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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."
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.
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...cheaper graphic cards...
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.
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?
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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.
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Meh... Increasing emphasis on super-duper graphics decreases emphasis on gameplay and fun. Give me the classics any day of the week!
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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.
$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...
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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...
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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.
is a decent card for under $100. I shouldn't need a $150-$200 card to play 8 month old games.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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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).
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Does anyone use OpenGL anymore? Is it still up to date with all of these features?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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 $400 price tag might just be justifiable for a 7800GTX.
There is also the problem of having too much realism. When everything is almost perfectly realistic, the brain concentrates on finding imperfections - inaccurate lighting, tiniest BSP flaws, misaligned textures. This happens because in the Real World those cues are used for determination of spatial relationships (surface quality, shape intricacies etc.) so when one of them is just slightly incorrect, you get this feeling of "wrongness".
So, actually, increasing simulation quality doesn't mean more subjective realism.
"But if you buy all 3 consoles each generation, you're spending abut as much for the PC, and not getting the side benefits of a full computer."
I buy myself an Xbox (200$), 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!
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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.
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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
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.
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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.
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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?)
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"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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.