GeForce FX benchmark

[Katarhyne]

Well, I think it's valid to say that the highest-end NV30 will outperform the Radeon 9700 Pro. But that's not the whole story. Especially when you consider that it's highly likely that ATI will release a new card immediately following or even before the NV30 release which DOES outperform the Geforce FX cards. The Geforce FX just isn't that fast, relative to it's release date. It can't be. Why? Because we know essentially everything there is to know about the basic design. As I've said elsewhere - they had to strap a dustbuster onto the card to get it to 500Mhz, and the only reason they did that was so that they COULD outperform the R300.

[Alientank]

Well that's true. If ATI does release a new card before the NV30 that DOES outperform it by a good margin, then that means it could push Doom 3 to over 50 fps on high res (on a good system e.g. 3.06 ghz p4 and 512 ddr or RD1066 ram) don't you think? Also that would mean I would get that card over the NV30 of course :p

[Zaldron]

Katarhyne said:

And, I'm sure there are lots of game companies distributing or otherwise sharing shader frontends.

Only if you license engines. Unreal, Q3A and Anachronox, the only game engines I can think with a moddeable shader script atm, have practically nothing in common.

Cg is such a great idea, ATI should adopt it as a standard too. You wouldn't believe how fucking tedious is to write a little app that parses "human" text, made by a designer, into multitexturing passes, transform data and blending modes while taking great care of syntax. It's like coding a reduced language just to have chromed effects on your swords and leds that shine even in the shadows without having the artists pester the coders with stuff like "and like then this thing that is masked with that one goes bling bling and turns blue very fast and spins around the bolt while the text scrolls in the second screen, mmkay?".

[EsH]

Zaldron said:

the artists pester the coders with stuff like "and like then this thing that is masked with that one goes bling bling and turns blue very fast and spins around the bolt while the text scrolls in the second screen, mmkay?".

lol

[Katarhyne]

Zaldron said:

Only if you license engines. Unreal, Q3A and Anachronox, the only game engines I can think with a moddeable shader script atm, have practically nothing in common.

The latest Lithtech has some form of shader support, as does AMP and a few other less-well-known engines. AMP was used in Gore. The Serious engine has a fairly simple shader language too, as far as I know.

Zaldron also said:

Cg is such a great idea, ATI should adopt it as a standard too. You wouldn't believe how fucking tedious is to write a little app that parses "human" text, made by a designer, into multitexturing passes, transform data and blending modes while taking great care of syntax. It's like coding a reduced language just to have chromed effects on your swords and leds that shine even in the shadows without having the artists pester the coders with stuff like "and like then this thing that is masked with that one goes bling bling and turns blue very fast and spins around the bolt while the text scrolls in the second screen, mmkay?".

No, I would believe it. I was the sole coder for all of my group's projects in my highschool compsci classes as well as my webmastering class. "d00d can u maek it do this cuz that would be 2 kewl 4 words lol" Yeah. I know.

[Dima]

Alientank said:

Arg I'm not trying to start anything up sorry. I shouldn't have said that. You do have a lot of valid points and that but I mean, facts are facts, the Nvidia card will pass the 9700 Pro, so why bother arguing about the next ATI card that isn't even in development yet.

That's where you're wrong!
Not only ATI's successor to R300 has been in development for a while now, but it has already taped out, meaning that if GeForce FX turns out to be faster by a large margin than R9700pro, most chances are that ATI would release R350 (if i'm not mistaken, that's it's codename) to counterattack the GeForce FX. If the card turns out to be just a bit faster than R9700pro, ATI would manage by simply lowering the prices on R9700pro and R9700 cards.

[Alientank]

Yes but they haven't talked about the 350 yet have they? Nope. However I would not be surprised if they just strapped on 128 megs of ddr 2 memory and blew the shit out of the nv30. I would buy the ati card then.