>>I don't even know what you are talking about with this. Do you?
>I guess I'll have to put it more simple terms for you. I say
Sounds reasonable.
OK do it.
Does it? You just admitted the 3dfx doesn't suck.
But please keep em coming!
--
Header address intentionally scrambled to ward off the spamming hordes.
>>It does not, Andy Hollis has been quite upfront about this. As well as
>>less graphical features, he says that the way Riva implements textures
>>you would have to set your draw-distance to half of the 3dfx distance
>>to achieve similar frame rates.
>That's pretty vague. Perhaps you could enlighten me with a more
>technical description of the problem "the way Riva implements
I remember. I think I participated in that one :-)
Don't know who is right or wrong? I believe you. And he didn't exactly say
something negative about the Riva, I believe he tried explaining the
problems they were having with it. If you interprut that as negative, that
is your problem. IMHO of course :-)
Yep.. Well now you know where some of us get our attitude from.
--
Header address intentionally scrambled to ward off the spamming hordes.
There's the RRedline patch of Myth which looks much better than the
Glide version.
--
Eric T. Busch
http://ebusch.akorn.net
>Name a rendition app. Duh, like ICR2? N2 without bilinear filtering
>or is it Z buffering which is lacking...
Randy
Randy Magruder
Contributing Reviewer
Digital Sportspage
http://www.digitalsports.com
No problems there.
Nice backpedal. First you want to claim that you can't play Longbow 2
on a Riva, and THIS is what you fall back on? Here's an idea. Why
not just admit you didn't have your facts straight when you posted
that?? I might enjoy LB2, but I'm really more interested in F-15 (not
that this has anything to do with rec.autos.simulators, where we sit
now). And by the way, the myth of inherent Glide/3DFX visual
superiority has been pretty well shattered. I can give you some sites
showing side-by-side screen compares of Glide v D3D/Riva on the
latest, greatest titles. They are indistinguishable.
No, by rather MORE than a few percentage points.
Well, something has got to give. You no longer have the fastest
possible speed with the 3DFX in D3D mode, and you have no support for
any Rendition-Readyt apps. As is most often the case, you can't have
it all. If you get a Rendition you can't run Glide apps and your D3D
won't be quite as fast as it will with a Riva. If you have a Riva you
have the fastest D3D preformance but no Glide or Rendition, and if you
have a 3DFX you get Glide and D3D but no Rendition and the D3D is not
the fastest. So it really comes down to support. Right now, the 3DFX
is ahead in some genres and in others its a wash. Since Jane's has
begun producing Direct3D patches to its sims, it looks like they
haven't ignored the fact that boards like Rendition's and NVidia's are
selling like hotcakes to a market that won't even look at Voodoo 2
until it drops under $200.
It says more about Ubisoft than it does about D3D. They did it for
3DFX first, and they still have to finish fixing problems with the D3D
version, but they aren't visual quality or frame rate problems. Heck
the D3D version of F1RS ran nicely even on my old P133 I had before I
upgraded to a P300. One developer producing a better version in Glide
than D3D does not your case make (though your trend here on Usenet is
trying to show that a single single example is good enough to prove
grand sweeping statements).
Nope.
Well, since you already have made up your mind about what I'll write,
I guess I don't need to write it. Thanks for saving me some time!
But if you're interested in the TRUTH, my comments about F1RS are
going to be primarily based upon its driving model and AI. Display
quirks might be worth mentioning, but since I know that they aren't
there in the 3DFX version, I'll note as such and let the reader decide
based upon what board they have. You make the mistake of assuming I'd
write a review with myself in mind, rather than my readers, and for
the record, the driving physics and AI are highly unlikely to be
affected by the video board.
Randy
Randy Magruder
Contributing Reviewer
Digital Sportspage
http://www.digitalsports.com
You know its kind of interesting how when MS comes out and says that
Glide didn't offer any advantages for CPR when they tried it, they
were blasted as being incompetent programmers and that the hardware
was not the problem. When Andy Hollis of Janes comes out and says
something negative about the Riva version of Longbow, its suddenly the
hardware that's the problem (no possibility of it being that the
developers aren't as hot with D3D hardware as they are with Glide?).
I don't know who is right and who is wrong, but its certainly an
interesting trend among those who endorse the 3DFX as the only viable
3D card.
Randy
Randy Magruder
Contributing Reviewer
Digital Sportspage
http://www.digitalsports.com
This is a straw-man argument of course, nothing of the sort has
happened. I and others here have pointed out again and again the
rational arguments why 3dfx is superior. You have been unable to
counter these arguments, so you just lash out with your mindless
ranting accusing everyone of being religious (in other words, you
avoid the argument altogether), e.g.:
There you go, in the very same post where you "just have to laugh" at
accusations of being religious, you mindlessly spout more of the same
accusations as if it has some meaning.
ROF,L! The next time you want to roast an argument, here's a couple of
clues: first, check to make sure it's not your own pet argument you're
roasting. Second, don't use that very same argument that you
supposedly despise IN THE VERY SAME POST (!).
Joe
This is just not so, from my reading of the 3dfx newsgroups. Voodoo2
is THE hot topic, everyone is talking about them, and I'd estimate at
least 90% of the users on the 3dfx groups are planning on upgrading
ASAP.
Not really, just a continuation of the current trend of using 3d
accelerators as a cheap way to get more performance out of your
current machine. 250$-$300 is not "expensive", BTW - that's in the
"impulse buy" range for most people interested in high performance
PCs.
Not. There are many capabilities of Glide just not available in D3D -
LB2 is a good example, Andy Hollis has said there are visual quality
compromises (as well as performance ones) in LB2 D3D.
So there are some games that don't take advantage of the more advanced
capabilities of Glide. This prooves nothing, obviously.
Joe
"And since Riva does not do 8-bit palletized textures, it needs twice
the space to represent the same amount of area.? So, FOR EQUIVALENT
TEXTURE MEMORY USAGE, you only get half as distant of a horizon with
D3D, if you want reasonable performance (better than software). "
That's a pretty big qualifier to omit there! Since Riva boards can
use system memory for textures, whereas 3DFX boards use only on-board
texture memory, it may not be entirely fair to limit the comparison to
using the same amount of memory. And why should NVidia explicitly
support 8-bit textures for space reasons if space is NOT an issue with
that board?!
Andy also said in a different message (again see all caps which I have
added to emphasize a key point):
"I can't say exactly until we know for sure. We have to wait for
possible driver fixes/enhancements from some card makers, and we also
have to weight the cost/benefit value of certain other bits of work we
could do. The latter is due to the fact that many 3D cards (Riva
included) do not support 8-bit paletized texturing. OUR ENTIRE SYSTEM
IS BASED ON THIS. "
So the problem is not so much the hardware as the fact that Hollis'
programmers built and optimized a 3D engine based upon THEIR design
decision to optimize for 8-bit textures, undoubtedly in targeting the
3DFX architecture (and possible texture memory limitations) squarely.
One must wonder if they were doing the Riva version from scratch
whether they would have made such a design decision, given the much
larger amount of texture memory a Riva board can handle (via system
RAM) and the resulting conclusion that there might not have been any
reason to limit the game to 8-bit textures.
Andy then says:
"We have done some clever things to make it work reasonably well on
these deficient cards, but any further speed imporvements will come at
significantly more time/dev cost. There must be reasonable return to
justisfy this time/expense."
So Andy's inclusion of Riva in a batch of "deficient" cards is (at
least from this post) based upon his finding that the Riva hardware
isn't compatible with the "system" that the Jane's programming team
implemented to support the 3DFX hardware and corresponding texture
memory limitations. I understand that he doesn't want to re-write
Longbow 2 for D3D...but at the same time, just because someone does
away with a hardware feature because it addressed something that's no
longer a limitation doesn't mean that this is BAD. Just that its not
something you could easily re-architect for.
Andy makes a compelling argument as to why Longbow 2, patched, won't
run as well on D3D/Riva as it does on a 3DFX. However, he fails to
convince me that a ground-up version of a game aimed at an
architecture like that in the Riva wouldn't be every bit as good as
one aimed at Glide/3DFX. Perhaps he could do so if his team attempted
to do a from-scratch Riva-optimized game.
Randy
Randy Magruder
Contributing Reviewer
Digital Sportspage
http://www.digitalsports.com
I seriously doubt it is my gateway, it uses a standard Intel 440lx
motherboard, there is nothing special inside, basically it is abunch of
other manufacturers parts that were all put together in one computer. You
could buy all the stuff yourself off the shelf to make it.
> I don't even know what you are talking about with this. Do you?
> --
> Header address intentionally scrambled to ward off the spamming hordes.
Do you ordinarily extrapolate the entire 3DFX user base from the
loyalists who are patrolling the 3DFX newsgroups? Or did you make an
exception in this case? The people on the newsgroups are generally
the most knowledgeable and fanatical about things like this, but they
aren't the mass-market -- they are the people who will say: "What?
Another $250 for another 20 fps in Falcon 4.0? SOLD!" Most of the
public isn't like that. If they were, the Sega Saturn would have sold
like hotcakes at $399. Instead, look what happened to Sega, while
Sony and Nintendo introduced at lower price points and won big.
As you would expect on Usenet!
And that's how many out of the current 3 million or so 3DFX owners?
I've already addressed these "visual quality compromises" in another
post and won't repeat them here. You didn't read carefully what Andy
said. You read into his comments what you wanted to.
Yeah, Jedi Knight and Turok obviously are programmed by losers.
Randy
Randy Magruder
Contributing Reviewer
Digital Sportspage
http://www.digitalsports.com
Please. You mean calling someone clueless is not a personal
cheapshot?
Randy
Randy Magruder
Contributing Reviewer
Digital Sportspage
http://www.digitalsports.com
>--
>Header address intentionally scrambled to ward off the spamming hordes.
>>>Why whould I check their web site for a Riva patch for LB2? I would
>>>be surprised if it worked as good as 3dfx does, but I hope it does.
>>It does not, Andy Hollis has been quite upfront about this. As well as
>>less graphical features, he says that the way Riva implements textures
>>you would have to set your draw-distance to half of the 3dfx distance
>>to achieve similar frame rates.
>>Joe
More avoidance of admitting the simple fact that you were wrong when
you made the case that Longbow was 3DFX only.
Whatever. YOU can't run it hardware accelerated. A Rendition owner
can. Nice dodge, but pinned again.
Maybe, but since the Rendition doesn't have an AGP version yet (unless
the Thriller 3D is AGP?!) I've got one of the fastest boards around
for that.
I know some people who have both boards who would say the two are
indistinguishable at worst, side by side.
Thanks for pointing that out. I might do that. I'll definitely note
any problems with either board. But as I said, gameplay is going to
be a lot more important to me than video board peculiarities.
Right. And since they don't on my machine, they are of little use
except as a side note.
Randy
Randy Magruder
Contributing Reviewer
Digital Sportspage
http://www.digitalsports.com
Randy
Randy Magruder
Contributing Reviewer
Digital Sportspage
http://www.digitalsports.com
