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nVidia's GeForce 256 Breaks Out; changes 3D world
Hai Nguyen writes " nVidia officially unveiled the GeForce 256 (the chip formerly known as NV10).
Its architecture emphasizes both triangle rate and fill rate, so the chip can render 3D landscape with highly detailed 3D environments and models, and smooth framerates. Go get the full info." Holy moses. I want one. Now.
And I suppose its revolutionary, too. Somehow I doubt it.
Drop the marketing fluff -- we don't want any here. Just the facts.
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode."
Of course the 3 biggest questions are:
1) Will the driver be open sourced as the TNT/TNT2 driver is?
2) How soon will it be available to the public?
3) What kind of framerate will I get when fragging LPBs in quake 3?
Fun fun fun!
I think if anything seeing graphics like this are at least going to set a fire under some butts to get the next generation of stuff out. It is also good to see nvidia not having to worry about selling the chips. This whole Diamond/STB thing had me worried for a while.
Mister programmer
I got my hammer
Gonna smash my smash my radio
damnit...i did it too...
Juiced? Or Not?
Damn. I was hoping this would get linked up on the front page. :) Oh well, I took a trip to NVIDIA last week, and I'd love it if you guys checked my article out: riva extreme - geforce 256 coverage
- 15M triangles/sec - sustained DMA, transform/clip/light, setup, rasterize and render rate.
- 4 Pixels per clock (4 pixel pipelines).
- 480M pixels/sec fill rate - 32 texture samples per clock, full speed 8-tap anisotropic filtering.
- 8 hardware lights.
- 350 MHz RAMDAC.
- Most feature complete for DX7 and OGL - Tranform & Lighting, Cube environment mapping, projective textures, and texture compression.
- Will utilize 4x AGP performance with Fast Writes , which enables the CPU to send data directly to the GPU (1 GB/sec transfer rate), increasing overall performance and freeing the system memory bus for other functions.
- 256 bit rendering engine.
- Highest quality HDTV (High Definition Television) video playback.
- High Precision HDTV video overlay.
- 5 horizontal, 3 vertical taps.
- 8:1 up/down scaling.
- Independent hue, saturation and brightness controls in hardware.
- High bandwidth HDTV class video I/O.
- 16 bit video port.
- Full host port.
- Dedicated DMA video.
- Powerful HDTV motion compensation.
- Full frame rate DVD to 1080i resolution.
- Full precision subpixel accuracy to 1/16 pixel.
Snipped from www.bluesnews.comI just went and looked at the tweak3d guide ( http://www.tweak3d.net/reviews/nvidia/geforce256/1 .shtml ) and good god this card kicks ass.
The addition of Transform and Lighting really _is_ revolutionary. Once you've used one of these babies, you won't want to go back.
There's a list of useful links at Blues News (www.bluesnews.com)
My Journal
"hands-on tests" means prototype hardware already available, so this should be out fairly soon. None too soon, as S3 pulled ATI's trick and is coming out early with a chip at 0.18.
The Playstation II has a modified R10000 processor with very hefty floating point extensions - it won't have much of a problem doing geometry transformations. IMO, it will probably be about on par with the graphics cards floating around at the time of its release. It won't leave them in the dust, but neither will it be left in the dust.
OTOH, a friend in the gaming industry says that the Playstation II has architectural problems that might degrade performance (low system bus bandwidth, among other things). We'll see what happens when it ships.
So basically nVidia chose to make a high fill-rate card with hardware lighting and transforms (geometry acceleration). These aren't innovative directions -- they were the obvious ones. None the less, the other major player, 3dfx, has pulled back from these choices. I'll explain why:
... everything is (we once demonstrated that it's physically impossible under DX6 to be faster than a Voodoo3 under Glide). There are some downsides: if you want to do crazy weird stuff with your lighting (eg. wrong faster stuff, funky effects) you may not be able to get it to work. Similarly with geometry -- special fast cases will become normal cases. So there may be a 50%-100% gain in triangle rate, but it's unlikely geometry acceleration will ever be able to provide much more than that.
... 3dfx talked about putting a geometry accelerator on V4 but I believe they backed off from it. Voodoo4 is however still an SST and therefore still a true descendent of the original Voodoo chipset conceived as a flexible, long-term solution for both PCs and arcade games.
... it may be finally time to kill some very old paradigms in 3d hardware...
nVidia has a card which can do supported operations fast. It obviously has a lot of fill. It'll be a good board. Of course it'll still be slow in D3D
nVidia seems to have chosen not to support the hardware bump mapping of the Matrox G400, an extremely high fill (runs beautifully bump mapped in a window in 1600x1200x32bpp) card without geom accel. 3DLabs' long awaited Permidia3 will also have some kind of hardware bump. IMHO this is a relatively flexible feature -- you could do a lot with it. It remains to be seen how flexible nVidia's lighting and geom turn out to be.
I'll be impressed if D3D ever delivers real hardware geometry benafits. We have yet to see a single benefit of DX6 over DX5 (not screwing with the fp control word especially) actually work. I'm highly suspect of anything MS sez.
So what about the remaining behemoth, 3dfx? Their Voodoo4 is supposed to be an extremely high fill card (fill has always been their hallmark). It may not support any more hardware features (eg. bump, lighting, geom accel), but it will fill like crazy. It's supposed to do full screen anti-aliasing
I'm eagerly awaiting the new generation. But I expect the real crazy stuff to start happening in the following generation
The Voodoo 4 will be coming out around Christmas, and it will have hardware geometry as well. Rumour has it that it too will be at 0.22 micron instead of 0.18. I don't remember the name of the chipset off-hand.
S3 has also rolled out a new chip, with four pipelines and hardware geometry, at 0.18 micron. Check Sharkey Extreme for details.
Also, I've heard some reports that the PlayStation II will beat the living daylights out of PIII's loaded with then recent and most modern 3d accels. Even with this kind of chip, and most likely other chips to follow from nVidia's competitors, does this still hold true? Will the PlayStation II live up to the hype?
No, but it won't sink either. See my previous response on this subject (check my user info to find the post).
Get a load of the supplied pictures. Gee, low poly models sure don't look that impressive when you DON'T TEXTURE THEM ;P or do you really think the treads on the second tire are, or ought to be, geometry?
So it pushes 15 million triangles a second and a PIII only does 3.5 million. Well, where do they come from? Exactly what is used to store these geometries? I'd say that if they went with a rather Voodoo Glide-esque approach of putting all the geometries on the card and then giving minimal commands to position, scale and rotate them, then it could be significant. This, however, would be pathetically incompatible with all existing games- and frankly the bus is the bottleneck, that PIII is probably pretty comparable for doing transforms, it just cannot get them across the _bus_ as fast as a cached copy of the geometry on the card.
I saw what appeared to be a statistic that implied that games might see a 10% improvement in framerate. That, I think, is closer to the truth.
Sorry guys- you've been Hyped.
Um.
You do know what the word "hyperbole" actually means, don't you?
--
Don't imitate. Enervate.
3dfx is rolling out another chip, as people have been talking about for a while. It is rumoured to be at 0.22 micron too, and will have hardware geometry processing.
S3 already rolled out a new chip - at 0.18 micron. It too has four texel engines and hardware geometry processing.
IMO, the S3 chip is actually the one to worry about. Architecture may or may not be great, but at 0.18 micron it may outperform nVidia and 3dfx's offerings just on linewidth. ATI did something similar when it rolled out the Rage 128, if you recall.
What I'm waiting for is the release of the GeForce or (insert name of 3dfx's offering here) at 0.18 micron. However, I'll probably be waiting a while.
I would assume that Diamond would be quick to jump on this. They've been partners with nVidia for some time, and this chip looks to big to pass up, epecially with 3dfx out of the picture.
I read another article (the one on rivaextreme ... pretty good article), I can add a few more comments.
... imho this is kind of limiting ... we'll see.
... I again expect GeForce to better that ...).
GeForce has environment mapping (iirc so does Permidia3) but not bump mapping.
It can do 8 free hardware accel'd lights
A Voodoo3 on a fast machine under Glide can handle about a 10-12kpoly scene lighted textured w/effects and phsyics running about 20-25 fps on a 450a. I'll be very impressed if GeForce can do twice that -- 25kpolys at 25fps, or about 500k real polys/sec (BTW a Voodoo3 under ideal conditions w/out features can do 500k "fake" polys/sec
But 15million polys/sec is the kind of bloated number that usually comes out of graphics shops. Don't believe it for a second.
As for 100kpoly models lighted w/fx running smoothly, i'll believe it when I see it.
if DaveS or DaveR wants to correct me on any of this stuff, go right ahead guys...
Actually, I was there last week, and I can say that it runs kick-ass fast fully textured and environment mapped. They didn't provide us with any of those screenshots unfortunately, only the shaded models. But if you check back at my site in the next couple of weeks, I should have benchmarks on fully lit, textured, and mapped models. Did you check out the tree? It's freaking amazing.
Sound familiar? Back to the days of 3d-acceleration in games before DirectX?
Not if it can only transform 36 million polys per second, it can't (sustained transformation figure from an older slashdot article).
Based on all of the other numbers in that article, I suspect that they dropped a decimal point in the "75 million polys rendered" figure. That, or they're talking about flat-shaded untextured untransformed polygons.
Yes, but how well can the PCG systems do at movie speeds: on the fly rendering at 24 frames/second? nVidia is saying (and it remains to be seen how accurate their marketting info is) that this is the image quality quality that can move, not just a pretty static image.
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Microsoft writes each version of D3D by asking the manufacturers "What features do you guys need?" and then writing them in.
:)
...
There were no 3D games bfore D3D. No one had cards.
Just 'cos a card supports D3D doesn't mean you can assume your program will work right. You still have to test and debug each individual card. This is the voice of experience
Matrox's bump will be in D3D i'm pretty sure...
People use Glide rather than D3D 'cos it's way faster. Speed really is all that matters
Do you see GeForce boards on the shelves?
Do you see Playstation 2s on the shelves?
They've been conversation topics for months, but all either has now is alpha test hardware. It becomes difficult to see what point you are trying to make, given that.
Some of us are interested in the world of computing and what is happening in it, not just with Linux... And Slashdot does a marvelous job covering cutting edge technologies for both linux and non linux applications. Since right now Windows is the dominating computing force I think it would be ignorant and foolish to exclude the technologies that are emerging just because they are marketed to Windows users. How about going to your preferences page and applying that prejudice on the "Pretty Widgets" to filter Hemos. Retard. "Cynic?? Who's a cynic?"
--"Cynical?? Who's cynical???" -k-
Well gee...to filter stories you would have to get a login...but that would ruin that wonderful cover of AC that you hide under. Besides that your post is just lame anyways. nVidia will release linux drivers for this thing more than likely considering they did with thier past chips (albeit a bit late). On top of all that, I haven't responded to any good flamebait lately and I'm so ill right now that you were the perfect dumbass to unleash on.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
I feel sorry to tell you that Glide no longer has the massive performance increase compared to D3D. Yes D3D is still pretty hard to program for, and yes it is still slightly slower (20-30% in fact) but it is not like the old days when D3D would run at 30 fps and glide would do 70 fps. Even Turok which is only DX6 only gets 15 fps in Glide over D3D. The proof is in the games. Unreal is just as playable with D3D as it is under Glide.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
> There were no 3D games bfore D3D. No one had cards.
I do believe Glide was out before it, and DOS games (like the original Descent?) used it. Wasn't that before D3D?
There were people with the cards back then, not the millions there are now, but enough for accelerated 3D to be implemented in more and more games.
.Shawn
I am not me, I am a tree....
For those of you who doubt NV10's performance improvement, take a look at the workstation front. Even with Dual PII 400s, a card with a gamma geometry processor, is much faster (in medium textured scenes) than the Evens and Sutherland chipsets, which, although they have higher fill-rate, don't have geometry acceleration. A playstation kicks a P100s ass even though the main CPU is 1/3 the speed. Its becuase the playstation has HW geometry acceleration. In any case, HW acceleration will also benifit OpenGL, now truespace will run faster than ever!!!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That's easy- I presume you're rotating the tree realtime? _All_ that requires is that the tree can be cached on the card, which is then issued commands. ;) ) we have a comparable problem- there are 4X the voodoo cards as anything else, because of availability, and we're getting 'em off you PCers who are buying nVidias ( ;) dirt cheap, too! ), but Apple only supports ATI- so many important development tools are _not_ supporting 3dfx or Glide, and we are once again suffering the recurrent apple disease of Thou Shalt Use Only One Solution- in this case, ATI 3d acceleration. And I personally like 3dfx rendering better than even _TNT_, but this helps me not. (reading User Friendly I have been!). ;P
Why only one tree? What program, exactly, did this? There are some very serious questions to ask about demos like this. I, too, write software and try to come up with impressive claims. I can legitimately say that I'm writing a game with a ten million star universe with approximately sixteen million planets, of which the terrestrial ones (hundreds of actually landable-on planets) have terrains the size of the earth at 3 dots per inch for height information.
This is misleading as I'm doing it _all_ algorithmically- it's fair to ask 'well, what does it work like?' but nonsensical to imagine that somehow I'm messing with kajilliobytes of data. It's faked. (I have stellar distribution whipped, am working currently on deriving star types, slightly modified according to actual galaxy distributions- main current task is to come up with RGB values for the actual colors of star types, as this is more like white point color temperatures than anything else- very close to updating my reference pictures.
At any rate, will you believe me when I say that this reeks of demo? It wouldn't be that surprising if they used _all_ the capacity of the card to do that one tree. _I_ would. Might that be why there is only one tree and _no_ other detail at all (one ground poly, one horizon)?
More relevantly, what was used in doing that? If it was vanilla OpenGL, then okay, I concede this is very big. If they had to write their own software to do that, then you have a problem. Here in Mac land (also LinuxPPC land
You guys are looking at exactly the same situation here. Be damned careful. If you go with a proprietary technology you will fragment, and your developers will be faced with tough choices and could end up writing nVidia-only much as some developers in Mac land are writing ATI-only. This is bad. Do I have to explain why this is bad?
Let's get some more information about exactly how you operate this geometry stuff before getting all giddy and flushed about it, shall we? I don't see how software will use it without rewriting the software. And when you do that- it's an open invitation for nVidia to make the thing completely proprietary and lock out other vendors.
Or maybe they'd give the information out to people at no cost and not enforce their (presumed) patents for a while, only to turn around a year from now when they've locked in the market, and start bleeding people with basically total freedom to manipulate things any way they choose? But of course nobody (GIF) would think (GIF) of ever doing (GIF!) a thing like (GIFFF!) _that_...
There were no 3D games bfore D3D. No one had cards.
That's funny... I remember playing Wolf3D and DOOM before Direct3D was even a glimmer in Microsoft's eyes.
Posted that lastone when I was only halfway done flaming:
There were no 3D games bfore D3D. No one had cards.
That's funny... I remember playing Wolf3D and DOOM before Direct3D was even a glimmer in Microsoft's eyes.
People use Glide rather than D3D 'cos it's way faster. Speed really is all that matters
You've got to be kidding. Would you mind explaining how one API can be faster than another? Sure, a driver or hardware can be faster, but an API is just a specification. People use whatever API that will get the job done. If the job is to only support 3DFX cards, they use Glide. If the job is to support a number of cards, they use D3D. If the job is for portability, the use OpenGL.
For any out there that have been complaining, please allow me to shed a silent tear. The endless masses of consumeroids have their morning tranquility of force fed corporately altered news interrupted by video card enthusiasts ( or paid off placard wavers ). Rats.
"I could float off the floor if I wished to. But I do not wish to because the Party does not wish me to." - Abridged,
Is there a way to filter out Hemos stories?
Yes. Get a login/password, click "preferences" and filter away.
**>>BELCH
I'm still waiting for real-time ray-tracing. Once you look at a ray-traced image, every time you look at polygons you'll say "Yuck, what's that?" I have to say, though, that those textures and bump maps almost make up for it. Go get POV-Ray and see what I mean.
--
Seeing is believing; You wouldn't have seen it if you didn't believe it.
No way... every true fan knows it's pronounced "Gatchaman" ;-)
----
Dave
All hail Discordia!
- Dave
GeForce has hardware bump mapping, it's *real* bump mapping uses perturbed normals and dot-products, not faked tricks. Perturbed normals look better than even environment mapped bump mapping.
.18)
Secondly, D3D is a non issue. First of all, DirectX7 is *fast* Second, the games most likely to take advantage of geometry acceleration first will be OpenGl based. Glide sucks. OpenGL is way more open and cross platform.
Third, 3dfx can't defeat everyone in fillrate. They are bound by the speed of available ram which is maxing out at 200Mhz. All they can do is start using multiple pixel pipelines like NVidia and Savage.
But to beat NVidia, they'd have to use a 512-bit or 1024-bit architecture (8 or 16 pipelines) which unfortunately, is difficult with the current manufacturing process (.22 or
So I'm sorry to say, the Voodoo4 is not going to kick anyone's butt in the fillrate department.
(and super-expensive Rambus ram won't help them either)
Fifth, the triangle rate increase is 3-4 up to 10x as much, and many games like Team Fortress 2 or Messiah are using scalable geometry (the original 50,000 polygon artwork is used and scaled dynamically based on processing power and scene complexity)
Sixth, the hardware lights are in ADDITION TO regular lightmap effects and will give much better dynamic lighting effects than Quake's shite spherical lightmap tweaking technique.
3dfx is incompetent and no longer the market leader, and their anti-32bit color, anti geometry, anti-everything-they-cant-implement marketing is tiresome, along with 3dfx groupies who continually praise the company for simply boosting clockrates on the same old Voodoo1 architecture.
Both S3 and NVidia have introduced cards with the potential to do hardware vector math at 10x the speed of a PentiumIII, without the need to ship all the 2d transformed data over the PCI/AGP bus, and they have done it at consumer prices.
I'm sorry, but increased fillrate doesn't do it for me anymore. It's still the same old blocky characters but at 1280x1024. They look just as good if you display them on a TV at 640x480. What's needed is better geometry, skeletal animation, wave mechanics, inverse kinematics, etc everything that geometry acceleration allows you to do (NVidia, S3, Playstation 2)
I see a lot of people disappointed in the lack of bump mapping. I wonder however if you will need bump mapping with this card. Just make your models with more polys. I think that is why nvidia let off this feature, they want people to make higher poly count models instead of cheating with a bump map. Will it look better? We shall see.
Q.
It's too bad we couldn't have made a solid, open 3D game API spec before MS gave the world its proprietary version. OpenGL is portable, but writing an OpenGL driver is pretty much a bitch. Direct3D may be annoying to program to, but the drivers supposedly aren't quite so hard to write.
It's really too bad we don't have something like Glide (really easy to program to), but open, not 'only 3dfx' crap.
It's perfectly possible to do 3D in software. It's even somewhat more interesting, since you're not bound to and 3D card's paradigm. Software is where you get cool stuff like true voxels etc...
Glide probably wasn't out before DX3, but DX3 was pretty much useless (only a very minimum 3D API) so Glide may have beaten anything useful, tho not by much...
------------------------
Replying to another comment:
No, an API cannot be faster. But an implementation can. And an API's design can affect an implementation. In any case, Glide (the implementation) is a hell of a lot faster than D3D (the implementation), as per my original comment.
People have been using the occular graphic processors for millions of years
:)
Your people are not my people, apparently... My people have not been around that long..
Apes among us
What is the fill rate of the human eye??
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
I know nVidia had a public contest to pick the name for the NV10 chip. And GeForce is the result???
Sheesh... what's next - a website about the chip named GeSpot?
First off, I don't take this it as a given that just because you can't figure out a way to represent the meshes with variable levels of detail, that no one can. In fact, its my understanding that Quake 3 implements curves in a way that allows them to be retesselated to higher polygon counts depending on the graphics card and speed of the system. Second, even if a company didn't want to implement something like that in their engine, its not inconcievable that multiple environment resolutions could be placed on the game media. Many games already come with low and high quality sound samples to account for the wildly varying quality of sound cards out there.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
G Force
I suppose you aren't familiar with the game 'messiah'. They've written a new engine that performs real time deformation and tesselation to keep whatever hardware you have running at 100%. When too many polys are on the screen at once, and the framerate starts to drop, some of the models are tessellated. When a single object takes up a large portion of the screen it's polygon count shoots up. That's the only game I know of that can already use the power NV10 offers.
Every current chipset supported bump mapping via crappy emboss algorithms. What it comes down to is image quality - we'll have to wait and see when some more pics come out of nVidia.
Didn't DEC demonstrate an Alpha system doing
near real time ray-tracing? I think it was
around the time the Compaq merger was finalized.
Man I wish I had the link.
The review on this tweak3d mirror
Josh
yes, but their current (annoyingly obfusciated and therefore unfixable) drivers have very poor performance. Its really a shame they don't take the clue from Matrox, if they released working code AND left it unobfusciated AND released specs I would buy from them until either they go out of business or I die. So far people are releasing either code or specs, and the code is all obfusciated and therefore unservicable.
Do you have a Playstation 2?
Do you also have a GForce256?
Do you have actual numbers to prove your point?
Do you REALIZE just how fast 10x really is?
Didn't think so.
Please, don't post something if you have absolutely no clue as to what's going on.
I'm rather sick of all the hype, and such...
:)
WHEN DOES IT SHIP? My $ is on mid 2000 at best.
I'm sick of all the 3D card companies doing this, Nvidia is no exception. (case n point, TNT: delays, and its specs got downgraded quite a damn bit) At least TNT2 is nice, plenty of selection. Its closer to what the original TNT specs called for though, just overclocked.
3dfx has delivered in the past with specs and inside timeframes, but OPS no 32bit for V3, even though everyone wants/needs it.
Matrox brings out kickass g400...but just try to buy one, especially dualhead [main selling point] and even more so the max [the one that is always quoted in benchmarks] (sarcasm) I guess there were so many damn reviews they ran out of stock. (/sarcasm) The max is "9/9/99" anywhere you look for it (which is the THIRD date given so far) oh yes you could have preordered (overpaid) and *maybe* ogtten one but sheesh! get real. The dualhead is a pain in the butt to find, the retail version even harder. Plus, expect to pay $30 more than you should.
ATI? Bleh. Too slow. They sold 'fake' 3D chipsets in the past for too long for my taste anyway.
S3? Bleh. Too slow. Too late.
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Not bad spelling, bad typing
While the original release of the NVidia drivers were obfusciated (run through the C preprocessor before the source was released), that was due to a lawyer popping up and causing trouble at the last mintue. I was under the impression that the next release after to XFree86 provided regular source code.
Am I wrong?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I really dislike 3Dfx. Sure, their cards have always been with the pack leaders in terms of performance, but only *if* you use their propriatary, non-portable, unextensible GLide API. Their OpenGL performance is really bad. 3Dfx is extremely protective of their API, too. If you so much as look at it the wrong way -- lawsuit city!
I really, really, *REALLY* hate propriatary APIs. It is like 3Dfx wants us back in the bad-old-days of DOS, where every program had to have its *own* drivers for every piece of hardware out there. If game XYZ didn't support your hardware, you were flat out of luck.
Frankly, it looks to me like they started out as the market leader, but have since lost their edge, and are trying to keep their strangle-hold on the industry by locking people into an API they own. (Hmmmm, sound familar? *cough*Microsoft*cough*)
No thank you.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Obviously you haven't heard of implicit surfaces. You know, those things like B-Splines, NURBS et al. Describe a surface by a series of control points and then tesselate according to your performance requirements. Start off with a low figure, or do benchmarking when first installing the game then use this info to up the number of triangles until you hit the frame rate/quality level ratio you want. Very simple, very old technique. I s'pose you haven't heard of the Teapot either.
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton
GeFORCE 256 hardware is not alpha hardware.
The actual chips are released now to board manufactures.
www.atacomm.com - The Leader in VoIP Product Distributi
Suppose the chip runs at 500Mhz (just for the sake of argument), then it would have to retire 100
floating point operations per cycle to reach
50GFLOPS. I *DON'T* thinks so.
You should consider thinking again. These chips are *massively* pipelined. There are indeed hundreds of floating point operations being performed every cycle. What do you think 23 million transistors are up to?
I agree that this feature is high on my list too; I'm sure he's aware of all the implicit techniques out there but bare in mind that smooth cubic urfaces are one thing but random relief detail (i.e. drawn by an artist as textures tend to be) cannot be so easily represented by any higher order surfaces that spring to mind; Also, using environmental bump mapping (or a more accurate technique that perturbs the normal) you can save on polygon bandwidth and add the illusion of greater quality at greater speed, which is what I want from a 3d card.
Maybe in the future we'll have cards that do what softimage does and take a bump map and convert it into some sort of polygon representation, only on the card itself and then we would have silhouette edge detail as well (you could do that by finding the edge polygons and only splitting those).
For now, environment bump mapping and hardware t&l seem to be the best route.
The next card I buy will have both and probably more.
Tim
...and just maybe it'll be out by the time the NV10 hits the bargain bins....;)
> Do you have a Playstation 2?
I'm afraid I couldn't possibly comment.
> Do you also have a GForce256?
It's probably in the post.
I love being a games developer.
How does pipelining help you retire more than 1 instruction per cycle? I'm sure that it is heavily pipelined, but AFAIK that only helps with reducing the CPI if it is larger than 1. I'm also sure that the chip is superscalar but 50GFLOPS sounds unrealistically high, the Fuzion 150 runs at 200Mhz, is MP SIMD with 1500+ processing elements and still does approx. 3GFLOPS.
You'd also need to have 200-300GB/s bandwidth to sustain that kind of speed (assuming a modest 16 bit-sized floats).
I think game programmers will always find something cool to do with those spare cycles - we'll probably see them going to improved AI, improved physics models etc. The emphasis will probably shift slightly away from the "cool envelope-pushing graphics == cool game" mindset, toward a "cool game == cool game" mindset. I guess? Today, a "good game programmer" may mean "good 3d programmer"; this will probably change slightly in the future; although games will always still have 3d, less development time will be required to get the 3d stuff working fast.
Look at the specs next to an Oxygen card.
GVX1:
GeForce:
Think it might have a following in the professional rendering market?
If PS2 ever arrives, it won't exactly look so great next to these systems. And, as with all things, the price will eventually drop on such cards. If the price is too steep, wait a bit, or buy a TNT2U in the interim.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I thought I stated those were illustrations. I could not get the high degree of tesselation that I wanted, I was just trying to ILLUSTRATE tesselation. And the screens are what they gave me. I saw textured, shaded, mapped models.
I checked them in the insane hope the prices were bogus and they'd have more stock.
/next
/next
:)
:)
MATROX MATROX MILLENNIUM G400 16MB
SGRAM AGP SINGLE HEAD
MATMILG40016A $119.00
Bleh, dualhead needed.
MATROX MATROX MILLENNIUM G400 32MB
SGRAM AGP SINGLE HEAD
MATMILG40032A $178.00
Bleh, again.
MATROX MATROX MILLENNIUM G400 32MB
SGRAM AGP DUAL HEAD OEM
MATG400DU32A $189.00
OEM. Card + Cardboard box and datzit. God damn pricey for that. In stock? Yep.
MATROX MATROX MILLENNIUM G400 32MB
SGRAM AGP DUAL HEAD RETAIL
MATG400DU32AR $229.00
Here we go, finally. OPS, its almost as much as the MSR for the max! In stock? No.
MATROX MATROX MILLENNIUM G400 32MB
SGRAM AGP DUAL HEAD MAX RETAIL
MATG400DUMAXR $309.00
YEAH RIGHT. Even matrox started at $279 and went down to $249. In stock? NOPE. I recall these guys now, once before they *claimed* they had it in stock on shopper.com, though in all reality even matrox hadn't shipped them yet to NE1 except those bastard reviewers.
BTW, lets see how full of crap the 9/24 date is when that day comes and passes. You can quote me on that
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Not bad spelling, bad typing
Double infinity a finite number of times and you hit infinity...
And it doesn't even need the Axiom of Choice to prove... (If you take AC, then you simply observe that there is a limit ordinal less than or equal :-)
Alternatively, do anything with a set that doesn't prevent it being a set and you can never hit 'Absolute Infinity'.
So there...
<SmugMode>
:-)
:-))
:-)
:-))
:-)
:-))
</SmugMode>
John
John_Chalisque
NVIDIA has had pretty good OpenGL drivers since their Riva128 chipset - they are stable and fast - I don't think that is going to change, especially not now after the deal with SGI...
goto your preferences and say i dont want stories from Hemos
i personally disagree with you, but if you dont like it, at least take the time to read the options available instead of wasting all of our time and the moderators time with it.
not to mention Rob's servers (well, not anymore,.. but...)
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