Geforce and Geforce 2: T&L Screwed

RedShirt

Golden Member
Aug 9, 2000
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Does anyone feel the same way I do? We all go out and buy a Geforce or a Geforce 2 thinking in the future many games would take advantage of the onboard T&L. Well now there are only a handful of them and the T&L chip is now outdated. Games will not be written for it. Instead, they will be written for the Geforce 3. Promises Promises... I guess we were all test dummies.

Onboard T&L was just all hype. No card currently needs it... Think how much cheaper a Geforce would have been...
 

Pariah

Elite Member
Apr 16, 2000
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This point was brought up numerous times, but anyone who said it was accused of being a 3dfx zealot or whatnot. It's hindsight now. No games will need the Geforce 3 until it is few generations old as well. That's the current state of the industry.
 

RedShirt

Golden Member
Aug 9, 2000
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Well, I'm sorry, but I was a big Nvidia fan, but now I am not. They are charging outrageous amounts of money for technology that doesn't currently do anything.

That'd be like buying a Pentium 90 with SSE instuctions that costed 500 bucks back in the day. I just wish there was a sensible company out. No T&L, good speed RAM and a nice fill rate. That'd be the perfect card for todays apps...

We need Nvidia, but we also need some competition that can produce well made cards and rock stable drivers. I'm becoming bored with the computer industry and I'm not the only one.
 

Soccerman

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
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well T&L on Geforce cards will be used, the question is how well will they do? do they require special optimizations for the Geforce cards to get the T&L to go smooth?

why does Giants not run so smooth on Geforce cards (I've heard it doesn't hit very high FPS).

So, IMHO, the Geforce cards are better for the games that are about to come out that utilize T&L, but not by much.

I'd like to see what the Radeon 2 will do.. and Kyro 2.
 

virusag13

Senior member
Aug 14, 2000
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"That'd be like buying a Pentium 90 with SSE instuctions that costed 500 bucks back in the day"

Kinda like the P4 right now.

As for the Nvidia, I am not really pissed because I upgraded from a TNT2 chipset. Maybe in a year when programmers are taking advantage of the GF3 i will be, but until then, I am happy with my GF2 and dont feel screwed.
 

Rand

Lifer
Oct 11, 1999
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New features are never of much use immediately after they become available, and by the time they are of use the product in which they originally became available with is usually not powerful enough to use them well.

In the case of T&L it makes a decent difference when it's supported but even now, long after the release of the GeForce1 T7L still doesnt seem to be of much interest to most game designers.
By the time all the nice new features of the GF3 are actually used we will probably be seeing GF5 cards, and the GF3 will seem old and slow.
 

Rand

Lifer
Oct 11, 1999
11,071
1
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New features are never of much use immediately after they become available, and by the time they are of use the product in which they originally became available with is usually not powerful enough to use them well.

In the case of T&L it makes a decent difference when it's supported but even now, long after the release of the GeForce1 T&L still doesnt seem to be of much interest to most game designers.
By the time all the nice new features of the GF3 are actually used we will probably be seeing GF5 cards, and the GF3 will seem old and slow.
 

mindiris

Senior member
Oct 23, 1999
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But here's a better perspective: If no one even bothers to build features no one will use, no one would even spend any effort to build applications that support non-existent features.

It's a chicken and the egg problem, and Nvidia, like them or not, solved that delema.
 

RedShirt

Golden Member
Aug 9, 2000
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You guys don't fell a little upset? I wonder how much cheaper an identical card to the Geforce 2 would cost with no Onboard GPU (for onboard T&L).

Let's say that would nock off 50 bucks of the price. Cards would be more reasonable. Does anyone remember when the budget for a videocard was 100 bucks? It's just getting more and more ridiculous. You can buy a WHOLE console system for the fraction of the price of a videocard and still get close to the same preformance. Apparently, no one feels the same way I do.
 

RedShirt

Golden Member
Aug 9, 2000
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Oh... and in addition, I do not feel Nvidia is a terrible company by any means, I'd just like to have an alternative company. 3dfx is dead (and did not listen to the needs of their customers), and ATI has some of the crappiest drivers around.

If ATI would get their drivers corrected, I would be a happy man. Their cards offer a greater bang for the buck. They also realized that fill rate isn't that important because the cards memory bandwidth is the bottleneck.

I look at a Geforce 2 and see a very inefficiant design. All that wasted core speed is not needed. It does not effect games at all. I'm willing to bet at high resolutions a 150 mhz core would be fine. Take off the fan and the heatsink and you got an even cheaper card.

Nvidia has a place and I do enjoy their excellent driver support and market leading designs, but I miss having a market follower around. I feel that I really have no choice as to which videocard I should buy.

If only ATI would focus on drivers...
 

duragezic

Lifer
Oct 11, 1999
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One of the main reasons for the GF2 Ultra and GF3 price is the high speed DDR ram that isn't in very high quanities yet.
 

borealiss

Senior member
Jun 23, 2000
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i have used the T&L on my geforce for quite a few games. quake 3, star trek: elite force, and realmyst. granted that anything based on the q3a engine only uses transformations in hardware, it does provide a nice performance boost as oppose to it being turned off, but nothing dramatic. most other games that i play don't really need the power for it. as far this rant, i don't think that purchasing a geforce/geforce2 is a waste of money if you plan on playing games with it often. most of the cost comes from the memory and it's availability. a geforce ddr is still a very capable card, and it can be had for a little over a hundred bucks which is a steal. any card that comes out with "new" features isn't going to have them taken advantage of until the next generation of games, but just because the t&l on the geforce line isn't being used to the extent they should be doesn't mean they're a waste of money. just don't buy into the hype that all 3d companies surround new releases with, and i don't see a problem.