The physics test video from HL2 showed they are much better than Far Cry. I haven't gotten halfway through FC yet, but the physics don't seem as great as what I saw there.

Have you seen that video, with the test level for showing off the physics yet, Yuzzem?

I'd bet money that John Carmack has optimized Doom3's rendering engine to that of the original Unreal. Unreal was tweaked solely for 3dfx... now Doom3 is hardcore tweaked for Nvidia cards..

He already optimized it for Nvidia, optimized it to get it to run as good as ATI does on that arb something path that the Nvidia card should be running on to begin with.

Carmack probably was upset that they discovered they would have to spend resources to get Nvidia's cards to perform right, while ATI's cards didn't need much of anything. Though I wish they then did the same for the ATI cards and who knows where the performence would be, as I and someone else already pointed out.

Maybe if Nvidia actually stopped trying to do non-standard stuff, the nv30 might have actually performed right along side the r300 on the same path and then they could have focused on that path and brought more performance than what's capable now overall.

The worst part about the Geforce FX cards isn't their architecture.. but the noise.. It sounds like a high powered gas lawnmower.

What about the Doom 3 special path and the HL2 DX8/DX9 path, if it was a good card why would that have needed to be done?

Check out the top post at this thread (A thread merge made it second to top post).
http://rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33745089&perpage=30&pagenumber=4

It has photo comparisons of Far Cry between ATI and Nvidia. I feel sorry for those with nvidia right now. Anyone with nivdia having problems that are shown there, might be specific to 5900U?

This comment was edited on Mar 2, 03:53.

Have you tried the omega drivers yet, maybe that will solve some problems.

Also, head over to www.rage3d.com

That's the biggest ATI site I know and has a very good forum for getting help.

Check out the driver sections, or general radeon discussion area.

They use to have the actual ATI driver makers reply here and there and take a couple hours for answering questions after a driver release, but some people ruined it.

People are so quick to blame drivers and then the company as being bad. I'm sure there's a nvidia user out there with some kind of set-up that has given him just as much problems as you have had.

Some people just end up with a set-up that's hell, but just because you did doesn't mean it's always like that for everyone. Probably 95% of users have nearly no problems.

The same thing goes with complaining about nvidia drivers. Both sides will have people who just have bad luck and everything falls apart. There's no way to test everything, and I'd hate to say, but a lot of people would tell you it's user error.

I had a GF3, no problems. Then I got a 9700pro, and I also had no trouble there either. What does that say, according to you I should be having hell with ATI.

Someone testing a 5900 and a 9800 on the new far cry demo had a bug with nvidia. The trees in the distance were missing the fog or haze on them, so they popped out, while the ati card worked fine.

Also, reviews have shown when benching with Halo that nvidia cards didn't render all the lights the ATI card did.

I'm not saying ATI is bug free, but you act as if Nvidia is. The fact is, again on either side, someone is going to have major issues through some odd config or user error. Maybe your next ATI card will be fine, or a Nvidia card, but that next nvidia card could have just as many problems, but unlikely to happen to you again.

This comment was edited on Mar 2, 00:19.

Posted by Walt C.

A suggestion: try playing your usual crop of games bumped up one or two or more notches in resolution above what you were accustomed to with the Ti4400, while using FSAA and AF at the same time. Many people make the surprising mistake of upgrading their 3D card only to continue running their games at the same resolutions and IQ settings they used with their older cards. When I moved up from a Ti4600 to a 9700P in September of '02, whereas I'd been used to an average setting of 1024x768, 8x AF, 0x FSAA (I found FSAA way too slow and uuu-ugly with the GF4 and just didn't use it), with no change to the system other than the 3d card, I was suddenly running everything at 1280x1024 to 1600x1200, 2x-4x FSAA, 16x AF at framerates often better than what I'd gotten from the Ti4600 at a lower resolution , no FSAA, and 8xAF. I was so impressed I bought a 9800P in May 2003 to replace the 9700P (which went into a secondary machine)...

If you make an upgrade as you've described you've made but you don't notice a lot of difference it's only because you haven't let the card stretch its legs and show you what it can do, so you might want to set things up from an IQ perspective differently from your settings for your former Ti4400--it should become evident that your 9800P will run games at resolutions & IQ settings impossible for your Ti4400. Should be no contest--but unless you push the card beyond what your Ti4400 could do you'll never know it, which would be a real pity...

I reposted his message on the 4400 to 9700pro because people might have missed it because what he replied to appears after his message a page ahead. I also agree with exactly what he said. Turn up the res to 1280 with AA and AF (Don't use quality AF, just use performance, the only difference is bilinear instead of trilinear, oh a big difference in performance), and then you'll see a huge difference.


This comment was edited on Mar 1, 23:55.

Levels finished: 40
Gernades Used: 10465
Launches: 564
Bounces: 1567
Engineers popped: 4625
Time Spent: 0:51:01

Almost gave up after 30 too.

What's bad about quicktime? Have you seen the quality of the trailers at quicktime.com? I haven't seen anything else at that quality that can be played while it's dling.

What's bad about quicktime? Have you seen the quality of the trailers at quicktime.com? I haven't seen anything else at that quality that can be played while it's dling.

Latest thing I heard was MS doesn't want the new patch that improves the performance to come out, but Gearbox might still do it.

http://rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33738161

That's a thread over at rage3d where people have been talking about it for the past month.

On my 9700pro system, the game ran really good for the most part at 800*600, with fps locked at $30, besides the low-res, the game played smoothly.
This comment was edited on Feb 12, 21:44.

Right. All six programs that they mentioned that got performance increases just HAPPEN to be used as benchmarks by everyone, and ATI just HAPPENED to create a new driver that miraculously increased framerate for these six apps, and none others. It's all just a big coincidence.

Well, at least it's not like Nvidia, where they would miraculously have new drivers claiming 50% faster when ATI whooped them with a new product.

Why is everyone always so negative, it's like the glass is always half empty to you all.

"Blah blah that patch for so and so will never be out," "Does this make the game blah and blah," if you don't like the game, but out! I don't go around posting about games I don't like to just say I don't like it in the faces of people who do.

This comment was edited on Feb 12, 16:34.

(because it undoubtedly fucks up some game here or there, and who fucking cares about Aquamark??),

Who said they spent time working on Aquamark to get that gain, it just might be the result of other driver changes they made and they found it helped it some as a side effect. So why not list it in the notes?

Also I'll note again, all the performance gains they mention are for the DX8 family cards.

I'm interested in most how it says it the monitor won't go black for several seconds after changing the D3D settings.

Does anyone know if that UT2003 performance update of 15% applies to XMP as well?

I've been getting shitty FPS in that game on my 9600xt (Athlon XP 1700+) and apparently everyone else has too...

The 9600xt isn't included in the performance gains in this patch, just read below what I pulled from the release notes just above that gain you mention:

"This release of CATALYST™ provides performance gains to the ATI DX8 product family. These products include the RADEON™ 9200, 9000, and 8500 series. Performance gains are noticed throughout the following software"

Xbox Next The Graphic Chip
The graphic chip will be based on the the R500. This VPU has been in design at ATI’s Marlborough, Mass. office. It'll be fully compatible with DirectX 9's PS and VS 3.0 and the next version of DirectX: DX10, the same suite of APIs that will be used in Longhorn.

What nobody is telling you and you'll know about this first, here on TeamXbox, is the revolutionary approach of the Xbox 2 to deal with today's biggest problem in graphics chips: memory bandwidth.

The graphic chip will contain not only a graphics rendering core but up embedded DRAM acting as a frame buffer that is big enough to handle an image that is 480i and can be 4 times over sampled and double buffered. Yeah, we all remember Bitboys but this time you can bet this is for real. This solution will finally make possible HDTV visuals with full screen Anti-Aliasing on.

The technology also supports up to 512 MB of external memory on a 256-bit bus. However, current specs plan to use 256 MB RAM, big enough for next-generation visuals which are all about computational power rather than large storage.

Article from: http://www.teamxbox.com/news.php?id=5388

I'd go there and make sure that was all of it, but my company recently started using Websense to block webpages in certain categories. And they went completely overboard with the category "Games."

Instead of just blocking sites that let you play games, they blocked every site that has do with games, not playing them, like news sites such as Bluesnews, which is only not blocked now since someone spoke up about it. I can't even visit Nintendo.com, and I work at a newspaper where I layout a tech section each week and I need to go to these sites to get info and screenshots, not play games, oh man is it annoying.

Anyone else have this problem at work? I can just submit a request to remove blocks on certain sites that I need for my job, but there are just too many to count, basically any game news site, xbox offical site, ps2, official game websites, and I'd have to use a password unless they unblock it to everyone.

This comment was edited on Feb 6, 22:22.

Are you asking why PC Halo sucked? Because if you are, then I can give you a multitude of reasons. Halo is/was great on the XBox, but it is a mediocre shooter on the PC compared to the other games available. Not to mention all the bugs and the fact that you felt like you were playing a 2 year old game (which in fact you were) that ran through it.

First, the fact that the game is 2 years old you say. Well, I'm still waiting for pc games to feature vehicles like Halo did. XMP vehicles feel like crap, BF1942 is great, but it's a MP game, Far Cry isn't out yet. Also, the particle effects are pretty good in this game, the sparks bounce off surface after surface before fading, rather than just from the source of the bullet hit and disappearing when falling through the next surface. The AI plays very well, not many new games are that good, turning on the hardest setting will really suprise you.

It has some decent physics, with a mix of death animations. Pixelshader effects are pretty nice, haven't seen that in many pc games til just recently. Nice large outdoor areas. Cool lighting effects, I think some nvidia cards in reviews showed they were not rendering all the lights correctly. So overall this game features everything new games have and even more for being 2 years old.

Speaking of bugs, what made it buggy? I never had a crash or graphical glitch the whole time. You can't turn on AA, but many games since then have had the same problem, like NFS:U if you have the blur and light trails on. The AI never got stuck in something, or didn't notice me. Already in the earley version of the FarCry demo I found a guy facing a wall stuck. A couple things mentioned in the readme fixed most problems, like if you turned the mipmap detail anything lower than the highest. So what bugs are you talking about in Halo?

It has a decent storyline, so it's above average there, with many twists. The gameplay is excellent, though somewhat repetitive, it still felt like a great combat game, and that's what it is, it's all about the combat, hence the other part of it's name.

With the AI, cool weapons, special effects, great sense that you shots register with everything, physics, turns taht simple architecture people complain about into a huge battle seen with sparks flying everywhere.

The MP player is pretty fun too. Anyway, I still can't see what's it get's such a bad wrap. I'm guessing because of the performance and lack of AA, other than that, it's great.

This comment was edited on Feb 6, 02:59.

You are aware that they are, in essence, the same thing right? Just a different way of doing it. There is no difference graphically between 800x600 with 2xFSAA and 1600x1200 without FSAA. At least, if my ancient definition of AA is still how they do it. (Ie, 800x600 with 4xFSAA means the image is drawn at 4x800x600, or 3200x2400, then compressed back into your 800x600 screen. This compression is what removes all the jaggies)

You have it partly right, but I don't think that method is used much now, really inefficient. Take a look at AA through different cards:

parts taken from an article, scroll down for a link with the full description
GeForce4 — The GeForce4 Ti chips use an antialiasing algorithm known as multisampling. This algorithm singles out pixels on polygon edges by checking the Z-buffer for each pixel. If a pixel is covered by more than one polygon, the chip will do a texture read for each of the samples it's grabbing. If not, the chip will avoid the texture read, conserving effort and memory bandwidth. The multiple samples are then blended. In this way, multisampling algorithms effectively do edge-only antialiasing.
The GeForce4 Ti's multisampled AA is so efficient, there's barely any performance penalty for turning on 2-sample (or 2X) antialiasing.

Radeon 8500 — The Radeon 8500 is a different case. It uses more sophisticated sample placement, but it doesn't use multisampling. Instead, the 8500 uses supersampling, which is simply rendering a scene at two or four times its original size (or more) and then scaling it back down, blending two or four pixels into one. Supersampling provides full-scene AA, not just edge AA, but it's much less efficient than multisampling—the algorithm has to do a texture read for each sample it processes.

Parhelia — The Parhelia's unique Fragment AA method does edge-only antialiasing with lots of samples—sixteen, to be exact. Fragment AA does a Z-buffer check to determine which pixels are on polygon edges, then segregates edge pixels from the rest of the scene. Non-edge pixels are rendered normally, while edge pixels are sent to a fragment buffer and rendered using 16X ordered grid supersampling (see the pattern image at right). Although Fragment AA doesn't use a rotated or quasi-random sampling pattern, it's very effective, because sample size is more important than sample pattern. 16X AA is hard to beat.

Radeon 9700 Pro — The Radeon 9700 Pro improves on the 8500 by shedding supersampling for multisampling. This change should help performance immensely. The 9700 supports 2X, 4X, and 6X modes. Beyond that, ATI has included a number of innovations in the 9700's antialiasing hardware; most should help image quality and performance.

To read all about it, check out this article, though it might be old since it's about the 9700pro.
http://tech-report.com/reviews/2002q3/radeon-9700pro/index.x?pg=12

This comment was edited on Feb 6, 02:36.

Why is Halo bad to everyone. The only complaints I've ever heard besides "It sucks" is that the arcitecture was very simple and repetitive. Beyond that, everything else was great about the game. The AI, the weapons, vehicles that moved and felt like they wieghed something. It was just a blast to play. The fighting felt good, the special effects, the guns, the way enemies reacted, etc.

So besides the simple arcitecture, and maybe performance, what's the big problem with the game?

I admit though, I wish it never was bought by M$ and we could have seen what the game would have been liked before they changed it for consoles. Halo 2 is looking damn good though.

Also, no one's saying here that consoles are better than PCs, at least I am when it comes to power and flexibility. But when it comes to a console, they can design games specifically for one configuration and pull much more out of the hardware than expected. So right away when the Xbox came out, we were already seeing graphics on its older hardware that exceeded what we had on PC with hardware that was 3 times as powerfull.

The only thing Xbox lacks is good memory and bandwidth for high-ress AA gaming. But the Xbox 2 is all about that problem with the r500 ATI chip. You'll be gaming at HD resolution with full AA.

We're not even seeing what can be done with a 9700pro yet, except in ati demos and such. Finally a game near complete, Far Cry, shows some next generation graphics, but now that could possible be delayed or canceled. Who knows when D3 and HL2 will be out. Far Cry looks great, but if it was designed to run on one system with an old 9700pro from the begining, nothing else, it would probably look much much better and perform great. But it has to run on many configs, so there can't be really good optimizing as can be done with a console, so the overall graphics and performence isn't as good as it could be.

I mean Halo runs hardly no better on PC than the xbox when the pc hardware can rip the xbox it to shreads, and we're already seeing Halo2 pics that look like D3 graphics that will run on the same xbox hardware as Halo 1, but by the time it comes out for pc, if it does, we'll need something 10 times as powerfull as the old xbox. As I'm sure todays hardware that runs Halo1 on pc will need to be double to run Halo2 the same, while Halo2 on the xbox will run fine, even though it's the same hardware that Halo 1 ran on, no need for an upgrade.

Bitchy? I was just letting him no that he miss read it because it sounded like he thought there was only one expansion. So far I've been trying to promote the game as still good despite this, I was never complaining.