GeForce FX thoughts by Cameron Wilmot

[The One]

this is what i hope to see to in the future


My GeForce FX Thoughts
Published: 28/01/2003 04:50:07 AM
Author: Cameron Wilmot

I was just recently asked in our forums what I thought of the whole GeForce FX fiasco. I gave my honest opinion and wanted to share it with our wider audience – here is my stance on the whole situation and remember it is just my opinion, unbiased toward ATI or nVidia, as you’ll notice neither of them advertise with us - so frankly I don’t care what either company think of my thoughts, unlike possibly other web media do.

I think everyone should wait at least another month to see what third party companies come up with before making a judgment on the GeForce FX - don't loose sight of the fact that the 5 or 6 online reviews we have seen to date are of a reference design, and like always - third party go ahead and improve on it to compete with other companies doing the exact same thing. And not just performance-wise this time, cooling as is the clear case with the GeForce FX - and let me assure you, after talking to many third party companies today, they are all just as concerned with the noise related issues as you and I, and are all working hard to come up with more noise-tolerable solutions.

I tend to agree with the latest post made over at nV News by Typedef Enum saying that many websites hyped the NV30 so much (we are probably even guilty of it) that everyone was expecting the McLaren F1 of video cards, and obviously it did not happen and it seems the entire tech community is suddenly bitter towards nVidia for it. Let me lay it on the line for you all - nVidia had the lead over ATI and any other GPU maker on the market and have enjoyed much industry support for the past 4 or 5 years. Now watch ATI soak it all up for 2003 and possibly beyond, as they should, while nVidia sit back and scratch their heads for an answer. This is the key reason we've seen companies such as Gigabyte and Creative switch to ATI - they aren't stupid by any means, they know ATI and their future plans and goals. Hell, if anything it makes things better for as both companies compete to be king – let’s just sit back and soak it up ourselves.

There comes a point in time where frames per second, are just that - simple frames per second. They've gotten so high now that there is no need seeing anything faster, at least in my opinion. Instead of looking for an outright speed king, why don't some of you folks enjoy more of the eye candy on offer and let the truly talented programmers of our world blow us away some more with unprecedented life-like detail instead of worrying about how high your 3DMark 2001 SE score is. Seriously guys, Dawn (the sexy nVidia elf chick) was just a start - wait till programmers and developers around the world make use of CG (ATI will also support it in their R350) and continue to perfect their art and we'll be back to seeing frame rates back in the 60-80 range, as told to us by nVidia - then and only then, will frames rates matter and come back into play like they've mattered so much over the past few years.

Frames per second are only those guys, so remember it. Why drive your car at such extreme speeds that you miss the beautiful scenery on the side of the:clap:

btw i didnt write this some one at tweaktown wrote it and i agree with his opinion

[DSC]

This isn't about frame rates.

What most people are probably. unhappy about is the inferior FSAA implementation, as well as the low performance when AA + Ani is used together. I'm one of those. I'm sure Nvidia can do a LOT better than that.

When a competitor can provide the same product months before you can, with better FSAA and image quality, you really start to wonder..... :o :confused:

[Hanners]

Originally posted by DSC
This isn't about frame rates.

What most people are probably. unhappy about is the inferior FSAA implementation, as well as the low performance when AA + Ani is used together. I'm one of those. I'm sure Nvidia can do a LOT better than that.

Not to mention heat and noise, which third-parties may well struggle to deal with too.

[AGP64]

Originally posted by The One
Seriously guys, Dawn (the sexy nVidia elf chick) was just a start - wait till programmers and developers around the world make use of CG (ATI will also support it in their R350)[/ and continue to perfect their art and we'll be back to seeing frame rates back in the 60-80 range, as told to us by nVidia - then and only then, will frames rates matter and come back into play like they've mattered so much over the past few years.[/B]

Agree with most of your story. But I'm curious where you got the idea that Ati will support CG in their R350.

[The One]

i got that from teawktown.com i didnt write this but i think what he said is true and thats what i want to see more eye candy and thats what nvidia is aiming for and ati to and i really hope that ati those support the cg cuz if they do our future games will look even better than they look now


p.s.
and poeple stop being so negative this guys are doing the best for all gamers (good job ati and nvidia):thumbsup:

[silence]

i agree completly.......it's not all in fps.

in all forums i visited i saw only few posts made by guys who are working with 3d and NONE of them said anything bad about fx.......prolly cause it is filled with features they need.

IMO..........we should all be saying thnx to nvidia cause they finally started to concentrate on new tech instead of just fps.

r350 will be faster then fx,but it won't bring anything new into 3d and games..........and what i want from my new card are new features.

did anybody at least tryed to ask some game developer what kind of impact on IQ will have 128 bit color precission fx has??or all those dx9+ shaders and stuff????

at some point you need to change your point of view and that's what nvidia did...........there is space to improve and without doubt they WILL improve fx.


IMO...........it would be 10 times easier to put 256 bit bus on gf4 core,produce it with .13 process, clock it to 500 and put DDRII on it........and that would prolly also beat current FX in current benchmarks >> BUT nvidia took other way, they opened for future and now they have to work very hard to bring that future to us. it is nice knowing they have vision they are chasing when desinging thier new products........

as i said,i'll buy FX for sure.......gonna wait till price drops by 25-30%,but i am buying it.:) :)
r350 will be faster then my 400 Mhz fx, but when new games come they'll prolly look better on my fx :) :) :)

[saturnotaku]

Originally posted by YeuEmMaiMai
ATi with fast 32bit color rendering

When you could actually get games to run without coughing up rendering or fatal exception errors due to shoddy drivers

S3 with metal and texture compression

That S3 couldn't even get to run right on its own cards without actually decelerating graphics.

3Dfx with vastly superior FSAA

That unfortunately was too far ahead of its time running on a graphics card that ran at the same (slow) speed on the PCI bus as it did on AGP.

SiS the first with .13u AGP 8x cards

That's about all those cards have going for them...and what games make use of AGP 8x right now, pray tell?

There's a difference between being simply being innovative and knowing when and how to implement changes. Up until the NV30, NVIDIA has consistently been right on target with its products, delivering solid cards with good drivers and excellent developer and manufacturer relations.

But now it seems like the tides are shifting and it seems NVIDIA has gotten complacent. Hopefully this will wake them up and drive them to make an even better product next time around. Should that happen ATI and whoever else will have to come up with something even better than that and so on and so forth. All this means only good things for us consumers.

[The One]

http://www.hothardware.com/reviews/images/gffxshowcase/nymph.jpg

what you think the gfx is a bad video card look at dawn look at the details in this pic ...the fx may not be faster than 9700pro but i think nvidia has opend the doors to the next generation of games and they way they will look man i wish a game came out with this kind of graphics like dawn up above this tread them graphic are killer

[jbirney]

Wow nV PR team has really worked wonder to make Silence believe the things that he does.

IMO..........we should all be saying thnx to nvidia cause they finally started to concentrate on new tech instead of just fps.

Problem is the ATI gave them both features and speed on a design that was out 6 months proir.

r350 will be faster then fx,but it won't bring anything new into 3d and games..........and what i want from my new card are new features. r350 will be faster then fx,but it won't bring anything new into 3d and games..........and what i want from my new card are new features.
did anybody at least tryed to ask some game developer what kind of impact on IQ will have 128 bit color precission fx has??or all those dx9+ shaders and stuff????

GF3 cards that entered in the truly programable TnL were delievered to us almost 2 years ago. How many games out there actualy use the DX8 vertex and pixel shaders pineline? You can count them on one hand. Ut2k3 is the first game to actually stress the TnL unit that we say back in the orignal GeForce. John C has said that Doom3 was mad possible by the feature set of the orignal GF card. Do you see my point? It take a horribly long time be fore the average gamer ever sees these so call features used in games. And by the time they are used the card is usally outdated.

You also do realise that anything the GFFX can do the R300 can also do (it just may require more then one pass through the DX9 shader pipeline).

The One
I dont agree with parts of your statement. What good are these new things if they yeild performace that is to low to deal with? Remember the V5 FSAA for years it was the best form of FSAA out there but it was just too slow. Having features is fine. But we both now that with the 2 years or so it seems to get these features into games, what does the end use get in return? A chance that their investment in the future will be used? Too many features have been promised for use that never have seen the light of day (HOS on GF cards for example). Buying for future use is a gamble at best. IMHO they need to blance features/future use with current top of the line perfromance. That way the end users can get results right away and have a chance that before they replace their card more of it will be exposed. Has that happen in the past. Not yet.....

[AnteP]

Originally posted by AGP64
Agree with most of your story. But I'm curious where you got the idea that Ati will support CG in their R350.

The author must be a bit confused. Hardware per se doesn't support Cg.
If you support DX and OGL in hardware Cg is a software matter, not hardware.
Last time I spoke to ATi they didn't seem very interested at all in Cg. They rather have people using their Rendermonkey suite combined with HLSL for DX9 and OGL2.


The One
Dawn demo runs at like 20-40 fps (at 1600x1200 without FSAA/Aniso, and yeah this is not something I heard. it was there in front of me, I touched the card to make sure it wasn't a hallucination etc.)
the background is just one large texture. it doesn't even have that many polygons (125k)
about the only thing straining the card is PS/VS ops and yet the performance is still crappy
how do you expect this to be the future

what happens when you put five of those models in a real "map" in a game and not just a 2D background then add AI, physics, weather effects, FSAA and Aniso

if the future is watching beautifull pictures in a slideshow I think I'll pass ;)

Dawn is damn impressive visually, they even simulate blood vessels under the skin that transport the blood that crates the different shades of her skin etc.
but wtf who the hell cares if it runs at ~30 fps? and yet this is just a very sterile test with just two models in it (the branch and Dawn herself)
when put in a real game you'd be looking at single digit fps

[saturnotaku]

Nobody here (except the ATI trolls) have said the FX is a bad card. All we're saying is we're disappointed with the results thus far, especially considering how much this card has been hyped and delayed.

Will it be different by the time the NV35 comes around? I sure hope so.

[jbirney]

The one,

nice pic but I still dont see the wow factor since the R300 has the same feature set? Unless the game is hard coded for the FX it will run just fine on the R300....

[digitalwanderer]

But I gotta admit that I don't think the smart money is on anyone making any stellar improvements to any of the GFFX's current short-comings of noise or heat any time soon. I really do think that all the delays were caused by nVidia trying to figure out a way around that...and their solution just doesn't impress me that much and if they were forced to use that I don't expect many manufacturers to step up with some instant innovation for it.

I am gonna reserve me final judgement on the card until it is actually available, I'm just also gonna have a lot of fun poking fun at nVidia in the interim.

After all the bloody, "Are you READY?!?!", hype I figure they've got it coming. ;)

[The One]

so because the nv 30 didnt deliver it dosent mean that next nvidia cards will will be the same remember this is new technology
it will take some time for it to be better just like everything new that comes out their is always room for improvements we all seen it with what ati has done ....so what that dawn runs at 20 fps but it looks good .what do u think that in a few years you wont see graphics like that and iam sure the wont be running at 20-30 or 40 fps .those are the kind of graphics i want to see in game . i really dont care whos is the king of vid card if it is ati or nvidia great for them ass long as i get the graphic quality at the end its all good then,when the graphics get to the kinda of detail then worry about the fps and the performance of the cards

[jbirney]

BTW not ever devlopers liks CG, from Derek Smart:

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4045&start=60

First the Cg farce. Now this.

Frankly, I'm speechless and really have no clue what to say at this point.

At any rate, as long as there is competition, gamers win. And thats all that matters really.

[Hellbinder]

I think most of you here are missing the point. Ill even give you guys the argument that the GFFX is 10-15% faster than the Radeon 9700pro accross the board.

Great.. That is no longer Nvidias problem. Nvidias problem NOW is a little product called the Radeon 9900. And I know for a fact that My Radeon 9700pro overclocked to 351/344 gains an average of 16 FPS in all my games with FSAA+AF.

The Radeon 9900 is going to be clocked OVER 400mhz, with about 400mhz ram giving it 25GB raw bandwidth, not tio mention Core tweaks to make it faster clock for clock than the R300.

There are even some new *Rumors* that Tyan is plannign on realeasing a Tachyon 2 with 500mhz DDR-II powering the 9900. Imagine that.

[Mike89]

I have to disagree with parts of the starting post.

The fact is, vid cards still aren't fast enough. There are still games out now that when turning on all the eye candy that will even give the FX/9700 Pro a run for its money.

This does not even take into account games that will be coming in the future. Does anyone honestly think that even the FX or 9700 Pro could handle a game with the graphic quality detail of the Dawn demo? Pictures look good but running a game like that is going to be a different story. Sure you could start turning things way down and lowering the res but this is the point isn't it.

From what I can see, ATI still just has better efficient implementaton of both FSAA and Aniso, even counting the FX. And this is from a card that is six months old and still handles itself quite nicely compared to the FX.

And they're doing it without the heat/noise issues of the FX, which is enough in itself to turn me off no matter how fast it is.

I just don't think the FX is going to be appreciably improved from what the previews have shown. The FX is wound up so tight already, I don't see much room for improvement. You can only do so much with what you got.

[The One]

to clear things up i wasent talking about the fx or r300 to run game that has that image quality of dawn i was referring to the other gen of vid cards

[Demiex]

That is just one developer, this is a list of companies supporting CG: < this is from nvidia, but i'd doubt they would fabricate company names like this >

GAME DEVELOPERS:
Auran
Bethesda Softworks
Beyond Games
Bioware
Blizzard
Cat Daddy
CodeCult
Codemasters
Contraband
Core Design
Criterion
Dark Black
Destineer
EALA
Electronic Arts
Elixir
EMG
Ensemble Studios
Epic Games
Fox Interactive
Grin
Headgate
High Voltage
Inevitable
Intrinsic
Ion Storm
Kaboom
Kuju
Lego Media
Lionhead Studios
Lithtech
Massive Development
Maxis
Microsoft Game Studios
Nadeo
NAMCO
NDL
NemoSoft
Novalogic
Pivotal
Rage Sheffield
Relic Entertainment
Ritual
Sega
Sony Online Entertainment
SpinVector
Steel Monkeys
Turbine Entertainment
Valve
Vulpine
Yeti Studios


DCC VENDORS:

Alias|Wavefront
Discreet
Softimage

If u want go to nvidia's website and check out cg testimonials. Lotta big names in there. There are WAY to many quotes of Vice-Presidents, Lead Programmers etc. who support this to list. So believe who you want, one quote from a dev, or 50 from the same type of people.

Demiex

[R.Carter]

Interesting how nobody mentioned Matrox.

They were the first to bring some of the interesting technologies to the graphics market.

[ReDeeMeR]

FX is definately not a consumer part, does it suck? No, but it simply is unbalanced, I'll bet in games V&P Shaders used in dawn demo will make this card crawl, because:

A) They wont be strickly Nvidia optimized
B) Game developers really suck at optimizing games(except few like Blizzard, Westwood, Id etc).
C) No game uses V&PS as fundamental engine part, ie V&PS are still kind of like addon, you can run em on and off.

We will see real nice games wich will use V&PS as main engine part like UT2K3 uses TnL extensively and look how fast and cool it is even on say Geforce 2MX

[marqmajere]

If ANY of you thought the FX was the "ATI Killer", then you need your head examined. The fact is, the FX is STILL a good card. The only thing wrong with it is that it should've been released 5 months ago. That's it. Will it run all the current games with little or no problems? Yes. Does it give the 9700 a run for it's money? YES. You folks have had enough time to inflate this monster of a card to preportions I didn't even know existed and now that you see it's not what you dreamed of, you feel let down. Well too bad.

I don't think it's a bad card at all. In fact, I think it's a great card. It's as if you're complaining that McDonalds new hamburger 5800 doesn't have the extra mustard and pickles you thought it would and this makes it worse than the Burger King hamburger that was released 5 months ago and has almost the same amount of toppings. Does this mean that the BK burger is better? No. It just means that you had to wait a little longer for the McD's burger.

I'm tired. I'm going to get some sleep. Maybe you should too. :mad:

[AnteP]

Originally posted by marqmajere
The only thing wrong with it is that it should've been released 5 months ago.

Yeah except for poor OGMS/SS with poor performance at anything beyond 2x FSAA. Insane noise levels. Heat. Buggy drivers (without DX9 support). FSAA-limitations at 4x in OGL. Insane price (in Europe at least). Extremely limited availability. Taking up one extra PCI-slot (Which also causes incompability with certain setups as Anand showed: it's simply not installable). Low overclocking potential. etc.

Yup, only thing wrong with it is that it's late. Great observation, you really hit the nail on the head...

[mocca]

You can wait all you like while I'm enjoying another company card which run as good as this pathetic card, way cooler with much less noise. I'm no ATI fanboy so don't start flaming me. I just state what I think. I cannot believe that I wait for 5 months for this pathetic card. If you want to wait for another month and hope that 3rd party mfg will solve all the problems, go ahead. I am fed up with nVidia marketing bs. All they do is try to divert people attention since R9700P while they know their card is pathetic. I hate this kind of trickster. First, someone say the GFFX will perform about 30% better than ATI, then they said that it will be available on November/December, then January, and now February or March.

I sincerely disappointed with nVidia this time. The card is pathetic and they knew it 5 months ago. They just lie and hype it up so people will wait for it. And what do we get now, a pathetic card that cannot compete to a 6 months old card without excessive hsf (i.e., the dustbuster) which is loud like hell?

Mocca

Edit: typo

[CtB]

@Demiex :
< this is from nvidia, but i'd doubt they would fabricate company names like this >

Well, people with a memory may remember the incredible list of "T&L" games that was available at Nvidia's site short after the GF1 launch... There were like 50 games on this list. Of course, most (that is to say 45+) of them didn't have any T&L enhancement whatsoever. They just put a list of all DX7 and OpenGL games... Nearly all DX7 games used their own pipeline for T&L, not the default pipeline, which meant that GF cards didn't get to use their T&L unit. OpenGL games used the T&L to some extent, but it didn't matter because those games models featured a very small amount of polygons anyway.

I think most of those companies "support" Cg in that they sent their developers to a few Nvidia courses on Cg... I may be wrong, but I strongly doubt it.

@mocca : welcome to the wonderful world of FUD. At the very moment I saw the initial press releases that said "up to 30% better performance than 9700 Pro" aund tech previews on the NV30, I bought a 9700 Pro. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...

Just for the record, I've used and enjoyed Nvidia's products for quite some time now (GF2 Ultra, GF3, GF4 4600). The incredible flop that the GFFX is does not mean Nvidia will not make another incredible product later. But for this cycle, ATI is the clear winner.