My short editorial on 3d card reviews

[ben6]

Wrote a short piece, you all might want to take a gander

http://www.pcrave.com

 

[Doomtrooper]

I agree with alot of your content..

Now make sure your partner at Nvnews understands what a Objective review is next time he writes a FSAA article comparison between a 8500 and a Geforce 3.

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/fsaa/page1.htm <-- Link is down now

The entire article was how to use a tweaker to get a Geforce 3 FSAA to look as good as ATI's. Running with Anistropic enabled on the Geforce 3 shots and none with the 8500 and putting comments like "look, the Geforce 3 looks better"
Their wasn't a single objective word written in that ENTIRE article

I think one of best FPS games on the market today is MOHAA, now if someone could write a demo file for Omaha Beach, this would be a great new Quake 3 type benchmark.

 

[Oompa Loompa]

Indeed, DoomTrooper could teach classes in objectivity...

 

[Doomtrooper]

Indeed, DoomTrooper could teach classes in objectivity...

I don't write review articles do I, but IF I DID, I can gurantee you that it would be alot more objective than that.
Hey are you not some short little guy that works fo a chocolate factory, Willy Wonka

 

[Mephisto]

>>When I first started in this business, there was basically 1 benchmark for videocards available, Q3A Test .<<

Really? Then Expandable, Unreal Flyby, Shogo M.A.D., Falcon 4 and Halflife Counterstrike aren't videocard benchmarks to you.

 

[LeStoffer]

Image quality comparisons on games other than Quake3.

I think that Reverend's review of the GF3 where he put a lot of focus on the merits of anisotropic filtering is one of the very best reviews ever. Why? Because he put something new on the table. Now everybody is benchmarking with anisotropic filtering on/off and there is no doubt that Reverend's review have had an impact. Outstanding.

How does your favorite games play, look , feel with the new card? What glitches have you encountered?

Oh yes please! Most of the writing today is about stating the obvious (the reviewer just comments on benchmark numbers ).

I really think that the whole focus about keeping a review objective has gone the wrong way. Reviewers play it safe by doing the usual benchmarks and base their opinion merely on that. A great review is much more about finding the strong and weak points about a card. And this is where the review might have to loose some of this objective BS.

Reviews can be subjective and [thereby] fulfill their purpose. Look at it this way: When you read a review on a movie you know that the review is subjective but since you have faith in that specific reviewer (know his taste) it really okay.

All in all I would much rather read a subjective review by Reverend than a objective on anandtech or whatever.

Regards, LeStoffer

 

[Doomtrooper]

Well said Lestoffer, everyone allways bases a video card by Frames Per Second, which is silly.
Graphic cards are about graphics and this always overlooked, in fact looking at older video card reviews done by major sites they observe IQ but never make much reference to it. This old ANAND article where they compare compression images is a classic example:

So what kind of performance drop do you see when you disable S3TC? On a 32MB card, the performance hit can be up to 50% depending on the situation (Quaver is the perfect benchmark for this); 64MB owners will be happy to know that they can disable S3TC without losing much performance because of all of the extra memory.

Is it worth it? It's not as noticeable as it would be if the walls or floors looked really bad, but for some gamers it is a big problem, so you can try experimenting with turning r_ext_compress_textures off to see if the game is still playable by your standards.

So even though the IQ was this bad, because of the performance hit they chose to run the benchmarks with S3TC on and of course the GTS won the speed crown. With large review sites like ANAND overlooking IQ then its easy to see why others don't bother either.