GeForce 3 At Tom's Hardware!

[BFG10K]

Tom's Hardware.

Man, what a cracker of an article.

 

[BFG10K]

If you look at this page you can see some screenshots of FSAA and what framerates Quake 3 is running at.

Quake 3, 1024 x 768 x 32.

0xFSAA: 159.3 FPS.
2xFSAA: 85.4 FPS.
4xFSAA: 51.4 FPS.

Those framerates are unreal!

 

[demenion]

Also it saids they are High-Quality, so the texture sliders might not be maxed, still good though

 

[sapphoo]

That would be about 10$ per fps.

 

[Mem]

Well Tom`s hardware did mention flakey drivers so the benchmarks should get better just like the Voodoo5 5500 did.

Btw "BFG10K nice find"

 

[TravisBickle]

the early bird catches the worm, eh!
wow, that's a lot to get through and makes me grateful I only spent $140 on my card. but get a load of this:
"Anti Aliasing has been a big topic in the 3D-scene last year when 3dfx put all its marketing force behind this single remarkable feature of Voodoo5. NVIDIA made the mistake of joining the anti aliasing world, providing a rather sad solution that was eating up 3D-performance like crazy. While 3dfx's T-buffer solution was certainly more efficient than NVIDIA's super sampling method, both performed too poorly to make it a really noteworthy feature."
sometimes I think Tom just lives in some unreal macho world of benchmark numbers alone. I regularly use fsaa in 8x6. does Tom REALLY play games??

 

[Ahriman6]

Travis:

No, the problem with a reviewer like Tom is that he won't come off 32-bit output, even if the game really doesn't show a difference between 16- and 32-bit. And, let's face it, combining 32-bit and FSAA on any of last year's cards would result in a slide show.

 

[Ahriman6]

Oh, and as for Tom's article the man doesn't have a clue what he's talking about when it comes to multi-sampling. More holes in it than a piece of swiss cheese. But try emailing Tom and pointing this out and watch him beat his chest and become Tom the Teutonic Tech-lord, master of all he surveys.

 

[HappyGamer2]

Good Old Tommy, I haven't been to his site in at least 6 months

 

[vlieps]

Ahriman6!-
Have You actually played any game with FSAA on a last years card? No You have not. I have V5 and I can say that it works excellent with any todays game even in 32-bit color. Even with 4x FSAA. OK, not in FPS games, but, believe me, in FPS games everything is moving so fast that it is a nonsense to use an FSAA in those games anyway - You just do not see the difference, and it is not like in those reviews - You never stand in one place and stare at 4x zoomed piece of stairs.
For racing games it works excellent at 600x800 32-bit and 4x FSAA. Also in MechWarrior 4, FSAA is just a must, because then You very clearly see the small objects at a big distance - and in that game it is important.
What I want to say - it is not important to have the highest FSAA settings on the highest possible resolution to be able to play a game. It depends on the game and on the situation.

 

[pidge]

I play with FSAA on my Geforce 2 Pro on racing games and it looks beautiful. On FPS, I just run at 1280x1024 w/ 32-bit color. FSAA is here to stay.

 

[BenSkywalker]

sappho-

Glad someone brought that up

Now the Radeon, like the GF2 does in many situations, slides back at 1024x768 and doesn't actually run 2x2 at 1024x768 32bit in Quake3 but it does run 2x and going by these numbers we see the Radeon 64MB DDR @28.6FPS and the GeForce2 64MB @37.4.

Radeon 64MB DDR $179(AT's priceguide) = $6.25 per FPS(2X)

GF2 64MB DDR $248(AT's priceguide) = $6.63 per FPS(2X)

GF3 64MB DDR $500(MSRP) = $5.85 per FPS(2X)

I started a thread a few days ago asking people to define value for when the GF3 launched and got no replies, this is why I asked

 

[Ahriman6]

Vlieps:

I've used both a V5 and a GTS card last year, so, yes, I know what I'm talking about. While what constitutes 'smooth' frame rate is subjective, I don't think most people would feel that any of last year's cards would give playable performance levels with both 32-bit and 4x FSAA enabled, not unless you dropped the resolution down to 1996-level's 640x480.

 

[TravisBickle]

hey, you thread-crasher! this is supposed to be about the GeForce3!
even the first athlon cpus in QIII exceed 25fps with 32bit color and 4xfsaa in 8x6. now QIII needs the fastest frames around and people said 25fps was required. now they say it's 60fps required-huh, that's a strange leap isn't it- fact is that many other games would work with less than 25fps, and most people have faster processors now.

 

[Killrose]

Enough of this "Preveiw" Crap!!, I want a real reveiw!!.....so when is that going to happen?

 

[pen^2]

travis, i dont want 25fps on a bar graph, actually something in the range of 50 and higher cuz 25 avg means terrible frame rate all over, prolly high 10s for most part. and YES you can tell the difference between high 50s and 30s in FPS, higher immersion factor, although that could be subjective.

edit: while those framerates look mighty impressive, but keep in mind the test was performed with a pee4 - the only thing it excels at anyway-, unlike our durons, t-birds, athlon classics and pee3s.

 

[pidge]

Here is a pretty good read.

 

[Moz]

Pidge, did you miss the link? or are you referring to the article above?

 

[JayPatel]

best preview out there out of them all.

 

[Silhouette90]

guys check digit-life.. There is an actual and (one of the best I have ever read) benchmark of the Geforce3.
And if you guys ask my opinion, GF3 starts to shine when the games listed on nvidia's site will be on the market. As for the current games, what gf3 brings is a more efficient memory access which increases frame rates in 32 bit and/or with FSAA (the new z-buffer management tehcniques and cross-bar memory switch). In their article, it is clearly seen that the fill-rate of gf3 in 32 bit is around 1100 Mtexel, which was like 600 Mtexel in GF2 ultra. It is a shame for Nvidia, because most of these techniques were already incorporated in Radeon which was released almost a year ago.
As for FSAA, if your monitor can display 1280x1024, why to stick to 640x480 with 4x FSAA. This first one will give you the same quality and saves some bandwidth due to filtering. The same applies to 800x600 as well. And in case for 1024x768, the FSAA is only required for the race games or simulations where there is a high contrast images on scene. BTW, in directx8, AA can be applied only to specific objects instead of full-screen. This means if the contrast of the textures in the environment is low (where the difference between FSAA image and non-FSAA image is barely noticable), then AA may only be applied to the portions where the other objects would be drawn, which will save a lot in terms of bandwidth without sacrificing quality. I hope the guys at Nvidia adds this as a feature in their card.
I am really curious about the sucessor of the radeon. These guys packs lots of features even in the radeon like 3 texture pixel shader (yep, this one year old card can run most of the pixel shader effects created in directx8 (and according to digit-life, sometimes faster than gf3!!!!)), volume textures, hardware shadow mapping, all kinds of bump-mapping, advanced z-buffer management techniques. And, what they could not do right in the previous chip will be completely right on the next chip.
Lastly, I hope it would not take too long to see a MX version of this core.
Best all,

 

[pidge]

Whoops. Sorry. Here it is. But the site seems to be down right now (its digilife). Maybe in a few minutes, it will come back up:

Geforce 3

Pretty good read although I wouldn't really put much wait on the benchmarks since the Geforce 3 is targeted for DX8 apps.

 

[vlieps]

The numbers look impressive but wasn't it pretty much the same as Voodoo5 6000 could get, and that card was also supposed to cost around 600$? Just curious, someone seen V5 6k benchmarks?
Concerning those high-resolutions, I think that is not the thing that makes games look nice, look at Your TV screen, it is just something around 640x480 but those advertisements look sooooo nice. I think it is more about polygon count and lighting that makes the picture look natural and nice. I ALL games the models look damn blocky nowadays.

 

[Taz4158]

<< I am really curious about the sucessor of the radeon. These guys packs lots of features even in the Radeon like 3 texture pixel shader (yep, this one year old card can run most of the pixel shader effects created in directx8 (and according to digit-life, sometimes faster than gf3!!!!)), >>


This I find extremely interesting..........

 

[Silhouette90]

Taz4158: I hope I would not mislead you. I read that the Radeon can execute most of the pixel shader demos (which does not use 4 textures at the same time), and the hardware permits most of the blending operations. I think in the digit-life's test, they just run simple shaders which radeon can also handle without a speed penalty. I have doubts if radeon can run the nvidia demos at full speed-which demostrate the capacity of the gf3.

Geforce3 is a great product, but very overpriced. I think when the games that really take advantage of it comes out, the price may be lowered around 350-400$ and an MX version may be seen in the market (I can live with two pixel process per clock). Also, they may have to lower the price if ATI comes with a better chip with lower price as well..

Best,

PS: I read that this is the same core that they would use in x-box. These guys took 300M$ from Microsoft to develop this chip. So still why this overpriced product. Maybe due to a deal with Microsoft to force the people to buy an x-box instead of this as a PC card.. Any guess?

 

[pidge]

I thought I read it was $200 million but I could be wrong. Anyways, its not fair to compare the two units. Microsoft is gonna be losing boatloads of money with each XBox unit they sell however they will try to make up the money through the money they expect to make by licensing software titles for the XBox. NVIDIA and their board manufacturers do not have this to back them up. As I stated in other post, the Prophet III is going to retail for $529.99 so Geforce 3 should easily become available for $450 or even less as time passes by. By the time the DX8 apps which take advantage of the Geforce 3 come out, the Geforce 3 should be below $400 and their should be MX versions as well based on this chip.