sbp

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/d...718155730.html

http://www.halflife2.net/forums/show...5&pagenumber=1

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Well dayummmm...another reason to go for ATI.

Speedfreak

Hmm... the Half-Life2 preview movie was at the ATI booth at E3.. hmmm...

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Call me Fleet Admiral §pêêЃrêák™! Go get me some coffee.
CoolSpeed

Thesifer

Lol.. I wont how much ATI Paid to Valve for that ? .. Just tryin to run Nvidia out of Business...

Kevster

Like that will happen.

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I think over again
My small adventures, my fears.
The small ones that seemed so big,
For all the vital things I had to get and to reach.

And yet there is only one great thing, the only thing:

To live to see the great day that dawns,
And the light that fills the world.

-old Inuit song

Thesifer

Well.. Nvidia has been in a Slump lately... Hopefully they recover... The NV40 Chip should be nice..

Bires

COME ON!

Do they seriously expect us to buy this?

[Valve]
Weal...we is really good programmmers, but that new fangled effex chip is just too darn komplikated! [/Valve]

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Five years...

Thesifer

It does sound a little strange.. but they can say whatever they want to get people to NOT buy their game if they want to

ski

Are there any benefits of goign NVIDIA as of July 2003?
Price? Performance?

It just seems like unless you're a fanboy of NVIDIA, there's no reason to go that direction (if GFFX would have been a bigger hit it would be different)

Nija

Yeah, I don't want to have to buy a new damn video card all the time.

that's the best reason, IMHO

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"Nija is the dark soul of gotapex. We don't like to talk about him." - LPMiller

sbp

For the most part, not really.

GeForce 4 Ti4200 has a good price-performance value.

Nvidias low end solution, the 5200 series, is DirectX9 compliant while ATI's low end products are not. Not having DirectX9 right now is not a massive deal, especially in that market. At least its better then its predessor at that price range the GeForce4 MX.

Increasing the speeds on the 5600 Ultra made it more competitive.

The 5900 series is a solid product. However its pixel shaders aren't as good as ATI, its fsaa leaves a lot to be desired and ATIs cards at that price range are the better bang for the buck.

Get the picture folks are not particularly thrilled with Nvidia's offerings at this time?

What does the future hold? Well Nvidia does have interesting products in the works like the GeForceFX 5900 Value and NV36 {GeForceFX 5700}. Of course ATI has its own moves planned {like R360} and will eventually get a low end DirectX 9 complaint solution.

Uttar does a decent job of collecting the various tidbits: http://www.notforidiots.com/GPURW.php

Bires

I don't use FSAA; it seems to mess up the text/menus in games all too often. I just leave the settings to "application" and let the games look like they are designed to look. (I run the games at 1100x800@85Hz or 1000x700@100Hz.)

Currently, an overclocked Ti4200 is all I need right now, and since I don't use FSAA, my overclocked (classic) Radeons are capable cards too.

sbp

http://www.rage3d.com/#1059005642

More on Half Life 2 and AntiAliasing

Gabe Newell, Valve's main man has commented on Half Life 2 and DX9 cards. Click the link for the whole discussion as it's rather informative. Here's the post in it's entirety


Since people seem to be hyperventilating over the anti-aliasing issue, I thought I'd update everyone.
1) How bad is the problem?

With current multi-sample implementations of anti-aliasing, you may sample texels outside of the polygon boundary, which may result in sampling light maps from other polygons.

This has always been a problem. This is a problem with Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3, Daikatana, Sin, Elite Force, Half-Life, Counter-Strike on the X-Box, or any game that uses packed lightmaps with multi-sample anti-aliasing.

You would see these artifacts on polygon boundaries where the wrong lightmap is being sampled. It will look like a bright or dark line on the edge of a polygon.

Gary McTaggart brought this up in an email because he is being pretty hardcore about graphics quality right now. This is not a new problem. If you've run a game that uses lightmaps with anti-aliasing turned on, then you've been seeing these artifacts the whole time.

Artifacts may show up more frequently in Half-Life 2 simply because we've eliminated lots of other artifacts, and because we have a lot of variation in scene lighting due to our art direction.

To put this in perspective, not doing tri-linear filtering on mipmaps is a lot worse.

2) What are potential solutions?

Support Centroid Sampling

Use Pixel Shaders to Clamp Texture Coordinates

Centroid sampling doesn't have the problem that center sampling does in multi-sample antil-aliasing. ATI has supported this form of anti-aliasing for the 9000 series. The tricky part is enabling this when DirectX doesn't easily expose this.

There's a different trick you can use with hardware, such as NVIDIA's, that doesn't support centroid sampling. Basically you trade off some pixel shader bandwidth to clamp the texture coordinates so that you don't sample texels outside of that polygon's lightmap sub-rect.

Between these two approaches, multi-sample anti-aliasing artifacts should be a non-issue for any DX9-level hardware running Pixel Shader 2.0.

3) How will this look?

We'll release one of the demo movies with the anti-aliasing artifacts in and one with the anti-aliasing changes.

Source: http://www.halflife2.net/forums/show...&threadid=3071

sbp

Ironic thing is older cards using supersampling anti-aliasing will be fine. Of course its unlikely you'll be able to use AA with these older cards {got bigtime performance drop}.

Ok you can use 2.0 pixel shaders to clamp the texture coordinates.
Here's the problem for Nvidia-its pixel shaders are weaker than the 9700/9800 series.

Cantacuzene

I used to not use AA, then I bought a card that could use it without preformance issues and I fell in love with pc gaming all over again. I can never go back to jaggies.

sbp

Bires

What a surprise...