I was reading an article about the state of the 3d accelerator industry (see link on the daily flip for 2/2/2000 @ www.flipcode.com). the article reiterated what 3dfx has release about the voodoo4 and voodoo5. i started thinking about how this technology will make my games look better. well full-screen anti-aliasing if great, but only if they can do it without a performance penalty. i guess if they never let you turn it off, there won't be any penalty since it can't go faster anyway. motion blur is great. it will especially help if _not_ running at 60 fps because it will make the images seem to blend together nicely. i've heard people complain that the screenshots of motion-blur look stupid, but think about it. it's called MOTION-blur. it works when things are in motion. screenshots can not do motion blur justice since it defeats the purpose of it. depth-of-feild is stupid in first-person-shooters (which we all know are the types of games 3dfx is aiming for) because the card can't know what you are focusing on. it will be great for in-engine cut scenes though, because cut scenes can be set-up like a movie, where the cinematics dictate what the audience focuses on. giga-pixel is a cool thing, but it's a trick. the only way to get giga-pixel capability is to buy the highest-end card, the v6 6000, with the 4 VSA chips. heck, the low end card is already beat by TNT2Ultra and GeForce cards, and the mid range v5 5000 and v5 5500 will most likely be beat by whatever nvidia has up it's sleeves. which brings me to pricing. i'm sure not paying $600 for giga-pixel and two features which may not be initially supported by developers, if at all. remember, all the t-buffer effects can be done in OpenGL with accumulations buffers. i've actually seen them all done on my TNT1, albiet slowly. even the low-end 3dfx hardware will cost more than cards with more fill-rate (ie: TNT2Ultra will be about $150 when the v4 4000 will be about $200) so right now my call is skip v4 and v5 and wait and see if rampage is better. get a geforce, TNT2ultra, g400, rage fury MAXX, or savage 2000. they're all here now, most will beat the v4 4000 in fill-rate, and most cost less anyway. anyone else got any opinions of 3dfx's new stuff? -Justin White jowhite@bigfoot.com AIM: Just6979 www.bigfoot.com/~jowhite "To infinity and beyond!" -Buzz Lightyear "I can only show you the door. You must choose to go through it." -Morpheus "Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when open." -Anonymous "I know Kung-fu." -Neo "Ignorance is bliss" -Cypher "My name...is Neo!" -Neo Edited by - Justinfinity on 2/2/00 11:55:24 PM

you have a point about geforce not being able to keep up with the athlon in fill rate on current games. but even a 750 MHz Athlon can''t pump out the polys that a geforce can. maybe with 3d-now optimizations, but that would suck up all it''s resources, leaving nothing for input, AI, etc. and since 3dfx''s new stuff isn''t going to be out for a while (they don''t even have silicon yet), nvidia will probably have the fill-rate to compete by then (NV15, geforce2, whatever)

so yes, 3dfx will be a great match for ultra-fast CPUs, if you want to spend more than the price of your CPU for the graphics card.

-Justin White

jowhite@bigfoot.com
AIM: Just6979
www.bigfoot.com/~jowhite

"To infinity and beyond!" -Buzz Lightyear
"I can only show you the door. You must choose to go through it." -Morpheus
"Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when open." -Anonymous
"I know Kung-fu." -Neo
"Ignorance is bliss" -Cypher
"My name...is Neo!" -Neo

Meanwhile Nvidia bring out a new chip every 2 seconds!

actually, the whole point from what i read is to free up the CPU from doing the T&L so it has much more space for expanding in areas such as AI and other things.
so it would be just as good on a fast computer.

most of the q3 benchmarks have had vsync off. the geforce has hardware t&l but it''s a lousy one. just like you can have a 50m pix/sec card and a 800m pix/sec card... the same applies for t&l for it''s tri/sec rating. the fillrate on a geforce isnt much better than the last generation of cards either. i''d have to say its a waste of money unless u want the best card available always since it''s the best one at the moment. if you play glide games like unreal, then a v3 will beat out a geforce still. i''m sure a v5 will run glide games impressively.

the best thing to do is wait for legit unbiased benchmarks then decide which card is the best deal. you cant tell how a card will perform before it''s available. my guess would be that a v5 6000 will blow a geforce away since it has ~11GB/sec memory bandwidth and ~1.4Gpixels/sec.

for hardware t&l, i''d rather wait for a card that can process about 2 or 3 times as many polys as the fastest cpu of the time. and games should then have settings to adjust geometry detail so that these cards can be put to use. the geforce cant even pump out as many polys as a 750mhz processor in a game (not in a synthetic... but in a game like q3 with all the ai, collision, etc)

geforce can''t pump as many polys as a 750 MHz athlon in a real game? geforce peaks at 15 million theoretical, so estimate about 10+ million real life. an 750 MHz athlon cannot do this while also running the rest of quake3.

but my original post was not about geforce. it was about the relevance of 3dfx''s new hardware. as you said, nvidia''s next stuff will be even faster in fill rate in poly rates.. which means that newer games with tons of polys, like experience, will scream on a geforce-equipped machine, but a v5-equipped machine won''t be able to pump enough polys to even come close to the v5''s fillrate max. so v4 & 5 will be good for super-fast cpus running current and older games. but who wants to spend >$400 this fall to be able to run quake2 and quake3 at insane rates while new games like experience. for example, nocturne has cool cloth movement algorithms, but they east up alot of CPU time. if the T&L for the scene was done in hardware, you''d have that many more polys per second to get those fast fillrates we all want. with SW T&L, the CPU would so busy with T&L and cloth that your fillrate would be very cpu limited so giga-pixel rate on the card won;t mean shit

-Justin White

jowhite@bigfoot.com
AIM: Just6979
www.bigfoot.com/~jowhite

"To infinity and beyond!" -Buzz Lightyear
"I can only show you the door. You must choose to go through it." -Morpheus
"Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when open." -Anonymous
"I know Kung-fu." -Neo
"Ignorance is bliss" -Cypher
"My name...is Neo!" -Neo

dont just quote nvidia marketing terms. hw t&l isnt implemented very good yet in geforce.

just wait until all the next generation cards are out and look at the real game benchmarks. that should answer your questions about the relevance of 3dfx''s new hardware.

i just saw something about v5 might be having multi-monitor support... i may have to get one for that if it has it. g400 was too slow otherwise i wooda got 1 of the dual ones.