Posted by
Hemos
on from the look-at-the-purty-pictures dept.
~fly~ writes "Tom's has a detailed review with benchmarks of Nvidia's new GeForce256 'GPU'. " The synopsis: High expectations, but it appears to meet the demand.
A lot of confusion seems to be going around about that whole GPU T&L thing when applied to Quake3, well Shugashack amazingly enough has the answer from one of the developers working with Quake3 technology. Here you go, right from the Shack. His benchmarks of the card are pretty good too.
Quake 3 does indeed use T&L and will take advantage of any hardware supporting it. It uses OpenGL's transformation pipeline for all rendering operations, which is exactly what T&L cards such as the GeForce accelerate.
Well what if Q3 used the other stuff besides the transform engine? The other three real features are the per-vertex lighting, the vertex blending, and the cube environment mapping. Since Quake 3 has static world lighting, one of the only places for the lighting to be useful would be for the character lighting, especially for dynamic lights. The current character lighting implementation is pretty quick though, I don't really see *too* much of an improvement there, though it is worth mentioning. The vertex blending may help skeletal animation, but since the current test has no skeletal animation, it would not help it at all in the current benchmarks. And the cube environment mapping won't help the game at all, since the game doesn't use cube environment mapping to begin with.
While I'm at it, the use of OpenGL doesn't necessarily mean that all games will be accelerated by the GeForce's T&L. Such examples are Unreal engine (including UT) based games. Its architecture is very different from QuakeX's and cannot benefit from T&L hardware without rearchitecting the renderer, as Tim Sweeney has said before.
Tomzilla
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3
Tom Pabst (of Tom's Hardware) has gotten himself mixed up in a lot of tough questions about his journalistic integrity (or lack thereof). There have been many accusations that he was a little too generous with certain reviews in exchange for getting hardware to review before anyone else on the 'net, and there was a big stink about him rushing to publish Q3Test "benchmarks" without even looking into whether such a thing would have any basis in reality. Tom has responded to some of these allegations, and his responses have not been particularly professional.
Anyone on the net can put up a web site and review products. Don't take other people's reviews (which are really opinions) as truth. Question seriously those who are writing. Many online authors have not displayed much professionalism, and those types are probably best avoided.
Re:Comparison to Pro Graphics? Here:
by
TraumaHound
·
· Score: 3
Riva3D ran the GeForce256 through Sense8's Indy32 benchmark. The results are here.
Far as I can gather, looks pretty promising. (with the right CPU. They used an Athlon.)
Seems to me like the next logical step is to have a graphic card that can handle more of the game duties. If a box is built right, the CPU can be slow but everything flies because the work is handed out to chips specialized in different tasks (see: Amiga, mid 1980's, which is still a superior design than any current PC). This chip makes a good first step in that direction, taking over the lighting and such, eliminating the need for faster AGP transfers and such. Ideally, I would like to see a graphics board that actually takes over some of the program itself. Of course it would be even better to have a NUMA motherboard and have chips dedicated to I/O, another to graphics, another to sound (not through the ISA/PCI slot), thus the CPU itself wouldn't have to be the latest greatest to turn out incredible results. These guys are turning out a chip in the ballpark of $100/piece wholesale that runs circles around any CPU. The whole computer needs to get that way. The only time you should ever need a fast CPU is for science/math, not for a normal desktop machine. ***Of course Transmeta might change the whole scenario, because if their chip can be reprogrammed on the fly to do things like graphics then there's no need for so much hardware.
random, possibly baseless points and conjecture
by
LocalYokel
·
· Score: 3
At first, I thought the moderators were all smoking crack again, but I see that they probably ran out of moderation points... Why is it that the subject of 3D graphics cards seems to bring out such obnoxious folk?
Frankly, I'm just not interested in these new components. Is an extra $100 enough to justify a 5% increase in performance, and if so, how many generations should be skipped after that before upgrading? Nvidia is talking about a 6 month schedule (though nine months to a year seems more realistic).
At the rate things are going, graphics cards will soon be the most expensive component in every system, even with RAM at its current prices. I'm also willing to bet that NetBSD will be ported to exclusively use the GPU, bypassing most components altogether, before the product is even released...
For me at least, I can't justify the costs of upgrading my system every six months just so I can play the newest rehash of a ten year old game. It doesn't impress me that the *new* version gives you more control, gore, levels, and/or 3D graphics -- I liked the *old* game just fine.
The CPU or component speed haven't been the bottleneck in games for a long, long time. The imagination of game developers has been occupied with utilizing the hardware acceleration buzzword of the moment, not with developing new groundbreaking ideas...
Doing a search for geforce on www.linuxgames.com revealed this snippet from an irc log: ----------- ([Jar]2) (orlock) WIll they still be supporting Xfree86/Mesa3D/glx/linux/etc like they have in the past? (nvdaNick) Yes.
(MicroDooD) (LaRz17) Will drivers for multiple operating systems be released at the same time? (nvdaNick) As for driver releases, I think NVIDIA is planning to release all drivers at once.
([Jar]) (MfA) Will the non windows drivers be open source? (ie not run through the pre-processor) (nvdaNick) What would you want with open source drivers, by the way? (nvdaNick) I'm not sure what our plans will be regarding that. -----------------
\begin{speculation} Anyway, if this is correct and nVidia is going to be have official support for Linux they are probably going to use SGI sample implementation and thus cannot release their driver as open source. \end{speculation}
Boy, does he hate 3dfx o_O
by
Chris+Johnson
·
· Score: 4
What happened with that, did they make fun of him or not give him cards to test or something? Like anybody, I have pet vaporware that I'd like to see succeed and become real, and for me that's the next generation 3dfx stuff with the antialiasing and motion blurs (in which the former would work with old games too). It's OK with me if it doesn't fly, I'll still wait and see what happens with it, but it's pretty boggling to see this guy kicking at 3dfx so bad. He was coming up with these big benchmarks for a GeForce card that people can't even get yet, and making nasty remarks about how poorly the Voodoo3 measured up (when actually Glide ran competitively when available), and how old is the V3 by now? Compared with a GeForce that people can't even get ATM?
It's nice to see that they've apparently added some of the MPEG 2 motion compensation support that ATI has had for a while. But I really wish they would bite the bullet and add a full MPEG 2 decoder. It would only take about a half million transistors; no one would even notice the extra die area.
Software MPEG 2 decoders for Windows basically suck, and there aren't (yet) any real-time decoders for Linux anyhow. Hardware decode is the way to go.
I keep hoping that someone will ship an inexpensive VIP-compatible MPEG 2 decoder daughterboard that I could use with my Asus V3800 TNT2 card, and it hasn't happened yet, but simply building it into the next generation nVidia chip would be even better.
Eric
Tom's...and every other hardware site too
by
sugarman
·
· Score: 5
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone on the net can put up a web site and review products. Don't take other people's reviews (which are really opinions) as truth. Question seriously those who are writing. Many online authors have not displayed much professionalism, and those types are probably best avoided.
Riva3D ran the GeForce256 through Sense8's Indy32 benchmark. The results are here.
Far as I can gather, looks pretty promising. (with the right CPU. They used an Athlon.)
Seems to me like the next logical step is to have a graphic card that can handle more of the game duties. If a box is built right, the CPU can be slow but everything flies because the work is handed out to chips specialized in different tasks (see: Amiga, mid 1980's, which is still a superior design than any current PC). This chip makes a good first step in that direction, taking over the lighting and such, eliminating the need for faster AGP transfers and such.
Ideally, I would like to see a graphics board that actually takes over some of the program itself. Of course it would be even better to have a NUMA motherboard and have chips dedicated to I/O, another to graphics, another to sound (not through the ISA/PCI slot), thus the CPU itself wouldn't have to be the latest greatest to turn out incredible results. These guys are turning out a chip in the ballpark of $100/piece wholesale that runs circles around any CPU. The whole computer needs to get that way. The only time you should ever need a fast CPU is for science/math, not for a normal desktop machine.
***Of course Transmeta might change the whole scenario, because if their chip can be reprogrammed on the fly to do things like graphics then there's no need for so much hardware.
At first, I thought the moderators were all smoking crack again, but I see that they probably ran out of moderation points... Why is it that the subject of 3D graphics cards seems to bring out such obnoxious folk?
:)
Frankly, I'm just not interested in these new components. Is an extra $100 enough to justify a 5% increase in performance, and if so, how many generations should be skipped after that before upgrading? Nvidia is talking about a 6 month schedule (though nine months to a year seems more realistic).
At the rate things are going, graphics cards will soon be the most expensive component in every system, even with RAM at its current prices. I'm also willing to bet that NetBSD will be ported to exclusively use the GPU, bypassing most components altogether, before the product is even released...
For me at least, I can't justify the costs of upgrading my system every six months just so I can play the newest rehash of a ten year old game. It doesn't impress me that the *new* version gives you more control, gore, levels, and/or 3D graphics -- I liked the *old* game just fine.
The CPU or component speed haven't been the bottleneck in games for a long, long time. The imagination of game developers has been occupied with utilizing the hardware acceleration buzzword of the moment, not with developing new groundbreaking ideas...
My US$0.01 (lousy Canadian pennies
--
E2 IN2 IE?
Doing a search for geforce on www.linuxgames.com revealed this snippet from an irc log:
-----------
([Jar]2) (orlock) WIll they still be supporting Xfree86/Mesa3D/glx/linux/etc like they have in the past?
(nvdaNick) Yes.
(MicroDooD) (LaRz17) Will drivers for multiple operating systems be released at the same time?
(nvdaNick) As for driver releases, I think NVIDIA is planning to release all drivers at once.
([Jar]) (MfA) Will the non windows drivers be open source? (ie not run through the pre-processor)
(nvdaNick) What would you want with open source drivers, by the way?
(nvdaNick) I'm not sure what our plans will be regarding that.
-----------------
\begin{speculation}
Anyway, if this is correct and nVidia is going to be have official support for Linux they are probably going to use SGI sample implementation and thus cannot release their driver as open source.
\end{speculation}
What happened with that, did they make fun of him or not give him cards to test or something? Like anybody, I have pet vaporware that I'd like to see succeed and become real, and for me that's the next generation 3dfx stuff with the antialiasing and motion blurs (in which the former would work with old games too). It's OK with me if it doesn't fly, I'll still wait and see what happens with it, but it's pretty boggling to see this guy kicking at 3dfx so bad. He was coming up with these big benchmarks for a GeForce card that people can't even get yet, and making nasty remarks about how poorly the Voodoo3 measured up (when actually Glide ran competitively when available), and how old is the V3 by now? Compared with a GeForce that people can't even get ATM?
Software MPEG 2 decoders for Windows basically suck, and there aren't (yet) any real-time decoders for Linux anyhow. Hardware decode is the way to go.
I keep hoping that someone will ship an inexpensive VIP-compatible MPEG 2 decoder daughterboard that I could use with my Asus V3800 TNT2 card, and it hasn't happened yet, but simply building it into the next generation nVidia chip would be even better.
Eric
Did an NDA expire today or something?
Just a couple quick links:
Anandtech GeForce 256 Review
Ace's Hardware GEForce 256 Review
RivaExtreme GeForce 256 DDR Review
The FiringSquad GeForce 256 DDR Review
GA Source Guillemot 3D Prophet Review
3DGPU Geforce 256 DDR Review
Fast Graphics Guillemot 3D Prophet Review
CGO GeForce 256 Preview
Shugashack GeForce, V3 and TNT2 benchmark roundup
Riva3D Full GeForce 256 DDR Review
GeForce 256 DDR Review at Planet Riva
Any others?
--sugarman--