"Hans Bergengren" <s...@spam.com> wrote in message
news:koY38.17723$l93.3551138@newsb.telia.net...
> "Mark Nusbaum" <mark.nusb...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> > Yeah, like the guys who bought TNTs in late '98 and then got their copy
of
> > Quake3 a year later, slapped it in and cranked up the quality to utilize
> > those detailed textures and 32-bit color, and then fragged away at 5
> frames
> > per second.
> Uhhh... Not exactly, no.
> Tell me which feature will make today's video cards frag away at 5 fps,
> please. You aren't really painting a true picture of the situation here,
> dude. Things have happened since the TNT was released, mebbe it's time to
> realize that for die-hard 3dfx fans?
Not following you, Hans. I'm not talking about today, I'm talking about late
'99. I think it's true that hardware has caught up to the games today as
compared to then, so it takes longer for this effect to take place. But it
still happens - look at the article at AnandTech today on cards running the
beta Unreal2/UT2 engine. There are development issues that will make the
cards run better when the games do come out, but you can see the framerates
dropping. If you look at 12x10 32-bit, no current card even hits 35fps, GF2
Pro/Ti's do 16, my Radeon 14 (sob!).
> > Just because you have certain capabilities in hardware doesn't
> > mean you'll be able to use them when the software eventually comes out.
> But
> > people like you who buy into this crap, primarily shoveled by the
hardware
> > press, are the reason nVidia rules the business now.
> Here we see it again, sore loser syndrome. ;-)
> <sarcasm>Otoh, 3dfx was a fair company, THEY DECIDED FOR YOU when a
> particular feature was "needed" and released a card supporting that
feature
> years and years after the competition did. Yeah, that's a much better
> approach than that Evil Nasty Nvidia. If only all companies competed
fairly
> by making sure they lagged behind 3dfx, I'm sure the state of the gaming
> market would be MUCH BETTER today...!</sarcasm>
Regarding 3dfx, if they hadn't been in the financial condition they were in
'99 and had stayed viable, I have no doubt that the state of gaming hardware
would be better than it is now. I think their approach was somewhat
different than nVidia, moreso than ATi, and a third competitor would have
done a lot to spur development. Without their financial difficulty, 3dfx
would have gotten their V5 generation out earlier, including the 6000. Since
they were still on a .25mu process, their next, die-shrunk generation would
have been much faster. Continuing the multichip solution would have changed
what the card could do, and things like FSAA at very high resolutions was
possible very soon, and other effects as well. There are those who say (and
I'm not talking about 3dfx diehards) that the only very good thing to come
out of the featureset of the last few generations of cards is FSAA, and 3dfx
and ATi have contributed as much as nVidia in this area.
As 3dfx faded away nVidia's development slowed and the prices went up - the
$200-250 TNTs were followed by the GF256 32mb SDR at $250-300, the GF 32mb
DDR at $300-350, the $350-400 GF 64mb DDR, the GF2 GTS at about $350, then
the 64mb version at $400-450, and finally the GF2 Ultra at $500 after 3dfx
was long gone.They've backed down to the $400 level with the GF3 and Ti 500,
probably realizing what the limit was that even gaming fanatics would pay,
no longer having to pay so much for 64mb of fast DDR memory, and realizing
that they still have a competitor in ATi. But have the advancements in
performance over those last two years been worth the bucks? Would the
picture have been the same if 3dfx was pushing them all the time?
Regarding 3dfx' product decisions. It's not like I bought the card a year or
two before its release and then got stuck with their development decisions.
I made that decision based on what it could do, my assessment of what it
couldn't, and the price. Anyone was free to do that, and it would have been
nice if the press coveyed that message. But they didn't, rather they coveyed
the type of message that you do, that 3dfx was almost evil, that they were
truly bad for gaming, that one would really regret getting one of their
cards only six months or so after buying it. I think that kind of bias hurt
3dfx in very real ways, and ultimately lead many people to...
> > like the guys who were buying all those TNT2 M64s when the GeForce first
> > came out, because nVidia was best then as well.
> I have no idea what people you're referring to, but one has to remember
that
> everyone is responsible for making their own decisions (and doing proper
> research in order to make the right one for them).
...buy cards that didn't perform very well at all but had that TNT2 name
that the press touted so much. It's that low-end base in OEM and retail
boards that has benefitted nVidia greatly in terms of profits, name
recognition, wider OEM penetration. That's a big part of the reason ATi
decided to redouble their efforts in the high-end gaming arena, I think, to
help
protect their low-end and OEM base.
> > I'd think that people who
> > populate the hardware newsgroups would know better. But I guess I can't
> > complain if you guys spend $400 on a card that perhaps helps in the
> > development of better software that I can actually run when released a
> year
> > or two later on my new, faster (but no longer cutting edge) $200 card...
> Not sure what you're talking about. I got my GF3 in november, it wasn't
> particularly new by then, it did not cost $400 either, that's just wishful
> thinking on your behalf. Nor have I preached the virtues of getting $400
> video cards, that's just another example of wishful thinking on your
behalf.
> Seems the only defense left for the aging 3dfx fanboys are accusing others
> of mindlessly and needlessly buying $3-400 (and sometimes more) video
cards,
> that's just SO pathetic.
The prices I mention are suggested retail at release, since that's about the
best relative measure I can think of. Your GF3 purchase came after the
release of the Ti "generation", so should have been less, and you may not
have bought it off the shelf in a typical retail outlet. No matter - I paid
$180 for my Radeon64 DDR Vivo early last year, but I would refer to it as a
$400 card since that's what SRP was at release. I don't really care what you
paid for your card, I'm just indicating prices to show relative
measurements, between nVidia cards and others, between generations of nVidia
cards.
And I'm not some bitter 3dfx fanboy living in the past. I think they made
some very good cards, did a lot for 3D gaming in the early days, and I do
wish they were still around for everyone's sake. I could easily say that you
and
the other "nVidiots" love to crow over your victory over 3dfx that was
measured by a company going out of business, love to cite benchmarks and
wiz-bang features, but ignore the price of admission to the nVidia club, the
lack of real, measurable benefit from those features you tout, and the cost
of the loss of competition to everyone. But I won't.
Finally, I'll leave you with a few words from John Carmack early last year
on your precious GF3's programmable shaders:
"Now we come to the pixel shaders, where I have the most serious issues.
I can just ignore this most of the time, but the way the pixel shader
functionality turned out is painfully limited, and not what it should have
been.
"DX8 tries to pretend that pixel shaders live on hardware that is a lot
more general than the reality.
"Nvidia's OpenGL extensions expose things much more the way they
actually are: the existing register combiners functionality extended to
eight stages with a couple tweaks, and the texture lookup engine is
configurable to interact between textures in a list of specific ways.
"I'm sure it started out as a better design, but it apparently got cut and
cut until it really looks like the old BumpEnvMap feature writ large: it
does a few specific special effects that were deemed important, at the
expense of a properly general solution.
"Yes, it does full bumpy cubic environment mapping, but you still can't
just do some math ops and look the result up in a texture. I was
disappointed on this count with the [original] Radeon as well, which was
just slightly too hardwired to the DX BumpEnvMap capabilities to allow more
general dependent texture use.
"Enshrining the capabilities of this mess in DX8 sucks. Other companies
had potentially better approaches, but they are now forced to dumb them
down to the level of the GF3 for the sake of compatibility. Hopefully
we can still see some of the extra flexibility in OpenGL extensions."
Kinda looks like the same ol' story...
