I am not impressed with the graphics card industry.

[CaiNaM]

Originally posted by: Raduque
You LCD people are whiners. That's what you get for dropping the coin on it ^_^
/me pets his HP 21" professional CRT.

As for FEAR... I just finished it, literally, about an hour ago. It was extremely playable for me at 1024x768 noAA, 4xAF with everything at or near max except soft shadows. That REALLY drags my rig down. A-XP 2500+, 1gb ram, 6800OC. And I only bought this thing (the 6800OC) because my 9700Pro could no longer push the pixels in the latest games for me. It sucked running the FEAR demo on it =(

you know you can play at those same settings PLUS 2xAA for virtually no performance penalty?

 

[JimmyH]

The online multiplayer FPS are the greatest FPS games

Agreed. I am currently playing Quake4 multi. Quake4 dm8 is Quake3 q3dm17, the longest yard! Its kinda sad that my Athlon 700mhz w/ a voodoo3 2000 is smoother than a 4000+ clawhammer, X800xt pe+ on the same map.

I doubt I'll get that Holy ******! excitement that I got first time I saw QuakeGL on a Rendition verite. The tradeoff of map size for detail also bugs me. I remember Glide Unreal leaving that wrecked ship and going, Whoa! humungous. Don't get me wrong stuff looks better, just evolutionary and no longer Revolutionary.

 

[SickBeast]

I think what has happened is that the programmers have been making games based on the specs of the new video game consoles that are coming out. Once R600 and NV80 are released, I would expect them to have a very long useful life, as any developer in their right mind will make their games portable to the Xbox 360 at the very least.

 

[gtx4u]

Originally posted by: Rage187
I only care about performance in the big 3 graphics engines

Doom3
Source
and the Unreal engine.



Games like FEAR, Farcry and CoD2 I could care less about since most new games will be running on one of the big 3 engines.


But I agree, there is no reason why FEAR runs like crap on the best graphics card when games that look better(like HL2 and Doom3) run perfectly smooth at the highest resolutions.

There is a simple reason why HL2 and Doom3 can run faster than FEAR, in HL2 most of the world textures are simple hell the entire engine is simple compare to FEAR, most of the world don't even have alot of bump mapping. In Doom3/Quake 4 enemys bodies dissapear in less than 10 seconds, of course the engine can run fast, it's mostly just rendering the map you're playing on! But in FEAR almost every dead body stays on for a very long time. And there is much more special effects going on in FEAR while explosives are happening too.

 

[gtx4u]

What are you all complaining about?... jeeze... I have AMD 64 3200+ @ 2.5ghz, 2x 6800 gt oced to 409/1101 and 1 gig of cheap ddr 500, I was able to play the game fine on 1688x1266 on 2x AA and 8x AF

With everything in Video set to high, except for lightning, volumetric lightning, and shadows which was at Medium, and I turned off softshadows because it was too slow and it looked ugly as hell and was not a neccesity. If you have 128mb video card use medium for game textures. http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2575&p=3

Also I turned down All ragdoll physics to medium because it's not that important.
At these settings I always stayed above 33 fps which is more than enough to
play the game. Considering the human can see that much. The only really slow fps was when the game was zoomed in with the particle rifle, and the ar-gun with the scope and when you use slow-motion. I find it weird that when you zoom in and have slower fps because you're actually seeing less things on the screen at once, and the slow-motion fps lag thing is probably putting a huge load on the cpu calculations. But for most of the time during combat it rarely drops below 33 fps for me.

 

[gtx4u]

Originally posted by: Vernor
Shooters are more tech demos that anything else these days, often subsidized by hardware vendors.

Call me when a real game, like Oblivion, comes out.

WOW really? Why are there so many people playing CS:Source, and Quake 4 Multiplayer, and Halo multi?

 

[Polish3d]

Man I can't wait for ES Oblivion

 

[dfloyd]

Originally posted by: meelk
having to purchase a $200 or $300 (or more) PPU will completely turn me off gaming.

That right there says so much friend. For the first time I really believe the PC Gaming market is in trouble. The power of the Xbox 360 and PS3 really does come close to true high end PC gaming. And it does all this without driver issues, updates, conflicts and it does all this for around $400-500 without needing to upgrade every other year to keep playing and enjoying your games.

Now dont get me wrong, I am a diehard PC gamer and really wish PC Gaming would continue to be the game system of choice. But I am afraid with Video cards getting so expensive and games coming out that pretty much require upgrades to enjoy them, the PC market is going to start suffering. Not only will it have fewer people coming into the market but imo it will have quite a bit of gamers departing the PC scene. Fewer overall gamers, means fewer overall reasons for developers to continue to stick with the pc as a gaming device. Now this make take ten years or more to come to actually come to play but for the first time, at least imo, its definatly looking very propable.

 

[tuteja1986]

BF2 didn't need a beastie comp it was the stupid developer fault. Anyways load up time has been reduce in 1.3. Dice are really good releasing unfinished/buggy games example : Bf1942, BFVietnam, BF2 , BF2 Modern combat.

Originally posted by: sonz70
Same was said about BF2 when it first came out, that hardware would take a year to two to catch up to them game, wheras in reality, it took much much less.

 

[Therk]

Originally posted by: tuteja1986
BF2 didn't need a beastie comp it was the stupid developer fault. Anyways load up time has been reduce in 1.3. Dice are really good releasing unfinished/buggy games example : Bf1942, BFVietnam, BF2 , BF2 Modern combat.

Originally posted by: sonz70
Same was said about BF2 when it first came out, that hardware would take a year to two to catch up to them game, wheras in reality, it took much much less.

It is not because of dice, but because EA always pushes them to release the game on the release date even if its not fully polished.

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: Soviet
Topic Title: I am not impressed with the graphics card industry.

What "Industry"?

Only two manufacturers does not an Industry make.

 

[pontifex]

Originally posted by: CaiNaM
run it at 1280 or 1024 and quit whining... no one is making you buy anything -- it runs and looks decent on mid-range hardware w/ lower rez

i finished F.E.A.R., enjoyed the graphics (tho the game got repetetive), and now i'm gonna play some Q4

thats what i was thinking. so run it at a lower resolution. do you really need 1600x1200???? i have a bfg 6800 oc and run my games at 1280x1024 and they still look amazing.

 

[DJSfurry]

wow you know. with ATi and nVidia making the Gpus in the 360 and PS3, they have control over what they release in the PC market. if PC's had other companies making the GPU's we might've seen some huge leaps in technology a year ago or so. looking at whats out on the PC and whats on the upcoming consoles, we really see where technologies at and how were at such a disadvantage because of this.

how can a console that can process everything so much faster and is so much more advanced than a computer, (2-3 years) yet cost less than a graphics card for a computer which is only part of what you need to build a whole computer, which cant even compete with the console?!

 

[CaiNaM]

Originally posted by: DJSfurry
wow you know. with ATi and nVidia making the Gpus in the 360 and PS3, they have control over what they release in the PC market. if PC's had other companies making the GPU's we might've seen some huge leaps in technology a year ago or so. looking at whats out on the PC and whats on the upcoming consoles, we really see where technologies at and how were at such a disadvantage because of this.

how can a console that can process everything so much faster and is so much more advanced than a computer, (2-3 years) yet cost less than a graphics card for a computer which is only part of what you need to build a whole computer, which cant even compete with the console?!

because first of all, they sell consoles for less than what it costs to make them. lose money on the hardware, but make up for it on the games (licensing is much different than pc games).

second, performance is different as they are designed to do one thing and one thing only -- play games. it's much easier when you don't have to consider a broad range of hardware combinations.

 

[Vernor]

it's remarkabale that people still ask that question in 2005.


The PC is a jack-of-all-trades.
It is desgined to run tens of thousands of different applications.

 

[Vernor]

And it does all this without driver issues, updates, conflicts

No patching is not an advantage. It's a serious drawback.

 

[BenSkywalker]

What "Industry"?

Only two manufacturers does not an Industry make.

Actually it only takes one, although he mentioned the graphics card industry where there are dozens of players at least, even if you take it as a working implication that it was supposed to be about GPUs then that leaves ~half a dozen out of which ATi and nVidia are the second and third largest.

 

[xtknight]

Only two manufacturers does not an Industry make.

As a side note, why do people talk in that certain aforementioned fashion as if it's a German sentence containing an auxillary verb? Surely that's not proper English. Sorry, little things annoy me.

Back to the point: why don't two manufacturers make an industry?

 

[tacobellsmell]

microsoft controls the graphics industry with a nice api called directx

 

[aLeoN]

So I'm retarded and OpenGL is nothing.