Come on NVIDIA why is it so hard for you to............

[Wingznut]

"The VSA-100 is a bit of diaster"

Now why would you say that? Really... a "disaster"?

 

[AtomClock]

I've been reading this thread and there seems to be another way to phraze this thread. Why doesn't 3DFX optomize their drivers to give a similar performance boost in Quake that is seen in Unreal?

Based on all of the people defending NVidia, it would seem that, while the nvidia cards are always better than the 3dfx cards they aren't better when the game is optomized for the 3dfx card.

In other words... if the nvidia card is really better than the 3dfx card then it SHOULD be possible for nvidia to produce a set of drivers which would give good D3D performance for Unreal. Unless the card really isn't better, then.. the poor performance is simply a choice by nvidia to neglect the Unreal engine.

 

[StickHead]

Deus EX runs flawless on my system at stock cpu speed(700) at 1024X768.

 

[Whitedog]

I agree with the part about bashing the programmers... I just put together an ATHLON + GTS system and bought Deus Ex (Brand New game) and it plays like Hell! Everythings Good until you get into "transparent" textures (like fences) then it's choppy as hell.

D3D has been out for a LONG time now.. long enough! There shouldn't be any excuses! And YES! I know they have 3DFX logo's Plastered all over their products too! Shameful!

I'm glad though that the industry standard is GOING with D3D! One day this nightmare will be over! We need a STANDARD! hehe

 

[Dulanic]

Wing all the cases he mentioned are not NVidias fault. That was his point. And with the new D3D patch for Deus Ex it runs great, as does UT with the Open GL patches you can setup. But seriously most things arent NVidias fault. The MB issue is a VIA/NVidia issue.... however the GeForce was here first so its really VIA's fault for not supporting it correctly.

 

[Wingznut]

But most of the nVidia issues, take the Via issues for example... Neither ATI, Matrox, nor 3dfx have the same problems. Why is it that they run fine on the Via's where the nVidia's won't?

Can't you blame nVidia at all, for not working closer with Via, to ensure compatibility?

nVidia must have known that the Unreal engine games won't run so swell... Did they not care, when building the GeForce's? Glide has been open sourced for a while... Why not spend a little effort to improve their product? (Although, to blame the poor Unreal performance because of the API might be a bit simplistic.)

 

[Dulanic]

Im not saying NVidia is perfect... but all of the things mentioned like I said are not their fault.

The VIA thing is like buying an aftermarket part for your car and complaining to your car manufacturer when it doesnt work. I know its a tad different but it is VIAs job to quality test their products. This problem could have just as easily happened to 3Dfx or ATi. NVidia is working hard now to resolve it with VIA. Here Im talking about the KT133 AGP 4X Win2K issue.

And the Unreal thing... well you cant blame NVidia again. It was due to poor D3D programming. Its like if you go to a website with really poor HTML... its not your browsers fault it doesnt come up right.

Like I said is NVidia perfect? No, but all the cases mentioned are not their fault.

 

[Dulanic]

Oh and on the glide thing... why spend time implementing a dying API? Its a waste of resources honestly. I don't think most people would want Glide implemented on NVidia cards if NVidia has to sacrafice resources that could be working in even better features. You cant have everything on a card Would it be nice to have Glide support? Sure, but Id rather they spend their resources elsewhere. And NVidia has offered to help Epic work on OpenGL support.

 

[magtab]

Wasn't there talk of Nvidia adding palletised texture support to there drivers that's why all Nvidia cards run Unreal based games so bad.

So come on Nvidia add palletised texture support soon so we can just get on with playing the game's we have bought.

 

[Wingznut]

ATI doesn't seem to have a problem with the UT d3d code.

 

[Dulanic]

Well we can sit here and arguee this... but this is the case for all the cards. GeForce blows away 3Dfx in Q3. V5 beats Nvidia in UT. ATI may beat NVidia in UT but then NVidia beats ATi in alot of other games. Every card has a few downfalls. But try the patches mentioned above and all the games he mentioned run wonderfully.

 

[Dulanic]

Actually I just realized a good way to put my point. You cant expect a video card company to specialize their drivers for thousands of games. You can expect a developer to support a few video cards well. Make sense?

 

[Wingznut]

Yes it's very true that each card has it's strength's and weaknesses. This is why when people make blanket statements (such as product A sucks), it kinda gets to me. (I'm not inferring that you said this.)


"Well we can sit here and arguee this"
Nah, I'm not in the mood.

However, I would like to hear why Noriaki calls the V5 a "disaster."

 

[oldfart]

Personally, I don't see why people bash Epic. Unreal/UT is a great engine. What other game has support for D3D, OpenGL, Glide, MeTal, and a pretty decent software renderer? Quake I/II/III has support for OpenGL ONLY. I also don't understand all the D3D complaints. I had a Voodoo 3 and played UT in Glide and was very happy with the performance. I recently upgraded to a Radeon and was expecting the game to suck in D3D. BIG SHOCK!! The game friggin ROCKS in D3D!! Incredibly smooth and looks beautiful!!. A substantial improvement from my V3 in Glide. From where I sit, I see NO problem at all with UT's D3D support. I thought I was in UT heaven. Then Ben told me about the Loki S3TC patch. Now I run it in OpenGL with high res textures. Can it get any better?

 

[Gouki255]

Recently I got a radeon and got a hold of Rune, and I wasn't expecting much performance wise cuz I heard UT suck unless it is played in Glide. I installed it anyway and the game is set to d3d mode automatically. I thought what the heck I will give it a shot. Surprisingly the game play is really smooth and the graphics are....FANTASTIC. I was speechless for a moment, even though the game kinda suck as I go on.

 

[Midnight Rambler]

<< Wasn't there talk of Nvidia adding palletised texture support to there drivers that's why all Nvidia cards run Unreal based games so bad. >>

Exactly! All this BS about the problem being a result of using Glide. U/UT wasn't the only game that nVidia had trouble with. Tribes was another major problem, and wasn't it for the very same texturing reason? I really doubt the programmers of these games purposely chose to lock out a huge market segment by using Glide, but rather they used it for a good reason. No?

 

[ArMs]

Stop whining about nVidia, they still kick more @$$ then you could ever hope to.

 

[Ben]

<sigh>

 

[BFG10K]

LOL... yeah, neither are the Q3 sky problems. Or the incompatibilities with some motherboards. Or...

Wingnut stop flogging that dead horse. You know very well what the situation is with nVidia's boards and with certain games. There have been dozens of threads and websites explaining what is the cause and how nVidia's hardware/drivers are not at fault.

I'm certain that if the Voodoo line had a similar problem, it would definitely be 3dfx's fault.

Might I remind you that 3dfx's boards come last on the accuracy scale when rendering reference images?
Might I remind you of 3dfx's MiniGL crap which failed to run half of the OpenGL games out there?
Might I remind you of the fact that 3dfx's boards have no movie/DVD acceleration?
Might I remind you of the fact that 3dfx's boards are lacking a lot of standard features that other video cards have, yet they are priced comparatively to them?
Might I remind you of the ridiculous sizing of 3dfx's cards which mean a lot of people can't physically install them?

Those are faults of the hardware company. One game which has poor sky quality when it runs is not the hardware company's fault!

Now why would you say that? Really... a &quot;disaster&quot;?

Because they are one generation behind in performance and lack features that today's generation of cards have. Also you require two of them to even put then on the same chart as the competition (just look how the V4 totally blows).

Personally, I don't see why people bash Epic. Unreal/UT is a great engine. What other game has support for D3D, OpenGL, Glide, MeTal, and a pretty decent software renderer? Quake I/II/III has support for OpenGL ONLY.

Oldfart, supporting mutiple APIs is not really indicative of how well the game engine runs. Quake 3 is a far superiror engine because it runs fast, supports large textures and 32 bit colour right out of the box. Also ID didn't bother with a software engine which IMO is a very good idea. Also you cannot deny that Unreal requires greater effort to get it to run, and experiences more problems than Quake 3.

Just look at the performance levels of the two games. A 1.2 GHz Thunderbird easily surpasses 160 fps in Quake 3 yet in UT it can't even hit 90 fps. Face it, the Quake 3 engine is far superior to the UT engine.

Nobody is denying the Unreal engine doesn't look nice and play nice, because it certainly does. Heck I like playing the game and I have just bought Return To Na Pali and I love it. But face it. The engine was designed for Glide and Direct 3D (and the other APIs) was thrown in as an afterthought.

 

[Weyoun]

god people, you're beinning to sound like 5 year olds, grow up a bit... you know who you are...

about this whole nVidia's fault thing, a lot of these issues haven't been nVidia's fault, rather sloppy operations and procedures, like not supplying enough voltage to the AGP slot, giving numerous conflicts with teh GF1. Although nVidia could have avoided this, it isn't a problem any more as their power consumption is far less that the GF1's 24W consumption.

As for the Q3 texture compression issue, it's both id and nVidia's fault here. id for writing a *very* bad implementation for DXTC (compression of transperant/sky textures?) and nVidia's for writing a sub-par on-the-fly texture compression algorithm. This has to be understood before pointing the finger at only one of these companies and their products.

The Unreal engine, a very interesting topic. Overall, this was a very good engine for it's time, but taking the original UT release, it can be directly compared to the one in Unreal. What were the guys at Epic doing all that time? Yes, the inclusion of a software renderer was important because of it's development position (1994?), but is simply redundant nowadays. id was able to get a robust, new and fast engine out the door, yet still making all the resources for Q3. IMHO, Q3 is really just a game that shows off an example of it's engine, not to provide endless amounts of strategy, gameplay and intellectually required skills

We really need a new engine as a common denominator, Q3 is starting to see an outdated picture, and UT isnt exactly a perfect model.

 

[oldfart]

BFG, do yourself a favor. If you want your posts to be taken seriously, you have to get off of this bashing 3dfx kick of yours. It really makes you look like a dumbass troll. It grates on peoples nerves. You've posted a couple of time without 3dfx bashing and it was very refreshing. We all know you hate 3dfx, and yes they have their short commings, how about you get over it? Why are you so bent on constantly posting anti 3dfx? I wasn't happy with the newest 3dfx cards, so I just bought something else. End of story.

On to your comments. Did I say UT was a better engine than Q3? No, I didn't. I think Q3 is a much newer and much more advanced engine. My point was that I was complementing Epic for supporting 4 API's and a good softwware renderer. I've personally played the game in every one of them. All of them work very well on the proper hardware. Glide on my V3, D3D and OpenGL on my Radeon, MeTal, on my buddies S3 Savage. And software at a co-workers house. His kid LOVES that game and is actually using the UnrealED to design mods and levels. He has a crap video card without 3D acceleration. Would you like to tell him that the software renderer wasn't a good idea?

 

[pen^2]

<< about this whole nVidia's fault thing, a lot of these issues haven't been nVidia's fault, rather sloppy operations and procedures, like not supplying enough voltage to the AGP slot, giving numerous conflicts with teh GF1. Although nVidia could have avoided this, it isn't a problem any more as their power consumption is far less that the GF1's 24W consumption. >>


i thought it was the motherboard manufacturers cutting corners and not sticking to AGP specifications that caused the problem? of course i could be wrong, but IMO its unfair to blame nvidia to come out with a nexgen card a full step ahead of competition. if it were some multi voodoo1 core based card using the same 0.25micorn process to come out at the same time, i am sure they would have had the same problem, if not much worse.
as for the UT/nvidia problem, epic must be bunch of dumbnuts for not realeasing a patch for the most dominant 3d graphics card lineup up until now to let some third party developer come along and blows glide setup outta water.

 

[Wingznut]

Ok BFG, we'll play another round.
&quot;Might I remind you that 3dfx's boards come last on the accuracy scale when rendering reference images?&quot;

And exactly why do I give a rat's @ss? The V5 ROCKS! in all the games I play. ALL of them, which is a huge variety.


&quot;Might I remind you of 3dfx's MiniGL crap which failed to run half of the OpenGL games out there?&quot;

Again, why do I give a rat's @ss? The V5 doesn't use a miniGL and it plays every game extremely well.


&quot;Might I remind you of the fact that 3dfx's boards are lacking a lot of standard features that other video cards have, yet they are priced comparatively to them?&quot;

You mean like that all-useful T&amp;L? Yeah, I really miss that.


&quot;Might I remind you of the ridiculous sizing of 3dfx's cards which mean a lot of people can't physically install them?&quot;

Again, why do I give a rat's @ss? It fits in my case just fine. And if it didn't, I'd buy a new case. Not an issue. I'm fairly certain that someone who's willing to spend $300 on a video card, already has an above average case.


&quot;Because they are one generation behind in performance &quot;

Ok, this is pure bullsh*t. My Q3 benchmarks are neck and neck with a GTS at 1280x1024x32 resolution. Sure the GTS kicks it at 640x480. But I don't spend $300 on a card, to play at low resolutions. I don't know anybody who does, either.


C'mon BFG, at least pick out some relevant examples. I don't believe you've ever explained your personal hatred towards 3dfx. It's got to be an interesting story.

 

[IBMer]

Ok BFG, like I do on the 3dfiles.com board to a person named Jerk, I will make you look stupid.

Might I remind you that 3dfx's boards come last on the accuracy scale when rendering reference images?

We will go to the sharky review for this one.

&quot;3dfx's Voodoo4 deviates the furthest from the software renderer but manages to improve on the image's accuracy. You'll see that the tents in the Voodoo5 capture have all of their legs, whereas the software capture omits a couple of them. The same holds true for Matrox's G450 image.&quot;

The Review

Might I remind you of 3dfx's MiniGL crap which failed to run half of the OpenGL games out there?

MiniGL is gone and there was always WickedGL which didn't have any problems. BTW most MiniGL was also impletements into games by the designers.

Might I remind you of the fact that 3dfx's boards have no movie/DVD acceleration?

Pure FUD, they do have DVD hardware acceleration.

&quot;DVD hardware assist: planar to packed-pixel conversion&quot;

Stated directly on the specs of the V5 and V4.

Might I remind you of the fact that 3dfx's boards are lacking a lot of standard features that other video cards have, yet they are priced comparatively to them?

By the time these &quot;standard&quot; features get implamented in games the next generation cards are out.

Look at Cube Environment mapping.... almost a year and still no games.

Might I remind you of the ridiculous sizing of 3dfx's cards which mean a lot of people can't physically install them?

The V5 isn't that big and the V4 isn't that big either. If you had seen one you would know that it doesn't even go past the big motherboards for the Athlons like the A7V, K7V, KA7 and the KT7. So you shouldn't buy one of these motherboards either right?

Those are faults of the hardware company. One game which has poor sky quality when it runs is not the hardware company's fault!

Q3, FAKK2, SOF, UT when adding the S3TC hack all have problems with the sky because S3TC is inferior FXT1.

Oldfart, supporting mutiple APIs is not really indicative of how well the game engine runs. Quake 3 is a far superiror engine because it runs fast, supports large textures and 32 bit colour right out of the box

Hmmmm.... lets see is that the only thing that a game engine is superior for. Lets see a vast open level with the Q3 engine that doesn't choke. The UT engine is a great engine and that is why people keep using it.


Just look at the performance levels of the two games. A 1.2 GHz Thunderbird easily surpasses 160 fps in Quake 3 yet in UT it can't even hit 90 fps. Face it, the Quake 3 engine is far superior to the UT engine.

I can show you pictures in game of UT with 150fps-200fps on a GTS even.

You also forget that ATI cards run this engine fine as well...only nvidia cards choke.... why because they don't support Palletized Textures.

Ben:

Funny that I was able to fix this by editing the Quake3 executable. nVidia's drivers now overwriting game executables to trash games?? They must have it in for people.

You should do a couple more tests. While I found that the fix did improve the sky in one level well, the ones with the red sky still look like crap and the level based texture corruption remained.

<a target=new href="http://web.tampabay.rr.com/mvust/nocomp.JPG[/L

[L=Normal S3TC Compresson]http://web.tampabay.rr.com/mvust/normal.jpg">No Compression</a>

Compression with the Fix

Nothing has been done to this horrible looking crap that is around all of Q3.

Plus when you add the patch I lose 5fps at 1024x768x32 with Max details. Maybe this is a sign that NVidia doesn't want to implament the 128x128 texture occlution like ATI because their benchmarks would suffer a lot.

 

[Weyoun]

sorry for my incoherent english Brotherman, but yeah that was my point We just finished our year 10 major exams today, tirreddd

The problems you're seeing IBMer are related to the substandard on-the-fly compression method nVidia wrote for OpenGL. While the differing levels of compression (DXT1-5) may help for transperancies, it certainly does nothing for the lightmaps. This is also a contributing factor on the sky texture, as it looks noticably worse on nVidia cards than others....

Can someone with a lot of free time actually go through the Q3 pak file and compress all these textures, and see if it still works? If it does, no more checkerboard lightmaps, and we might see a fix for this problem yet...