NVIDIA's offical response to Futuremark

[Zenikase]

Originally posted by Neural
I think you mistook me for meaning that they could liscense the optimizations to software programmers. I dont know for sure but I think they probably give the optimizations out for free to programmers or even pay them(under the table of course *cough* intel *cough*) to use their optimizations so there cards run faster. What I was referring to though is how intel is forced by non monopoly laws to liscense its SSE implementation to AMD because if intel refused, AMD could claim that intel was stopping it from being competitive i.e. M$java and Sun java. Intel gets around this though by implementing new optimizations in each new core refresh in order to stay one step ahead of its liscensees. I shudder to think of the evilness at the top of intel...

Yes, it's one of the several reasons why I despise Intel and will probably never buy their CPUs and motherboards as long as there is viable competition. I wish they would enforce the same type of anti-competitive laws on video card manufacturers, and who knows, it may happen in the near future.

[Steppy]

If the use of clip planes is now "optimization", then where does the line get drawn? Not rendering ANYTHING would just be the extreme case of using clip planes, would give super high scores, but would be worthless...but according to FM and NV that theoretically would be a perfectly acceptable "optimization". Something stinks here IMO.

[jAkUp]

i feel nv, or other video card companies have to throw in something extra for the "average joe." cinematic computing... and fp32 are words they use to attract consumers. just following the dx9 spec, and being fast at it doesnt cut it anymore for the average "joe consumer" i think it would be great to just follow dx9 specs, it allows more developers to concentrate on gameplay and graphics. and keeps them from moving towards consoles (which more and more companies tend to be doing)
pc gaming is dying slowly... the recent big games have sucked. the cost for creating pcgames are getting higher than the profits... and generally pc gaming is in a slump.
hopefully hl2 and doom3 breath new life into pcgaming.

[Zenikase]

The reason why more developers are moving on to consoles is because there are they have rules set in stone as to what will work and what won't. It's a single set of hardware they have to program for, and there's no need to worry about compatibility because it will never change. This leads to much faster and cheaper development time, allowing them to focus on more important things, like the game itself.

[ragejg]

I have to disagree...

I think publications are misguidedly conveying things like that. Is the astronomical rise in population of hardware phr33ks all for nothing?

PC gaming is growing in crazy ways... It's created scrutiny for the stars on this playing field, and magnified the occurence of the rifts between companies in this competitive environment.

And it leads to real big threads... :D

[Neural]

Originally posted by jAkUp
i feel nv, or other video card companies have to throw in something extra for the "average joe." cinematic computing... and fp32 are words they use to attract consumers. just following the dx9 spec, and being fast at it doesnt cut it anymore for the average "joe consumer" i think it would be great to just follow dx9 specs, it allows more developers to concentrate on gameplay and graphics. and keeps them from moving towards consoles (which more and more companies tend to be doing)
pc gaming is dying slowly... the recent big games have sucked. the cost for creating pcgames are getting higher than the profits... and generally pc gaming is in a slump.
hopefully hl2 and doom3 breath new life into pcgaming.

I agree about hl2 and doom3, many have talked about the next "killer app" that will puch PCs to the next level, at the rate things are going I only hope hl2 and D3 are "market salvagers" otherwise without good games to feed the gpu need, the whole nVidia vs. ATi will be a moot point as the needs can be met by the Super Duper intel EXTREME graphics!

[Sazar]

Originally posted by Neural
I agree about hl2 and doom3, many have talked about the next "killer app" that will puch PCs to the next level, at the rate things are going I only hope hl2 and D3 are "market salvagers" otherwise without good games to feed the gpu need, the whole nVidia vs. ATi will be a moot point as the needs can be met by the Super Duper intel EXTREME graphics!

unreal II was hpyed and turned out to be... for me... utterly not worth the money or the time... (um 8hrs ? come on... this is not super mario from the old nintendo days... )

[jAkUp]

ok all this is my honost opinion... its just an opinion and i agree that eveyone may not agree with me.

well... it seems like nowadays we are just seeing poor console ports, or poor sequels... ut2k3, ut, nfshp2, all are poor sequels... that fail to even touch the game before it.

warezing is larger than ever... with more people downloading games and not buying them... supposly huge games are turning out to be duds... ea and ea sports are going down the drain... (with the exception of a few titles) eidos is nearly down the drain... and good companies are going bunk, looking glass studios... etc.

we are seeing more sim's game's than anything else... (im so glad sims 2 is going to be 3d, not because i play it, but because it will push the industry)

games are getting buggier, its taking 1 or 2 patches for a game to be stable anymore... costs for making them are rising, companies are moving to consoles, and they are setting strict deadlines. the hardware level of the average consumer is lowering... remember when there was only 32mb of ram? moving from 32mb>64mb was a huge difference in windows, games, and everything in general... now a days... moving from 256>512 is only for games. so the average "jow blow consumer" has a lower end system.

the people who own computers are rising... however, the people who own computers for gaming is decreasing... we are a small part of a very large population.

there has been a few innovative games recently... splinter cell... maybe gta3... even though it is a console port to name a few... but not nearly as many as their used to be.

[Kruno]

Originally posted by MikeC
I can already tell this thread is going to go nowhere fast.

Too late. It was already a pissing match before the thread was even made. :lol:

[Sazar]

Originally posted by jAkUp
well... it seems like nowadays we are just seeing poor console ports, or poor sequels... ut2k3, ut, nfshp2, all are poor sequels... that fail to even touch the game before it.

games are getting buggier, its taking 1 or 2 patches for a game to be stable anymore... costs for making them are rising, companies are moving to consoles, and they are setting strict deadlines. the hardware level of the average consumer is lowering... remember when there was only 32mb of ram? moving from 32mb>64mb was a huge difference in windows, games, and everything in general... now a days... moving from 256>512 is only for games. so the average "jow blow consumer" has a lower end system.

the people who own computers are rising... however, the people who own computers for gaming is decreasing... we are a small part of a very large population.

there has been a few innovative games recently... splinter cell... maybe gta3... even though it is a console port to name a few...

yes... that brings up a point I have brought up before...

would standardization not HELP game devs and the companies that produce these products? lowering costs and maknig products more stable rather than having to continually waste time/effort on maknig sure it runs on products that have a different interpretation of the standards ?

joe blow consumer's voice needs to be drowned out by joe blow above average consumer...

[Zenikase]

Game content in general has degraded most likely because of a) rising costs and b) stupid publishers who rush developers to get their product out the door as fast as possible.

People are demanding bigger, better graphics. What they don't know is that it comes at a cost. Video processors have become so complex, it's bad enough having to write for one product, but companies also have to ensure that the competing cards work just as well. This headache doesn't get any better when pig-headed manufacturers outright refuse to conform to the standards given. I have no experience in this field, but I can assure you that enormous amounts of time and money are invested solely into this.

Some publishers are also very anal about having a timely release. They have no regard as to whether the game is complete or not, as long as they can fool some poor suckers into giving them their money. This is usually the reason why we have fatal bugs that require multiple patches, as well as expansion packs with all the stuff that could've been in the initial release had they a few extra weeks to work on the game. If a publisher is ailing, they're going to want as many products on the shelf at one time as possible. It's about quantity, not quality.

[sbp]

Tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode as the benchmark turns. :eek:

[Zenikase]

Eh, the discussion is pretty dead already. We've spent most of this page talking about how much the PC games industry sucks. :p

[Quinn1981]

Originally posted by digitalwanderer
How many people here think these two companies should be defining the rules of benchmarking? Let's have a show of hands... :bleh:
Hehehe. Good point. But you never know. Maybe after all this screwing around in secret, they actually were listening to their customers and fans. :o

[Quinn1981]

Originally posted by Zenikase
Eh, the discussion is pretty dead already. We've spent most of this page talking about how much the PC games industry sucks. :p
Another good point. Now, we just need more of these and there will be reason to continue. :)

I said it before jokingly. Maybe we need an actual PC 3D Graphics Benchmarking board or something made up of different people in the industry. It's the only way to keep assholes like... you know... :rolleyes: screwing with the numbers... in more than one way.

[scott123]

He, he: I hate to say I told ya so.

Kinda looks like Futuremark see's the reality, and realizes that they need Nvidia on board to survive.

As I said, it doesn't matter who's right and who's wrong. When the #1 graphics card maker says your product sucks, and your product just happends to be a benchmark program, you have a serious problem on your hands.

I think Futuremark see's the reality, and they are in survival mode.

Scott

[Rowen]

Let's not blame nVidia... after all, they're only trying to prove what they always said about 3DMark2003... it sucks and can be manipulated... :)

Now serious... as long as a driver show the performance gains in the real games without any kind of problem, why would I care about 3DMark??? It's useless... it's only about competition between people trying to get the ultimate score...

[Nv40]

many interesting views ,from diferent topics.. here is mines..

1)pc-games are not losing any ground ,but the opposite..
where did you think all the money of ATI and Nvidia comes?

the only thing that can hurt PC-games is warez
but actually CD keys are working really well.. heck.. i bought Ravenshield
and many other games ,when they kick ass they deserve my money
can wait for Doom3 and Hl2 :)
but another thing that can hurt Pc-games is ->MS with the Xbox.
if they try to control more the pc-industry :(

2)standars doesnt benefit the industry when they dont benefit the
majority. but only a few .. its was MS bad move to force Nvidia
to use all their FP32 precision (never intended for today games but for the professional market) in games.. WTF what they were thinking?
they were responsible for all this mess about Fp24 vs Fp32 ,since they
raised the specs ,many months later Nvidia hardware was finished.
so as you see sometimes Standars do more damage to the industry
that benefits to it (part of 3dmark -Nvidia mess have something to do with the precision of MS).
if we take in to account that Microsoft is trying to monopolize the industry ,i will not like to see OpenGl to go any day ,is the only thing that
force MS to not gain full control of the Pc-games ,and force gamedevelopers to code only for their gaming console (cough) HALo.
standars are not always a good thing ,in the console market standars
doesnt exist , and notice the many high quality games and how succesfull is that industry. the positive side about Propietary ,is that there is so many innovations in the hardware. (PS2 vs Xbox vs gamecube vs dreamcast). in PC's all video cards amost do the same thing.
and something makes me believe that without standars ,
we will have many more innovation in video cards ,with new technolgy
the negative side is more work for developers. a good a aproach can be
something in the middle between standar and propietary. to have more
innovations without too much extra work for developers.

3)no matter if NVidia or ATI now support 3dmark , no benchmark
should ask hundreds of thousands of dollars to BIg companies ,
because nobody give so huge sum of money if they are not going to receive something back. :angel2:
the way DELL defend 3dmark makes me believe even more about this..
i dont see Gateway or compaq in the betaprogram . something bigger is going on. at least with other syntetic benchamrk noone have to pay nothing ,and people observe the scores ,but never buy a card for that. but 3dmark is used by DELL and ATI and probably in the future by Nvidia to sell video cards. and im againts that ,because all gamers buy video cards to play games but 3dmarks may mislead them about the performance they will see in his favorites games. thats why you see many times in Forums.. "why my card is so slow in this game.?" unless 3dmarks use real game engines there is no way they can be taken as representative of games of the future.

in games its a diferent Story. generally speaking is more dificult there
to do the same thing as 3dmark ,because Game developers needs to sell
their games ,and they know that if ATI hardware doesnt run well in their game (they will lose money) ,they know that if Nvidia hardware doesnt works well in their game ,(they will lose money).in syntetic benchamrk they dont need to run well ,they only need to give you a score .

and ATI and Nvidia knows that to sell their video cards ,they need to run well in all games ,not only one. so is imposible to buy $$ all gamedevelopers and all his games ,to perform only well in their cards. its far more cheap to spend that money designing a powerfull hardware. ;)

[bkswaney]

Originally posted by Rowen
Let's not blame nVidia... after all, they're only trying to prove what they always said about 3DMark2003... it sucks and can be manipulated... :)

Now serious... as long as a driver show the performance gains in the real games without any kind of problem, why would I care about 3DMark??? It's useless... it's only about competition between people trying to get the ultimate score...


Yep... and we all know 3dmark can be beat.
There are ways to cheat it. :)
Without being nvidia. :angel:

As long as drivers are stable... keep making my games faster and look better I could care less really. :)

#1-stable-bugs
#2-IQ
#3-fast

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by Zenikase
The reason why more developers are moving on to consoles is because there are they have rules set in stone as to what will work and what won't. It's a single set of hardware they have to program for, and there's no need to worry about compatibility because it will never change. This leads to much faster and cheaper development time, allowing them to focus on more important things, like the game itself.

I would say that more developers move to consoles because console games are more profitable as they sell more copies than pc games. Look at the top10 PC games sold in any given year, I don't think all games on the top10 even can sell a million copies(certainly not the top20). The top 20 console games each year easily sell 1 million copies each.

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by scott123
He, he: I hate to say I told ya so.

Kinda looks like Futuremark see's the reality, and realizes that they need Nvidia on board to survive.

As I said, it doesn't matter who's right and who's wrong. When the #1 graphics card maker says your product sucks, and your product just happends to be a benchmark program, you have a serious problem on your hands.

I think Futuremark see's the reality, and they are in survival mode.

Scott

Hmm, nvidia is the one that left Futuremark. Futuremark didn't kick them out.

[Zenikase]

Originally posted by Nv40
many interesting views ,from diferent topics.. here is mines..

2)standars doesnt benefit the industry when they dont benefit the
majority. but only a few .. its was MS bad move to force Nvidia
to use all their FP32 precision (never intended for today games but for the professional market) in games.. WTF what they were thinking?
they were responsible for all this mess about Fp24 vs Fp32 ,since they
raised the specs ,many months later Nvidia hardware was finished.
so as you see sometimes Standars do more damage to the industry
that benefits to it (part of 3dmark -Nvidia mess have something to do with the precision of MS).
if we take in to account that Microsoft is trying to monopolize the industry ,i will not like to see OpenGl to go any day ,is the only thing that
force MS to not gain full control of the Pc-games ,and force gamedevelopers to code only for their gaming console (cough) HALo.

Microsoft can't force nVidia to do anything, all they do is lay down the guidelines for 3D accelerators to follow. There are only minimums as to how precise they can carry out fragment shader operations, and the manufacturers will have to live with their decisions, favorable or not.

Here's an excerpt from a NV30 vs. R300 (http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/nv30r300/index.php?p=9) comparison on B3D:

According to DX9 Beta 2.1, the internal precision required by PS2.0 is here:


Implementations vary precision automatically based on precision of inputs to a given op for optimal performance.
The minimum level of internal precision for temporary registers is s10e5 (FP16).
The minimum internal precision level for constants is s10e5 (FP16).
The minimum internal precision level for input texture coordinates is s16e7 (FP24).
Diffuse and specular registers are only required to support [0-1] range, and high-precision is not required.


So, we can see R300 is a true DX9 card in spite of 24bit internal float precision in the pixel shader pipeline. Of course, NV30, which supports true IEEE-32(s23e8) FP precision, is also a true DX9 card.

Note that only parts of the R300 pipeline are at 24bit precision, with the chip being a mixture of both 32bit and 24bit floating point precision. The core pixel shader operations are carried out at FP24 precision however the texture address operations (and the entire Vertex Shader pipeline) are IEEE-32(s23e8) FP precision. The output of shaders can be converted to lower precision, such as 32bit or 64bit per pixel, or converted up to 128bit per pixel.

It was confirmed that R300 and NV30 support both FP16 per component textures and FP32 per component textures. Besides, R300 also supports 16bit fixed point textures, and to the contrary NV30 supports 12bit fixed point textures. NV30 and R300 also support 64bit and 128bit "float" frame buffer.

R300's pixel pipeline also supports 1d/2d/3d/cubemap floating point textures where NV30 is limited to texture_rectangle. Floating point textures in R300 are limited to nearest filtering. R300 also supports muliple 128bit and 64bit texture formats, including a c4_16 format where each component is a 16bit fixed point value and full filtering, 3D textures and projected textures are supported.

[Steppy]

Originally posted by Nv40
many interesting views ,from diferent topics.. here is mines..

2)standars doesnt benefit the industry when they dont benefit the
majority. but only a few .. its was MS bad move to force Nvidia
to use all their FP32 precision (never intended for today games but for the professional market) in games.. WTF what they were thinking?
they were responsible for all this mess about Fp24 vs Fp32 ,since they
raised the specs ,many months later Nvidia hardware was finished.
so as you see sometimes Standars do more damage to the industry
that benefits to it (part of 3dmark -Nvidia mess have something to do with the precision of MS).

Umm, that was Nvidia's own pimping of their "32-bit" that led MS to decree ATI's "lower" 24-bit the minimum standard. It turned out that Nvidia's 32-bit is/was mostly unusable and needed 16-bit or less to perform well. Had Nvidia not been so concerned with one-upping ATI on the spec sheet and just said 16-bit was their preferred method, 16-bit most likely would have been the minimum for DX9.

[Quinn1981]

Seems like nVidia knew from the get-go that their new FX stuff sucked at vertex and pixel shaders compared to the ATI stuff and couldn't admit it. Or at least that's what it looks like to me. I don't see why it matters when the next group of cards is what gamers are going to go crazay for and we might start to see some real use of DX9. They have made a big deal out of nothing really. They could be working on great drivers and making sure their next product is going to be it's best instead of this crap. Oh well. Guess there will be more ATI users as we go along. nVidia needs to shape up. It only took 3Dfx a couple of blunders to end up going away and nVidia has racked up a good few already with the FX stuff. I still think they 5200s are nice for slow systems or work stations though. :rolleyes:

[Zenikase]

Originally posted by StealthHawk
I would say that more developers move to consoles because console games are more profitable as they sell more copies than pc games. Look at the top10 PC games sold in any given year, I don't think all games on the top10 even can sell a million copies(certainly not the top20). The top 20 console games each year easily sell 1 million copies each.

You also have to consider the fact that there are more console gamers than PC gamers, since most people don't like going through the trouble of dealing with bugs/crashes, incompatibility, poor performance, etc. Others may not have a system powerful enough to enjoy the game (although this has become less and less common, with the trickling down of DX8.1-class video cards into the value market). With a console you just pop in the disc and you're set. This, plus the fact that console games are much harder to pirate, due to proprietary mediums and the complex hardware modding required to play a pirated game that not only could be risky, but voids your warranty.