You're comparing it to the wrong chip. Everything I've seen and heard about the K7 indicates that it'll beat the pants off not just the Celeron but the Xeon at the same clock speed... and it clocks faster, too. If you compare a K7's price tag (and we're talking $400 or so for the 500s) to a (slower) Xeon's, AMD comes out ahead by a serious margin...
This was a decent review. The author, Kenn Hwang knew his stuff. It is worth the reading.
About the chip... I can't wait. I tried to see if VA Research was going to work on optimization for it. I got the salesmans response of we have other machines, wouldn't you rather buy that?
-- -I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
I've read lots of different reports on that
by
J.+FoxGlov
·
· Score: 2
I agree with the sentiment; 70 fps can cause motion sickness.:o> Reason why some people refuse to play Quake and EverQuest; it's not because they don't like playing games, they just get physically sick of watching those polygons.
18 fps was the quality of most.mov videos when Quicktime 1.5 was the big, big deal. I remember those looking choppy as hell. Maybe different eyes are more or less sensitive than "normal" eyes. I dunno. All I know is that you can't tell geeks they can't use technology if it presents itself, so by next year we all could be convulsing in epilepsy.
J.
-- damned vulpine
http://sb.drtwister.com/
Incorrect numbers given
by
Doug+Merritt
·
· Score: 3
Where did you get these numbers??? They're all wrong.
The human eye percieves smooth motion at about 20 frames per second.
No. It varies depending on contrast and ambient lighting, but 60 frames per second is often cited for purposes of generalization.
TV (in the US at least) is broadcast at 24 fps
No, U.S. TV is 30 full frames per second (interleaved from 60 half frames per second to reduce flicker). European TV is 25 frames per second, due to 50 half frames per second interleaved. (In both areas, there's a historical and RF noise connection to the 60/50 hertz power lines.)
movies are usually at 30 fps
That doesn't ring a bell; I think it's actually 24 frames per second double-shuttered to give an effective 48 fps. I may be misremembering the precise numbers there.
At low resolutions used for games (640x480, 800x600), many graphics cards can supply the monitor with a vertical refresh rate of 85 Hz, but at high resolutions, all but the most expensive cards (things like cards designed for CAD, such as the FireGL cards) drop off in maximum vertical refresh rate.
Yes and no; what you said is very misleading, since recent higher end cards from Matrox, and the Nvidia TNT2, retain high frame rates even at the highest of resolutions (approaching almost 2000x2000 these days). Now it's true these are "high end cards", but that's in a consumer sense of very roughly $200, they are *not* high end CAD market cards, which can cost thousands of dollars.
I found 1024x768 to be a much more desirable resolution for playing quake. So, what use is it if the Athlon can push out frames faster than your monitor can display them???
That's largely a matter of taste. It's true that not everyone has high quality monitors, but on the other hand, a fair number of people (including gamers) do in fact have high bandwidth monitors. Your taste (and monitor) isn't everyone's.
Granted, there are other areas where fast 3D performance is a big plus (rendering movies, etc.), but for games, 70fps is absolutely pointless
Now that goes way too far. Actually, a monitor refresh rate of a minimum of 70 hertz is highly recommended to avoid perceptual flicker under adverse lighting conditions -- this varies from person to person, but many of us see flicker, at least in peripheral vision, almost always with 60 hertz displays.
If you had said "85 fps monitor refresh rate is pointless", you'd be closer to the truth, although that too is debatable for more complex reasons that we're getting into here.
(I usually use 1600x1200 32 bit color 80 hertz for non-game (2d) purposes, and for games, usually have to drop it down, since I don't yet have a TNT2 nor voodoo3. The highest res of my voodoo2 is less than that of my 2d card.)
-- Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
We need more polys per second...
by
roystgnr
·
· Score: 2
Take a look at the demo they used - crusher.dm2, the traditional "put a lot of polys and a lot of lightmaps on the screen so the CPU is the bottleneck not the video card" demo. With most game demos, you max out around 90fps because of the fill rate of the video card, because game designers keep their poly counts low to accomodate low end CPUs.
Off-the-shelf, AGP 3D cards now are competitive in fill rate even with sweet SGI workstations, but for the geometry portion of rendering PCs get blown away, and seriously blown away with high polygon scenes. Until we get PC dedicated hardware to do geometry acceleration and not just texture filling (doesn't the G200/G400 do some geometry on the card?), we need heavy CPU FPUs to do it for us.
Sure, spitting out a bunch of 60 poly models at 120 fps might be overkill, but displaying 400 poly models at 60 fps won't be. In the near future I can imagine game designers giving "low poly -> high poly" options in the video setup just as they give "320x200 -> 1600x1200" options today to balance quality vs. performance. (doesn't half life do this to some extent already?) We're seeing the first 3D engines that render bezier curves by breaking them up into polys (does Q3 do this when the level is compiled or when it's played?) and the more polys you use the smoother it looks. Hell, the more polys you use the more cool stuff you can do with background effects (remember how the Unreal flies blew away the Q2 buzzing dots?) and realistically moving human models. And man, some of us want to play games with that kind of image quality.
Oh, yeah, and it'll be a big boon for scientific computing, video editing, professional rendering, etc. when they're reasonable on cheap x86 hardware too.
Don't worry, config your kernel
by
Ian+Schmidt
·
· Score: 2
"Winbond" is a Taiwanese company that makes temperature monitoring chips. All modern Pentium II/III motherboards have one, and Linux has supported them for a while (since at least 2.1.93 or so, and possibly sooner). There's even GNOME/KDE/WindowMaker/Afterstep graphical temperature readout apps - search freshmeat.
It is a well stated and known fact that 24 FPS and even 30 FPS give away errors in things that are filmed (ie spinning objects like wheels). To fool the human eye into thinking it is seeing real motion it needs not only 60 FPS but motion blur as well. The newest generation of game consoles can do this... Some people can easily tell the difference between 70 and 60 FPS. If you can't then count yourself as lucky because you will be satisfied with less.
Which is also why you won't find me buying Xeon any time in the near future
But isn't Xeon the biggest money maker for Intel? It looks like people ARE paying, and that's what AMD bets on.
It's like NT/Linux network benchmarking. Half that would saturate you bandwidth anyway - but people do pay attention.
Being the best and being just good enough is a huge difference in marketing world.
-- <^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Who needs 70 frames per sec?
by
TheMeld
·
· Score: 2
OK, consider these numbers: The human eye percieves smooth motion at about 20 frames per second. TV (in the US at least) is broadcast at 24 fps, and movies are usually at 30 fps. At low resolutions used for games (640x480, 800x600), many graphics cards can supply the monitor with a vertical refresh rate of 85 Hz, but at high resolutions, all but the most expensive cards (things like cards designed for CAD, such as the FireGL cards) drop off in maximum vertical refresh rate. I don't know about you, but I found 1024x768 to be a much more desirable resolution for playing quake. So, what use is it if the Athlon can push out frames faster than your monitor can display them??? Granted, there are other areas where fast 3D performance is a big plus (rendering movies, etc.), but for games, 70fps is absolutely pointless.
-- -Cheetah
Re:Who needs 70 frames per sec?
by
aressa
·
· Score: 3
I can see the debate now, it has been on/. many times:
24/30fps for Movie/TV takes into account a 24/30'th of a second of "motion", on games it is a crisp static image... the more frames you can show, the more it "blurs" like reality.
It really does make a difference.
A
Re:Who needs 70 frames per sec?
by
DingALing
·
· Score: 2
It does not matter if your monitor has a refresh rate of 85. If you feel that your FPS is capped by your monitor's refresh rate you can disable VSync. You can do it either through drivers or even in-game. Minimal artifacting might be present, but that is the tradeoff for getting the maximum speed possible. I won't even get into the 24/30/60 FPS debate now.
Forget the hand, use a rubber band...
by
BeBoxer
·
· Score: 2
Forget using your hand to see the flicker in your screen. Stretch a rubber band out and hold it up in front of the monitor. Then pluck it like a guitar string. You should be able to see the rubber band pulse up and down with sine waves if you get the tension right.
Also, the reason that a monitor is partially black isn't really an aliasing thing. It's just that any CRT is really only partially lit at any given time. The entire image never exists on the screen at once, it only exists in video memory and your brain. Simply taking a still photograph of a TV will demonstrate this.
On the other hand, when you see a monitor on TV the black band will be moving either up or down the screen at some frequency. The rate at which the band moves is an aliasing artifact whose rate is determined by the refresh rate of the monitor and the rate at which it is being "sampled" by the camera.
I can't find it now (archive's not working), but on amdzone they had a report on the power consumption of the Athlons (not sure who the source was). 60W!!!! Sheesh. Not that I don't want one, though!
Most OEMs are saying ETA for this chip is 8/16. AMD's page doesn't give an exact date, just Q3 99. Large Manufactures should already have them according to the Athlon(bleh) press release. Prices are kinda neat. AMD is shipping them in 1000 quantiy units, with the Athlon 600 at 699 per chip(in the 1000 quanity). Only 324 for the 500 MHZ, 479 for the 550.
Most gamers use Win 9x so SMP will not effect them. But when Q3A comes out then you'll see a lot of gamers look around for a OS that can scale! I always liked AMD but lately I have warmed up to the performance/price of Celeron! Of course the PIII tracking system will force me to go AMD all the way now.
Any recommendations on a dual processor MB? I'm building a new machine to use to run my Quake3 server, going to use AMD cpu - I'm interested in the idea of going SMP.
Winbond temperature management???
by
balneary
·
· Score: 2
Does anyone know what that means? I get nervous when pieces of hardware are named Win-something.
I think the most important aspect of this new chip is the continued pressure of competition on Intel. This should increase the motivation for the continuation of gains in performance and cost / performance ratio. In terms of what Joe Doakes average hobbiest gets for the money, I think the optimum design right now is a dual processor system using a not-quite bleeding edge CPU - say a PII 450 or therabouts. The cost of adding a second CPU to a system seems to be less than the cost of bumping up the clock another hundred or so MHZ. This does not account for improvements in internal efficiency, but you do get a lot more bang for the buck with 2 CPU's. The more people who have multiprocessor systems, wether SMP, clusters or even shared-memory systems the faster we will see the evolution of new software paradigms that will truly advance the state of the art. Z
Ugh. Well, there's no way trying to fool tech folks I guess:(
As most of you probably imagined, our server was on NT before we made the move to Linux. We kept the.asp extensions to make the transition smoother and avoid breaking external links. I believe the actual machines are 2 load-balanced dual p3-xeons with 1GB ECC each...still a bit flaky though.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at who has invested money into VA, and it might get a little more clear to you why they don't sell AMD products.
You're comparing it to the wrong chip. Everything I've seen and heard about the K7 indicates that it'll beat the pants off not just the Celeron but the Xeon at the same clock speed... and it clocks faster, too. If you compare a K7's price tag (and we're talking $400 or so for the 500s) to a (slower) Xeon's, AMD comes out ahead by a serious margin...
This was a decent review. The author, Kenn Hwang knew his stuff. It is worth the reading.
About the chip... I can't wait. I tried to see if VA Research was going to work on optimization for it. I got the salesmans response of we have other machines, wouldn't you rather buy that?
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
I agree with the sentiment; 70 fps can cause motion sickness. :o> Reason why some people refuse to play Quake and EverQuest; it's not because they don't like playing games, they just get physically sick of watching those polygons.
18 fps was the quality of most .mov videos when Quicktime 1.5 was the big, big deal. I remember those looking choppy as hell. Maybe different eyes are more or less sensitive than "normal" eyes. I dunno. All I know is that you can't tell geeks they can't use technology if it presents itself, so by next year we all could be convulsing in epilepsy.
J.
damned vulpine http://sb.drtwister.com/
The human eye percieves smooth motion at about 20 frames per second.
No. It varies depending on contrast and ambient lighting, but 60 frames per second is often cited for purposes of generalization.
TV (in the US at least) is broadcast at 24 fps
No, U.S. TV is 30 full frames per second (interleaved from 60 half frames per second to reduce flicker). European TV is 25 frames per second, due to 50 half frames per second interleaved. (In both areas, there's a historical and RF noise connection to the 60/50 hertz power lines.)
movies are usually at 30 fps
That doesn't ring a bell; I think it's actually 24 frames per second double-shuttered to give an effective 48 fps. I may be misremembering the precise numbers there.
At low resolutions used for games (640x480, 800x600), many graphics cards can supply the monitor with a vertical refresh rate of 85 Hz, but at high resolutions, all but the most expensive cards (things like cards designed for CAD, such as the FireGL cards) drop off in maximum vertical refresh rate.
Yes and no; what you said is very misleading, since recent higher end cards from Matrox, and the Nvidia TNT2, retain high frame rates even at the highest of resolutions (approaching almost 2000x2000 these days). Now it's true these are "high end cards", but that's in a consumer sense of very roughly $200, they are *not* high end CAD market cards, which can cost thousands of dollars.
I found 1024x768 to be a much more desirable resolution for playing quake. So, what use is it if the Athlon can push out frames faster than your monitor can display them???
That's largely a matter of taste. It's true that not everyone has high quality monitors, but on the other hand, a fair number of people (including gamers) do in fact have high bandwidth monitors. Your taste (and monitor) isn't everyone's.
Granted, there are other areas where fast 3D performance is a big plus (rendering movies, etc.), but for games, 70fps is absolutely pointless
Now that goes way too far. Actually, a monitor refresh rate of a minimum of 70 hertz is highly recommended to avoid perceptual flicker under adverse lighting conditions -- this varies from person to person, but many of us see flicker, at least in peripheral vision, almost always with 60 hertz displays.
If you had said "85 fps monitor refresh rate is pointless", you'd be closer to the truth, although that too is debatable for more complex reasons that we're getting into here.
(I usually use 1600x1200 32 bit color 80 hertz for non-game (2d) purposes, and for games, usually have to drop it down, since I don't yet have a TNT2 nor voodoo3. The highest res of my voodoo2 is less than that of my 2d card.)
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Take a look at the demo they used - crusher.dm2, the traditional "put a lot of polys and a lot of lightmaps on the screen so the CPU is the bottleneck not the video card" demo. With most game demos, you max out around 90fps because of the fill rate of the video card, because game designers keep their poly counts low to accomodate low end CPUs.
Off-the-shelf, AGP 3D cards now are competitive in fill rate even with sweet SGI workstations, but for the geometry portion of rendering PCs get blown away, and seriously blown away with high polygon scenes. Until we get PC dedicated hardware to do geometry acceleration and not just texture filling (doesn't the G200/G400 do some geometry on the card?), we need heavy CPU FPUs to do it for us.
Sure, spitting out a bunch of 60 poly models at 120 fps might be overkill, but displaying 400 poly models at 60 fps won't be. In the near future I can imagine game designers giving "low poly -> high poly" options in the video setup just as they give "320x200 -> 1600x1200" options today to balance quality vs. performance. (doesn't half life do this to some extent already?) We're seeing the first 3D engines that render bezier curves by breaking them up into polys (does Q3 do this when the level is compiled or when it's played?) and the more polys you use the smoother it looks. Hell, the more polys you use the more cool stuff you can do with background effects (remember how the Unreal flies blew away the Q2 buzzing dots?) and realistically moving human models. And man, some of us want to play games with that kind of image quality.
Oh, yeah, and it'll be a big boon for scientific computing, video editing, professional rendering, etc. when they're reasonable on cheap x86 hardware too.
They are currently selling K6-2 and K6-3 systems.
"Winbond" is a Taiwanese company that makes temperature monitoring chips. All modern Pentium II/III motherboards have one, and Linux has supported them for a while (since at least 2.1.93 or so, and possibly sooner). There's even GNOME/KDE/WindowMaker/Afterstep graphical temperature readout apps - search freshmeat.
TV is 30 frames (60 fields per second).
F /...
Movies run at 24 FPS.
It is a well stated and known fact that 24 FPS and even 30 FPS give away errors in things that are filmed (ie spinning objects like wheels). To fool the human eye into thinking it is seeing real motion it needs not only 60 FPS but motion blur as well. The newest generation of game consoles can do this... Some people can easily tell the difference between 70 and 60 FPS. If you can't then count yourself as lucky because you will be satisfied with less.
---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
Which is also why you won't find me buying Xeon any time in the near future
But isn't Xeon the biggest money maker for
Intel? It looks like people ARE paying, and
that's what AMD bets on.
It's like NT/Linux network benchmarking. Half that would saturate you bandwidth anyway - but people do pay attention.
Being the best and being just good enough is a huge difference in marketing world.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
OK, consider these numbers:
The human eye percieves smooth motion at about 20 frames per second. TV (in the US at least) is broadcast at 24 fps, and movies are usually at 30 fps. At low resolutions used for games (640x480, 800x600), many graphics cards can supply the monitor with a vertical refresh rate of 85 Hz, but at high resolutions, all but the most expensive cards (things like cards designed for CAD, such as the FireGL cards) drop off in maximum vertical refresh rate. I don't know about you, but I found 1024x768 to be a much more desirable resolution for playing quake. So, what use is it if the Athlon can push out frames faster than your monitor can display them??? Granted, there are other areas where fast 3D performance is a big plus (rendering movies, etc.), but for games, 70fps is absolutely pointless.
-Cheetah
Forget using your hand to see the flicker in your screen. Stretch a rubber band out and hold it up in front of the monitor. Then pluck it like a guitar string. You should be able to see the rubber band pulse up and down with sine waves if you get the tension right.
Also, the reason that a monitor is partially black isn't really an aliasing thing. It's just that any CRT is really only partially lit at any given time. The entire image never exists on the screen at once, it only exists in video memory and your brain. Simply taking a still photograph of a TV will demonstrate this.
On the other hand, when you see a monitor on TV the black band will be moving either up or down the screen at some frequency. The rate at which the band moves is an aliasing artifact whose rate is determined by the refresh rate of the monitor and the rate at which it is being "sampled" by the camera.
I can't find it now (archive's not working), but on amdzone they had a report on the power consumption of the Athlons (not sure who the source was). 60W!!!! Sheesh. Not that I don't want one, though!
Most OEMs are saying ETA for this chip is 8/16. AMD's page doesn't give an exact date, just Q3 99. Large Manufactures should already have them according to the Athlon(bleh) press release. Prices are kinda neat. AMD is shipping them in 1000 quantiy units, with the Athlon 600 at 699 per chip(in the 1000 quanity). Only 324 for the 500 MHZ, 479 for the 550.
Most gamers use Win 9x so SMP will not effect them. But when Q3A comes out then you'll see a lot of gamers look around for a OS that can scale! I always liked AMD but lately I have warmed up to the performance/price of Celeron! Of course the PIII tracking system will force me to go AMD all the way now.
Any recommendations on a dual processor MB? I'm building a new machine to use to run my Quake3 server, going to use AMD cpu - I'm interested in the idea of going SMP.
Does anyone know what that means? I get nervous
when pieces of hardware are named Win-something.
I think the most important aspect of this new chip is the continued pressure of competition on Intel.
This should increase the motivation for the continuation of gains in performance and cost / performance ratio. In terms of what Joe Doakes average hobbiest gets for the money, I think the optimum design right now is a dual processor system using a not-quite bleeding edge CPU - say a PII 450 or therabouts. The cost of adding a second CPU to a system seems to be less than the cost of bumping up the clock another hundred or so MHZ. This does not account for improvements in internal efficiency, but you do get a lot more bang for the buck with 2 CPU's. The more people who have multiprocessor systems, wether SMP, clusters or even shared-memory systems the faster we will see the evolution of new software paradigms that will truly advance the state of the art.
Z
enough is too much
Ugh. Well, there's no way trying to fool tech folks I guess :(
.asp extensions to make the transition smoother and avoid breaking external links. I believe the actual machines are 2 load-balanced dual p3-xeons with 1GB ECC each...still a bit flaky though.
As most of you probably imagined, our server was on NT before we made the move to Linux. We kept the