GeForce256 Uncovered

Hmmm,

If I was an nvidia engineer, and I knew that my latest sup3r 4w350m3 geforce of d00m chip was essentially a geometry unit slapped on top
of two TNT2s, guess what I would do?

I would take the drivers I made for the TNT2, and do the following

1. Make it work for the GeForce
2. Add all my sup3r l33t t&l calls so that my geometry engine actually gets used
3. Optimize

Anybody want to take a wild guess which parts the driver running on 3dhardware\'s card didn\'t have?

ps-I read on one of the news pages that a Creative guy specifically stated that hardware t&l was not working on those \"preliminary review boards\", don\'t remember which one though

The reason why the frame rates on the GeForce don\'t seem to blow the TNT2 away (apart from those apparently less-than-recent drivers) is mainly that at the given resolutions, fill rate isn\'t really an issue. What would really prove the merit of the board is if they did a side-by-side comparison of frame rates at the same resolution, but with the GeForce having the extra level of detail activated. Theoretically, at least, the difference in performance should be minimal (i.e. not enough to have a serious impact) or even non-existant.

32 bit and 16 bit give me 0 change in framerate on my TNT 2 Ultra from HErcules. (at 640 480)
16 bit is ugly as hell though.

And why fake it when you can get the real thing.....

hmmm been a while..
i best find my screenshots then.. and post them..
oh btw #47 default in q3 is 640x480 numbnuts.. i ment high quality..
big deal thou. i get 50.1fps in default..
32bit - 16bit...
big deal....
does it add any thing to game play? NOOO
does it take away any thing from game play? yyeesss...FRAMES PER SECOND!
does any one care? NOOO

#63 you must be mistaken..
your room mate has his on all shitty and reved for frames not eyecandy i bet..
if you want me too next lan party (3weeks) i\'ll get a picture of 2 computers running SIDE by SIDE V3 2000 vs CL-TNT2 ultra and i\'ll have my friend scan the pictures in for me...
btw tell your friend to install the latest drivers for the v3 2000-3000 card they might help a shit load..
(no more screendoor dithering shitty rocket trails)

I don\'t see why everyone is bashing trilinear on the TNT/TNT2. I find that it makes a difference (you can\'t see where different mipmaps are used), it looks better than bilinear to me. I\'ve never seen trilinear on any other card, so I can\'t see if THIS trilinear implementation sucks or not. Of course it takes a framerate hit so I don\'t use it, because I don\'t notice it that much anyway.

Oh yeah, and those GeForce benchmarks are very disappointing, where is the whole \"don\'t bother upgrading your CPU\" thing? Seems like you STILL need a fast CPU to get decent framerates on that thing.

Looks to me like 3dfx was right and Q3 IS fillrate-limited.

Of course these reviews never said if the framerates are rock solid with the GeForce (unlike other cards), and that would be reason enough to get it. I sure hope Thresh or other GOOD reviewers point out things like that.

I\'m still getting a GeForce because my TNT is running out of breath and there\'s nothing else on the horizon (S3 doesn\'t count, if nVidia\'s T&L sucks then S3\'s must suck even more).

Something to remember is that the performance drain on the GeForce 256 is the fill rate, NOT the polygon counts (although if you run at too high a resolution, this can be hurt). I\'d like to see what that super-high level of detail specific to the GF 256 chipset does (or doesn\'t do) to the frame rate.

By the way, anyone who says \"there\'s no difference between 16-bit and 32-bit,\" regardless of any facts or lies, is obviously just going to be a 3dfx die-hard who refuses to admit that cards like the Voodoo 3 are basically just massively overclocked and pumped up Voodoo 1 cards, with almost all the limitations they contain.

I, for one, can see the improvement (if subtle) in Q3 if you use 32-bit rendering and 32-bit textures. At the least, 32-bit rendering offers better transparency effects for things like rocket smoke.

on my ftp site
35.10.176.54
mp3 mp3

its in the mp3 directory

16 bit on a Viper does NOT look like that. You have your pics missed up.