GTS or Radeon or V5 Need opinions fast!!!!

[rampage2001]

Ok that was pretty good moralpanic.. the 2D on my Geforce isnt the greatest and I still have a place in my heart for 3dfx but its been dwindling since the v3. I did look hard at the v5 but I couldnt make myself buy it instead of the radeon. I believe the time for TnL is here, Q3 uses it and I already pointed out how that engine is usually the leader to whats to come. That game can't be ignored. I wanted to make myself get the v5, I really tried but I looked at benchmarks, saw the lackluster performance in my favorite games and couldnt make myself pay more for less. Yes I could be running AOE2 in glorified 4x4 FSAA.. it will be even nicer to run 4x4 FSAA on that game and then switch to Q3A and get great FPS to. I see your arguement completly but I don't think any card without hardware TnL and the other features the Geforce family has is just unacceptable at this point in the game. The number of games in development that will be released in short time that use hardware TnL include Escape from Monkey Island, Giants, Heavy Metal FAKK2 (absolutely amazing game), MDK2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Soldier of Fortune, Team Fortress 2, Test Drive 6, Tribes 2, Unreal 2 and Warcraft 3. How can you say not having TnL is perfectly ok when most of these games will be hits in their genres? Some of those games have already been released!

But Robotech simply took my spew as a insult to his ego and attacked my MX directly.. yet Nvidia has much more powerful chips to attack other than my seemingly puny MX. Even though this MX does have TnL, NSR, fast 16/32bit gaming that you might envy for $50.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Robo-

"BTW, the MX doesn't actually do 4x4. It does 2x2, and it looks quite pitiful and runs slow as a tree sloth on a cold winter morning."

Yes, the GF2MX can do 4x4, and it is clearly superior to any of the modes that the V5 can do(3x3 on the GF2MX is also better then 4x on the V5 for that matter). Of course, the resolution must be set low enough to allow for the memory needs(you said it doesn't, it does even if you wouldn't tollerate it).

Moralpanic-

"And of course the GF2 FSAA is nothing compare to a V5 FSAA"

They both are decidedly low end. The V5 has an edge, but both of them are quite poor. I've been working with FSAA for years and can tell you that the V5 isn't all that great in that department, though it does hold a slight edge over the other offerings currently.

 

[RoboTECH]

Ben, I was talking about people who don't LIKE running @ 320x240

Rampage, I replied in kind to your post. I didn't "insult your MX", I merely scoffed at your ridiculousness. If you don't want to receive such a ridiculous reply, don't post ridiculous statements.

Ben:

"The V5 has an edge, but both of them are quite poor. I've been working with FSAA for years and can tell you that the V5 isn't all that great in that department, though it does hold a slight edge over the other offerings currently"

Oh lordie. Ben. We've had this discussion before. We're talking REALISTICALLY USEABLE FSAA as available in retail-available cards today. I'm sure the 32-chip Aalchemy board from Quantum can do pretty good FSAA, but it's not available to Joe Consumer, so it doesn't count.

 

[Looney]

<< They both are decidedly low end. The V5 has an edge, but both of them are quite poor. I've been working with FSAA for years and can tell you that the V5 isn't all that great in that department, though it does hold a slight edge over the other offerings currently >>



Well, i'm thorough impress with the FSAA on the V5, so if that's consider poor, then the future for FSAA is truly exciting. Which cards are you aware of that's coming out with FSAA that's superior to the V5?

Anyways, i'm excited about the future. Once TNL is more widely used, coupled that with FSAA that surpasses the V5... drool.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Moralpanic-

&quot;Well, i'm thorough impress with the FSAA on the V5, so if that's consider poor, then the future for FSAA is truly exciting. Which cards are you aware of that's coming out with FSAA that's superior to the V5?&quot;

First a quick run down of some of the basic &quot;issues&quot; with current FSAA, don't worry, I'll get to what is coming

&quot;FSAA&quot;, as a single technique is dead for gaming boards. It is all done with for the forseeable future, and I think that is a very good thing.

FSAA, the type that we are used to, is a hack. The &quot;better&quot; it is, the worse it is in other areas(3dfx's is the best at reducing aliasing and also introduces the most artifacts). Gamers have grown accustomed to certain types of visual imperfections, in this case polygon edge aliasing and texture aliasing(shimmering). The current FSAA implementations introduce their own set of visual imperfections including haloing and blurring of object that are not in close proximity to the viewpoint.

One of the major problems with current hardware implementations(on the consumer level) is that they have optimal angles and worse case angles. Because of this, the &quot;best&quot; current board for FSAA, the V5, is in reality the worse at angles closest to 45 degrees, while the GF/Radeon boards are at their best in that situation and are at their worse when just off of 90/180 degrees.

Another major problem is texture blurring. In the closest proximity this is barely noticeable without a trained eye, but objects in the distance do become blurred due to the sampling positions reaching into adjacent pixels. When in the horizon, or any objects at a decent &quot;distance&quot; from the viewpoint, you will be sampling from pixels that do not even border each other, causing very noticeable blurring.

The implementations that I am talking about are all software driven in terms of superiority. Despite all the banter about &quot;true&quot; hardware FSAA, that is not a good thing. Software implementations have been superior and will remain to be superior for many years at least(and by the time hardware catches current software, software is more then likely to have evolved again).

What is coming, from all the DX8 boards is multi-sampling anti aliasing(MSAA). With mutli sampling, you reuse one texel sample and only check the Z value. With MSAA, you only perform anti aliasing on edges(Dave says it will also work on polygon popping, haven't asked them exactly how that works but he has hardware and I only have software emulation so I'd take his word). The biggest benefit of this? Nearly no bandwith overhead. Think about that for a minute, imagine what resolutions the GF2U could handle with FSAA on without taking any bandwith penalty. It has the raw fill to probably push 1280x1024 Q3 UHQ with 4X FSAA on.. that would look incredible compared to anything else. High resolutions and FSAA with better performance then anything out now(all the &quot;high end&quot; DX8 boards should easily humble the GF2U in non FSAA performance, let along with).

This isn't truly speculation, DX8 has native API support for MSAA(which is why it can be emulated by an average person now), and all the companies have said that they will have fully DX8 compliant parts.

Most people will realize that the above does nothing for texture aliasing, swimming textures and the like. This will be handled by trilinear filtering and more importantly high tap anisotropic filtering(32 or 64 tap, possibly more?). By handling texture aliasing using a &quot;controllable&quot; filering method, developers can have a better understanding of how to deal with them. FSAA is a pain in the @ss to deal with in many cases, you just don't know how something is going to look when it is AAd, particularly a pain if you are doing things like applying a bump map to a mountain range on the horizon. Very easy to trash the effect and waste a decent amount of time spent getting it just right by using the feature.

MSAA combined with more sophisticated texture AA techniques will result in two things happening, one is that FSAA will become a truly useable option which as of now it isn't unless you are using a carefuly defined set of standards(ie- lower then xx res, or when playing xx game). With the dramatic increase in performance MSAA/BTAA(better texture anti aliasing, have to have some abbreviation) will allow gamers to simply leave FSAA on and forget about it(nearly, it still will have a performance penalty, but it will likely be more akin to enabing trilinear and anisotropic filtering on current boards then the monster fillrate killer it is now).

The other thing it will do is reduce the amount of FSAA created artifacts. Currently, because of the way I play FPS, I simply can't use it. Doesn't matter which game it is, even Quake1 which I have plenty of fillrate to handle, because of the blurring in the distance. With MGSS/BTAA that issue will be gone.

There are many reasons why I am firmly of the stance that anyone who is looking should wait for a DX8 board, the above is only one of them(there are many, many more). The next generation of boards is going to be an enormous leap, no matter whose board it is.

Robo-

&quot;Ben, I was talking about people who don't LIKE running @ 320x240

I would have been ashamed of myself if I had read through this entire post and couldn't find at least one thing to b!tch at you about

&quot;Oh lordie. Ben. We've had this discussion before. We're talking REALISTICALLY USEABLE FSAA as available in retail-available cards today. I'm sure the 32-chip Aalchemy board from Quantum can do pretty good FSAA, but it's not available to Joe Consumer, so it doesn't count.&quot;

^Read above^ This is months, possibly weeks away. I wouldn't think of picking up a new board right now. Not everything about DX8 compatibility only deals with DX8 games

 

[RoboTECH]

hahaha...yeah, you're always bitching about something.

I thought you were talking about your 97 sample FSAA @ 6400x4800 resolution.

remember that discussion?

&quot;of course, it takes about 3 hours to render each frame&quot;

ROFL...that'll get ya fraggged in q3.

move one step, miss 219 maps, heh.....

 

[GEShields]

I have to reply to this post because I have had all 3...

I started with a GeForce 2 GTS 64mb from Hercules...It was good in 2d..good in 3d..

Then I went to a Voodoo5 from Quino...2d is good...3d is excellent with 4X FSAA turned on..

Next was a Radeon after listening to all the hype..2d was good..3d was so-so..on par with GeForce...going back to Best Buy this morning..

These are the games I play: MS Flight Sim, Delta Force: Land Warrior, Unreal Tournament, Janes F/A-18, Swat 3, and Falcon 4.0.

My wife does A LOT of word and excel stuff (law school student) and she even likes the Voodoo5 better..

These conclusions are based on real experiences...Games are playes at 1024X768 32bit, Monitor: Sony CPD-200gs(17&quot

Now...I would be happy with any of the 3 if I hadn't seen the other 2, but the Radeon will be replaced by another Voodoo5...

BTW, whoevere asked about the photo editing, the Voodoo5 does it very well...pictures are real crisp and clear.

Greg

 

[sandorski]

I must agree with GE, the 5500's 2d is very nice. Even RA2 looks better than with my Viper2(which has good 2d). I am very pleased with my new 5500, one downside is DVD picture quality, but I'll try different players/tweaks before coming to a final conclusion on that.

 

[rampage2001]

Thats great that everyone is satisfied with their V5's. But Ben really put it down on everyone here... I don't think anyone can come back on such a knowledgable post. Basically after someone posts something like that everyone goes back to their layman terms saying how they &quot;prefer&quot; one card to another. Basically the man said that software FSAA is superior to hardware because of its capabilitys to expand so easily.

I can see GE's attraction to the V5 looking at the games he plays. To each his own, I prefer the speed, quality and unmatched functions the AIW Radeon offers over every other card available. Its like their old AIW cards that were so tempting but they just couldnt match 3dfx's and Nvidias frames per second. Now we have ATI pounding 3dfx in the speed department, as with features and Nvidia is lucky to hold the speed crown due to the detonator 3 drivers. Other than flight sims I'd have to agree with the majority in saying the ATI has the most rounded, yet incredibly fast card out. We can also bank on future support because they are not having financial troubles either..

 

[Jrvr6]

AIW Radeon!!

Period!

 

[gerbz]

go radeon.

great post Ben !
that explains why nvidea's,and other,new gpu's will be programable.
but at what cost ?
dx9 is due next november !

 

[Looney]

<< Basically after someone posts something like that everyone goes back to their layman terms saying how they &quot;prefer&quot; one card to another. Basically the man said that software FSAA is superior to hardware because of its capabilitys to expand so easily >>



Wow, i really have to wonder why it's so difficult for you to understand the difference between theory and actuality. You can talk about theory, about the possible future all you want, but they're nothing but fantasies until they're concretely infront of you. Software FSAA MAY be superior, but according to what's available now, 3dfx FSAA is the best. So what was the point to that statement? Are you saying that because the Radeon and GTS use software FSAA that that's why their FSAA is superior? You can't possibly be saying that?



<< Other than flight sims I'd have to agree with the majority in saying the ATI has the most rounded >>



And what do you base this conclusion on? I'll tell you what games are better with the V5 than the Radeon: Everquest and similar games. Balder Gate 2 and similar games. Need for Speed and similar games. Rainbow 6/Counter Strike and similar games. Age of Empires and similar games. That pretty much covers all the genres except FPS. I prefer using 3dfx and it's FSAA over my Radeon 64DDR on all these games.

Tell me how the Radeon defeats 3dfx in those games.

 

[RoboTECH]

Rampage:

&quot;But Ben really put it down on everyone here... I don't think anyone can come back on such a knowledgable post. Basically after someone posts something like that everyone goes back to their layman terms saying how they &quot;prefer&quot; one card to another. Basically the man said that software FSAA is superior to hardware because of its capabilitys to expand so easily.&quot;

Yes, but how does any of what Ben said apply to you now?

he spoke about Dx8 cards and multisampling. there are no DX8 cards out, and no DX8 games and no multisampling. Doesn't apply.

He spoke of software FSAA. Slow. Not practical in gaming. Not available in any games today. Doesn't apply.

Ben's post was very knowledgeable (as always, the little geek! <g>) but again I ask, how does it apply to your decision, since nothing of what Ben wrote about applies to the graphics adapters currently available on the retail market?

Also, before I forget:

&quot;The number of games in development that will be released in short time that use hardware TnL include Escape from Monkey Island, Giants, Heavy Metal FAKK2 (absolutely amazing game), MDK2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Soldier of Fortune, Team Fortress 2, Test Drive 6, Tribes 2, Unreal 2 and Warcraft 3. How can you say not having TnL is perfectly ok when most of these games will be hits in their genres? Some of those games have already been released!&quot;

SoF and MDK2 have been released. Test Drive6 has been released. MDK2 benefits at lower resolutions from HW T&amp;L, but not by much. Test Drive6 is actually slower with T&amp;L enabled at many resolutions, and SoF looks no better, nor does it run faster. Sacrifice (a game you forgot) which has been pimped HEAVILY for it's T&amp;L, looks identical to non-HW T&amp;L.

I can't speak about those other games, but guess what? They're not released. So guess what? They don't apply yet. If you make the mistake of shelling out a crapload of $$$ for a card that has a HW T&amp;L unit onboard, you're going to be rather annoyed once you realize that today's T&amp;L chips just aren't going to hang when the REAL T&amp;L games (the ones where T&amp;L has a TANGIBLE benefit) come out.

 

[Taz4158]

Imagine a GeForce owner:
(Friend) Let's play NFS.
(GF User) Wait lemme switch to 6.321 driver..
(Friend) Then play Unreal...
(GF User) Wait I have to switch to 5.177 driver...
(Friend) Alright just play Quake.
(GF User) Wait I better use 6.022 driver for better framerates.
(Friend) Nevermind. What's your 3DMark?
(GF User) Wait I need to download driver 6.51 for 50 higher marks.
(Friend) Forget it, let's check out my homepage.
(GF User) Wait I gotta lower the resolution and refresh rate because the text is all fuzzy.

 

[RoboTECH]

Taz - ROFL!!!!

you hit the nail on the head.

best performance for me was 6.18 in Q3, but UT turned black, and windows was unstable

5.32 allowed me to play Q3 stable, and UT stable, but NFS-Porsche just plain sucked

but at least windows was stable.

and yeah, the 2d sucked royally @ 1280 and above. ugh.....

I tell you what tho, when that card was working, it flew like the wind.

 

[han888]

i just swap my asus v7700 with v5500 and i will said voodoo5 is rock here! it's have a good 2D quality and 3D quality however when i run 3Dmark2000, the mark was very sad, i just get 4100 mark on my p3-800@1000 cusl2
with my gts before i get 7042 mark , anyway i love this card! now my desktop look clear with resolution 1028 X 1024

 

[Wingznut]

Han, just how less fulfilled is your PC life... Now that you are missing some &quot;3Dmarks&quot;?

 

[sandorski]

Taz:

Hey I got a whopping 1194 3dmarks! Used to get 3400 with a Viper2. Funny thing though, my 5500 is faster than my Viper2 in every game I play! Funny, eh? 3dmark means nothing to me suddenly.

 

[Taz4158]

You got that right. As benching system changes it's okay but ridiculous to base your buying decisions on.

 

[RoboTECH]

yeah, 3dMark looks good, but doesn't really say a whole lot.

The helicopter section is just a big ole' &quot;Nvidia treemark&quot;

what's interesting is that the developers for Max Payne, which is based *somewhat* on the Max payne engine, said that 3dMark2000 is not necessarily the way MP will run or look, and that the T&amp;L engine used by 3dMark2000 is NOT the T&amp;L engine that will be used for Max payne.

interestingly enough.....
I will say that you guys have LOWASS 3dMark2000 scores, even for a 5500.

I get almost...5500 3dmarks with the 5500 <g>

haven't tried it with DX8 or newer drivers tho.

 

[sandorski]

OOPs, well I've got my shotgun and am off to do some crow hunting....

After posting my 3dmark comments in a couple threads, I suddenly remembered that I had 4x FSAA on when I ran that particular 3dmark run. Here is my revised default no FSAA 3dmark score: 3091 still lower than the Viper2, but embarrassingly better than my previous posts.

I laughed, I cried, I went insane! I decided to run 3dmark again with the intent on getting the lowest possible score. Well, I set the res to 1280x1024(the highest res I could get running 32 bit colour?), colour depth to 32 bit, 32 bit textures, 24 bit Z buffer, and turned 4x FSAA back on. The result 566! I think I should have selected Hardware TnL though, for a likely nicer drop.

 

[Ahriman6]

One small quibble with Ben's comments about texture filtering being used to alleviate texture alising. He wrote that trilinear and anisotropic could be used, and that's not true. Trilinear is not a sufficient replacement for RGSS/OGSS when it comes to texture aliasing. In fact, from my understanding it'll take at least 32-tap anisotropic to really remove the aliasing, with 64-tap+ being the real sweet spot.

As for the rest, yes, he's definitely correct about multisampling's benefits over supersampling when it comes to the bandwidth savings of re-using the texture sample per sub-pixel. But there still is bandwidth overhead. . .just not nearly as much as today's implementations. However, I feel that the Gamebasement crew is horrendously wrong in how much they promote FSAA issues (text/font problems, slight texture blurriness in certain games) as compared to its benefits. The webmaster, Jeff Atwood, constantly attacks today's FSAA and I personally think it's sweet as hell. Ben says it's not usable, and the only games I DON'T use it for are shooters; every other game I own, even new titles like Mech 4, Sacrifice, etc., I enable and thoroughly enjoy FSAA.

 

[RobsTV]

Some pretty amazing CRAP here.
Taz4158, have you even tried a GeForce?
Driver problems? Where? I have used one driver for all since I got a GeForce2 GTS a month ago to replace an 18 month old 3dfx V3 3000. 100% perfect. Couldn't say that before with the V3 3k, as I had to use many different drivers for different games and apps. Perhaps it was because I used AMD, and 3dfx card's were never tested fully with popular combinations, but either way, the GeForce2 GTS does not require driver switching like the 3dfx card always did. Maybe the 3dfx 5500 is better? Based on driver and tech support history of the V3, I highly doubt it.

Also, what's all this crap about 3dfx in UT? The GeForce2 GTS card looks much better and runs faster than the old V3 3k did, and that was before adding the second UT cd of compressed textures. Now that the GeForce2 GTS can use the compressed textures in UT, nothing comes close to the combination of speed and visuals to this card, in a high end system.

 

[rampage2001]

I ran 6.47 on my GeforceMX and I have no problems with any game. I'm 10fps off my cousins Radeon DDR in 1024x768 high quality on identical systems. I remember the day when you couldn't say one thing against the almighty geforce and now people try to make it look second class and this is nvidias ball game here folks. Everyone wishes they could be in nvidias position and had their chips. But they can't, won't and instead supply FSAA in the V5s case which I'm sure is nice but in no possible way superior to a feature filled geforce. I'd like to see a v5 run x isle and see it burn itself up with its enormous power requirements. Remember the 3defects voodoo 5 6000? That thing was the joke of the video card world.

We must remember what 3dfx has been saying for years, &quot;you don't NEED 32bit color&quot;, &quot;dont need large textures&quot;.. let these backwards people go back to the voodoo 1 they came from.
I don't NEED to pay more for less.. defending 3dfx is like rooting for a one legged man in a a** kicking contest.

 

[RoboTECH]

sandorski, you have some serious issues there

I can get 16x12x32 in 3dmark2000
slow as a treesloth, butI can do it.
what kinda CPU you have?

Ahriman, you are correct. Wumpus, Gamebasement's &quot;head cheese&quot; is horridly anti-3dfx. He's like Hardware is here, except Jeff has a very good head on his shoulders, despite his rather irrationally intense dislike of 3dfx.

Ben also has a good head on his shoulders, but his head is, unfortunately, in the clouds half the time. Here's a basic recreation of a discussion I had with him (not exact, but the idea is intact)

&quot;Ben, the 5500's FSAA is great!&quot;
&quot;It's not very good at all. I've seen better&quot;
&quot;Huh?&quot;
&quot;I run a computer that does 64x FSAA @ 3200x2400 resolution&quot;
&quot;HUH????&quot;
&quot;it renders at a speed of 1 frame every 12.7 hours&quot;
&quot;OIC. Not really a quake machine, eh?&quot;
&quot;no, but it looks great&quot;
&quot;right. So this has what effect on my gaming?&quot;
&quot;Well, the 5500's FSAA is blurrier, and here's why: <insert longass cockamamie theory about the 5500's &quot;inferior&quot; FSAA>&quot;
&quot;<scratching head, befuddled> lod bias slider fixes that Ben&quot;
&quot;it's still inferior&quot;
&quot;to what? RGSS is better than OGSS, even a frog knows that. &quot;
&quot;Multisampling is better
&quot;The GeForce doesn't multisample Ben. No cards/games use multisampling Ben. Why even use that as a basis for comparison?&quot;
&quot;It'll be much better in the future&quot;
&quot;it doesn't exist in games now Ben. What's your point?&quot;

or how about this (in relation to the 5500 vs. MX <laff> threads)

&quot;Ben, I prefer higher resolution, and the MX isn't all that great at higher resolution due to throughput issues with it's slower memory&quot;
&quot;Toy Story was done @ 640x480.&quot;
&quot;Mmmm...kay. <scratches head, befuddled yet again> and your point is....?&quot;
&quot;High resolution is just a substitute for low detail&quot;
&quot;Uh....and that has WHAT to do with the MX?&quot;
&quot;It has T&amp;L. I'd rather run high polygon, low resolution than high resolution with low detail&quot;
&quot;Uh, Ben? The GTS_Ultra couldn't run Toy Story-level detail, even if it were configured with 4 GTS-U cores running in 4-way SLI on an AGPx16 motherboard with 256MB 400 MHz 256-bit QDR onboard. The MX probably wouldn't be able to hang, either&quot;
&quot;Yeah, but the V3 is faster than the 5500 with complex polygons&quot;
&quot;<giggles> Okay Ben, if you say so&quot;

Like I said, Ben's a great guy, he just lives too much in the future and forgets to consider what is happening TODAY. Ben knows a bit too much about what is GOING to happen, and forgets what IS happening. MSAA - great concept. Let me know when retail hardware/software can actually use it. Until then, it doesn't apply.

RobsTV, your experiences are 180 degrees the opposite of what most of the rest of the planet has experienced. You might be interested to know that Asus itself doesn't recommend Asus GeForce cards for use with it's own Asus Athlon mobo's. Kinda interesting, eh?



<< The GeForce2 GTS card looks much better and runs faster than the old V3 3k did, >>

yes, let's compare a 2 year old card with a brand new card that costs $150 more. Sensibility here people? Credits go out to the S3TC team for makign that 2nd CD. I still wish I could figure out a way to convert them to FXT1.