GPU bad habits....

[SamuraiCatJB]

I was intrigued when I read this article.... first because of the ATI advertisements and news releases having lower than market prices leading the consumer to believe competative cards are competatively priced.
http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/8115

but one of the things that caught my eye was something I had begun to expect, such as the boards that are designed only for benchmarking and reviews and never marketed. I had begun to suspect this when even the US govt. could not get an Ultra Extreme. I am used to delays, but never that it simply can't be found to buy or ordered by any amount of clout thrown at it. The ultra extreme just never materialized. A few people commented I shoudl have got the equivalent in ATI, yet it also never materialized for them.

Although I think competition has been over-all good, but I think these habits of producing review only cards is bad.

[JackAxe]

I guess all that matter is the masses that buy into the B.S pricing.

<]=)

[zackepceo]

Tsk, tsk, tsk. ATI needs to get a grip.

[JackAxe]

Now I must ramble.

There are quite a few peeps on our Mac side that consider ATI the bomb. They seem to have forgotten about how ATI screwed us over for years back in the late ninties and it wasn't until NVidia came into play that they actually started to be somewhat competitive.

And now that Apple is focusing all of its efforts on Tiger, ATI has taken the opportunity to optimized its X800 with only 12 pipes, so that it outperforms a 6800 Ultra and even with OpenGL. :rolleyes: *Grumbles* And to make matters worse, it's quite sad that a PC with a slower proc scores over 100 FPS faster in Doom3 with a 6800U. The bottle neck is OSX in its current state and I'm assuming Aspyr's port probably wasn't top notch. If Motion is any hope, it performs much better on a 6800U then X800 and it has had quite a bit of optimization done by Apple.

<]=)

[SamuraiCatJB]

well, not to bring up the differences, but nVidia and ATI are apples to oranges. They are both fruit, but they taste VERY different.

Of course there are the pipelines, but as I have mentioned before, there is also the bits. We have now passed where anyone is treating color as 24/32 bit 3 or 4 component combined (8 bit per component). We are now in floating point color. ATI uses 24bit and 12bit float to get a little better performance out of their chips. nVidia uses full EXR (lucasfilms) standard 32bit/16bit float. Heck I drive a hybrid on the road, so I do understand the need for variety, the point is to know what you need and expect. Most people really don't care what it looks like, so in that respect ATI and nVidia are about even. But some game designers streamline for either a 16 bit or 12bit pipeline. In doing so, they also have chosen a vendor they wish to be representative as the fastest on their game.

If someone writes strictly by the book, 100% math standard, IEEE standard, EXR standard, etc. nVidia is going to kick. But if you take a tutorial from either vendor, ATI or nVidia, you can figure out how to streamline for more performance out of only one vendor. Then you choose.

3D graphics isn't something you just open up your text book and hit 1000fps on a 30,000 triangle scene. Even if the card does say you can get 300million verticies a second. Older software still uses methods from Opengl 1.0 to 1.2, when there are specialized formats and datastructures to get data to the board faster with 1.4 and 1.5 and 2.0. :)

[JackAxe]

I just hope that Tiger gives OpenGL the same performance advantage like Windows, so that it can take 100% of control if needed. This will give games a great boost and more importantly Maya, which BTW runs great on my Mac at 2560x1600. :) And I'll stick to 32 bit floats for Maya, don't want any of this 24 bit ATI poo. I just wish they would address that 1K hardware limit that is OSX related.

Anyways on the PC a it takes a X800/50 XT PE to match a 6800 Ultra, this isn't the case on the Mac side right now. *grumbles* Tiger is me hope. ~i~

OSX uses OpenGL 2.0?

<]=)

[SamuraiCatJB]

It better use 2.0, there are some nice features to spead up use, plus better integration of shaders than 1.5 (where they were barely extensions).

[JackAxe]

If it doesn't now for some reason, then Tiger would definately include it when It's relesed this April. Just wasn't sure since OGL 2.0 was anounced in late 2004, if I recall correctly?

Look at what I found: :D
http://www.tulrich.com/geekstuff/gameswf.html

I'm assuming that I would need to compile this if I downloaded it?

I guess this is probably why Macromedia is making Flash Player 8 with OpenGL. :D When I can export a stand alone Projector that utilizes OpenGL, I'll be one very very very happy camper. I'll be able to make Flash games that run full speed on older computers. I love GPUs. :)

<]=)

[SamuraiCatJB]

it has been in beta for over a year, in fact some of it was included in 1.5 because they were not ready to finalize. there has been lots of time to test 2.0.

[JackAxe]

And soon it will be in our paws, I mean your paws. :)

I'm glad OGL didn't get pushed out by MS's evil DX.

<]=)