRC) before GTA3 came out, and it was primarily a PC release. FarCry does some dynamic loading, I think, though it also has longer loads at the beginning of each level.

Re:There's still plenty of improvments to be made.

[Lord_Dweomer]

I think what you are discussing is valid, however I disagree with your implementation. While there are certainly some compromises that need to be made to get the MMO and FPS crowds to merge...I think what sets most FPS apart is the twitch skill required. While it is certainly interesting to combine the strategic elements of MMO games with the twitch of FPS, the reason skilled players like FPS is because even if they have a knife and the other guy has the uber weapon of killing, all it takes is one good knife hit to the head and they're down. Sure, a higher level person might have access to more things than me, but I don't want to be unable to kill him just because he has an ungodly number of hitpoints.

In terms of worldspace, i totally agree. And what i'd like to see (but would never happen in my lifetime) is a massive world with dynamically deformable terrain. When the game goes live, everything is pristine. And you can travel between cities and such. But over time as war progresses and people try to control different cities and territories, the war takes its toll on the landscape and cityscape. Buildings would remain with whatever damage someone did to them. Merchants might be driven out. And they could be rebuilt as well.

The other thing i'd REALLy like to see is for someone to have a game with a much larger flight ceiling. How cool would it be to be fighting in a space battle, and then take your boarding party in a shuttle craft directly down to the planet with no load times. Or can you say orbital bombardment from a capital ship in real time as the battle is being waged? And not just the simulated airstrike in BF2...I'm talking real players in gunner seats on ships shooting the main guns down to the planet surface.

Re:There's still plenty of improvments to be made.

[TheRaven64]

What if every wall crumbles when you hit it with a rocket?

Wow, flashback. The Catacomb Abyss - the first ever FPS, as I recall - had a number of walls that needed to be destroyed to proceed. One was in the first room you entered, something that took me a little while to work out the first time I played it.

Re:There's still plenty of improvments to be made.

[robnauta]

GTA does the same on the PC of course. And there are games that do streamload the environment, Dungeon Siege is a fine example. The world is made up of small patches which are streamed in if they are required and dropped by the LRU scheduler. You never see a 'loading' message, there are no pauses.

Agreed

[Supurcell]

Forget that scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise navigates that fancy holographic computer interface with his glove, I want to see some simple, effective Star Trek: TNG LCARS GUIs.

What I don't understand...

[yobjob]

Is how all this expensive hardware can play games at ridiculously high resolutions, yet they still don't look anything near as real as a game of football on a low resolution television set.

Re:What I don't understand...

[Hakubi_Washu]

I tend to ascribe that to resolution specifically (or, better, our minds ability to connect-the-dots on low resolution displays). On low resolution the fluidity of motion is more important since we'll make up for the lack of detail anyway, but it is apparently easier to create higher resolution for computer games than higher fluidity (artists cost?), so they try to achieve realism that way, which doesn't really work. Case in point: I saw the FF movie on crappy resolution first and was utterly stunned at its realism, so I decided to go to the cinema... Boy, what a mistake. Apparently they had great motion artists (When compared to games, which need to use the same animations again and again), but the detailed visuals were seriously lacking for my taste...

Re:What I don't understand...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is basically cause they have to high resolution, the old TVset has a very low resolution and maybe thats the way to go.. instead of showing all defects with highres, maybe hid them with lowres? =)

Re:What I don't understand...

[ardor]

Correct. The mind is much more sensitive to correct motion. I guess good motion blur and very good animation together can help a lot. Lighting is very advanced these days, in static settings PRT can make it look very real if used together with HDR. So this one isn't lacking, but animation is. Lighting has been pushed a lot in the past, but animation was left behind. A serious mistake. Half-Life 2 did it right (or at least less wrong than most) by improving animation.

Yes,.....

[Anonymous Coward]

but will it run Newton?

Re:The GFX features are great but games still suck

[Anonymous Coward]

FEAR is pretty and fun. They put a lot of effort into little effects here and there that make the game more immersive. Battle Field 2 has fun gameplay. Quake Wars is looking like it will be fun. I'm not big on Cyborgs, but Splash Damage has a history (Q3F, ET) of making fun multiplayer games and I'm on-board for more. DoD Source is attractive and fun, but nothing especially new. It's still better than looking at the grotesque visuals of DoD for Half-Life, though. AoE 3 looks good, and it's pretty fun. The latest NFS game looked pretty good, too, but I haven't played it. As for UT2k4, it added gameplay (what you're complaining isn't provided) along with built-in mic support.

You don't have to buy every new game that comes out. Doom 3 wasn't very popular, because it was boring. Who cares? Quake 4 isn't selling well, either. Big deal. That doesn't mean making games more attractive isn't a good thing. Do people really feel they're being insightful when they tell everyone "graphics isn't everything?" CounterStrike was the most-played FPS forever, and it looked less appealing than my hairy ass. I never liked it, but hordes of other people chose its gameplay over the superior visuals of essentially every other FPS game produced afterward.

To each their own...

[Imazalil]

Hmmm... What about regular strategy (un-realtime), simulations (planes, trains, automobiles, heck even bridges), "western-style" RPG's, MMORPG's, nethack, minesweeper, solitaire. PC's and Consoles are in different markets, hence things like dance and dance revolution are not too popular with the 3lit3 hax0rs and their souped up PC's. There is nothing wrong with rhythm games or the mario party games, but they are not pc games, likewise one does not buy a console for some serious sim games.

You buy the system that has the games that you want to play, it's that simple.

Yes, but maybe not for long.

[ardor]

Right now, OpenGL is on-par with Direct3D 9, now that the framebuffer object extension is out. Direct3D 10 is a wholly different issue, however. It has support for geometry shaders, constant buffers, superbuffers... OpenGL needs to catch up with new extensions or else it will fall behind, again. And this time, it may not survive.

Re:Yes, but maybe not for long.

[Cyno]

Direct3D isn't an option on my desktop, well, not without libraries that use OpenGL to do the actual rendering.

Besides, I'd rather use OpenGL for my own programs. So its unlikely it won't survive. It may not be your favorite, it may not have your favorite D3D eye candy games, but this isn't a competition about who can make the best gaming API. It isn't even really a competition. OpenGL is already the standard on my platform of choice, just like D3D is the standard on yours.

Re:Yes, but maybe not for long.

[ardor]

Its not relevant if it is your favourite or mine. If it doesnt have cutting-edge features, it will fall behind. If it falls behind, less and less commercial games will use it, and less reason will be there for the big IHVs to write drivers supporting the API. And poof! its gone. THIS is the main problem.

Of course this doesnt matter if you develop stuff that works on your computer and never leaves it. But once you want it to run elsewhere you have to consider these things.

In a perfect world, there would be no Direct3D, since the ARB would be a fast, competent organization, and the API wouldn't be as cluttered. A SDK would exist, in its volume, contents, and documentation on par to the Direct3D SDK.

Re:Yes, but maybe not for long.

[Cyno]

In a perfect world we wouldn't have this discussion.

There's more to 3D graphics APIs than cutting-edge gaming features.

OpenGL was originally designed for professional 3D graphic modelling, not gaming.

That it does so well in games is an example of how efficient and well thought out it was originally designed.

Getting these new "features" into OpenGL is a no-brainer. Seriously. Children can do it.

You have a point about drivers, since most drivers are closed-source, meaning we have to rely on nVidia and ATI to provide drivers that work with OpenGL. But if they didn't it would only hurt their products. There's always competition, nobody can use their market dominance to force something this significant.

Re:Yes, but maybe not for long.

[ardor]

"In a perfect world we wouldn't have this discussion."

Correct.

"There's more to 3D graphics APIs than cutting-edge gaming features."

Yes, but today, 3D gaming is one HUGE part of it. It is the driving force behind the progress in the consumer-level cards market. It is the number one reason why stuff like Doom3 or FEAR can exist today. If the ARB is reasonable, they recognize this. 3D-Gaming has become one main pillar of 3D graphics, there is no way around that.

"OpenGL was originally designed for professional 3D graphic modelling, not gaming."

See above.

"That it does so well in games is an example of how efficient and well thought out it was originally designed."

Well.... it does well, but it could do better. That's why OpenGL ES was designed. Also, it won't do well for games if the ARB decides to sleep again.

"Getting these new "features" into OpenGL is a no-brainer. Seriously. Children can do it."

Geometry shaders a no-brainer? Superbuffers? Practical, flexible instancing? Constant buffers? Well, they fit in nicely into the API, thats true, but the point is whether they will be available soon enough or not. Considering the ENORMOUS time it took them to finish the FBO spec (and its not even an ARB_ one yet, just EXT_ !), OpenGL's future may be grim.

"You have a point about drivers, since most drivers are closed-source, meaning we have to rely on nVidia and ATI to provide drivers that work with OpenGL. But if they didn't it would only hurt their products. There's always competition, nobody can use their market dominance to force something this significant."

Reconsider the market you are talking about. For CAD stuff you don't need fragment programs. You do need them for games. Of course nVidia and ATI will continue supporting OpenGL for CAD, but for GAMING? Remember that shader support is far from trivial. Developing driver code for it is time consuming and expensive. If there is no market for OpenGL games then well.... goodbye state-of-the-art. And goodbye gaming-in-Linux; AAA-titles for the PC will not be able run on another OS than Windows, since it will be the ONLY one with a cutting-edge 3D API.

Re:Yes, but maybe not for long.

[Billly Gates]

Unfortunately Vista just wraps all opengl calls around directx and I believe SGI sold their patents and OPengl technology to Microsoft.

I assume its dead as Microsoft wants to create more proprietary vendor lockin. I am pissed that opengl performance is crippled on Vista. ... that and the fact I blew money upgraing my AthlonXP to a +2400 and Microsoft canceled the 32bit version of Vista.

Where did all polygons/second rate go?

[slaida1]

Why professional modelling software makers can't optimise their programs to run fast on gaming cards? It's 3D it has lots of polys like games, what gives?

Why all the talk of game graphics is about filters and layers and not 10k+ polys / character? In fact the polygon talk is all but dead.

Because NV and ATI use basically same chips on both their gamer and pro lines, only limiting funtionality on driver level, is their only option to cripple and stop pro modelling sw makers' support for gaming cards to keep poly-drawing speed low and pump filtering/texturing/layers?

Platformers better on a PC?

[SuperKendall]

Platformers better on a PC? I don't think so. I don't know if you knew, but some of these new-fangled consoles have analog controls nowadays!

As to the rest of your arguments, there are a lot of gamers who never bother to get network connectivity. And extra controllers are perhaps $30 a system? Again only if you plan to use it multi-player, with someone else who does not have the same system and thus another controller they can bring...

The new system base prices are more expensive to start with for sure, but you can just wait a year, whack off $100 from each of those prices (well, perhaps not the Revolution - say $50) and continue to play the current consoles for another year with dirt-cheap games you never had time to play before.

The time for PC centricity in gaming has long since past. In case you hadn't noticed many games go to the XBox before the PC now. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 was the last hurrah for big mainstream PC releases of games.

There will always be a niche of games that play better on a PC (totally agree on RPG) but they are dwindling as the size and reach of the console market is too compelling.

Re: New 3D Graphics Card Features in 2006

[2e]

I heard of this company from, like, Sweden.
They're called "BitBoys, Oy!"
And they're coming out with this cool graphics card that like makes pixels appear on the screen, like really fast.
And they're develping a new technology that will "render polygons" whatever those are.
I have a Matrox G400 and I can't wait for this new technology!

waiting, Re:You missed the point.

[mennucc1]

Just last week I bought an original copy of "The curse of Monkey Island" (©1997 Lucas Arts); I will call it MI3, short of "Monkey Island 3".
System requirements: Windows95, DirectX 5, Pentium 90, 16MB RAM, 1.2MB HD free space. (Oh! The memories!).
I tried to install it in Windows XP, no way: it seems to install OK, but when I double click the icon, it never starts.
It took me 8 hours to find a way to install and run it in Linux. I happen to own Windows 95, so I tried Qemu : Win95 installs, but it refuses to switch to 256 color mode :-(. Then I tried Wine: I had to override its native DirectX (my MI3 contains original DirectX5), and now MI3 works as a charm. (Nothing beats emulators for Hardware Archeology!).
I fished the box of Monkey Island out of a huge heap of old sw at my local mall, "all for 10euros". I wonder how many money I saved, waiting 9 years for it. :-) Does anyone of the /. crowd buy it in the 90's, and remember how much it costed?

Re:waiting, Re:You missed the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

You could have saver yourself some time using win95 compatibility mode in Winblows. It worked for me... but I prefer playing on Linux. And as it seems you also use linux, you could give scummVM a go.

Have a go at www.scummvm.org All those LucasArts adventures work like a charm... and you have 2x and 3x rescaling with antialiasing. Under Winblows, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, OS X, a Palm or even a Dreamcast. If you use a debian-based distro, there is a deb on their site.

Back to the Future

[Keichann]

I'm sorry, but parallax is new?

Find me a decent platformer or space shooter (apart from that one Team 17 did) on the Amiga that didn't use parallax scrolling. :)

Re:Back to the Future

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are referring to "Projext X" by Team17, then that most certainly DID have parallax scrolling...

Here's the problem:

[Cadallin]

World of Warcraft may not have photorealistic graphics, but still so much time has been spent on graphical aspects of the interface, that there's really not that much there. That's why I quit playing after a relatively short time. The presentation may be quite varied, but as far as interaction there's just very bloody little to do. This shows very badly in the combat engine, and in the professions.

In the combat engine, one basically just stares at the screen waiting for timers to go off, and then one presses the corresponding number key. Sorry, but that's fucking boring. After about eight weeks of playing and trying my best to like the game, joining a guild, etc, I just quit. It wasn't fun. The professions too, suck. You click on an item in your iventory, or in the game world, and wait while a fucking timer goes off, most of the you then get a success message, sometimes you get a fail. It's just dull, there's more interaction in most text based MUDs than there is in WoW.

In my opinion 3D has never delivered on its promise of bringing more engrossing gameplay, only in rare instances has this been the case. Mario 64 brought us better gameplay, Ocarina of Time did as well, but WoW definately is worse as an RPG than, say, Baldur's Gate, or Ultima 7, or Ultima Underworld, and I think I know exactly why. The art for 3D games is so incredibly much more labor intensive that graphics creation is where all the money and time budget goes, while in "ye olden days" companies actually had TIME to devote to other aspects. The old Ultima games are particulary good examples, their worlds are rich, organic and complex, filled with interaction. WoW and it's ilk come off as wooden and immalleable. World of Warcraft literally plays like graphical version of Zork without the witty writing:

You are in a green meadow, you see a sword.

>get sword

You take the sword. You see a goblin.

> Hit goblin with sword.

You miss goblin.

goblin hits you for 3 damage.

>Hit goblin with sword

You hit goblin for 3

Your skill in sword is now 2.

goblin dies.

Re:Here's the problem:

[Negatyfus]

I see you didn't mention any other MMORPG's. I don't know that many of them, but I can tell that most of them were even less inter-active than WoW. The boring and repetitive gameplay is something you will find in most MMORPG's for several reasons. It's a real challenge for game companies to improve upon the genre in this respect. In single-player games you can do so much more. But this is a whole new discussion. We were talking about the graphics having an impact on gameplay, not the genre.

Re:Here's the problem:

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at Guild Wars, and the Mesmer profession in particular. Should solve your boredom problem.

Re:The GFX features are great but games still suck

[master_p]

Let me add F.E.A.R. in that list of mediocre games. I am currently at level 8, and all I have seen is fight against really clever enemy commandos...the game occasionally throws some 'horror' images, but they fail to be scary or tied up to the general feeling of the game...furthermore, the actual game is a ...text adventure: if you don't read the text at the opening screen of any level, then you have no connection to what is happening on the screen. F.E.A.R. is excellent technically, but as a game it sucks.

grfx CAN enhance gameplay

[majid_aldo]

examples in fp shooters:

- shadows. eg players casting shadows add a strategic element to gameplay.
- water effects. eg players can hide in water. depending on lighting conditions, the water can be transparent or reflective.
- HDR effects. eg. if you just came out from darkness (hiding) it should be a disadvantage to you.
- motion blur. eg if you use a rapid fire weapon you should be disadvantaged b/c you should experience vibration.

having said this, however, i don't see any other gameplay altering graphics features. from now on, all i expect to see is a steady march towards more realistic rendering.

Re:grfx CAN enhance gameplay

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe for single player, but not multi. That would assume that everyone has a high-end graphics card with all these features enabled. My 7800's motion blur and HDR would put me at a disadvantage vs someone playing with a GeForce 2. More realistic, yeah, but it un-levels the playing field. I guess you could have servers with a minimum hw requirement, but that seems overly problematic.

Re:The GFX features are great but games still suck

[ErroneousBee]

FWIW, my upgrade cycle is on hold till UT2007 hits the shelves, when I will take a hit on and AMD64 CPU, MOBO and nVidia GPU in one go.

Currently running passivly cooled 2500 Barton core and nv 4200Ti.

I just wonder whether I'll be able to hit a bangs/watt sweetspot like I did with my current setup.

Re:The GFX features are great but games still suck

[DrSkwid]

I finished it the other day, it doesn't really change.

Pretty and fun though. My friend spent a few minutes and all his grenades trying to kill a something in the next room which turned out to be a photocopier left running =)

Not sure about the text bit though, I have no idea what/who we saved or why. "kill everything" is the only instruction I need.

Total cost.

[Anonymous Coward]

The gouging price of the card itself + multiple hundred dollar electric bill to run it + bill for additional a/c to the cool room back down. The hidden cost shouldn't beat the price for the $700 cards in a year but it will beat the price for the $300 ones and it's perpetual. It makes one wonder if these graphic venders have major holdings in the energy production market(it'd actually make fiscal sense for them to do so).

Re:The GFX features are great but games still suck

[similar to mh2]

What the fuck? You're complaining because the AI is brilliant? And if you can't pick up on what's going on by listening to what Betters says after you upload stuff from a a laptop, or listening to the voicemails, well..your comprehension sucks. A lot.

Re:The GFX features are great but games still suck

[drxray]

UT2004 launched as a budget game (unless you got the special edition), included a partial rebate for UT2003 and got cheaper very quickly.

UT2003 was same-old gameplay with new graphics, so I didn't buy it. UT2004 added gameplay, so I did. In fact, it was probably the best value for money of any game I've bought, and it keeps getting better. They released another map pack only a month ago.

sorry, no

[namekuseijin]

"you seem to forget that genres like platformers and RPGs are better on a PC anyway"

I don't know that. PCs are known for mindless multiplayer first-person mayhem and turn-based strategic automated board-games.

Platformers like Super Mario Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog or RPGs like Final Fantasy are a very console thingy. To be exact: japanese videogame consoles' thingies.

I'd much rather to control a character via gamepad rather than keyboard/mouse. Keyboard/mouse is what i tirelessly use at work. A gamepad reminds me of a sofa and some rest...

Re:sorry, no

[antihippy]

I've been reading this discussion with some interest. I would like to ask when consoles started doing RPGs better than PCs? Oh, you mean "Final Fantasy" and its ilk? Sorry, but the final fantasy brand of RPG is very niche and, in my opinion, extremely boring. These games represent the sort of RPG that is archaic compared with the likes of Deus Ex, System Shock 2, Planescape Torment, KOTOR etc etc. I used to play Final Fantasy-esque style RPGs back in the day and, frankly, I've grown up since then. I would say they have niche (actually cult) appeal but I am mystified why people get so obsessed with them. They are very dull. Compare Final Fantasy VII with say ... Fallout (1 or 2); Similar gameplay (isometric, turnbased) but Fallout kicks their arse in many ways. If you like your FPS then it may be arguable that consoles are better than PC, but really, aren't we getting a little bored of them now? Half Life 2 being a flawed exception. For example; I never understood the fascination with Halo. when I played this I thought "ok, so it's pretty and you can drive the vehicles, but I've been playing these sorts of games for years now." I like my strategy games and, frankly, I've yet to see a decent strategy game on a console. Where are the Total Wars? Why do they tie you to these rubbish controller things when I have a perfectly good pc sitting over there? To me consoles represent the McGame industry. Fine, if you like that sort of thing, but as time goes on and the industry becomes less and less innovative expect to see increasingly derivative games - oh and much DRM. Not that you won't get DRM on a PC, just the proprietary formats and their ilk have all been problems on the console for years. I find it slightly wierd when I talk to a kid about games and he shows me the latest greates 'thing' and it's something I played years ago. Or he doesn't understand when I point out that there are better ways of doing things. It's almost as though medicority is cool and it's great that things are quite derivative.

Re:sorry, no

[namekuseijin]

"I would like to ask when consoles started doing RPGs better than PCs?"

I guess that would be since Square's masterpiece -- Final Fantasy VI, on SNES. Or perhaps a little before that, with Enix's swan song on the NES -- the amazing Dragon Quest IV. That was when RPGs as a storytelling medium took a huge step forward over the hack'n'slash multiplayer PC RPG boredom...

In fact, IMHO multiplayer RPG things in the PC are extremely boring because it takes away the fantasy about the game: suddenly, you're well aware that you're not fighting some truly cruel villain, just some Joe Blow from Milwaukee... kind of a let down in a "RPG"...

"Why do they tie you to these rubbish controller things when I have a perfectly good pc sitting over there?"

Perhaps most people's PC aren't good enough for gaming as a specially designed machine like consoles. Or perhaps the simplicity of playing with a joystick on the sofa in a big screen is far more entertaing for some people rather than playing with keyboard and mouse in the same boring PC of everyday job...

"I find it slightly wierd when I talk to a kid about games and he shows me the latest greates 'thing' and it's something I played years ago."

Yeah, i remember playing Metal Gear on an old MSX. However, despite featuring basically the same gameplay as the old one, the incredible production values on the plot, spoken dialogue, far better graphics certainly make it stand out. Same for platformers, shoot-em-ups and the likes...

Besides, isn't it the same thing for every human enterprise? Just because some caveman dude in the far past discovered it was cool to beat some trees in some random rythm doesn't mean some people in the future -- say, Bach or Beethoven -- would be mere mediocre rehashers to the thing called music... :)

Re:sorry, no

[antihippy]

Especially when Joe Blow is a spotty oik of a teenager. And I dispute that the Final Fantasy series was a step forward. It was much the same "Hack-n-Slash" game with only a marginal improvement in graphics and playability (and even then ...). i]Besides, isn't it the same thing for every human enterprise? Just because some caveman dude in the far past discovered it was cool to beat some trees in some random rythm doesn't mean some people in the future -- say, Bach or Beethoven -- would be mere mediocre rehashers to the thing called music... :)/i] I don't think it's the same argument. For that argument to be true you would have to assume that consoles represent a massive step forward in tech'. Mr Cavemen did not have the same tools as Mr Bach; Mr PC Programmer has largely the same tools as MR Console Programmer.

Re:sorry, no

[namekuseijin]

"It was much the same 'Hack-n-Slash' game with only a marginal improvement in graphics and playability"

you seem to be purposefuly forgetting to mention the amazing plot and dialogue, which are, frankly, what really set FF apart from old RPGs... and Nobuo Uematsu's superb musical scores! :)

yes, other than that, it's just hack'n'slash, just as most other games, PC or not, are just derivatives of older genres with updated gfx and better narrative devices and production values...

i'm done here

Great Graphics, Uninspired Gameplay.

[MaWeiTao]

The games pictured in those screenshots exemplify what's wrong with the gaming industry. Every single one of those games except one is a damn FPS, and the one that is different is another of many RTS games. Some of those are probably decent in their own right, but how many times do we have to play the same thing?

I'm impressed by what they're accomplishing in terms graphics. It's fascinating to me. At the same I have no desire to play any of those games because they all provide the same generic experience. It's like there's a game design template that all these developers grab ideas from. For all the innovation in graphics there is very little being done in story-telling, gameplay or mechanics. What about AI that can learn and adapt to the player? Apparently FEAR has some good AI, but it's basically reactionary, and the game itself is a lame take on generic Japanese horror movies; the developers watched the Ring one time too many.

There certainly is a place for ultra-realistic games. However, that these kinds of games don't inherently negate every other genre; less-realistic games aren't inferior. Is chess any less of a game because I can play a PC strategy game that runs pixel shader 3.0?

The marketing people spout the generic drivel that they're opening new vistas in gaming. We'll I have yet to see anything even remotely on that scale. These people have convinced the average, ignorant consumer that graphics are the pinnacle of good gaming making it difficult for anyone with less than the most advanced graphics to compete effectively.

These new games require massive budgets, a legion of employees and several years to complete. There's no way in hell an independent developer can compete on those terms. It's likely why Nintendo has decided to focus on gameplay over advanced graphics. The flashy graphics will impress everyone initially, but the excitement dies quickly the game itself offers nothing new.

The key question is, can you convince people that your game is superior based primarily on gameplay? I think it's a difficult proposition nowadays, the gameplay had better be phenomenal.

This seems to be a new thing.

[raygundan]

All of us of a certain age remember the advent of parallax scrolling-- which is using multiple regions of scrolling graphics at varying speeds to simulate the real-world parallax effect. (ie, clouds scroll more slowly than the foreground.)

Parallax mapping, however, is something else entirely in this context. It appears to be the name for a more advanced form of bump-mapping that incorporates the sort of depth and occlusion you'd get from a real object as you panned around it. One more advance in creating the illusion of a bajillion polygons from simple surfaces.

http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/games/SteepParallax/

Disclaimer: I am absolutely not an expert on this. If I am wildly wrong, please post and explain-- i'm curious too!

'Old' Music... Heh...

[Chordonblue]

"
It's just like with 'old' music. "There is so much crap right now, music in the 60s/70s/80s/whatever_period was so much better". No it wasn't, there was just as much crap around then as there is now, only the good songs 'stuck' and are still being played." ...are still being played... In TODAY'S 'songs'. God, how many remakes must we old fogies endure?!!

You forgot about cost cutting

[tjstork]

It's nearly impossible to get a TV with a UHF/VHF antenna input, because they don't make them like that anymore.

So they took a feature away from TVs now and that is better?

It's nearly impossible to get a TV that doesn't support closed captioning and content lockouts, because they don't make them like that anymore.

True

Technology has improved, and they don't make them "like that" anymore because "that" way yields a poorer product.

Sometimes, but not always. Sometimes newer versions are less expensively made and with poorer workmanship and materials to cut costs. Consider these examples:

American cars prior to 1974 were actually made from a better and stronger grade of steel than cars are today. It was also heavier and less fuel efficient, so the car got worse gas mileage. I used to run my 1973 Oldsmobile through obstacles that would actually screw up an SUV of today. In a similar vein, cars used to have bumpers that actually worked, but they weighed too much, again, fuel efficiency favored, and got the boot. Now if you want a fuel efficient car, that's what you get today, but, if you wanted a car that was built like a tank, well, they just don't make them like that any more!

They used to put cane sugar in Coca Cola, but in the 1980s American bottlers switched to corn syrup as a sweetener. Again, this was to cut costs and increase profit margins. As a result, if you really want the "real thing", you should get it from Mexico, where they use cane sugar to these days. Sugar is not propped up in Mexico like it is in the USA, so its actually -cheaper-. But in the USA, they just don't make Coke like they used to.

It used to be that computers did not have DRM, so you could copy anything with them, but, in the not too distant future, you won't be able to, because, they won't make them like that any more. In fact, you won't be allowed to record off of analog out and then redigitize, because, they won't make them like that any more.

It used to be that you got real food on airplanes, but, its too expensive, and now you can't even get peanuts because of handful of people with peanut allergies, and so, they don't fly like they used to.

Tonka trucks used to be always made out of steel and if you were a kid they were awesome. But then they switched to plastic stuff. Or how about when they switched Lincoln Logs from wood to plastic. What's up with that? Now you can get the "collectible original" Lincoln Logs and those are actually wood.

Technology is not always about making things better. Sometimes its about making a product 25% as good as it was, so you could make it for 40% cheaper.

Re:You forgot about cost cutting

[Anonymous Coward]

Tonka trucks are made of plastic now? Jesus fucking christ, what's the world coming to? Isn't anything sacred any more? What's next, plastic Erector Sets (Mechano)? Plastic Tinker Toys?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

3D mark '06 out today from Futuremark.

[thomasxstewart]

Today 3d mark '05 was replaced. It had trouble all year keeping up with sli & dual core changes, while only testing shader model 2. Over year scores seemed to stagnate, yet each new release of 3D mark '05 simply pushed all previous scores lower. Now one card can expect up to 10,000 in 3d mark '05. In 3D mark '06 shader model 3 is tested, sli & dual core are better addressed, while game card & cpu are both evaluated, before only gpu was evaluated. Its' 576 mb download & available at all usual sources. Awaitng Published Results. Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D.