Nvidia,GFFX,3DFX Discussion

[tortois]

Being an owner of a V5 5500agp,I
was interested about a thread on another
forum that said the GFFX using 3DFX technology
could lead to revitalizing the V5 either
in the way of new Drivers or something.
Has anyone heard this or can comment at all?
My V5 with amigamerlin 2.9 drivers,
and DX9 is working really nicely for most
all of the games i play.I hope these
cards aren't left out of the arena by
card or game companies.a dream come true
for many would be for the 3DFX card to be
picked up or continued somehow.

 

[pmonett]

The fact that the GeForce FX uses 3DFX technology is hardly a surprise given that when NVidia made *DFX drown it took the technological mastery and left the rest.
Yet I seriously doubt that any future product or driver will be useable on the Voodoo series of 3DFX cards. The technology available today probably bears very little compatibility with the 3DFX cards, so I do not see how any driver will grant a Voodoo card any semblance of current technological compatibility.
As much as it hurt when it happened, 3DFX is dead and Voodoo cards are now part of history. My own Voodoo 2 I cherish and keep jealously, but I have no illusion that NVidia or anybody else is going to put work and resources into making a DX8/9 driver for it.
Furthermore, the competition between ATI and NVidia has pushed hardware way beyond the capabilities we had only three years ago. I cannot imagine that a DX9 driver would actually work on a 3DFX card, given that DX9 is all about programmable shaders and lighting, and 3DFX has none of that.
If you can actually run a DX9 game on a Voodoo card, why would you want to ? You are missing out on practically all the eyecandy and power granted by more recent hardware. Even the V5 5500, a powerhouse in its time I agree, cannot possibly compete with a GeForce 4 Ti in terms of framerate and sheer triangle throughput.
Or can it ? What fps do you run for Quake III and in what resolution ? My figures are here :

http://www.sharok.net/english/hardware/history/performance/main.html

Bear in mind that these numbers are actually outdated, since I have changed CPU and video for more recent versions, but I have not had the time to benchmark and post results.
So, shall we compare ?

 

[tortois]

i have no figures to share,i've no doubt
after reading a @2700 3D-mark compared
to the huge numbers from newer cards that
theres been some real progress.I'd like to
know about making drivers and the idea
of emulation and optimization but I'm
a novice.Also with the idea of marketing in
mind,likened to the human range of hearing,
can a video card "Sound" impressive beyond
the ability to tell with the human eye?

 

[pmonett]

Can a vid card "sound" impressive ?
Definitely !
What do you think of a video card boasting 125 million transistors, when the highest P4 is up to around 60 million ? What do you think when you are told that this model can handle 36 million triangles per second ?
Right now, the marketing is entirely geared towards who can get the highest fps or triangle count.
Unfortunately, what counts is not the highest score you can get, but the lowest.
Nobody can make a difference between 100fps and 315fps.
But you sure do see the difference when your game drops to 40fps or below.
It is a generally accepted notion that you need 60fps to keep a scene fluid.
Therefore, I would actually prefer that somebody comes out with a card that guarantees at least 60fps whatever the scene.
Of course, the ability to do 60fps in very high polygon scenes (more than 200 000) is somewhat related to the highest possible score available, but loosely.
Right now, I have a GeForce Ti4400, with 512Mb DDR333 and an AMD XP2600+. I find that my PC is rather high-end, but if I play Unreal 2 Awakening, I continually find myself catching some frame stutter here and there. In other words, U2A is obviously a higher-polygon game than the usual, and my rig can't handle it smoothly enough.
Of course, I tried lowering my expectations (meaning the game settings), but that was only marginally successful.
I'm actually starting to wonder if the developers really did as good a job as they did for the engine of the original Unreal.
Either that, or we are coming into a period where developers have decided to up the ante on hardware requirements and us players will just have to swallow it and upgrade again (and again . . ).

 

[ANFPS26]

Alienware is ONE of the best. OCSYSTEM is up there with the best (my opinion).

http://www.ocsystem.com

Jim