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GeForce...right!
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07-09-1999 2:01pm#1
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Mind you, with it's not-too-impressive fill rate, I reckon the next-gen 3Dfx card will kick it around the place.. it's all very well putting a hardware pipe-line on a card, but all of the current games are still fill-rate limited at high-res.
Q3 has a max of around 10,000 polygons per scene, which really isn't a problem for decent machines these days - it's fill-rate and texture handling that need a boost in the short-term.
Think of the GeForce not as an acceletator for the current generation of games, but as an enabler of the next generation. Games will have to be written to take advantage of the GeForce fully, whereas 3Dfx's card is squarely aimed at pushing the performance of current games through the roof.. ah well, should be a very interesting market in the next few months.. I feel sorry for Matrox and their G400 Max.
Teeth.0 -
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3dfx's new offering doesn't look interesting at all, I fear
Even their top-secret announcement at ECTS which we're all not allowed talk about wasn't all that interesting, since it was to do with software not nex-gen hardware.
The GeForce is very impressive - the fill rate isn't as high as anticipated, but that's because it makes up for it with other features which reduce the fill rate that you're actually going to need in the first place. Anyone who saw their tech demo knows that the speed isn't gonna be an issue - with a processor twice as complex as a PIII and up to 128Mb of RAM onboard, this card is the best thing out there at the moment. The new 3dfx cards pale in comparison, and they look like they're playing catch-up with the TNT2 and the Neon, while NVIDIA themselves race ahead on the nex-gen path.
Ja,
Rob0 -
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Think of it this way - on your current hardware, do any of the current games or betas of future games run too slowly at 640x480x16?
If this is the case (ie, you have a processor slower than a P2) then you need more polygon crunching power, either in the shape of a faster CPU, or a graphics chip with hardware T&L.
If (as is the case for most people now) all of the current games and most of the new ones (such as Q3 and UT) run great at low res and 16bit colour - then you already have all the T&L power you need. As you increase resolution and colour depth, the number of polygons being handled stays exactly the same, whereas the fill-rate goes through the roof.
The current generation of games - up to and beyond Q3 are completely fill-rate limited, the only effective way to increase the performance of these games (on decent CPUs) is more fill-rate.
Hardware T&L is of course 'the way forward', but at the moment a card like the GeForce isn't going to make much of a difference beyond it's increased fill-rate and memory.
When the next generation of games with their ultra-high polygon counts and CPU-intensive physics engines and AI come along, the GeForce and similar cards will stand out - but then, you lot will just drop the poly levels, screw with mip-cap settings, and kill the lighting so it looks like Quake1 anyway, so why worry?
In any case, if 3Dfx can bring out a card with significantly higher fill-rate than the competition, I reckon their cards will be the fastest on any game that we will see until the middle of next year - I hope for their sake they have a hardware T&L card out by then, or they'll eat Nvidia's dust for sure!
Teeth.0 -
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Teeth - I seem to recall a discussion on the OpenGL list about GPU systems, and the final conclusion was that if NVIDIA write the GeForce OpenGL ICD right, games running in OGL will get a significant speed boost from the oncard geometry functions - without having to rewrite any game code. DX7 supports GPU stuff transparently as well, but not as well.
3DFX's fill rate in the nexgen isn't going skyward - they're concentrating on lamer features like the fabled T-Buffer (like anyone in their right mind is gonna use that, it'd be like turning around in this day and age and writing a GLIDE-only game) and other ummmm stuff that we're not allowed talk about on public boards... But I can assure you all that it ain't earth-shaking
Ja,
Rob0 -
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hmm, t buffer is a load of crap?Doubt it. Companies will support it because there'll be a large enough userbase within weeks of its realease. many games even now support a couple of proprietary 3d audio standards. None of which have dominace over the other.
T buffering will be easy to add in, and will have a major effect on gameplay by dropping the fps needed to be playable hugely. The only reason we need 40+ frames per second playable is because of the lack of blur in movement and so on in each frame. The extra frames are needed so our eyes cannt keep up and add in the blur makeing the games look like the real world and less jarring to our perceptions.
However with t buffering framerates of 25, like in films, will be perfectly acceptable to the eye without any of the jerkiness apparent to us at the moment. So thats a pretty cool feature. Instantly helping lower end cpus (3dfx once again being the way to go for ppl with crap cpus) and adding a nice improvement in quality to all users.
Not exactly an unimportant and useless piece of hardware
Still think nvidia will walk all over them (hope so anyway
Q
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