with the exception of the Gainward and Radeon all those other cards are workstation cards and aren't all that great for games. The Quadro is decent, but the Matrox and 3DLabs cards are steaming piles when it comes to gaming.
Most 3DLabs cards, esp. the Wildcat series have no vertex or pixel shaders.

You want really pricey card that is a real performer get an Nvidia QuadroFX 3000. The gen-lock version goes for about $2600. We're using the 2000fx's at my lab and they are utter monsters.

The minimum GF1 requirement is because the GF1 has a stencil buffer and dot3 blending on hardware. A gf1 will run Doom3 but it will not be nearly fast enough due to GPU, core/ram clocks and less TMU's than later cards.

Entry level (and remember that a game like doom3 is highly dependant on its mappers due to the lighting model) should be round about gf4 if you want anywhere near decent FPS IMO.

You can have 8 opengl lights rendered at once in once pass so long as they do not overlap, 2 overlapping lights alone = 2 passes on a card with one TMU and so on. Then add extra passes for dot3, specular, gloss and luminance map blending.

The Doom3 leak was a memory hog because the model format was ASCII still as it was in the development mode. Expect it to be Binary by release and a lot of textures were still TGA's, expect some what can be jpg's to be jpg's. For people complaining about HDD swapping even with .5 - 1 gig of ram this is why.

Depending on where John "genius" Carmack decides to do his light calcs (CPU or GPU) and how efficent his physics and col det calcs along with all the rest of it (AI, rendering pipelines, raw tris to be rendered blah blah) are you shouldn't need a silly speed CPU. TMU's and raw GFX card b/w are what is really required IMO, but then it is only my opinion and I am often wrong.

Tom Baldry.

Theres a company out there,I can't remember the name, but they create graphics cards for simulators. Like Military flight Simulators. You tell them what you want and they build you an Nvidia or ATI based graphics platform. What they mean by build is they take 10 (or however many) 9800 PRO Cores or Whatever cores and create a graphics board that they all fit in. Then they load on the required amount of RAM and various other things and your left with a little computer box the size of a small server. They run like 5 digits minimum for cost. It was in a magazine I read, I forget what it was. I'll see if I can go find it.

Edit: Can't find the magazine.

This comment was edited on Jul 23, 19:15.

you happen to know that the gf1 was the generation after tnt2?

Yes, I know the progression of NVIDIA's lineup. I was only referring to what is currently available. I don't see any GF1's at all in any stores over here.

The only major featureset improvement since the GF1 has been the GF3's pixel and vertex shaders. It's quite dissapointing to notice how sparingly this feature has been used so far.

I rather enjoyed the Performance and Image quality of a GeForce 2 GTS. I had one along time ago, 32MB DDR. It was great.

>>Do they even sell those relics? Over here for a couple of years now it's been either a TNT2 or a GF2 MX for the low end.

uhm...you happen to know that the gf1 was the generation after tnt2? and a gf1 certainly owns a gf2mx...
so far i´ve had a gf1 256, a gf2mx400, a gf2ti and now a gf4ti4200 - and believe it or not i played ut2003 on the gf1...and no matter what harware beeps want you to believe, the difference isn´t all thaaaaaat big - it´s not like the gf4 made my frame rates go through the roof...

and imo the only reason why a gf1 is mentioned as the minium requirement is because it supports the needed t&l feature noone said it would run very well on that card.

cheers,
lio

p.s. sorry, this was my first post here...thought the reply would show up next to the post where i hit the reply button...

This comment was edited on Jul 22, 10:09.

one could build a state of the art gamer system for 1100$ if they know the right places to get parts..
i recently looked buidling me a second machine:alum moded case with water cooling
athlon 2800+/512 400 ddr(ram cooling)/geforce fx 5600, 80 gig hd, good asus mobo for $1100

DrEvil is right as far as i've heard... Most of that money goes to the 512mb of ram and the speedy ramdacs to power those monitors... I don't think they're too much of a slouch in as far as games go though.

AFAIK the wildcat is meant for use with modelling and CAD programs and isn't designed for games. Last I heard, as far as games are concerned they aren't able to outperform what we all know of as gaming cards. I could be wrong tho, this is only what I was told.

3DLabs Wildcat VP990 Pro 512MB AGP 8x w/Triple Head Display - $1499.95

OMG! That's insane. You could buy a pretty decent whole computer for that kind of cash. And that's not even considering the 3 21-inch monitors you'll want to hook up to that beast.

Good thing there are plenty of choices at the lower end of the spectrum nowadays.

"If so lets hope he dies before his race starts to become a second problem for him....god knows that he wouldn't want his strong black brotha's any where near a zombie/monster infested area. Lets hope to keep the blacks safe for a more political game, so they can live and keep living."

keep smokin that crack homie!

If so lets hope he dies before his race starts to become a second problem for him....god knows that he wouldn't want his strong black brotha's any where near a zombie/monster infested area. Lets hope to keep the blacks safe for a more political game, so they can live and keep living.

"are there going to be any black people in Doom 3?"

i was hoping to see mixed race wedding on the first map.

"D3 alpha was not compiled in debug mode, it was an alpha code..."

The version of the game makes no difference. It was compiled in debug or release mode. It's just a compile option, it doesnt mean the game is finished. All I was saying is that if it was a debug compile that could have been a factor of shitty framerates, other than the obvious "it was alpha". No doubt the released game will run probably alot better than the alpha.


Alak:
I think you missed the point. If your video card has to use your main system ram, your games are going to take a serious framerate hit. That is, if the game tries to load more textures than it has memory. Sure it will work, but the performance is going to be well below what it would be if it could put all the textures in the VRAM. Also, I guarantee that your friends games probably arent using even a third of that 3gigs of ram for gaming.
This comment was edited on Jul 21, 15:39.

There was one black guy in the D3 trailer from E3, so "yes". But he will be an expendible sidekick or nerdy scientist... as always.

There was an ExtremeTech review of ATI 9800 cards not long ago comparing the 128 MB model with the 256 MB model. The benchmarks of all games gave results that were within 1 fps of each other across the board, even when looking at Q3 running over 200 fps (= 1/2 % increase in speed with double the RAM).

Increasing the RAM only improves speed up to a point and then beyond that point the extra RAM is just redundant. This point is dependent upon the requirements of each individual game.

Personally: I just doubled my system RAM to 1GB and haven't really noticed much improvement in the performance of my computer, including the fps of my games. In fact the D3alpha runs slightly slower, even after all the tweaking to utilise the extra memory.

> Assuming the D3 alpha was compiled in debug mode,
D3 alpha was not compiled in debug mode, it was an alpha code.
That is, an unfinished product. Does not matter if it was compilled in debug mode or not, it was not the final product.

My point is that Carmack indeed invented an algorithm for displaying real world shadows in a PC.
So said that Carmack has not invented any new algorithm for shadows, which is wrong. Carmack invented a new algorithm for shadows.

Thats my only point.

You program in OGL and DX?, cool! Then you should already know what "Carmack's Reverse" is.

If you still believe that Carmack did not invent anything about shadows for D3, please define Algorithm. Maybe we are using different definition.

Peace

Heres a Couple I found at the local store, Im not making this up.

Gainward GeForce FX 5900 Ultra Deluxe 256MB AGP 8x - $845.95

ATI Radeon 9800 PRO 256MB AGP 8x - $729.95

3DLabs Wildcat VP990 Pro 512MB AGP 8x w/Triple Head Display - $1499.95

Matrox Perhelia 256MB 512-bit GPU Retail w/Triple Head Display - $1299.95

PNY QuadroFX 1000 128MB AGP 8x - $1379.95

Thats just to name a few. Pretty Pricey works of art.

*All Prices in CDN Funds*

are there going to be any black people in Doom 3?