Yet another Re:3D-Cards
Volker Oth
After reading lots of press releases and gossip about the new 3D-Cards,
I feel you're interested in _my_ humble opinion :)
Diamond Edge-NVidia:
"12 Million Texels/sek" sounds nice, but what do they mean by this ? Is it
the number of texels read or written ? Sure not every texel read is also
written concerning the design of the Edge (no local texture memory). If
it's the number of written texels, how many data is transported via the
bus then ? All in all I really doubt that the Edge can handle larger
amounts of textured polygons at much more than 20 fps...
Quadrature Mapping sounds even nicer, but not one of the games developed
especially for the Edge will support it for something else than perspective
correction. For sure no API (Direct 3D etc.) will support it, either.
Additionally, I could imagine writing a routine to sort polygons by depth
(remember: it's got no z-buffer) is quite hard if they are not flat.
OK, SEGA is supporting it. But I really doubt that SEGA will ignore
the other cards or the MS-API if they can't sell enough Edge-only-stuff...
Rendition Verite (or vTHritTH ??? hey, this theta-stuff sucks :)
OK, it's got a RISC-core (in a year or so, RISC will be a word like
interactive multimedia data highway ;), and yes, ID like it, furthermore
they tell you it could reach half a million polygons a second.
Until I heard about that Quake-talk, I really thought this one could rock,
but what the hell do they think to tell me Quake runs at 20fps ??? And this
without monsters and only 256 colours ??? This is sad ! Even if ID gets
Quake to run at 30fps with 16K colours by pushing the card's limits, it's
still sad: games using a library as CGL or the Direct-3D-API will surely
be crap for the library can't use the card to its limits. And I bet only
a few games will try to use the card directly.
By the way: statements as '500000 Polygons per second' are pure bull-
shit. What polygons ? Textured ? Shaded ? Filtered ? How many pixels etc. ?
Another remark: Could it be that this "fexible risc core" is just a way to
tell us, this card has no real hardware rendering at all ???
Creative 3D-Blaster
Well, not much to say about this one. It's only VLB and 3Dlabs call this
a low cost version of their further developed Permedia chipset.
Did I mention that the specs are bullshit (850000 Polygons/sek, ha,ha!) ?
Creative also plans to use the Verite chipset on the PCI-Version of their
3D-Blaster (they call it Pentium adopted, whatever this should mean :)
The only question here is: why do they support Verite instead of Permedia?
Is it a question of pricing, time or do they really consider the Verite
to be superior (which I doubt) ?
3Dlabs Permedia
Hey, I (still) trust these guys (a matter of time :). They have the know-
ledge concerning 3D-accelerators and it's not their first try (if you
count the 3D-Blaster). What I really like about 3Dlabs is that they give
you at least some interesting infos and not just press releases stating
that their chipset is the best. They talk about 500000 textured 50 pixel
triangles per second (perspective corrected and bilinear filtered) not
just about polygons. If true or not is another question, though...
Anyway, Microsoft's APIs are based upon chipsets by 3Dlabs, so games _and_
applications, using the API will get maximal _hardware-acceleration_.
OK, I admit, I believed them - shame on me - should know better ;)
So what d'ya think: will we get this >=30fps, >=16K colours, >=640x480, shaded,
anti-aliased, mega-detailed game-overkill or what ?
History tells us: NO! dOnut tells you: maybe ?
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