How good is the GeForce 256 ???

[holze41]

hi

first off is this little sucker already out
and how good is it ?
is it possible to play all games,or just
games made for the geforce 256 ?

thank´s

[RobRich]

They should be hitting the retail shelves on the next couple of weeks. They have onboard transistion and lighting in hardware which means it will offload these functions from your cpu. OpenGL apps should support this right away, except quake based games which use light maps instead of vertex lighting, which is required for T&L. It also can process textures on a four way pipeline, instead of two way like TNT-2 or v3. The problem is that nVidia is pumping over 15 million triangles per second, but their fill rate is only approx. 480 megatexels per second. This means that you games will be full of detail but run slow at high resolutions (>1024x768).

S3 is releasing the Savage2000 next month, with all the same features as the GeForce, but with hardware texture compression and extremely high fill rate. Depending on the final silicon, their hardware T&L chip could render nearly 20 million triangles per second. S3 also uses their s3tc texture compresion to process more textures and have higher detail in games that support it. The biggest deal about the s2k, it has a fill rate over 700 megatexel per second, nearly twice the GeForce. On paper it has nVidia beat, but if s3 has sorry drivers like their last series of cards don't expect this miracle to actually happen.

The biggest contender for the new year is 3dfx. The supposed v4 will most likely not have hardware T&L, but extremely high fill rate. Their fill rate could be over 2x of s2k. Silicon prob's delayed their chipset until Q1 2000. 3dfx also will also finally include options for advanced rendering techniques, not just high fps.

The company to watch is BitBoy's Oy. Their Glaze3D chipset is no longer in the vapor ware realm. They have just finished complete system simulation tests, and are finalizing the silicon design. With their pci builder simulation system (acurate to 1 ms), they have rendered Quake2 frames in 3-5 milliseconds, which would equate to nearly 300 frames per second. This is just the model 1200 chip. Their 2400 chipset uses two 1200 chips in a dual rendering pipeline. They also plan for a 4800 design in Q3-Q4 2000, which uses four 1200 chips with a Thor geometry processor. As for advanced rendering, they have all the options nvidia plans to support, plus several of the things 3dfx plans to include with the v4. www.glaze3d.com (http://www.glaze3d.com)

I'm keeping my CL TNT-2 at 160/190 until the nVidia/S3 debate issue is settled. Then I'll make my decision. I'm hoping the Glaze3d chip makes it in Q1 2000, but I'm seriously doubtful.

[This message has been edited by RobRich (edited 09-30-99).]

[This message has been edited by RobRich (edited 09-30-99).]

[holze41]

Pantion/RobRich:well that sound´s promissing,i will stick to my voodoo 3
until i get some reviews,btw ebworld offers
a Guillemot 3D Prophet with the GeForce 256
for 289 $,i think the price is ok if the
card can do the thing´s they say

thank´s

[Pantion]

It isn't out... supposly it will be on retail by christmas.

It it will be one, if not the best video card avaible. It will not be cheap... but if you want good performance and a bunch of fps well this is the card for you.

It will play all the games you already have, well maybe some will need patches, but don't worry they will be avaible in no time after the geforce release.

If you are a 3Dfx lover well you'll need to wait till feb or march... and well see if 3Dfx can keep up against Nvidia.

In my opinion don't buy either until reading the reviews... if ya got a TNT2/TNT2 Ultra or a Voodoo2/3/banshee just hold on for a while. /forum/smile.gif

[AuraEdge]

Im expecially intrested in how it claims to work as well on a P3 600 as a P2 233 or somthing like that, Ignoring CPU speed except for AI, and such. Seems to be an excellent upgrade for low end machines with AGPx2 Slot on the board.

Well see how well it can live up to this claim

[JerseyJoe]

Here is a review from zdtv:
http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/freshgear/products/story/0,3679,2334149,00.html
Basically it says that until you have directx7 and games supporting directx7 the card will not show its true potential.

[acid_burn~187]

I'm running a TNT2 Ultra card right now, and no doubt about it, after the GeForce 256 is out for a bit, I'm upgrading. I have seen this card work, and it's started a religion amongst everyone else who did!! So far this is the GOD of gaming video cards.

[mungchung]

The Geeforce256 seeems like a ok card. With current drivers, fps should be a good bit over the TNT2U in existing games. In future games that support T/L, the difference should be even greater. Also improved drivers should improve fps even more.

Also overclocking the memory on the GeeForce yields huge benefits as minor ocing of mem should easily push fillrate over 500mtexels/sec. However the card is DEFINITELY fillrate limited. All tests so far(ie. CL has retail boards alreay out in Singapore) show that the card is totally saturated at 1280X1024X32. However the Cl Geeforce initial street pricing seems only to be about $200. Not bad considering a TNT2U is still over $150.

There is a Geeforce Pro coming out with DDR RAM which should go a long way to solving the memory bandwidth problem. If clocked at the same speed, the memory will be able to handle twice the fillrate as it reads the memory on the up and down of every clock cycle. This should let the card show its true potential. Early reports for the Pro card seems to be godly. However pricing of the Pro seems to be a good $100 over the vanilla version.

The V4 incredibly fillrate has been shown to be the result of the V4 coming standard with DDR, which should definitely ensure the V4 will price at least $250 street. Besides fullscreen AA, the V4 doesn't seem to offer much more then a V3. Savage 2000? Well savage has never come out with an impressive gaming product and has never had the drivers support required. Specs seem awesome but i'll wait till the actual silicon is tested.

[Vidfreek]

Well did any of you read about the Napalm (its not the V4 anymore)? It has FXT texture compression which can compress a texture at a ratio of 1:10 compared to S3's 1:6 ratio, that can do a lot on its own and it also supports fully S3's texture compression too. The T-Buffer can do mindblowing special effects such as the full screen antialiasing, which I saw shots of with NFS III, and it improved the current game so much, everything was clearly defined and smoothed out. It also has motion blur, and point of view focus for that story enhancing and gameplay eye candy. Its going to have 32 bit color support and supposedly be able to sustain 60 fps with all the things happening.

Now the GeForce will have Transform and lighting (not Transition and lighting). This in itself does not do much for gaming. The onboard Geometry processor is what the big deal is all about. Its going to take away from the processor ALL of the 3d calculations and leave it open for AI and others. Untill T&L is written to be taken advantage of it wont do much good. So far I know of Quake3 and Messiah are the only ones that support it as of now. If game makers start making more AI intensive games and adding other calculations to the fray, the GeForce will again not be good for low end machines, they will still need a high end processor to do all the new calculations that are being put into the game.

The Napalm looks to be my favorite of the bunch, adding AA to all the current games, making them look better, and not having to wait for games to use the T&L like the GeForce is a big factor for me. It seems that the Napalm is going to become the best looking(graphically) and the GeForce is going to become the fastest. Kind of switching places dont you think. With 32 bit and Full screen AA the Napalm is going to look the best. The GeForce just by adding more polygons, and no AA isnt going to improve much in the graphics department I dont think, just gonna make it faster.

[AuraEdge]

Hey Vid..did u ever see the Teapot comparason of AA vs. More polys? Id rather have more polys anyday!

[800XL]

I'm with Auraedge. More polys good, AA is nothing compared to 10x the poly count. Circles no longer look like octagons and such, they look like circles.

[skywalker[TSG]]

geforce256 is out here in sweden and it retailes for 300$
http://www.mycom.se/produkter/default.asp?Itemnr=9368

[This message has been edited by skywalker[TSG] (edited 10-11-99).]

[RobRich]

Need fill-rate, don't care about hardware T&L. Try this: The GigiPixel GP-1 has made it to true silicon and should be out in the next few months. It can achieve over 1000 megatexel fill rates. It handles all memory executions using a compression algorithm that is totally hardware based, so you no longer have to have special patches or optimized versions of games. They have not officially released the compression ratios, but it has been leaked that it far exceeds s3's and 3dfx's texture compression. The compression applies to any data moving across the memory bus, not just texture storage. The card also supports full screen anti-alaising with no performance loss. As for price, GigaPixel is marketing this to be cheaper than same genreation 3dfx or nVidia cards. Unlike the Glaze3D, this card actually exists in hardware in California.

Also ATI just released specs for their next-gen card, the Rage Fury Maxx which has two Rage Fury Pro chips (one for even frames, one for odd), 64 meg of mem, and two complete triangle setup engines. The rest of the specs are the same as the original Rage Fury Pro. No hardware T&L, but does have higher fill rates than GeForce256.

Follow this link for more:
www.sysopt.com/forum/Forum4/HTML/001054.html (http://www.sysopt.com/forum/Forum4/HTML/001054.html)

[This message has been edited by RobRich (edited 10-11-99).]