Worst and best graphics tech ever?

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Anarchist420

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Feb 13, 2010
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In my opinion, it would have to be FXAA, with lossy texture compression coming in a close 2nd.

The problem I have with FXAA is that it often doesn't do a good job with edges and it's being promoted in favor of rotated grid sampling (or sparse grid if 8 or more samples are used) and nvidia doesn't support MSAA hacks anymore.

I know that I'm probably the only person in the world who doesn't like lossy texture compression, but I think it's bad because lossless texture compression is technologically possible. While lossless texture compression wouldn't allow for as quite of large or as many textures to be stored in memory, it would look better overall IMO. I've never thought 8k^2 textures were necessary, especially since we have AF and since texel density can vary. Given the same color depth, a 4k^2 texture is only 1/4 the size of an 8k^2 texture. Then lossless texture compression would surely on average save at least 15%.

Coming in 3rd place would have to be DX as opposed to OpenGL. DX is proprietary, closed source, and has standardized things too much. I think it has severely limited the progress of Graphics. I think it has done a few good things including the advocating unified shaders but it has mostly made things worse IMO.

As for best graphics tech, I would have to say 3dfx's RGSSAA which is still the very highest quality 13 years after 3dfx first revealed it and 12 years after they hard launched the first product that could do it. It made the competition's ordered grid sampling look pathetic to say the least.
 
ShintaiDK

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
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Hard to pick the worst between AFR and any AA setting above 4x.

DX is the best tech.
 
TakeNoPrisoners

TakeNoPrisoners

Platinum Member
Jun 3, 2011
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Personally I like FXAA and other shader based AA as it is basically a free AA setting and most of the time looks pretty good. It enhances games that already have MSAA enabled and makes games where enabling MSAA is not an option look better. It isn't perfect but for some games like Max Payne it is necessary. It also works with aliasing that MSAA cannot do anything about. I think it is one of the best technologies we have today.

Worst tech? Probably AFR, microstutter is bad.
 
P

Pottuvoi

Senior member
Apr 16, 2012
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Anarchist420 said:
In my opinion, it would have to be FXAA, with lossy texture compression coming in a close 2nd.

The problem I have with FXAA is that it often doesn't do a good job with edges and it's being promoted in favor of rotated grid sampling (or sparse grid if 8 or more samples are used) and nvidia doesn't support MSAA hacks anymore.
Click to expand...
For the price FXAA does decent job and latest game nvidia did MSAA hack was Diablo3..
Also mixed AA modes will be the future as just adding samples does not guarantee a good result for the price.

I do agree that in many cases if one has powerful enough hardware the MSAA/SSAA is better choice when compared to basic post AA methods.
Anarchist420 said:
I know that I'm probably the only person in the world who doesn't like lossy texture compression, but I think it's bad because lossless texture compression is technologically possible. While lossless texture compression wouldn't allow for as quite of large or as many textures to be stored in memory, it would look better overall IMO. I've never thought 8k^2 textures were necessary, especially since we have AF and since texel density can vary. Given the same color depth, a 4k^2 texture is only 1/4 the size of an 8k^2 texture. Then lossless texture compression would surely on average save at least 15%.
Click to expand...
The 1/4 - 1/8 compression ration is not the only big advantage with texture compression.
Possibly even bigger is the ability of GPUs actually decoding textures within their cache and thus the compression ratio is saved in VRAM bandwidth when fetching texture samples.
Anarchist420 said:
Coming in 3rd place would have to be DX as opposed to OpenGL. DX is proprietary, closed source, and has standardized things too much. I think it has severely limited the progress of Graphics. I think it has done a few good things including the advocating unified shaders but it has mostly made things worse IMO.
Click to expand...
DX has it's faults, but shouldn't really be blamed on standardizing things.
Every time GPU manufacturer has made huge leaps MS has advanced the minimum specs and allowed some outside spec abilities.
Downfall of OpenGL can only be blamed on Khronos group and their inability to advance their API.

The biggest problem with graphics advancement in terms of variety was change from software renderers to hardware and even that was due to the very simple hardware of the time.
This has been mostly fixed in last few years. (SM2 was first big step to right direction.)
Anarchist420 said:
As for best graphics tech, I would have to say 3dfx's RGSSAA which is still the very highest quality 13 years after 3dfx first revealed it and 12 years after they hard launched the first product that could do it. It made the competition's ordered grid sampling look pathetic to say the least.
Click to expand...
Both AMD and Nvidia both have sparse/rotated SSAA modes which have 'identical' quality to one 3dfx had with t-buffer. (except the obvious +32bit framebuffers etc..)

Ability of 32xSSAA is nice bonus with current cards..
-

As I said earlier for me the change from software to hardware rasterizers is most likely the worst and best both..
It gave us incredible jump in speed, but all the fun things, tricks and new graphics methods we could just test and check with some lines of code came impossible.

2 textures blended on top of each other in single pass was nice and it was very easy just to send display lists to rasterizer.
It also was so very very limiting. :(

Proper programmable GPUs took way longer than I anticipated, but it really is great thing to have.
 
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dave_the_nerd

dave_the_nerd

Lifer
Feb 25, 2011
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Kyro II - (Tile based rendering) both the best and the worst.

It was way ahead of its time.

Also, I owned one. w@@t.
 
Grooveriding

Grooveriding

Diamond Member
Dec 25, 2008
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100% agree on FXAA.

It's a ludicrous technology. It gets pushed as moving forward with IQ, when it is a step backwards. haha.
 
DrBoss

DrBoss

Senior member
Feb 23, 2011
415
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BEST: Monster 3D (3Dfx Voodoo) - AKA Duke Nukem 3D, Rise of the Triad, and so on.
 
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master_shake_

master_shake_

Diamond Member
May 22, 2012
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best when they put 2d graphics on the same card as 3d graphics (they used to be separate)

worst physx what a waste of resources...
 
W

WMD

Senior member
Apr 13, 2011
476
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Best: adaptive MSAA, DX9
Worst: SLI/ CF, DX11 tessellation

Adaptive MSAA because it provides near the quality of supersampling at very low performance penalty over regular MSAA.

DX9 because its the most widely used API offers great performance and allows easy development on both console and PC. It can still look good as witcher 2 will prove.

SLI/ CF because of MS and poor driver support.

DX11 tessellation because it requires very powerful hardware and the returns are not very obvious vs simply increasing geometry complexity.
 
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nenforcer

nenforcer

Golden Member
Aug 26, 2008
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Although you may dislike Microsoft DirectX, OpenGL has pretty much been playing catch up since the release of DirectX 9.

OpenGL had the problem of competing vendors whereas DirectX has only one vendor, Microsoft, albeit it only ran on one platform, Windows.
 
lamedude

lamedude

Golden Member
Jan 14, 2011
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Bitboy's Extreme Bandwidth Architecture for both. Worst since it didn't come out and the best since 9MB of eDRAM sounds like a good idea back in 2000.
 
2

2is

Diamond Member
Apr 8, 2012
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Physx would be the worst for me. I had a 5870 before my 680 and replayed my games that supported physx and didn't really notice anything spectacular.
 
P

pcm81

Senior member
Mar 11, 2011
598
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BEST: Color Display
WORST: Any 3D tech based on a flat tv screen / computer monitor... If you want 3d go with no screen, just a hologram.
 
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