A Geforce3 can be expected to significantly outperform a Geforce FX 5200. A Geforce 3 (not Titanium) has 7.3GB/sec of memory bandwidth, an FX 5200 has 3.2GB/sec. The Geforce3 also has twice the number of pixel pipelines as the FX 5200. Overall, I wouldn't be surprised at all if you got twice the framerate the dude with the FX 5200 did, or near-so.
A Geforce FX 5200 is quite literally the slowest DirectX9-compatible videocard you can buy. A Geforce2 or Geforce4 MX would be significantly faster at OpenGL or DirectX7! Expecting a $50 videocard to give you good performance on a modern, DirectX9 game is just ludicrous.
There are dozens of highly effective aircoolers available. The problem is that people only buy the cheapest, crappiest heatsinks available. Get a Thermalright (NOT ThermalTake) cooler and you won't have problems. You can even get performance that is vastly better than your average loud cooler when using a silent fan, if you use a good Thermalright heatsink.
Windows 98 and ME are essentially identical to Windows 95. Only cosmetic and other minor changes have been made to the OS. The only true OSes from Microsoft are those based on Windows NT, including Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Remove all glare from the screen. Rearrange your room if you have to.
If you're on a CRT, raise the refresh rate to at least 85Hz. If on an LCD, make sure you're running at the native resolution. If your CRT monitor doesn't support at least 85Hz, get a new one or switch to an LCD.
Have your eyes checked. If you need glasses, get them. If you have glasses, see if you need a new pair.
Play with the monitor brightness/contrast as needed. Straining to make out dim images is not good. If your monitor sucks too much to display images with proper contrast or brightness, replace it.
Finally, make sure you're sitting appropriately. If you're looking at your monitor at an uncomfortable angle or height, fix it.
I'm not sure what codec chip that board uses, but most of them use the Realtek ALC650. What you have onboard just provides DAC, ADC, and digital output functionality, all sound processing is done in software. As with all AC'97 sound solutions that I know of (including the SB Live!), it will resample internally to 48Khz. Overall, I'd guess that the onboard will probably sound better than the SB Live!. The only exception might be for gaming, I'm not sure how the 3D positional audio drivers are. Since it's fully software, games may be slower than the SB Live!. All things considered, I'd just use the onboard audio.
IME, Grado phones sound rather bright and tinny (except in the very high end), and I don't really find them very comfortable. Audio Technicas are respectable, but all in all I think the Sennheiser HD590 is a very good headphone for someone just getting into high end audio, who wants headphones that are very versatile (good for all types of music, gaming, movies) and don't require an amp.
The front outputs on a Soundblaster Live! are AC'97, the rear outputs are I2S. Before audio is fed to the DACs, the Live! resamples to 48Khz. This would be fine, except the resampling is done VERY poorly. Resampling 44.1Khz (or any other audio) to 48Khz before feeding it to the soundcard will noticeably improve audio quality. nVidia Soundstorm still uses an AC'97 DAC, but the Realtek ALC650 on my Abit NF7-S v2.0 provides decent quality. It still resamples internally to 48Khz, but the resampling is quite decent. You can do better in software, but the difference is really only noticeable in certain killer samples designed to point out resampling artifacts. I can max out the volume on my system and never hear any hiss or interference. It's pretty nice.
This is, actually, the case. Assuming a stable source, quality loss starts in the DAC, where the digital signals are converted to analog for playback by your speakers. If your DAC sucks, or is one that poorly resamples everything to 48Khz (Soundblaster Live!, for example), you've already lost the game. After the DAC, the analog signals are subject to interference all the way until they hit the speakers. On a properly configured system, any EMI or other interference should be minimal.
To get the best audio bang for your buck on a modern system, replace first the speakers, then the DAC, then the source. Get damn good headphones or speakers so you can make the best of what you have, get a great soundcard so you can feed the speakers a high fidelity signal, and make sure your CD player is playing in digital mode with error correction on.
On my system, I first purchased Sennheiser HD590 headphones. The improvement was stunning, on all sources and types of audio. I then upgraded my soundcard from a Soundblaster Live! to nVidia Soundstorm (onboard on my new motherboard), which brought a very noticeable improvement in audio quality, even to poor quality MP3s. Finally, I made sure I had the highest accuracy decoder plugins for WinAMP, and used ASIO output to pump my decoded audio directly to the sound chipset, resampling to 48Khz to placate the AC'97 DAC. This brought a smaller improvement in quality, but heck, it was free.
Have you looked at getting headphones? With a nice pair of headphones, you can get quality that you'd have to spend several times more to get from speakers. Most notably, you gain an unmatched soundstage and incredible immersion in the music. Sennheiser Prestige HD-590 headphones retail for $150, and do not require an amplifier, unlike many high-end headphones. If you want incredible audio quality for a not-so-incredible price, they're your best bet. Check out the Head-Fi Headphone forums for more information and advice.
SACD audio data is stored on a DVD disc. A single-sided, single-layer SACD disc has a capacity of 4.5GB, just like DVD, while dual-layer discs store just short of 9GB. See this Sony website for more information on SACD discs.
The main purpose of this is so that you can listen to your old CDs and MP3s and have them come out of every speaker on your 7.1 surround sound system. Users get annoyed when only two speakers of their expensive system are doing anything. For true multi-channel experiences, we've already DTS ES. Unfortunately, Dolby Digital EX relies on Prologic matrix coding to cram the rear channels into the surround channels to make 7.1, but it's the best you can do without a new audio format.
Nope, the winner is the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Note that while Sealand IS internationally recognized, thus should be in the running, SMOM is still the smallest "real" country.
If every Oil Producing and Exporting Country sucked up and sold oil as fast as they could, gas would be under $1 a gallon and all these countries would be poor. OPEC exists to keep oil production at market equilibrium. Similarly, if every DRAM manufacturer produced at 100% capacity, RAM would be $.10 a meg, and all the producers would go out of business. I see nothing wrong with manufacturers agreeing to only produce to market equilibrium, it's better than the alternative of wild swings between high and low price as companies go bankrupt and reappear. I'll also note that there's a difference between agreeing on how much DRAM to produce and letting the market determine the price, and fixing the price in house.
The situation with Rambus vs. JEDEC (the industry group that comes up with DRAM standards) is essentially identical to SCO vs. Linux. Rambus sat on the JEDEC to develop the DDR SDRAM spec, while failing to note, as the JEDEC rules required, that certain technologies were covered by Rambus patents. They waited a few years until DDR SDRAM was popular, then said "Hey, we own that. Give us money." Rambus was pure evil, out to make DDR so expensive due to license fees that their own vastly inferior RDRAM was the only option. Anything the RAM manufacturers could do to fight the Rambus threat was welcome, in my view.
The 32-bit version of Windows currently leverages the "no-execute page protections" processor feature as defined by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). This processor feature requires that the processor run in Physical Address Extension (PAE) mode.
Although the only processor families with Windows-compatible hardware support for execution protection that are currently shipping are the AMD K8 and the Intel Itanium processor families, it is expected that future 32-bit and 64-bit processors will provide execution protection.
This sounds nifty, too bad x86 CPUs don't support it (barring AMD's x86-64 offerings). However, doesn't PAE mode result in significant I/O performance degradation?
FYI, ATI branded cards are made by Sapphire Technology, and are pretty much identical to the Sapphire branded cards. The ATI ones just get a different (inferior) cooler, and get put in a different box with a different software bundle.
The error correction, as I have mentioned, is not strong enough to insure bit-accuracy of the output stream. It's designed to give an acceptable rendition of the original audio signal that isn't full of audible bit-errors, NOT to produce a stream that is identical to the original. You're going to get a lot of concealed errors resulting in reduced audio quality, which may or may not be noticeable.
While an optical drive knows everything about the stream and its accuracy, it does not tell the rest of the system. There's no facility for it to do so. Thus, you have no way of knowing if the data was read perfectly, or if the audio you're hearing has been interpolated to conceal data errors. This is why you need to use high quality rippers to get the most accurate version of the audio, if the error correction was bit accurate you could just use a simple copy operation, like on a CD-ROM.
The point is that the error correction does not insure bit accuracy. You'll never know if you have an exact copy or not, because the error correction isn't strong enough to tell you, the user. The drive knows to some extent, but there's no facility for it to tell you. Just because it rips perfectly fine with no errors or audible distortion doesn't mean that the file you have is bit-accurate to what was burned on the CD.
A problem with the error correction used on CDs is that it is not designed to deliver a bit-accurate signal. A CD burned as data (Mode 1) gets an additional 100MB of error correction information in order to insure bit-accuracy even with reasonable levels of damage to the disc. On an audio CD (Mode 2), corrupted sections of audio are interpolated, or simply muted for short periods. While you'll clearly notice when the audio is cutting out, you may not be able to tell when the audio is being distorted due to interpolation, and your overall experience will be reduced quality. This is why we need high quality rippers like CDParananoia, and can't just copy the data right off. Even using a high-quality ripper, it's not likely you're getting a bit-accurate signal, unless you use a pristine disc and high quality drive.
This is actually just a cost-cutting measure. By using passengers with laptops to control the plane, they don't have to employ pilots. Welcome to the future of aviation! Shades of Ender's Game and all that.
ATI's F-buffer renders the 64-instruction limit moot, offering support for essentially unlimited pixel shader program langths. Realistically, nVidia cards are going to be running in low-accuracy mode simply to attain usable framerates. Also, even in high accuracy mode, final frame output on a Geforce FX is still lower quality than on an Radeon due to the poor quality filtering forced on the FX to improve performance.
The fact of the matter is that updated drivers and games aren't going to make a difference. nVidia is out of the running at least until the NV40 GPU is released. nVidia wasn't expecting DirectX9 applications to become popular before then, thus didn't design NV30 to support them properly.
AquaMark3: We are currently investigating our rendering in AquaMark3. We have identified that we are rendering an image that is slightly different than the reference rasterizer, but at this point in time we are unable to identify why that is. We believe that this does not have any impact on our performance. Our investigation will continue to identify the cause and resolve it as soon as possible. One point to note is that we render the same image using our latest driver (CATALYST 3.8) as we do with a driver that pre-dates the release of Aquamark3 by almost six months (CATALYST 3.2). Also, in all of our dealings with the developer of Aquamark3, at no point have they advised us that they are unsatisfied with the images that we are rendering. We do not have any application specific optimizations in our driver and we are not cheating in this application.
As many are aware of, Tomshardware is the "Weekly World News" of the computer world. The only consistent factor in their reporting is the misleading nature of their articles. Furthermore, describing any Geforce FX as an "image quality king" is an outright lie, as image quality is noticeably worse than a Radeon even on the games that ATI supposedly "cheats" at. Go look at some screenshots for yourself if you doubt this. nVidia has still not stopped cheating, as their cards still will not enable Trilinear filtering, even when requested by the game and enabled in the drivers. nVidia's recent driver upgrades that purported to increase Pixel Shader 2.0 performance merely drastically reduced image quality, still failing to achieve performance parity with ATI products.
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queue, v. To get in line. cue, v. To give a signal or prompt. The More You Know(tm)
A Geforce3 can be expected to significantly outperform a Geforce FX 5200. A Geforce 3 (not Titanium) has 7.3GB/sec of memory bandwidth, an FX 5200 has 3.2GB/sec. The Geforce3 also has twice the number of pixel pipelines as the FX 5200. Overall, I wouldn't be surprised at all if you got twice the framerate the dude with the FX 5200 did, or near-so.
A Geforce FX 5200 is quite literally the slowest DirectX9-compatible videocard you can buy. A Geforce2 or Geforce4 MX would be significantly faster at OpenGL or DirectX7! Expecting a $50 videocard to give you good performance on a modern, DirectX9 game is just ludicrous.
There are dozens of highly effective aircoolers available. The problem is that people only buy the cheapest, crappiest heatsinks available. Get a Thermalright (NOT ThermalTake) cooler and you won't have problems. You can even get performance that is vastly better than your average loud cooler when using a silent fan, if you use a good Thermalright heatsink.
Windows 98 and ME are essentially identical to Windows 95. Only cosmetic and other minor changes have been made to the OS. The only true OSes from Microsoft are those based on Windows NT, including Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Go take a look at LCDs on the market. Especially in the low end, the vast majority have only VGA input. It's exceedingly retarded, but whatchagonnado.
I'm not sure what codec chip that board uses, but most of them use the Realtek ALC650. What you have onboard just provides DAC, ADC, and digital output functionality, all sound processing is done in software. As with all AC'97 sound solutions that I know of (including the SB Live!), it will resample internally to 48Khz. Overall, I'd guess that the onboard will probably sound better than the SB Live!. The only exception might be for gaming, I'm not sure how the 3D positional audio drivers are. Since it's fully software, games may be slower than the SB Live!. All things considered, I'd just use the onboard audio.
IME, Grado phones sound rather bright and tinny (except in the very high end), and I don't really find them very comfortable. Audio Technicas are respectable, but all in all I think the Sennheiser HD590 is a very good headphone for someone just getting into high end audio, who wants headphones that are very versatile (good for all types of music, gaming, movies) and don't require an amp.
The front outputs on a Soundblaster Live! are AC'97, the rear outputs are I2S. Before audio is fed to the DACs, the Live! resamples to 48Khz. This would be fine, except the resampling is done VERY poorly. Resampling 44.1Khz (or any other audio) to 48Khz before feeding it to the soundcard will noticeably improve audio quality. nVidia Soundstorm still uses an AC'97 DAC, but the Realtek ALC650 on my Abit NF7-S v2.0 provides decent quality. It still resamples internally to 48Khz, but the resampling is quite decent. You can do better in software, but the difference is really only noticeable in certain killer samples designed to point out resampling artifacts. I can max out the volume on my system and never hear any hiss or interference. It's pretty nice.
This is, actually, the case. Assuming a stable source, quality loss starts in the DAC, where the digital signals are converted to analog for playback by your speakers. If your DAC sucks, or is one that poorly resamples everything to 48Khz (Soundblaster Live!, for example), you've already lost the game. After the DAC, the analog signals are subject to interference all the way until they hit the speakers. On a properly configured system, any EMI or other interference should be minimal.
To get the best audio bang for your buck on a modern system, replace first the speakers, then the DAC, then the source. Get damn good headphones or speakers so you can make the best of what you have, get a great soundcard so you can feed the speakers a high fidelity signal, and make sure your CD player is playing in digital mode with error correction on.
On my system, I first purchased Sennheiser HD590 headphones. The improvement was stunning, on all sources and types of audio. I then upgraded my soundcard from a Soundblaster Live! to nVidia Soundstorm (onboard on my new motherboard), which brought a very noticeable improvement in audio quality, even to poor quality MP3s. Finally, I made sure I had the highest accuracy decoder plugins for WinAMP, and used ASIO output to pump my decoded audio directly to the sound chipset, resampling to 48Khz to placate the AC'97 DAC. This brought a smaller improvement in quality, but heck, it was free.
Have you looked at getting headphones? With a nice pair of headphones, you can get quality that you'd have to spend several times more to get from speakers. Most notably, you gain an unmatched soundstage and incredible immersion in the music. Sennheiser Prestige HD-590 headphones retail for $150, and do not require an amplifier, unlike many high-end headphones. If you want incredible audio quality for a not-so-incredible price, they're your best bet. Check out the Head-Fi Headphone forums for more information and advice.
SACD audio data is stored on a DVD disc. A single-sided, single-layer SACD disc has a capacity of 4.5GB, just like DVD, while dual-layer discs store just short of 9GB. See this Sony website for more information on SACD discs.
The main purpose of this is so that you can listen to your old CDs and MP3s and have them come out of every speaker on your 7.1 surround sound system. Users get annoyed when only two speakers of their expensive system are doing anything. For true multi-channel experiences, we've already DTS ES. Unfortunately, Dolby Digital EX relies on Prologic matrix coding to cram the rear channels into the surround channels to make 7.1, but it's the best you can do without a new audio format.
Nope, the winner is the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Note that while Sealand IS internationally recognized, thus should be in the running, SMOM is still the smallest "real" country.
If every Oil Producing and Exporting Country sucked up and sold oil as fast as they could, gas would be under $1 a gallon and all these countries would be poor. OPEC exists to keep oil production at market equilibrium. Similarly, if every DRAM manufacturer produced at 100% capacity, RAM would be $.10 a meg, and all the producers would go out of business. I see nothing wrong with manufacturers agreeing to only produce to market equilibrium, it's better than the alternative of wild swings between high and low price as companies go bankrupt and reappear. I'll also note that there's a difference between agreeing on how much DRAM to produce and letting the market determine the price, and fixing the price in house.
The situation with Rambus vs. JEDEC (the industry group that comes up with DRAM standards) is essentially identical to SCO vs. Linux. Rambus sat on the JEDEC to develop the DDR SDRAM spec, while failing to note, as the JEDEC rules required, that certain technologies were covered by Rambus patents. They waited a few years until DDR SDRAM was popular, then said "Hey, we own that. Give us money." Rambus was pure evil, out to make DDR so expensive due to license fees that their own vastly inferior RDRAM was the only option. Anything the RAM manufacturers could do to fight the Rambus threat was welcome, in my view.
it's like an evil zombie that wants to eat your brains.. and increase your penis size.
I experience those symptoms every time I see an attractive woman.
The 32-bit version of Windows currently leverages the "no-execute page protections" processor feature as defined by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). This processor feature requires that the processor run in Physical Address Extension (PAE) mode.
Although the only processor families with Windows-compatible hardware support for execution protection that are currently shipping are the AMD K8 and the Intel Itanium processor families, it is expected that future 32-bit and 64-bit processors will provide execution protection.
This sounds nifty, too bad x86 CPUs don't support it (barring AMD's x86-64 offerings). However, doesn't PAE mode result in significant I/O performance degradation?
FYI, ATI branded cards are made by Sapphire Technology, and are pretty much identical to the Sapphire branded cards. The ATI ones just get a different (inferior) cooler, and get put in a different box with a different software bundle.
The error correction, as I have mentioned, is not strong enough to insure bit-accuracy of the output stream. It's designed to give an acceptable rendition of the original audio signal that isn't full of audible bit-errors, NOT to produce a stream that is identical to the original. You're going to get a lot of concealed errors resulting in reduced audio quality, which may or may not be noticeable.
While an optical drive knows everything about the stream and its accuracy, it does not tell the rest of the system. There's no facility for it to do so. Thus, you have no way of knowing if the data was read perfectly, or if the audio you're hearing has been interpolated to conceal data errors. This is why you need to use high quality rippers to get the most accurate version of the audio, if the error correction was bit accurate you could just use a simple copy operation, like on a CD-ROM.
The point is that the error correction does not insure bit accuracy. You'll never know if you have an exact copy or not, because the error correction isn't strong enough to tell you, the user. The drive knows to some extent, but there's no facility for it to tell you. Just because it rips perfectly fine with no errors or audible distortion doesn't mean that the file you have is bit-accurate to what was burned on the CD.
A problem with the error correction used on CDs is that it is not designed to deliver a bit-accurate signal. A CD burned as data (Mode 1) gets an additional 100MB of error correction information in order to insure bit-accuracy even with reasonable levels of damage to the disc. On an audio CD (Mode 2), corrupted sections of audio are interpolated, or simply muted for short periods. While you'll clearly notice when the audio is cutting out, you may not be able to tell when the audio is being distorted due to interpolation, and your overall experience will be reduced quality. This is why we need high quality rippers like CDParananoia, and can't just copy the data right off. Even using a high-quality ripper, it's not likely you're getting a bit-accurate signal, unless you use a pristine disc and high quality drive.
This is actually just a cost-cutting measure. By using passengers with laptops to control the plane, they don't have to employ pilots. Welcome to the future of aviation! Shades of Ender's Game and all that.
ATI's F-buffer renders the 64-instruction limit moot, offering support for essentially unlimited pixel shader program langths. Realistically, nVidia cards are going to be running in low-accuracy mode simply to attain usable framerates. Also, even in high accuracy mode, final frame output on a Geforce FX is still lower quality than on an Radeon due to the poor quality filtering forced on the FX to improve performance.
The fact of the matter is that updated drivers and games aren't going to make a difference. nVidia is out of the running at least until the NV40 GPU is released. nVidia wasn't expecting DirectX9 applications to become popular before then, thus didn't design NV30 to support them properly.
An excerpt from ATI's Response to recent allegations of benchmark cheating
AquaMark3: We are currently investigating our rendering in AquaMark3. We have identified that we are rendering an image that is slightly different than the reference rasterizer, but at this point in time we are unable to identify why that is. We believe that this does not have any impact on our performance. Our investigation will continue to identify the cause and resolve it as soon as possible. One point to note is that we render the same image using our latest driver (CATALYST 3.8) as we do with a driver that pre-dates the release of Aquamark3 by almost six months (CATALYST 3.2). Also, in all of our dealings with the developer of Aquamark3, at no point have they advised us that they are unsatisfied with the images that we are rendering. We do not have any application specific optimizations in our driver and we are not cheating in this application.
As many are aware of, Tomshardware is the "Weekly World News" of the computer world. The only consistent factor in their reporting is the misleading nature of their articles. Furthermore, describing any Geforce FX as an "image quality king" is an outright lie, as image quality is noticeably worse than a Radeon even on the games that ATI supposedly "cheats" at. Go look at some screenshots for yourself if you doubt this. nVidia has still not stopped cheating, as their cards still will not enable Trilinear filtering, even when requested by the game and enabled in the drivers. nVidia's recent driver upgrades that purported to increase Pixel Shader 2.0 performance merely drastically reduced image quality, still failing to achieve performance parity with ATI products.
Nice try, though.