Interesting aproach on quality of graphic cards and short explanation of HSR in Intel integrated ships !

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030903/integrated_graphics-12.html

Could this explain  the superior quality of image on voodoos ?
Best regards!

How do you figure?  ???

ATI and Nvidia have video cards that are not integrated and they have just as good, if not better quality, considering the technology has been imporoved since the voodoos.

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wrote on 05.09.03 at 02:31:34:

How do you figure?  ??? ATI and Nvidia have video cards that are not integrated and they have just as good, if not better quality, considering the technology has been imporoved since the voodoos. Your fontrune cookie reads "You foolishly belive in the goodness of mankind"

Depends. The 16-22 bit filter and overlay quality even today is not matched by ATI or Nvidia...

Indeed.

The 22bit Post-Filter and also the MipMap Dithering are Features I really miss on modern ATI Cards, for example...

(although these Bandwidth Monsters run in 32bit all the time anyway)

But the MipMap Dithering really is a notably missing item, despite high FSAA and Aniso capability.

Not to mention running games in 16 bit on a card other than Voodoo: kill me with dither patches..., everything seems too much blurry, and no clear shapes, effects...

Yeah, I admit I have played some games on my Geforce2Pro (one notch higher than the GTS) and then on my Voodoo 5, I do notice 3Dfx has a greater quality factor to them, I thought it was just me, or I was fooling myself.

I also noticed with WinXP and the AmigaMerlin 2.5SE drivers I am able to run 4X Anti-Aliasing with a game like Quake 2 (yeah I know need to get something that pushes to card a little more) and regardless of the settings, like LOD, etc.  (how cranked they are/aren't) I still get around a little over 34FPS +/- 4FPS

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Your fortune cookie reads

"You foolishly belive in the goodness of mankind"

The fun part is that no card from the competition can beat the Voodoo in quality, although S3 might be the closest to the goal. The boards are good, but the drivers are most of the time the problem to blame.

Also, I've seen Unreal Tournament in MeTal (S3 native mode, as glide for 3dfx), and it was more than a kick against the competition: ATI,Nvidia. Performance was excelent and quality great in 1024 with 32 bit color depth.

Unfortunately, even if it has no sense, although S3 is still alive, too few (I guess 2 or 3 games supported MeTal) games take advantage of the card capabilities. Now there are no games designed either with glide or Metal.

S3 Texture compression win the game developers somehow (and it's very good in quality), MeTal unfortunately not, and it's no sense in why, and 3dfx is dead, so as the dreams of users to play glide games...

Quote:

The fun part is that no card from the competition can beat the Voodoo in quality, although S3 might be the closest to the goal. The boards are good, but the drivers are most of the time the problem to blame. Also, I've seen Unreal Tournament in MeTal (S3 native mode, as glide for 3dfx), and it was more than a kick against the competition: ATI,Nvidia. Performance was excelent and quality great in 1024 with 32 bit color depth. Unfortunately, even if it has no sense, although S3 is still alive, too few (I guess 2 or 3 games supported MeTal) games take advantage of the card capabilities. Now there are no games designed either with glide or Metal. S3 Texture compression win the game developers somehow (and it's very good in quality), MeTal unfortunately not, and it's no sense in why, and 3dfx is dead, so as the dreams of users to play glide games...

So, that´s the point, it´s a mather of hardware or a driver one, or both ? Everyone who has played any Quake powered game with wickedGL, or NFS with the Glide kit, knows what I mean by IQ.  In spite of this I have never seen such quality in a Gforce, even with the Omega drivers.
Regards!

wrote on 08.09.03 at 15:56:11:

So, that´s the point, it´s a mather of hardware or a driver one, or both ? Everyone who has played any Quake powered game with wickedGL, or NFS with the Glide kit, knows what I mean by IQ.  In spite of this I have never seen such quality in a Gforce, even with the Omega drivers. Regards!

Mostly a combination of hardware and drivers, but for most of the cases it's rather a drivers issue. Nvidia is eager for speed, ATI also, so in these days nobody builds video cards to be the best, or near the best in video quality. These days numbers buys, and this is what the producers advertise and most of the consumers expect.

Voodoo5 will be for sure, still for years to come, the video card that was mostly near "photorealistic" quality. If Rampage would have seen the daylight, it would have been the first photorealistic video card, a huge step ahead in terms of quality. For numbers, it's 52 bit internal processing, still ahead anything available for PC's today.

Keep the 3dfx spirit alive!

That's right! It's all about how fast a video card can crunch numbers not quality - at least for the most part.

Heck, there's even a poll that FutureMark took and asked would you rather quality, frames-per-second, blah...blah...blah....and the number one thing people voted for was FPS (how much a card will push rather than what it looks like) voted 2nd was quality.

Looks like quality has taken a back seat ever since 3Dfx kicked the bucket. Sure the new cards can handle speeds in 32Bit color that 3Dfx (Voodoo 5500 -- the last card I got from them to compare) couldn't BUT to me I would sacrifice FPS for quality (though not to the point of the game dragging it butt).

Sure you got 2xFSAA, 4xFSAA (not as good as 3Dfx  ;) ) and AnisoTropic filtering, but those are worth anything if you don't have quality -- you can anti-alias a piece of dog crud and apply an anisotropic plane to it all you want , but it still doesn't look that good - as compared to a nice piece of art (That being 3Dfx  ;) )

I want my quality dangit! Do you know that Nvidia changed the naming in their "Quality and Performance Settings" From "application controlled", "balanced" and "aggressive" to something different that I have only noticed in the 45.23 detonator changed to "high performance", "performance" and "quality", can get confusing if they keep switching around this kind of stuff, and it kinda makes you wonder "why?", until you turn it to quality and 2x FSAA and watch it all slow to a crawl, even on a PIII-1Gig machine! (this is with the GeForce2 Pro 32MB, using DirectX 6,7,8 and OpenGL games.

At least 3Dfx was consistent, and they let you tweak the card to your preference, you could disable v-synch (,etc.) without searching for hours on the 'net for the correct registry key (depending on what detonator version) or having to use 3rd party utilities to force it to do what is should do natively -- provide a quality image w/excellent performance. Now this is just with the Nvidia cards, so I can't say much about ATI - but I get the feeling from what I read/researched, that it isn't any different.

But most everyone is only concerned about FPS more than quality it seems.  :(

Hmmm... Even comparing some of the old games, the newer ones, even if they are supposed to have better quality (sometimes questionable problem, on an overall score), the lack the most simple thing: FEELING.

More, even if most of the companies have built much more games, most of the new ones (FPS, even car races to a certain degree), have by far a too likely sensation of concrete. All the buildings, the interiors are too brown, too dark, too grey. I haven't seen a game with such color and quality, yet with feeling as the FPS: Unreal Tournament, the classic...

By the way, when I talk about IQ I know, or I think so, what I mean: the almost photorealistick images in RTCW when using WGL. Although I know what it is not, resolution, AA, AF, etc, I don´t know how to expain it exactly, so we can be sure we are talking about the same thing. Is there any objective definition of IQ ?
(I´m afraid the message got a litle complicated, blame it on my "english", he...he...he...)
Regards!

wrote on 01.01.00 at 00:00:00:

Hmmm... Even comparing some of the old games, the newer ones, even if they are supposed to have better quality (sometimes questionable problem, on an overall score), the lack the most simple thing: FEELING. More, even if most of the companies have built much more games, most of the new ones (FPS, even car races to a certain degree), have by far a too likely sensation of concrete. All the buildings, the interiors are too brown, too dark, too grey. I haven't seen a game with such color and quality, yet with feeling as the FPS: Unreal Tournament, the classic...

You know I never really thought about that, but . . . .this is true there is a certain degree of feeling that is missing.

These games seem robotic if you will not lively, and even though it is a new version. . feel like it has been done before. There is no feling of depth either.



wrote on 01.01.00 at 00:00:00:

By the way, when I talk about IQ I know, or I think so, what I mean: the almost photorealistick images in RTCW when using WGL. Although I know what it is not, resolution, AA, AF, etc, I don´t know how to expain it exactly, so we can be sure we are talking about the same thing. Is there any objective definition of IQ ? (I´m afraid the message got a litle complicated, blame it on my "english", he...he...he...) Regards!

I didn't quite get what you are trying to say and I don't think it is due to your English.

You are trying to explain something with too many technical abberviations and verbage.

Could you put what you are trying to say in layman's terms (the most simplistic way you can)?

Heeheeheehee!  ;D

A lack of fun... Hmmm. The fun aspect is much questionable, as the fun and funny are not in certain games: races (avoiding the exception: Carmageddon clasic). It is the feeling that you have when you play the game, it seems arcade, in certain cases entirely nonsense and in others "everything looks like this place is empty, and has never been someone here"...

I think this in part due to the how the texturing is handled by the driver, they look static and unrealistic in games now.

Compared to the voodoos that had more of a realistic look to it. Plus 3Dfx was the only one to use scan line interleaving -- may that be partly why things look better on a voodoo card?

I can only speak of this in regards to the Nvidia cards, because I have yet to test a Radeon.

Saw Nvidia, saw ATI, seen Geforce, seen Radeon: no big deal actually... Radeon is better in terms of quality, but on par, or even worse in terms of drivers compatibility.

Belive-it or not, it's not a problem of how the textures are handeled. Unrealistic textures happend because everyone pushes the limits of textures size more and more, and most of the textures are designed by computer programmers, rather than coming from real life. And when you draw a leaf, no matter how much you try, it will still be a computer generated leaf, and it's never as near to the reality.

To demontate some miths. Interleaving means the creation of one screen from 2 or more sources. Basically, in a 2 chips system, one will draw all the odd lines, the other the rest. In 4 or more chips, 1 in 4 lines are handled by each chip. It does not improve quality but speed, doubling or quadrupeling, or even more...

Still, believe it or not, the main problem these days, if a game runs well on a voodoo (no graphic corruption), sometimes the difference between 3dfx and Nvidia gets less evident, because when both has to create the same jagged and blurry textures (aleready worse), some good filtering (even the best and precise), still offers an unpleasant result. Eg: you can't put a rocket inside a car, and turn it into a space shuttle. Even if it's faster than any car, still is not air-tight to live in space...

Games are mostly worse than they were 3 or more years, because there are less and less enthusiastic, trained people, that are left to work on long-term projects. All that is important these days is how fast they can finish a game, and how it costs them less... In this cases quality may be resonable for ones, but for the others who have seen and enjoyed the state of the art quality, it's just crap...

I know how SLI works.

Yeah I agree with what you say, though I wonder if maybe the reaoson the artistic nature isn't there, maybe becuase we got a whole new generation of programmers that are inexprienced?

I mean I doubt someone like John Carmak is going to stick around the scene for too much longer, who's going to replace him? another FNG.

But then again you have a point -- just in general terms, the mighty buck rules -- it used to not be that way!

It's all about profit nowadays, I don't even think some of these programmers take an art class to learn how to be a graphic artist -- to learn how to draw on paper so when you do it on the computer you can replicate it.

I wonder if they have any art skills at all, and think they can get by on that, along with the company not caring -- as long as the $$ flows in, quality can suck a goat.

It's like you said -- crap -- especially when you got not only this going on, but companies like Nvidia making expensive shit in a box with pretty pictures on it and passing it off as a video card.

So now you got a very expensive crappy video card and horrible quailty in the game as well -- man it does get worse.

Though with the Radeon as well - I wonder if you can blame it on the video card at the same time, are they what they used to be (quality wise) either?

Radeon are quality wise: at least the FSAA is better, faster, and the texture seem to be less blurry than on Nvidia. But when you try a game as MS Train Simulator and Radeon fails with a crash when you try to see the winter with snow, it's more than strange. And another, not so praised card, S3 Pro SavageDDR, has no problem with running the game with snow, and it looks less blurry than the Radeon...

I don't know what to think anymore...I mean you site some good examples of what's going on with video cards now-a-days.

Just some weird sh** goin' on in the industry.

Also, to confuse even more, older games like those for Dx7 don't work properly, and some of the games run misteriously faster on the opengl than on d3d, even if most of most of the cards (that you buy for a PC, not for CAD), are first DX compliant, then OpenGL.

Also, the good old Unreal Tournament is a good test for how compliant the cards are: GeForce make for some strange Z-buffer problems and flicker when moving near lights, Radeon is having problems with the detail textures, which appear and dissapear sometimes, and even the overall look is not very good.

On contrast, you have to admit that each and every card runs extremely whell on 3dMark2001, Quake3. Never seen a card to have problems with these tests, since Quake3 and 3DMark is what sells the card. A few fps more in these games and the PC magzines notice and give 10+ score. Better performance in a game as NFS HP2 would bring no reviews.

More, all the cards can do a type of BumpMapping, and although it is a basic thing that enhances the realism in games (used in Max Payne, Slave Zero), hasn't been used in race games, in fps (Quake3, Unreal Tournament 2003 seems to lack it also, Alien vs Predator). Even a simple 1 channel bump mapping can increase the realism when you look at a paved footpath.

To make problems even more complex, lot of games use 32 bit color, but as a test proved on the Banshee, nor the Quake3, nor the Vice City nor the Serious Sam (1 or 2), put such a big difference when changing from 16 to 32 bits on another card than 3dfx. On 3dfx, even if no 32 bit is available, the filtering and way of working makes that you see no artefacts on smoke and fire, even if Nvidia and ATI are doing it...

Most of the games are 24 bit color, not 32 bit. 24 bit means 8 8 8 in R G B. The 32 bit mean that an alpha channel would exist in the parameeters, and you would see realistic bump-mapping, different as the light is casted on the object, which obviously never used in a game until now... So true 32 bit games were near sure never released until now, with the danger of broking some hearts...

I have found this to be true myself, you've hit the head on the nail again.  ;)

Funny thing is -- people are worried about FPS as well as the comapnies, but even 30FPS is beyond what the eye can differenciate. so funny they'd try to push famerate instead of keeping it steady at the point before the eye can differentiate and keep it from dropping below that.

Plus given the the fact that any given moment the human eye can only process so many amount of color at once, depending on whether or not it is a moving imageor not.
http://home.wanadoo.nl/paulschils/05.00.html/

Nvidia wants to go for 256Bit color -- after 32Bit - - I doubt you'de notice anything.

In fact, mostly important is to have a constant, or as near to constant number of frames per second, rather than a fluctuating one. It is better to have a nice 30 fps all the time, rather than a go from 60 to 100 downto 13.

There exists good example of games that have constant framerate, and with a decent accelerated D3D card, it would go very fluent: GTA2, on a Vodoo, no matter if it is V2, V3... This game run extremely fast (over 60fps) on a Banshee with a CPU at 450Mhz AMD. Setting the framerate limiter, everyting is very nice.

I doubt that today games can run similarly, even on the best CPU/GPU combination. Games are just not designed in the way they used to be...

But you can't win the competition with others, when everyone sticks to number rather than near reality, and good sense...

You know I am glad you bringthis up -- becuase I have noticed that the frame rate - from what I have noticed - is not consistant -- it fluxuates too much - in the day of the voodoo cards the frame rate was always consistent, at least more often than not.

And yeah -- it's all about how many frames per second you can make the card push - rather than have a card (or even a game for that fact) to be balanced -- good FPS - very little deviation/fluxaution, quality -- making it blanaced in all other important areas of what makes a great video card (AKA - 3Dfx). But that has all gone to the wayside.

Weird thing is -- Nvidia has some 3Dfx programmers that joined on when they bought out 3Dfx, you think they'd have input and try convince other to get these geforce (or what other weird names they care to come up with) up to the level of a 3Dfx card.

To bring back the talk with the color depth...
3dfx intended to release the Rampage using 52 bit internal color processing. They knew very whell that this would be "photorealistic" quality. And the funny thing is that the 52 as oposed to 32 bit color depth wouldn't bring any performance penalty (as 22 bit did no overall stress over 16 bit in the Vodoo2/3 days).

What is interesting is that 3dfx was aiming to enter with very big respect into the high-end professional market, since Rampage could do in hardware some Adobe Photoshop effects, and probably it would have evolved to bring us near 3DMax full acceleration...

256 bits... If everyone would want to do that, the only reason would be to show how big they are. Think about the days in which Nvidia pushed 32 bits with the TNT/TNT2. No matter how much magazines will reccomend, 32 bits bring the TNT to loose more than twice the speed and bring maybe 10% more quality. but the 22 bit filter of Voodoo: 50% more quality, 1% performance penalty. So with 256 bits, the producer will only find a mean to push ultra-fast memory and GPU bandwidth into the market. Results may be nearly 0 in terms of true visual output, but the costs will be so big, that luckly competition will vanish in front of the large numbers of buyers that push eachother to buy, in the big numbers race. You will need 10 times more speed (fillrate, texture space, bandwidth), to use 256 bit colors reliably.

And when we think that the 8-bit color game consoles bring so much fun, and they were so cheap, 256 bit colors seems a huge stupid stress, with no real proof, very costly, wastefull...

wrote on 23.09.03 at 11:14:52:

To bring back the talk with the color depth... 3dfx intended to release the Rampage using 52 bit internal color processing. They knew very whell that this would be "photorealistic" quality. And the funny thing is that the 52 as oposed to 32 bit color depth wouldn't bring any performance penalty (as 22 bit did no overall stress over 16 bit in the Vodoo2/3 days). What is interesting is that 3dfx was aiming to enter with very big respect into the high-end professional market, since Rampage could do in hardware some Adobe Photoshop effects, and probably it would have evolved to bring us near 3DMax full acceleration... 256 bits... If everyone would want to do that, the only reason would be to show how big they are. Think about the days in which Nvidia pushed 32 bits with the TNT/TNT2. No matter how much magazines will reccomend, 32 bits bring the TNT to loose more than twice the speed and bring maybe 10% more quality. but the 22 bit filter of Voodoo: 50% more quality, 1% performance penalty. So with 256 bits, the producer will only find a mean to push ultra-fast memory and GPU bandwidth into the market. Results may be nearly 0 in terms of true visual output, but the costs will be so big, that luckly competition will vanish in front of the large numbers of buyers that push eachother to buy, in the big numbers race. You will need 10 times more speed (fillrate, texture space, bandwidth), to use 256 bit colors reliably. And when we think that the 8-bit color game consoles bring so much fun, and they were so cheap, 256 bit colors seems a huge stupid stress, with no real proof, very costly, wastefull...

How to enable 22 bit filter in V3s ?
Bye !

<quote>How to enable 22 bit filter in V3s ?
Bye ! </quote>

Go into your 3dfx Advanced Features, and in the Direct3d and Opengl/Glide settings, change the 3d Filter Quality to High and the Alpha Blending to Sharper.
:)

Exactly - 256Bit -- I see no need to do that, it's like you said - more expensive and reduces the performance of the video card, as opposed to how 3Dfx approached it with how they did 22bit.

Besides they'd need transfer an extrodinary amount of data accross the AGP bus - which some cards *only in theory* can do, but in reality I don't know one company yet that has been able to make the AGP bus transfer at even 1/4 of the speed promised.

Heck I have disabled fastwrites on my GF2Pro and got beter performance -- hmmm....it was supposed to work the opposite.

Maybe 3Dfx was knew something or was intune with certain features out there -- AGP IS a failure -- it
doen't do what it's supposed to -- can't live up to what it promised. It's better then PCI - but not by that much of marginal difference.

Yeah I notice that 8-bit game consoles were very fun, regardless of graphics, they were challenging - but not too much unlike today where they are so DAMN hard they aren't fun anymore - the just piss me off. didn't eve have that problem w/8-bit consoles.

this is true especially with the Playstation 2 - well great graphics, BUT the game designers are either touting the grpahics capabilities or making it too damn hard they no longer are any fun requirng me to get a game shark to beat it or waste my life away getting pissed off at it.

IMHO, those 96, 128, and maybe soon 256bit internal accuracy are only needed to allow complex Shader Programs to run without rounding errors affecting colours (they don't require equivalent Texture Colordepth of course, which would make Textures waaaay to big to handle).

Still, even the latest available DirectX9 Cards are far from using anything exceeding 40-50 consecutive Shader commands (they're still too slow for more complex operations).

I agree, one always has to check the fine line between true, usefull "Gamer's Happiness" (3dfx style) and pure Marketing (the NVidia way currently) :P

Even if 256 bits might be related to shaders, the big truth is that there is already a rumour that John Carmack will bring in Doom3 or their next game: 48 bits color depth.

AGP is bringing solid one big difference to all the cards: 66 Mhz speed, which in practical tests has proved that a V5 AGP can outrun steadly a V5 PCI, especially in higher resolutions (where most of the data transfer is pushed to the limit). But, given the fact that the V5 PCI handled so whell, even if it was on a 33 Mhz bus, even if it has no special priority over the Sound card for example, it would still bring those 60+ fps in your favorite game (Quake3 or Unreal Tournament, or Descent3...).

All the other things added to the AGP: Fast writes, Side-band addressing, AGP texturing, Faster transfer ratio (2x,4x,8x,???x), all bringed a little bit more performance, on paper or on real life. But what is mostly important is that if a GPU is already running with a full load, even AGP 16x with fast writes, wouldn't bring even a single fps more. It can probably slower the card's output, because the CPU becames too much occupied with fulling a buffer that is never totally used in the neccessary time by the GPU.

A similar case was with AGP Aperture, which in case of too big (4MB+), it actually make a lower performance with Voodoo's since the CPU and the Bios are all the times wasting cycles to fill that buffer, prior to doing other tasks...

wrote on 23.09.03 at 18:48:36:

<quote>How to enable 22 bit filter in V3s ? Bye ! </quote> Go into your 3dfx Advanced Features, and in the Direct3d and Opengl/Glide settings, change the 3d Filter Quality to High and the Alpha Blending to Sharper. :)

Thank you, I didn´t know it was already enabled, he...he...he...!

[Response to Flaconfly]

I never really though of it like you pointed out -- but I have kept up my reading on Nvidia, and one of the PC mags I read (don't remember which one, was a couple months ago) was touting 256Bit color and were breaking apart how the current color schemes work, and how 256bit will bring better color.....blah,blah,blah... so knowing Nvidia as we do, it will mean they'll use it as an actual color mode. Nvidia hasn't ever been known to use the technology like that as 3Dfx did.

[Response to Boui Andrei]

AGP brought a great promise, but I think it ends there, most of what it promised remained on paper, it did improve things, but not like promised - I have read many documents like Intel's Document Explaining AGP and it all looks great and makes sense why AGP -- but I from what I have read on the subject -- the bus speed its self doesn't even get anywhere =near= as high as any AGP specification design says it will.

With the new video cards w/128MB -- that is ridiculous -- why you'd need =that= much frame buffer since there aren't that many games that will utilize it. I think that's great that someday our video cards will have as much memory as there is main memory. But they haven't made the boards work hard enough to use it; they should find a way to utilize this memory. Otherwise you've just bought an expensive video card w/memory it won't ever touch.

Too Much Of A Good Thing? The Lowdown On 128MB GeForce3 Ti200 Cards

High-Precision Color

That and considering when (with the new blazing fast types or memory/motherboards out there) it can steal from main memory.

There have been tests done, and it was found out that those boards don't even make use of more than 1/2, more if you are lucky or can push it hard enough.

I think all these ideas are great ones, and I would LOVE nothing more than to see them deliver what they promise, if not more. But sadly, we may not ever see that day for a long time - if at all.

NV18 & NV28:
NVIDIA Chips with AGP-8x Flavor

But they admit - silently, that AGP didn't do what is was supposed to so now they ditch that and jump on the PCI Express bandwagon. Rather than improve/re-design the current technology and get it to work as promised. Then just keep redesigning it rather than spend gobs of $ for new design plans, just to scrap it later.

This link, prooves that they are going to trash AGP and go to PCI Express. Meaning AGP was a BIG mistake?

Hm, UT2003 and Unreal 2 already make heavy use of the 128MB Video RAM.

Add 4x/6x FSAA, and you'll even force a mighty 128MB card into heavy AGP Texturing (!)
(I saw my Radeon 9700pro drop downto 1fps occasionally by playing around with that ;) )

UT2003 could actually use 256MB of Video RAM, but the highest Texture Quality setting was intentionally disabled; flush the engine via console command to reload Textures, and see every 128MB Card slow down to a crawl, any 64MB count spf (Seconds per Frame) ;D

The future is already here, beginning to make 64MB Cards a limiting factor, and this development will continue.

IHMO, large Video RAM equipped Cards will have a prolonged lifetime, since nothing slows down a card more, than excessive AGP Texturing.

(use a Voodoo4/5 or even a Voodoo3, and play UT2003 > CTF-FaceIII with 32bots on High Texture Quality settings *g*, you'll quickly know why 32 or even 16MB are way too small juggle some 200MB of Textures ;) )
---------------
The big promise of limitless Texture Memory by the use of AGP indeed was a complete failure. By the time the AGP Performance was actually sufficient (in theory), the amount of Textures had increased by a factor of 10, again putting it far behind actual bandwidth requirements.

And now, the local VRAM is often delivering a peak bandwidth of ~15GB/sec, which puts the mere 2-3GB/s modern High-End DDR-SDRAM delivers to a shame.
It's like switching to an Integrated Video, massively slowing things down...

Hardware T&L seems to benefit nicely from 8x AGP for Data Transfers, but that's about it; AGP Texturing has to be avoided to prevent performance suffering...
-------------------------------
Maybe the future is in smarter/better Compression algorythms ?
Otherwise, 512MB equipped Cards might become a standard quicker than you might think (although advancing DRAM technology will allow for it soon) ;)

Or someone develops CL0-0-0, actual 1000MHz (PC10000?) RAM Modules for Motherboards, that might help as well.
For now, RAMBUS or PC400 DDR-SDRAM are completely unsuitable for full scale Graphics Operations or Texture Manipulations that were aimed to run off low latency, 300MHz+ dedicated VRAM.
(which is upto 15 times faster, since the Motherboard's PCI Bus, Devices and CPU also need fast RAM access, basically all of it already).

That all makes sense but one that I still wonder.

Have you ever gotten the =true= 1.2 Gig/sec data trnafers from AGP 4X, etc. or whatever the teoretcial tansfer rate is, for any AGP spec. for that matter?

The reason I call it a failure is because it cannot live up to that standards it was supposed to.

Last I knew 8X was the thing I was not aware they have gone abouve that -- or even implemented it in cards that are alread in retail.....I must be on drugs  :P because last I saw, the current cards you can go out and buy are 8X AGP max.... :-/

I keep reading - anywhere AGP is tested in a mutlitiude of ways (via the web, magazines) that it doesn't even reach more than 1/2 of its promised bandwidth -- it doesn't even go to the qouted Gigahertz range for the current and past specifications by a land slide. Some features are great some don't matter worth jack squat.

And I don't know if you read that Intel link about AGP8X but is specifcally said they see the future technology as PCI Express, in the desciption of AGP 8x! That clearly states, they are switching to that standard as a replacement -- for whatever reason.

I have come to that anlyzartion because if it weren't true PCI Express wouldn't be mentioned on that page and just it's own page.

sounds kinda fishy readin that and actually thinking they'd keep AGP....just me but I think they are trashing AGP (good/bad/etc.) and going to PCI Express, they have gotten the press to hype it up to no end and you see it on every web site, mention it on the AGP homepage.....it looks like it will be phased out in the near future, improved to some extent but ultimately phased out.

Falconfly stated that the game would need a VRAM of about 256 MB for textures. That is utterly huge and a massive waste: where does the texture compression enter the game? An S3TC or a DXT1 would bring this huge wasted RAM downto a mere 64Mb, which would be a much more acceptable and real figure.

The facts with texture compression brings back images from the Vice City game, we all know that it has texture compression. However, by activating or disabling texture compression from the drivers on a ProSavage DDR, there was no overall increase in quality, even if the game was using the decompressed textures. The speed of the game was slower, but not halfed!!!

This shows clearly that S3TC, along with a maybe future well thinking PAL16 (16-bit color palette) texture compression, would bring any game, no matter how complicated, to incredible quality levels (as oposed to the very lossy DXT), with even lesser texture memory usage than DXT.

Texture compression can bring the true balance between marketing and true performance and efficiency.

But, let's return to UT2003. The game was viewed and analyzed. And what do you know? The 256x256 textures were awsome in Unreal Tournament 1, as oposed to the wastefull, not so amazing, but considerably huge 512x512 and 1024x1024 textures in certain areas of the game.

Also, the test with the Banshee in Quake3 with 512x512 textures didn't bring an AMAZING difference to the overall quality in game, even if more VRAM is used.

In short, the conclusion would be that the overall look of the UT2003 game is very relative when compared to high-end results from the pasts (UT1), but with hardware costs trippled, with frequency the same, and with a very big complexity in the design. And fun, I don't think I will have more fun than in good old UT, with a 3dfx or S3 Savage...

@Boui :

lol

The Textures are already compressed.
(what were you thinking ?)

Uncompressed, they would be somewhere around 2-4 GigaBytes, wouldn't fit anywhere ;)
Without Texture Compression, nothing works anymore since a long time now.

And DXTC is basically S3TC (DXTC being a relabeled DirectX variant, but they are quite similar, as they do about the same job).

16bit Color Palette ?
Well, last time I saw that was on Quake 1 I think...
Most Games now are fully optimized towards 32bit; anything else is only for fallback Options (hence really not optimal).

UT's original 256x256 Textures don't cut it by today's standards; they looked "as good as it gets" though, since it was really optizimed for 3dfx Glide with some really nice tricks.
But now, just compare it to the S3TC Compressed counterpart in OpenGL (if available) and the difference is simply gigantic.

I do agree that some of the Textures of UT2003 didn't turn out to be as good as expected, but it rather looks like they rushed the Release, than the Texture's own fault. When I look at DM-TokaraForest at Max. Detail, though, it becomes apparent what High-Res Textures really can do :)

What card you choose to have fun with, is of course your own decision. I play Unreal Tournament and UT2003 "competitive", meaning I cannot accept even 0.1 Seconds delay, still I want the Option of the best Graphics existing at the same time.
And for that, there aren't many Options left that can still produce solid 100+fps at 1152x864 32bit plus Aniso and FSAA.

@ Black_out

Yes, of course I do...
However, those figures really are theoretical, always loses something to latency and overhead.

But no matter if it's 1.2GB/s or 900MB/s, the Result remains the same : progressive performance loss, increasing with the Proportion of Textures not in local VRAM, but stuck in AGP Texturing.

And you're right, 8x AGP is the current standard (doesn't look like they try to raise it again, since the classic AGP Architecture doesn't handle it anymore).

But big Problem with AGP really is, that is has to compete with other Components for the precious RAM Bandwitdh, and the simple fact that even High-End RAM can hardly deliver sustained 8x AGP Transfer rates.
All that usually results in strictly limited AGP performance, far from the maximum possible.

PCI Express will indeed replace AGP quite shortly, but I'm not sure whether this is yet another Marketing gag, or of real benefit (which I doubt to some extend).

Maybe right with UT2003 texture compression already used.

But, I saw S3TC and DXTC inside a texture compressor program, and it looked very JPEG trashy for the DXTC, while the S3TC was still clearly shaped and colored accordingly.

Wrong, Quake 1 is 256 color textures. Fully optimized for 32 bit? Yes, maybe to lie: 32 bit means RGBA, 8888. If they were using RGBA, rather than RGB (24 bit), I would have seen some different efects on material by their colors. I didn't saw environment bump-mapping, neither a sort of precise bump-mapping to showcase the use of the A channel inside the RGBA 32 bit. In fact I didn't saw ANY bump-mapping.

Wrong again. I compared the textures in OpenGL using S3tc to those when running with Glide in UT1. What a surprise: S3TC didn't get anything better than the original textures did (on the S3 ProSavageDDR), since the original textures are used also by Glide, there is no special textures set for Voodoo, although the Glide is as oposed to d3d, and although 3dfx works very differently as oposed to other cards texturing capabilities and precision.

Quake3 textures were also big, I remember one that is 1600x960. I saw that one on Voodoo. I expected to see it much better on the S3. I looked also at the texture itself inside the texture package: no big deal, actually. Even with 256x256 or with 2048x2048 texture size limit, it doesn't count, that texture still looks near the same, bad.

Aniso filtering. I should laugh seriously. I saw FIFA2003 on a Geforce, on a Radeon, on a S3 Savage 4 (no Aniso filtering). Using the most advanced aniso, for both the results were good, but were seriously crushed by the "No mipmap" setting with S3. Now the grass was looking very good, very crispy, not blurry as on Geforce and ATI (even with largest Mips). Aniso is no big deal if the card is not....VERY GOOD.... to take advantage of it(as a 3dfx or a S3 would take).

Ehm, yes... "maybe"...
(for a second, I imagined UT2003 shipping with 12 CD's , of which 10 would be needed for Textures alone, hence my "lol" ;) )

So you're saying a 16x Aniso Image rendered by the current "Aniso King" of Visual Quality (ATI) looks worse than an S3 Savage rendered Frame...

Well...

Personal preference I'd call that ;)

About your S3TC vs. uncompressed Statement in UT :
Sorry, but either you made a significant mistake, or you'd really need heavy glasses :

One of the most frequently posted Screenshots to demonstrate the superior quality of the S3TC Textures was the Planet Texture rotating around CTF-Face.

The difference is nothing short of dramatic, so I think this is beyond personal preference; it's an obvious leap in Quality.
To stay with this Map, same applies to the Wall and floor Textures.

If you wish, I'll post 2 unprocessed, uncompressed 24bit Bitmaps to demonstrate both.

I was reffering at a 16x Aniso image with the most detailed MipMaps with Radeon or Geforce, as oposed to no Mipmap for the S3. And NoMipmap does cost nearly 8fps or more in certain cases. So it is not as free as you would believe. Also the Nomipmap for 3dfx in Glide costed, but the overall quality: unbelivable (tested in NFS5, Quake3, UT).

S3tc brings no benefit in another game, because of the way the textures are by themselves: ViceCity on Savage4 and on Banshee. On Banshee it locks, but when it's not, the street, the people don't look different than on S3 (or Ati, or Nvidia, the same story).

Bad textures, even in 2048x2048 can't outmatch state-of-the-art 256 or 512 textures....

Well, in all honesty, running a Game at 158fps on the CPU limit, or "only" at 150fps on Max. Quality, really doesn't make a big difference.

I'll go and make some Screenshots, so you can see the difference yourself (I can only reckon that you've actually never seen a true, High-Res Texture image)

If Texture compression for High-Res Textures didn't bring any advantage, nobody would use it *hint*

http://www.falconfly-central.de/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=games;action=display;num=1064502662

[Boiu Andrei]:

S3TC does help make what wouldn't be possible otherwise -- do-able. And makes it so complex graphics can be had without gigantic performance hits.

Microsoft's Description of how S3TC helps

Toms Hardware - Quick blurb in 3Dfx section about FXT1 also confirms the S3TC does help quite a bit.

[FlaconFly]

What I think Intel should implement is definately a separate bus for grpahics as AGP is, and make it so you can install memory for that bus and main memory - so those two are both separate -- not sure how well that would acutally work. :P

Or just make the video card manufaturers responsible for adding (whatever amount) memory on their cards as they are, for the most part, not Intel -- just plain don't use system RAM.

Also Video card manufacturers could provide an option to add video memory to their cards if you wish to upgrade, though that would problaby be a bad idea for most non techie end users. ::)

I already know what compaines have done this before and that it has been done - but I think you took it out of context - I was referring to Nvidia, ATi and the up and coming XGI.

But like you said the reason they problaby don't is becuase they wouldn't have people buying their new video cards every 6 months, rather they'd upgrade the memory as a cheaper alternative.

Black_out,

Your ideas of having a board to sell a Video Card with replacable RAM modules is good and bad. Why? These memories will be much costlyer, since you should include also better pins to resist to some in and out of the slot, then the memory sockets will be costlyer to build and they would have some problems with the cards that would have damaged sockets (from production), so the cost for the memory and the board will be much higher.

Also, some memories for PC are having problems with errors (bad manufactured). Those on Video Cards would be by far harder to detect, and would lead to a strong number of users who have this kind of problems to spend tons of money to make their card work properly (this because malfuctions happend, and some of the products can naver get out damaged, or worse, become damaged by their use). More, the guaranty on this boards will be very hard to offer, since if using a bad ram module, you could destroy the Video Card...

The best sollution would be to find out a way to trully use AGP at the full potential, especially AGP texturing. How? by making possible that the card to use system memory to emulate the frame-buffer  (on board VRAM) as needed. The only succes was that you can transfer textures or take them directly from the AGP zone in your system ram. What was never attempted was to keep some algorithms inside the RAM and let them run from there, and others to stay only in VRAM.

What problem did appear? The textures must be mapped to the geometrical shape. And believe it or not this is the huge problem of accelerators. Mapping 2 big textures on a cube is easy. Mapping 2 big textures on a 365 polygon object is very big time consuming (since the texture must be streched and tight to each polygon).
On an average, to give you a clue, this is consuming from 35% to 80% of the GPU time, not including FSAA, Lighting, Multi-texturing, Filtering of textures (which would cost the CPU, if he would do it, half the performance  (bilinear filtering) as oposed to no-filtering).

Having said that, it becomes clear that the GPU is already running nearly full even when on a game menu, which, of course isn't the case for game consoles (but they are build in a totally different way to do it efficient).

Alright, I'm almost out of this Thread...

Some clues :

- Manually upgradeable Memory is currently hardly possible anymore.

Why ?

The cuicuitry to connect to the VRAM must be extremely short (the faster the clock, the shorter they need to be).

Eletrical Resistance for an external Module connector would be completely inappropriate to accomodate Signal Lines, that need specific Fall/Rise times and Amplitudes over half a clock clyle at 300MHz DDR and beyond.

In the past these things simply were not such a big factor, and Upgrade Modules were possible.

- any curreny 3D Video Card can usually render a simple Game Menu faster than the Game-Side framecounter goes (e.g. beyond 1000fps) ::)

Untextured Objects are rendered nearly as fast as Textured objects nowadays, provided the number of Pipelines can still render in single-pass.
The only notable effect can be observed, if the Amount of Polygons per scene takes sufficient, additional toll on the GPU, or the amount of Textures used really requires the Card's Memory bandwidth, or eventually, by general Overhead induced by really heavy Texture usage.

But then, who would want untextured Objects (?)

@Boiu_Andrei

This the last time I "clear up" your weird statements.
Refrain from making them in the future, or face consequences.
Read up on those basics > then post, and not the other way around...

Falconfly:

Why so grim?

I don't mind this conversation because it is very engaging (in a friendly manner) and the things we've all brought up are interesting, I have learned some things I didn't know. It's interesting to me, I have read views that I wouldn't have look at from the angle others do.

Patience

Huh ???
I am not grasping what you are trying to say

@Boiu_Andrei

This the last time I "clear up" your weird statements.
Refrain from making them in the future, or face consequences.
Read up on those basics > then post, and not the other way around...[/quote]

I agree with you Blackhawk, Andrei has improved, in quantity and quality, the discussion in this forum, and I have learned a lot with his insights.  Falconfly needs someone to make him throw off all his knowledge, he...he...he...
Bye!

This topic obviously dead, not becuase of the many point/counter-points regardless of whether or not they've been re-hashed, etc. but rather it seems boui andrei is getting a little pounded on.  :-/

Shall I make a return? I don't know, I am still thinking at this aspect...
But why not stick a light up again?

What was the first game that used multi-texturing?
Quake2.

What can multi-texturing do? Show more realistic objects, use of bump-mapping effects, transparency, chrome (shiny) objects... You can continue the list.

Even if some of you know how single texturing is, let's try and see how much can a mutli-texturing environment affect the performance on a multi-texturing capable board, and on a single-texturing capable board.

We will take this games as a benchmark:
NFS3, Quake3, Unreal Tournament and GTA3.

Say how much you think multi-texturing use is enhancing each game, where you see it clearly, and how much performance you loose when multi-texturing is used on both a capable and on a non-capable single pass multi-texturing board (eg. Voodoo3 as opsed to Voodoo Banshee and other cards might follow)...

Hey Black_Out, are you an EVIL DEAD fan? ???

(sorry this is a little off-topic, but I had to ask!) :P

I'm a BIG fan of EVIL DEAD... ;D

I own ALL THREE - EVIL DEAD movies on DVD and Laserdisc! ;)

Groovy! 8)

Hee hee hee  ;D

Yup, sure am, I also own all them re-mastered in THX/DTS.

If you want to talk further on this, please start another thread for it so we don't confuse anyone reading this particular post.


wrote on 02.10.03 at 23:59:50:

Hey Black_Out, are you an EVIL DEAD fan? ??? (sorry this is a little off-topic, but I had to ask!) :P I'm a BIG fan of EVIL DEAD... ;D I own ALL THREE - EVIL DEAD movies on DVD and Laserdisc! ;) Groovy! 8)

Check off topic area for new thread! ;)

This is my BOOMSTICK! :o

Groovy! 8)

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Edit: 06/10/03
----------------------------------------------------------------------

In response to Boiu_Andrei's post below...

Our new discussion has been moved to the "This & That" area... :P

Although you seem to be correct, this thread looks a bit dead now! :(

Oh well! ::)

Wonder if there is anyone interested in continuing this topic. With "paulpsomiadis" and "Black_out", imediately starting a new discussion, and also because of the fact that the last post regarding multi-texturing was not continued by anyone...

Is there seriously anyone interested in continuing this topic in the same way as before???

so from reading this thread, it seems to me that the 3dfx voodoo 6000 card must be the most advanced video card produced today for playing games

i wonder , cos i keep saying that 8x mode looks bloody photographic and it would seem that no ati or nivida card currenty can do this

im playing motogp in 800x600 in 8x mode and getting the required 60fps a sec im sure it so darm fast

the vodooo 6000 currenty with 2ghz cpu support along with new koolsmokey drivers can make the system wiz along perfecty

i also super cool the card with a 35cm desktop fan pointing into the case

perfect for the v6000 as it staying nice and cool the surface of the card behind the vsa100s

compared to no cooling and things really heat up hey

Rgerads

ElviSALive

Mister ElvisAlive:

From were did you draw that strange conclusion that this topic was about V6000?
Again the story with the MotoGP. What is so amazing at that game anyway?
Overclocking, overclocking, wonder if it is anywhere else interesting for you, or worth...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
To Admin (Falconly or Patience):

At what can a topic get to when the topic has get to more than 4 pages: nonsense.
As a very rare attitude and request for admin, I would recommend this topic to be closed, because it is already gone too far from where it started. This way it would somehow preserve what is still connected to the point.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

OKAY!

With request from Boiu_Andrei, time to get this thread back on track!

It's quite true that cards nowadays have lesser image quality than what are deemed to be 'older' cards such as the Voodoo series.

Case in point - with the early GeForce cards (and probably STILL with the current ones) there are web sites that show how 'fuzzy' the image quality of the GeForce cards are.

The only way that this 'fuziness' could be removed was to physically modify the card by removing some resistors on the output lines of the card and shorting across some inductors.

Hmm...the original source of this info is DOWN...so check out what I mean at the bottom of THIS page...

http://users.froggy.com.au/frogge/pepper/video/vidreport1.html

Hmm...how about some screen shots of image quality comparison between cards!

Nuff said for now!

PEACE!

I have to add to this, the run of "FR - Poem to a horse", available on Bdreams website, although it is poossible to be found on others. Running with all the settings at maximum on an Nforce2 IGP, the quality IS questionable. One of the things mostly noticed is the text, that everywhere is blurred. In the credits zone at the end of the demo, the text is nearly too blured to be read.

On contrast, even if the ProSavageDDR is not pushing so much FPS (the demo is using lots of polygons, and lots of textures at other time, pushing the fill-rate to the limit of the chip), the quality is the very best. Everything looks clear and sharp, a very enjoyable graphics experience. And for the onest that are having doubts, yes, the Nforce was set with max Aniso, sharp textures... Still it can't beat, in quality, the ProSavage DDR, who didn't even had Aniso capability.