GeForce 3 At Tom's Hardware!

[Taz4158]

<< 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. >>


No no no, I read it, it's just that that was one area that the Radeon had been criticized by some people. In no way am I thinking speedwise the two compare. It was an interesting first look at the Geforce 3.


<< . Maybe due to a deal with Microsoft to force the people to buy an x-box instead of this as a PC card.. >>


Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

 

[HappyGamer2]

yes the over rated , worthless FSAA feature is hear to stay at least for a while, we all have 3dfx to blame for starting this BS,. Oh ya it looks like T and L may actually have a real future after all, We may actually get 30 games that actually use it by XMas 2001 or will it be Xmas 2002.:disgust:

 

[Mykex]

Tom's lost me when he said the V5 was a good upgrade for a K6x system. That was the push that opened my wallet,boy did it ever open my wallet since I needed to move up CPU/MB to an K7. The AGP V5 for a K6 a good upgrade? Yea,if you consider an F150frame a good upgrade for your lawnmower engine.

 

[HappyGamer2]

I don't take much stock in anything Tommy says

 

[Taz4158]

<< yes the over rated , worthless FSAA feature is hear to stay at least for a while, we all have 3dfx to blame for starting this BS,. >>


Couldn't agree with you more.

 

[HappyGamer2]

taz it was meant to be a joke, fsaa overated yes, worthless NO, then I found fsaa to be fairly worthless on my radeon card, but not the voodoo5. As for T and L is the most overhyped feature , soon maybe by xmas 2002 it will be something

 

[DaveB3D]

Tom totally blew his coverage of anti-aliasing. He basically got the whole thing wrong on the implementation side.


Tom, as well as every other preview I've read (and I think I've read most of them) totally blew the occlusion culling (HRS) part, getting the implementation completely wrong.

Edit: Sorry, I'm bitchy about it all. The whole situation really irriates me frankly. NVIDIA is giving sites their docs and they are all rehashing it and adding what they &quot;think&quot; NVIDIA is doing. Like everyone talking about NV using a hierarchical Z.. which they don't.

 

[Angus]

it's really good but really expensive too(i mean way too expensive)
:-(

 

[RoboTECH]

I find 3 things very interesting about all these previews I'm reading:

1) Same fillrate and memory throughput as the Ultra

2) FSAA, a feature that was once &quot;downplayed&quot; is now being hyped

3) Every review is finally admitting the REAL reason why almost no games used the GeForce's T&amp;L engine - cuz it was lame

the more I read, the less impressed I am.

I SINCERELY hope those benchmarks @ digit-life are wrong.

If so, the Ge3 is thoroughly underwhelming, and will perform far worse than I even thought (and I'm quite the skeptic)

BRING ON RAMPAGE!!!!!!

<d'oh!>

 

[BW]

Hell yea Happygamer2.I feel the same way.The fsaa on the Radeon sucked ass to be honest.On the 5500 it was nice. The same with T&amp;l .It may be used more in the future.My next card in a week or two will be the Ultra.I dont think the G-force 3 is going to show us anything till the games come out for it.The Ultra will still smoke anything except the G-3 for awhile.

 

[TravisBickle]

could a chip with a core of 200mhz really make faster T&amp;L than our contemporary chips of 1ghz+? according to RoboTECH it doesn't on his machine. now a programmable unit seems better!
people have a funny attitude to fsaa. ok, it eats power like crazy! but are you a sad fashion victim that only plays the latest games to justify and show off your card? no, I have some games over 2 years old or that don't go over 8x6 which give someplace for all that spare power to go. how can anyone say those crawling lines and textures look as distracting or unreal under fsaa?

 

[BFG10K]

The numbers look impressive but wasn't it pretty much the same as Voodoo5 6000 could get,

Even if the scores were the same as a Voodoo 5 6000, are you saying you'd prefer the surfboard/hovercraft Voodoo to the normal GF3? I think not.

Also, wait until the drivers are ready to be tested before making any final decision.

 

[Taz4158]

<< taz it was meant to be a joke, fsaa overated yes, worthless NO, then I found fsaa to be fairly worthless on my radeon card, but not the voodoo5. As for T and L is the most overhyped feature , soon maybe by xmas 2002 it will be something >>


I have never found a use for FSAA even on my V5 which utilized it far better than the nVidia or Radeon, it always felt tacked on. To me it seems that if the benches are accurate that they needed SOMETHING to hype thereby the push for AA.

 

[Silhouette90]

Hey Robotech, let me make these points clear.

Robotech wrote
>
>I find 3 things very interesting about all these previews I'm reading:
>
>1) Same fillrate and memory throughput as the Ultra
>
This is not correct. Although the teoretical fill-rate is almost same between two, the actual fill-rate of Gf3 especially under 32 bit and FSAA is much more better than ultra (around %80 performance gain over ultra). I think this is what increases performance of the games under 32 bit and FSAA (1.6x1.2x32+Qu FSAA at 71 fps).

>2) FSAA, a feature that was once &quot;downplayed&quot; is now being hyped
>

I dont agree with you guys about the FSAA thing. I still like to play one of my favorite old F1 game, which only support 640x480, and the FSAA makes the quality of rendering significantly far better than the non-FSAA one (on a Radeon). As I said, high contrast games (like the ones that take place in open environment) benefits a lot from FSAA. Even a 1x2 mode look far better since while playing games, you do not stop the game and analyze the scene if the card does a good anti-aliasing. I think with this card, Nvidia did what they have to do one year ago by sacrificing their so called 6 month product cycle. If they would still continue this agressive cycle, what we get is only lots of marketing hypes like not so good-working T&amp;L, FSAA implementation, bad bad bad memory arcitechture, etc etc. Maybe we have to thank Microsoft such that these guys are forced to produce a real decent chip at last.

>3) Every review is finally admitting the REAL reason why almost no games used the >GeForce's T&amp;L engine - cuz it was lame
>
Totally agree.. Lots of marketing hypes for 10-15 fps difference for low end machines (I admit that I benefit though, coz' I still have a P-II 350)... At least they are on the right track now..

>the more I read, the less impressed I am.

Actually, I am far less impressed for old gf2-gf products. These guys came up with fill rate numbers like 1.6Mtexel, which they can never never never reach, especially in 32 bit. I read lots of articles which blamed ATI about their drivers, but in real world benchmarks, their radeon chipset will get par-to-par scores (sometimes even better) above 1024x780x32 despite the maximum fill-rate is only 1Mtexel. Up to this time Nvidia always delivers products with lots of marketing hypes, and now this is the first time that I see something really innovative coming from them. I wish 3dfx is still on the market and I hope ATI will come up with more decent chip such that the competition would not be over at least for some more years.

Ps: I totally agree with John Carmack. This is the first time that I am very impressed by a capability of a chip after voodoo2. And shame on 3dfx, because what Jonh Carmack wants from a 3d chip (increased internal/external precision like 64/128 bit colors) was implemented in Rampage (remember the apperance of Spectre in their web page), and most probably with loads of new features which would be missing in gf3.

Best

 

[BenSkywalker]

Robo-

&quot;1) Same fillrate and memory throughput as the Ultra&quot;

~Twice as fast with FSAA enabled is roughly the same? Thought you were a big fan of FSAA?

&quot;2) FSAA, a feature that was once &quot;downplayed&quot; is now being hyped&quot;

Err, by who? Who downplayed FSAA and is now hyping it? It now is useable on the newer more fillrate intensive games, though I would still go 16x12, just use that sweet ani filtering along with it

&quot;3) Every review is finally admitting the REAL reason why almost no games used the GeForce's T&amp;L engine - cuz it was lame&quot;

You really need to get out more, in specific down to the software store and stop buying from the bargain bin for once

Can you list the 3D games that have come out in the last few months or are coming out in the forseeable future that don't use hardware T&amp;L? Have you looked at the benches from DigitLife on the GF3 versus the GF2U for hardware T&amp;L? I see one fact that the reviewers have ignored, the GF3 still has to transform and light the polygons just like the GF/GF2 do, it just can do more. Flexibility is a good thing, but it doesn't make the GF/GF2's T&amp;L any less powerful.

Look at the candidates for this years GOTY in any category, nearly every single one of them(that run in 3D course) use hardware T&amp;L and with the odd exception of Dave's system and yoursP) running very old driver revisions in the highest resolutions T&amp;L offers a rather decent performance boost, in some games that boost can go all the way up to 1600x1200 32bit everything cranked(Giants).

Looking at reality, that being that a great deal of games that are coming out/have come out are using hardware T&amp;L I think that any assumption of poor performance because of lack of developer support would be in stark contrast to the evidence. Another interesting trend, look at the games nominated and awarded best graphics awards for the year, you may notice an extremely interesting common theme developing amongst them

 

[HappyGamer2]

Taz, well I found uses for FSAA in some games, old games and some newer ones were you don't need blazing fast frame rates, there are plenty of newer games that are slower paced, were you actually look around a lot without much movement. I play a wide varity of games this included Q3 and Ut, but also includes games no one has ever mentioned on the forum.

Accurate bench marks?? when comparing my Radeon to my Voodoo5 I found benchmarking to be very inaccurate In Q3, even more inaccurate than UT. The radeon out benched the V5 in Q3 at 1280x1024x32, but in real game play the V5 was better. In heavy close combat , high load conditions the v5 pulled the load the better, not skipping or leaving out anything. I like how the V5 showes the rib cages and skulls flying, and esp in when you get face to face, eye ball to eye ball with your opentent, with the radeon these great visual were missing when the frame meter say almost the same frame rate.. I have watched the frame meter when actually playing the game not benching, the Min frame rates were about the same between the radeon and V5, but the picture(visual quality) is better on the V5 no matter what the fame rates say when you got to the heavy load conditions. I figure the radeon out benched the v5 becuase the frame rates would jump up(spike) high under light load condititions, causing the average frames to higher.

I found Ut benches to show the real story much better D3d Vs D3d, the radeon was faster in benches and in real game play at 800x600, but at 1280x1024 the V5 out benched the radeon and out played it in real game play.

 

[Mykex]

A minor point but,



<< Even if the scores were the same as a Voodoo 5 6000, are you saying you'd prefer the surfboard/hovercraft Voodoo to the normal GF3? I think not. >>



Yes and no,If the V5 6k had stayed in development until today it would more than likely be a total different animal. Instead of the occational test bed cards that are floating around. Its not really of any use to compair that card to anything. BTW if I did see a 6000 for 2x the cost of a V5(current price)I'de buy it in a flash!

One cool thing about the G3,it looks like with those memory HS's it will be real easy to toss a 120fan on it.

 

[pidge]

I was playing UT yesterday but since the Geforce 2 Pro drivers provide so many lower resolutions, I can not play at 1280x1024 which is what I usually play in. UT only supports up to a fixed number of resolutions. So the highest it will display is 1280x768 or something like that. Sucks big time. FSAA doesn't work well with UT either. All my other games, I just run at 1280x1024. Racing games I use FSAA but that is all. I don't play flight sim games.

 

[RoboTECH]

Ben-

How does the OGMS look? haven't seen it in action, I must admit if it actually CAN do this (70ish @ 1024x32 bit w/2x2) then I will be VERY VERY interested.

WRT 16x12, I'd use 16x12 in Q3 and UT, and 10x7 w/2x2 in just about every other game. I'm interested to see how the 32-tap looks, I just wish for the love of God, they'd institute a lod bias slider. imagine how 1024 w/2x2 + lodbias -2 + 32-tap would look
<jaw drops>



as far as T&amp;L is concerned, I forget I'm dealing with someone who's CPU is about half the speed of mine. Of course, you forget you're dealing with someone whose CPU is twice the speed of yours, as well.

Geforce T&amp;L is great for lower end systems, not a big deal for upper end systems. I have an upper end system, and MDK2 (the easiest example) ran slower in higher resolutions with HW T&amp;L enabled. Yes, I know, the lighting is different in hardware and software, but &quot;different&quot; in that case wasn't that much better.

I haven't played Sacrifice or Giants (been too busy with SB2001 and NHL2001 - WHOOT!!! Still waiting for the Mario Lemieux roster update ), so I'll have to plead ignorance in that case.

I'm reserving judgement on the Ge3. I wanna see what it can really do.

I still don't get why they can't implement a lod bias slider. It's incredible the difference that can make.

 

[pidge]

What is the difference technically speaking between a LOD BIAS slider and the mipmapping settings the NVIDIA drivers have?

 

[Zipperhead]

dahm,now i got to buy another video card

 

[RoboTECH]

technically speaking, a lodbias slider allows you to make the image look a pissload better

technically speaking, that is....

 

[DaveB3D]

OGMS looks good IMO.

http://www.beyond3d.com/dave/i8.jpg

You be the judge. (note: also using 64-tap anisotropic)

 

[RoboTECH]

YOWZA!!!!

Okay, I'm impressed. I take back most of what I said. <g>

How's it look in action?

What type of performance hit does it take @ 64-tap w/2x2 OGMS?

Perhaps I'll skip the Ultra after all.

 

[DaveB3D]

I don't have the card, I just have shots and some early numbers.. the numbers are a bit useless though as they are pretty unoptimized.