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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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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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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.
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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.
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
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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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.
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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.
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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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.
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.
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
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.
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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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).
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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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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.
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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