rec.autos.simulators

With the recent slanging match about these two, I thought I might post my views
on this so that hopefully a prospective buyer can make a more informed decision.

I've made a little chart describing the more common aspects and from that you
can probably work out whats more important to you. In the winner field I have
put both cards in if the margin is not so great.

Personally if I had the choice again, I'd get a voodoo card. (So you know where
I stand) My reason was that some of the aspects that the Riva wins in are not
important to me.. such as Integrated 2D/3D, 3D in a window, Resolutions etc
and some of the Voodoo were important such as Driver Maturity, Slower CPU,
and mainstream factor (larger market share)

As far as racing sims go, its a more difficult aspect because all the developers
seem to have taken different paths.. Papyrus (Rendition), F1RS (Voodoo, D3D),
GP2 (none), CPR (D3D) and the racing games like NFS etc seem to have Voodoo
support but at a very expensive cost by way of no***pit views.

If anyone thinks I've just got something plain wrong, left something important
out, please let me know.

Regards,
David

Feature                                 Winner
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Integrated 2D/3D                        Riva
3D in a window                          Riva
Video Quality                           Riva, Voodoo
Direct3D                                Riva, Voodoo
OpenGL                          Voodoo, Riva
Glide                                   Voodoo
Rendition Compatability*                Voodoo
Slower CPU                              Voodoo, Riva
Faster CPU                              Riva, Voodoo
Driver Maturity                         Voodoo, Riva
Highest Resolutions                     Riva, Voodoo
Texture Memory   Limitations            Riva
Mainstream (Market Share)               Voodoo, Riva
Cost                                    Riva, Voodoo
Games List                              Voodoo, Riva

* Voodoo cards can NOT run Rendition Native games, but you can run both a Voodoo
and Rendition based card in the same PC.

I have both...  why not have the best of two worlds.  Also, I don't like
Rendition stuff as much as riva or voodoo.  The Riva's 2D speed is
unbelievable, and the Voodoo's speed is great in 3D.  The only exception is
that D3D games look better and run a little smoother on my Riva card.  I
have a PP200 32m

Yea, you left out one important fact. The Riva uses lower quality
textures in order to gain speed. Texture tearing is a common problem
on Riva boards. Anyway, Voodoo2 will make all other consumer level 3D
cards defunct.
--
Nos

                 [This Space Left Intentionally Blank]

That's weird because the Riva cards use mipmaping  tricks that sacrifice
visual quality for the sake of speed.
http://www.bootnet.com/commport/nvidia.html

--
Eric T. Busch

http://ebusch.akorn.net

Hi,
Please excuse my lack of understanding this term but what exactly is
texture tearing? Is it the flashing problem many have spoke of here?
Thanks, Mike

  I'll add in there that the new Hercules Rendition boards are getting 1st reports
of matching or beating Riva's in D3d.  That isn't carved in stone yet, but if the
V2200 Renditions can match the Rivas, then a V2200/VOODOO combo could be very fast
and very compatible..(glide,D3D,RENDITION etc)
dave henrie

On 22 Jan 1998 23:48:16 GMT, "Mikes Designs"

                 [This Space Left Intentionally Blank]

And yep, it certainly looks like Voodoo2 will be the one.

Regards,
David

As much as I'd like a Voodoo2 it will be some time before I get one because the
initial price in Australia will be to rich for me. I'm hoping that the V2200
will be better in D3D for racing sims that use a***pit than the Voodoo
currently is. I base this on the performance hit that CPR had when turning
on/off the***pit.

Regards,
David

nVIDIA's Michael O'Hara says... (in response to boot's RIVA review),

<QUOTE>
"Auto generation of mipmaps reduces traffic across the PCI bus when
textures are actually stored in system memory. This is not the              
normal scenario. System memory is used for overflow. Having the ability
to texture from system memory as well as video memory gives a 4MB RIVA
128 the ability to run the majority of double buffered/z-buffered games
in resolutions up to 960x720. Auto-generation of mipmaps is not cheating,
it is an optimization that is allowed in the benchmark.

Furthermore, _it increases the quality of the rendering_. The flexibility
of the RIVA 128 architecture to texture from local or system allows for
some nice quality/performance optimizations. Most games that do not
generate their own mipmaps will look better when auto-mipmapping is
enabled than they would normally. If the application does not want to
utilize auto-mipmapping, RIVA 128 provides a means to disable auto-
generation of mipmaps."
</QUOTE>

In short, these "tricks" could also be called "innovations", they are not
the standard procedure, and they can be disabled, though I'm doubtful
whether any RIVA owner would want to do that. After all, why not utilize
one of RIVA's nicest features.

For those of you who are willing to give it a try, head to

        www.riva128.com

This site contains several links other to RIVA sites, like Riva Extreme,
RivaZone, and Dimension 128. Most of them have some tweaking utilities
available in their download sections. With such utility you are able to
conveniently adjust the number of generated MIP map levels (0-8).

Riva Extreme also contains screenshots from several games and if I
recollection serves me right, there was a comparison of visual quality
between Riva and Voodoo cards in RivaZone. Zone might be moving or
something, so I'm not sure if it's up at the moment, but when it is,
check it (as well as other Riva sites) out and see for yourself.

Btw, there are some nice demos and patches available for Riva owners.
TOCA Riva patch, and Longbow 2 Riva-only D3D patch, to mention a few.

---
Antti Markus Peteri

      "He was a bold man that first ate an oyster."

                               Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
                               Polite Conversation, Dialogue I

Randy
Randy Magruder
Contributing Reviewer
Digital Sportspage
http://www.digitalsports.com

Eric, stop reading boot.  Their assessment of Riva is incredibly dated
and many of their observations were proven inaccurate within a few
days after the magazine hit the stands.  Their "mip-mapping tricks" as
you so call it are auto-generation of mip maps for various LOD.  It is
a feature which can be turned on or turned off.  You can find the
technical discussion about this on nVidia's Technical Page site, and
you can find on bootnet's web site the print of the information boot
got from nVidia.  The 'tricks' as you mention them do NOT sacrifice
visual quality.  More often than not they are the result of bad (read
early/buggy/unoptimized/take your pick)  drivers or software that was
in pre-release status.  The observations made in bootnet led many to
believe (incorrectly) that transparency isn't supported by Riva cards
(gee that F1RS ghost car sure looks translucent to me!), and that all
the textures were grainy etc.  There are now several sites where
members who have both Monster 3D and Riva cards post side by side
640x480 screen grabs of newer titles to demonstrate that the image
quality is virtually identical.

Randy
Randy Magruder
Contributing Reviewer
Digital Sportspage
http://www.digitalsports.com

--
Nos

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So you think if he had better facts about the hardware he would
magically think the image was better? If he thought it looked like
crapola, what does it matter if he got some specs wrong? And
BTW, I am assuming you are correct about the specs. He isn't
the lone ranger in saying the riva picture quality was inferior.
Or do you not realize that?

--
Header address intentionally scrambled to ward off the spamming hordes.

And I repeat. If he had he facts straight, how does that magically make
the Riva image quality better?
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