We should know how GeforceFX performs by 23 Dec 2002

[gstanford]

http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=nvda&script=410&layout=9&item_id=360408
NVIDIA Corporation (ticker: NVDA, exchange: NASDAQ) News Release - December 2, 2002


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NVIDIA and PNY Bring GeForce FX to the World's Top Gamers At the CPL Winter Event

NVIDIA Graphics Processors and PNY Verto Graphics Cards Named
'Official Graphics Card' of the Cyberathlete Professional League


SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 2 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) and PNY Technologies(R), today announced that they have teamed up as key sponsors of the Cyberathlete Professional League's (CPL) Pentium(R) 4 Processor Winter Event. The annual competition pits the world's greatest professional computer gamers against each other for the chance to win $140,000 in cash prizes. The event will be held from December 18-22 at the Hyatt Regency hotel in downtown Dallas, Texas.

(Photo: NewsCom: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20020613/NVDALOGO )

Named the official graphics card providers of the CPL, NVIDIA and PNY will outfit all of the PC's used in competition with PNY Verto(R) graphics cards powered by NVIDIA(R) GeForce(TM) GPUs, and serve as lead sponsors of the $30,000 Unreal Tournament 2003 (UT2K3) Championship. NVIDIA also plans to host the first public demonstration of the new GeForce(TM) FX, the highly anticipated new GPU slated for availability in early 2003. Moreover, two lucky players will be rewarded a PNY Verto GeForce FX graphics card, while other gamers will have several chances to win various PNY Verto GeForce4 graphic cards throughout the competition.

"The CPL hosts intense competition between the best gamers in the world. It's only natural they would want to arm their gaming rigs with the world's best hardware," said Bill Rehbock, director of developer relations at NVIDIA. "GeForce GPUs are hands-down the best GPUs for experiencing today's hottest PC games the way they're meant to be played. We're thrilled to be a part of the all-out fragfest that is the CPL."

While the three-day competition is waging, NVIDIA will also be hosting public previews of its GeForce FX GPUs, the fastest, most advanced GPU on the planet and the industry's first GPU to enable real-time, cinematic-quality graphics and special effects on desktop PCs.

"NVIDIA and PNY Technologies are both unrivaled leaders in the graphics market for interactive entertainment; the CPL is indeed the perfect environment to showcase their latest products," said Angel Munoz, founder and president of the CPL. "The possibility of hosting the first public demonstration of the new GeForce FX is an honor for the CPL; and will offer hundreds of hardcore gamers from around the world, the first opportunity to experience this new level of cinematic realism for PC games."

"Professional gamers want the best of the best for a competition of this caliber," said Nancy Larson, manager, marketing communications for PNY. "PNY's Verto GeForce graphics cards deliver the latest and greatest top-to-bottom hardware for every experience level and every PC. The CPL is an event where we can engage players with the most advanced graphics hardware available today, where they can compete to the best of their ability at the most intense gaming event of their lives."

For more information on the CPL Pentium 4 Processor Winter Event, or to attend, please visit www.thecpl.com.

The driver situation can't be too unstable then. Hopefully those who win the cards will do us all a favor and provide benchies.

Greg

[Bigus Dickus]

(1) I'm not saying that the drivers aren't good at this point, but it wouldn't seem too difficult to make the drivers work well for a limited number of known games for a competition like this.

(2) Just because they say they're giving away two PNY NV30's to winners doesn't mean they're giving them away right then. Same thing happened with the R300 remember?

[gstanford]

Originally posted by Bigus Dickus
(1) I'm not saying that the drivers aren't good at this point, but it wouldn't seem too difficult to make the drivers work well for a limited number of known games for a competition like this.

(2) Just because they say they're giving away two PNY NV30's to winners doesn't mean they're giving them away right then. Same thing happened with the R300 remember?

Point 1)nVidia doesn't optimize for specific games, though a certain competitor certainly has "optimized" in this way in the past...

Point 2) Not enough info to know when they are being given away yet - in the absence of info to the contrary I'll assume at the event. No I don't know what happened with R300, I don't follow ATi happenings more than I absolutely have to.

Greg

[Bigus Dickus]

Originally posted by gstanford
Point 1)nVidia doesn't optimize for specific games, though a certain competitor certainly has "optimized" in this way in the past...Riiiigggghhhtttt.... :rolleyes:

Besides, the point was simply that if there were bugs that still needed to be worked out, don't you think it would be relatively easy to test the specific games being used in the tournament, and make sure none of those games was being affected by a bug? I wasn't talking about performance optimizations so much as about compatibility, though I'm sure they could (and will) do as much tweaking for those specific games as possible.

And out of curiosity... what is wrong with optimizing for specific games? They've all done it in the past.

[gstanford]

Riiiigggghhhtttt....
Quakitty! QUAK! QUAK!

Greg

[jbirney]

Originally posted by gstanford
Point 2) Not enough info to know when they are being given away yet - in the absence of info to the contrary I'll assume at the event. No I don't know what happened with R300, I don't follow ATi happenings more than I absolutely have to.

Greg

Gerg,

ATI was one of the sponsers for this years QuakeCON in August. They were going to give away R300 to some people as well as have them there for the people to use. So a lot of people thought the same thing that you are thinking with the GF FX. They though wrong. The cards they gave away were pre-orders that were good once the card ships (meaning the people that one them did not get them until ATI started shipping the R300). Also those that did play on the boxes were not allowed to do any sort of benchmarks and frame rates were hidden. Thus we got no usefull info on the R300 other than users saying it was fast.


Also to regaurds to your other point consider this. Notice how NV is still the fastest at Q3 benchmarks (unless extreme settings are used) but in every other benchmark that uses the Q3 engine ATI is faster. On the out side one might think that its nV that has optimized for Q3 only. But those other games (RTCW, JK2, SOF2, ect) are a bit more demanding and that is partly to cause for some of this......

[gstanford]

I like playing Ultima 9: Ascension, from Origin - a relatively obscure and very badly programmed, especially in the 3d rendering game.

Noone in their right minds is going to waste time optimizing their drivers for a game like this (even origin didn't support the game - they gave up on it very quickly).

However, whenever nVidia releases a driver that increases performance in other D3D titles I can see a corresponding improvement in U9 also. That should tell you that the improvements are not game specific, but rather focus on overall performance (lots of other not so common games will show you the exact same trend).

You could be right about the GF FX giveaway, but, we'll have to see what happens. Huang did say (very) limited availability at xmas at one stage.

Greg

[Bigus Dickus]

Originally posted by gstanford
Quakitty! QUAK! QUAK!

Greg

There were two parts to that statement of yours. I was disagreeing with the first... not the second.

[legion88]

Originally posted by gstanford
I like playing Ultima 9: Ascension, from Origin - a relatively obscure and very badly programmed, especially in the 3d rendering game.

Noone in their right minds is going to waste time optimizing their drivers for a game like this (even origin didn't support the game - they gave up on it very quickly).

However, whenever nVidia releases a driver that increases performance in other D3D titles I can see a corresponding improvement in U9 also. That should tell you that the improvements are not game specific, but rather focus on overall performance (lots of other not so common games will show you the exact same trend).

Greg

Correct. I just like to add that there are two general categories of "game-specific" improvements:

1) drivers optimized for a specific game engine (e.g. 3dfx's miniGL).

2) drivers optimized for a very specific game itself.

Option 1 is a bit more general than option 2 since it can affect more games, not just one. However, it might not yield as big of a performance boost as option 2 might have since the driver development team would be trying not to screw up performance or stability in other games that uses the same game engine.

But, there is a down-side to option 1. The drivers may work wonders on all games that uses a specific game engine but it may have a negative impact on games that uses a different game engine.

That's why 3dfx minigl couldn't run any games well other than those based on the Quake2 engine.

So....the driver team would have to find a way to recognize a specific game engine, which is a bit more difficult than writing code to recognize a specific game (e.g. if game = 'quake 3' then Quack versus if game characteristic = this and that then do this...).

In 3dfx's case, the game itself was coded to recognize the game-engine specific driver (e.g. you select it from the menu in Quake2) so 3dfx didn't have to worry about that. Those days are gone.

Option 2 is self-explanatory. I should point out that game-specific "optimizations" means it will not have any impact at all (positive and negative) on other games. Those in denial seem to never recognize this obvious point of game-specific coding.

They deliberately confuse option 1 and 2 as if they were equivalent. They do this so that pundits can argue illogically that companies that use option 1 are no different from those that use option 2. Thus, if option 1 is okay then option 2 would be okay as well. Or if option 2 is bad then option 1 is bad as well.

Now option 1 and option 2 fall in the category of "what general manner was it improved" , it does not discuss the "specific how" was it improved.

In ATi's Quack case, they hard-coded graphics settings for the Quake 3 benchmarks. Those in denial can never get pass the obvious point that it isn't the "manner" that's important, it is the "how". Hard-coding the graphic settings (the "how") to boost benchmark scores is, of course, cheating. It doesn't matter if those settings improved or degraded image quality. The obvious point is that the graphic settings are hard-coded, preventing reviewers from making a valid comparison of comparable graphic settings while providing a performance edge to ATi's Radeon 8500. This is cheating.

[-=DVS=-]

Originally posted by gstanford
I like playing Ultima 9: Ascension, from Origin - a relatively obscure and very badly programmed, especially in the 3d rendering game.

Noone in their right minds is going to waste time optimizing their drivers for a game like this (even origin didn't support the game - they gave up on it very quickly).

However, whenever nVidia releases a driver that increases performance in other D3D titles I can see a corresponding improvement in U9 also. That should tell you that the improvements are not game specific, but rather focus on overall performance (lots of other not so common games will show you the exact same trend).

Maybe some NUT from Nvidia was playing Ultima 9 and put extra work to optimize for it :D

Just Jokeing:p

[Uttar]

I'm glad to accalim Ultima 9: Ascension as the world's less optimized game ( TM ) :)

I've got it too, never finished it but I did go fairly far ( Destard ) - and, woah, if only that game was optimized for Direct3D...

That game was originally made for Glide, so that doesn't help much...


Uttar

[SavagePaladin]

Yet another game that EA stopped supporting.....hmmmmm

[Uttar]

Originally posted by SavagePaladin
Yet another game that EA stopped supporting.....hmmmmm

It was amazingly buggy at release, they had to rush it because else EA would have cancelled it.
They posted patches for about 1 year, making stability fairly okay and performance a little more acceptable. But it still ran like crap in D3D :)

Now, I really think Ultima 9 is a game that would benefit a LOT from a GeForce FX. Beside CPU ( no T&L support :( ) limitations, its biggest limitation is fillrate ( Early Z is useless here, the engine got *no* idea what front to back ordering is )
And what's GeForce FX biggest improvement? Fillrate.

I wonder if performance will be significantly better... It would look just gorgeous at 1280x960, 4X AA and 8X Adapative Aniso. I'd be spoiled for live :)


Uttar

[gstanford]

There is an unofficial patch for the game V1.18f, it gets rid of the copy protection and that helps performance a bit.
http://www.fansforultima.com/u9downloads.htm

There are lots of test levels and unfinished levels (terrains) that get installed with the game - I was the one who figured out how to access these initially, then a gamestate editor was coded by someone else to let you easily jump into them. (they are very unfinished, the items are all wrong and stuff like that, but there is a copy of the E3 Ascension demo level in there).
http://members.iinet.net.au/~larcombe/u9edit.htm
It's quite sad really, because you can begin to get a feel for what the game was actually intended to be (the U9 that was released was far, far from the planned U9 - EA has a lot to answer for).
Also you'll find some file formats etc, on the same site:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~larcombe/

Then there is Hannibal smiths website - it covers just about everything there is to know about the game and more.
http://home.twmi.rr.com/hanu9/index.html

lastly the wayward avatar forums where most folk go to talk about U9
http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~ultima9/ubb/Ultimate.cgi

Greg

[SavagePaladin]

Ultima 9 would benefit from a lot of things, and if you can't tell I hate EA. I'm avoiding buying anything from them while I have limited cash anyway. Better companies to support.

[Uttar]

Originally posted by SavagePaladin
Ultima 9 would benefit from a lot of things, and if you can't tell I hate EA. I'm avoiding buying anything from them while I have limited cash anyway. Better companies to support.

Personally, I'm simply boycotting EA's MMORPGs ( UO, MCO, TSO, ... )
And if I hesitate between two games, I'll generally take the one which doesn't have the EA label.
If they publish a real wonder, however, I certainly would buy it anyway. Not like that happens very often :p


Uttar

[SavagePaladin]

Oh yeah...actually I do buy Westwood stuff...occasionally....I suppose they have that label. As for MMO, I'm still on el 56k and I can't imagine doing that stuff (though Motor City could be cool)

[Uttar]

Originally posted by SavagePaladin
Oh yeah...actually I do buy Westwood stuff...occasionally....I suppose they have that label. As for MMO, I'm still on el 56k and I can't imagine doing that stuff (though Motor City could be cool)

Many MMOs are fine with 56K you know. Sure, you get a disadvantage in PvP, but as for PvM, it's really okay. Most of the time... :)

gstanford: Yeah, I got the V1.18f - And with a lot of hand tuning, I was able to get 10FPS average in Britain with very high view distance, 512x512 sky, 4X Aniso and 1280x960@2XAA.
What I'd really like to see, however, is 1280x960@4XAA with 8X Aniso. Maybe with adaptive Aniso and color compression this might become possible at something like 20FPS on the GFFX
If that was the case... Gimme! :)


Uttar

[gstanford]

I'm an idiot - the unofficial patch is 1.19f, not 1.18f and you should be getting a lot more than 10 fps in britain - the patch should help you out there.

A lot of game engines that feel sluggish boil down to the movement rate of your character, which gives the false impression that the engine is working harder than it really is.

Nolf & Nolf2 are much nicer to play if you increase your movement rate (in nolf2 use a hex editor on your savegame and look for the text "RunSpeed" very early on in the file - the number that follows determines your characters speed in game.)
MOHAA suffered from a slow/laggy mouse feel too but I forget the exact fix for that ATM.

You can alter this in U9 also - try this utility

Ultima IX:Ascension Extended Setup http://www.geocities.com/xenerkes/En/aboutu9aes.htm

greg

[SavagePaladin]

Originally posted by Uttar
Many MMOs are fine with 56K you know. Sure, you get a disadvantage in PvP, but as for PvM, it's really okay. Most of the time... :)

Maybe they would be, if I actually connected near 56k. Sigh. (36k seems to be my high)

[SavagePaladin]

I dunno, I find NOLF and NOLF 2 nice as they are.

[Uttar]

Sounds like I'm an idiot too :) It *is* the 1.19f I got.

I really don't think I should be getting more than 10 FPS in britain: the settings I got that with are really gorgeous:
- high res sky ( 512x512 )
- Far Clipping Range: 10000 , Middle Clipping Range: 8500 , Maximum Portal Range: 1250 , Flicker Range: 1300
- SkipFrames: 2 , AvatarSkipFrames: 1 ( skip frames between lighting system updates )
- Highest level mip-mapping *and* a -0.5 slider in Rivatuner
- 4X Aniso, 1280x960@32BPP with 2X AA

Only thing I did to increase performance is using compressed textures.


Uttar

[gstanford]

What is your system? I can pull 25 fps on average in britain, thats with a GF3 Ti200, an AMD 1800+, an nForce1 and 512mb memory, virtually the same settings as yours except I render @1600x1200 32bit no FSAA and don't use mipmapping in the game at all.

Greg

[Uttar]

Originally posted by gstanford
What is your system? I can pull 25 fps on average in britain, thats with a GF3 Ti200, an AMD 1800+, an nForce1 and 512mb memory, virtually the same settings as yours except I render @1600x1200 32bit no FSAA and don't use mipmapping in the game at all.

Greg

1700+, K7S5A, 256MB DDR, G4 Ti4200, about 9000 3D Marks with default settings

You use Aniso too? And what's your exact view distance? Because "highest detail" in the game is significantly less than the view distance I selected in the .ini file.
With "highest quality" settings, I got about 25FPS at 1600x1200 around britain too. Maybe a little less if I enable 4X Aniso.


Uttar

[gstanford]

my far setting is actually 14000, middle 8000, portal 850, flicker 2000 - thats my only difference from you except for 2x Aniso (forgot that before - too much of a hit on a Ti200 for much more IMO).

But all that is fairly irrelevant anyway - your problem is your ram. I have twice your memory and it shows in the results.

Ascension likes a fast cpu and tons of memory - the more the merrier. The graphics card hardly comes into it except for max resolution (I had a GF2 Pro before the GF3 and it was only approx 20% slower on average- but no aniso at all of course). The other thing to bear in mind is the game runs far, far better under 2000/XP than it does 9x (probably got something to do with memory management).

Don't forget the render target for this game was a voodoo2 in glide mode - its the cpu and memory that does all of the grunt work.

Greg