geforce3 and cost

i’m just curiuos, but did anyone actually pick up the geforce3’?

i didn’t…
ended up spending all my money on ps2, accesories, and games/dvd’s

laterz.

PS2 sucks… hardware is lame. My moneys on Xbox and Gamecube to clean up.

I got my Gf3 at reduced cost from nvidia anyways! :stuck_out_tongue:

Nutty

I bought mine for $400 at ebworld and it’s worth every penny. Orders of magnitude better than my TNT2 (which was $250 IIRC).

– Zeno

But then, a GeForce2 Pro would have cost you half as much (or less), and still be orders of magnitude faster than your TNT2.

That’s true, but it would be slower, wouldn’t have usable anti-aliasing, wouldn’t have hardware support for vertex programs, texture shaders, or depth buffer based shadows. Oh, and I’d have to upgrade it sooner.

I am a developer after all, and this new stuff is fun

– Zeno

“Usable anti-aliasing”, are you’re refering to Quincunx? It’s the up to date most useless FSAA implementation IMO. It does nothing but blurring the screen, and there are still visible jaggies with it. OGSS FSAA is also a waste of time for both consumers and driver writers, the only usable FSAA implementation in consumer level cards yet is the V5’s RGSS FSAA.

About the GF3 though, I’d get one if it had 3d textures. It looks really nice and the price is actually realistic and getting lower, but I do really need 3d texture
Now once again there are rumours saying that 3d texture are indeed supported, more specifically the forum at beyond3d.com … a guy there that claims to have talked to a tech guy from nVidia that told him that volumetric textures are supported in hardware and will be available in future drivers … now this is most likely BS, but if it was true I’d certainly reconsider getting a GF3

Humus -

I agree and have also bemoaned the lack of 3d texturemap support. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that new drivers will enable this feature.

Have you actually used the quincunx in a game? It doesn’t appear blurry to me, but edges do seem smoother. For me to really tell, though, I guess I’d have to take a screenshot and look at it with and w/o the quincunx on.

– Zeno

Originally posted by Nutty:
PS2 sucks… hardware is lame. My moneys on Xbox and Gamecube to clean up.

I got my Gf3 at reduced cost from nvidia anyways! :stuck_out_tongue:

Nutty

so?
the nintendo 64 hardware was even lamer…
yet i still bought it and had lots of fun with it.
i’m currently having a lot of fun with tekken tag and hopefully gta3 will be awesome.

laterz

I hope you weren’t comparing the N64 to the PS1- no contest, the N^4 is far more powerfull, 94 MHZ 64bit processor(main, there is also a ~70MHZ 64bit gfx co-processor) compared to 33MHZ 32bit (I know this isn’t really a fare comparison), 4MB + 4 MB upgrade ram comapared to 2MB, faster loading times, more powerfull gfx chip (64<32bit), far faster flops.

Anyway , I have now seen a PS2 in action and I have to say it looks crap; half the games look like N64 games, the other half look like PC games from last year and all have zero game play. The controller is also terrible and DVD playback is a joke.

[This message has been edited by Tim Stirling (edited 05-20-2001).]

Thanks Tim,
Yes I’ve worked on the N64, and think it was an excellent piece of kit.

I’m not too impressed with the PS2.

Nutty

Originally posted by Zeno:
[b]Humus -

I agree and have also bemoaned the lack of 3d texturemap support. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that new drivers will enable this feature.

Have you actually used the quincunx in a game? It doesn’t appear blurry to me, but edges do seem smoother. For me to really tell, though, I guess I’d have to take a screenshot and look at it with and w/o the quincunx on.

– Zeno[/b]

No, since I don’t have the card I haven’t used Quincunx, but judging the screenshot all over the web I’m not impressed by the quality it produces.

Superb double-theme thread !

  1. About FSAA: why the hell do you still need it when GF3 enables you to play at 1600x1200 ???

  2. About PS2 vs X-BOX vs DC vs N64 vs Jaguar (the first 64bit console, whatever Nintendo could say…) : the best console is the one with the best games (as long as gfx are not too lame ). DC was far better than PS1 on the paper but Sega failed (not enough good games). PS2 might not have fantastic games at the moment but let’s wait for GT3, GTA3, Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Liberty, FFX, FFXI, and the others… Now, X-BOX is nothing more than a PC to me… and I already have a PC (yep: Cyrix133+ with a Matrox gfx card !!!). Let’s wait until the X-BOX is released… What are you saying ? X-BOX will have zillions of games on D-Day ? So they said for PS2 but they couldn’t deliver… Let’s wait… Let’s wait…

Regards.

Eric

Well, I don’t know about xbox = pc. Doesn’t xbox have like two t&l units? Vrooommm

Originally posted by JD:
Well, I don’t know about xbox = pc. Doesn’t xbox have like two t&l units? Vrooommm

Which begs the question why has the Geforce3 only got 1 T&L unit. I presume there is a technical reason like the AGP on the PC cant feed enough vertex data to utilise both units? Anyone know?

Eric, one reason not to run at 1600x1200 is to get better refresh rates.

About the Xbox, I think that the games available for it will be mainly games that were designed for PC, and snatched by MS by “bribing” the developers to sign an exclusivity agreement. Am I being too cynical?

having a offtopic forum would hopefully place all these threads in one place.
i have a question r there any xbox games that don’t look like pc games?

Xbox is just a toy…PC hardware will be way better less than 6 months after the xbox is released…Also, I doubt the xbox will support OpenGL and that makes it even lamer hehe (unless you prefer D3D, in which case there is no Linux for you and I am sorry)

If you really gotta get a console go with the Nokia Media Station - it’s got Linux and OpenGL and OpenAL and SDL…

Originally posted by JD:
Well, I don’t know about xbox = pc. Doesn’t xbox have like two t&l units? Vrooommm

Originally posted by Eric:
2) About PS2 vs X-BOX vs DC vs N64 vs Jaguar (the first 64bit console, whatever Nintendo could say…)

Just throwin’ this in… the Jaguar was a 32-bit console. It had dual 32-bit CPU’s (the old trick - 32-bit Main CPU and a 32-bit GFX Unit = 64-bits, right? - Actually, I think it was only a 24-bit GFX engine).

While we’re at it - how about the PC Engine aka Turbo Grafix 16. By far ahead of it’s time, and an excellent system. Blazing Lasers, now THAT was a game. It was compared with the Genesis and the Super Nintendo, both 16-bit machines, and while it was the Turbo Grafix 16 - ie: 16-bit… it was actually an 8-bit CPU (Z80 I think).

Little bit of history for you.

Oh well…

Siwko

Siwko, according to this site:
http://www.gamezero.com/team-0/articles/features/jaguar_93/

“The Jaguar will feature a 16.7 million color palette with true 32-bit graphics, as well as 16-bit CD quality sound. The 64-bit RISC based processor can process at 55 MIPS (million instructions per second), allowing animation speeds in excess of 850 million pixels per second.”

I’ll check the spec out but it seems it was a 64-bit RISC…

Regards.

Eric

P.S.: and you can find more at: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/3015/jagspecs.html

[This message has been edited by Eric (edited 05-22-2001).]

I just got the GeForce 3, and I think Quincunx works pretty well, considering that it only gives you a small performance hit compared to FSAA on the Voodoo 5 and GeForce 2. And no offense but saying that Quincunx doesn’t look good after seeing a screenshot (which was almost certainly compressed) is like saying you saw a Viper parked on the street and it didn’t look fast.

To be fair, I got very little or no speed improvement at 800x600 and 1024x768, but Serious Sam was quite playable at 1280x1024x32 bit color with all graphics options turned on and Quincunx enabled. I still run with FSAA turned off though because I prefer the cleaner look and noticable speed improvement. I do think I’ll try the 4x AA and see how much nicer looking/how much slower it is than Quincunx.

[This message has been edited by Chromebender (edited 05-22-2001).]