Tagrineth said:
Randell said:
nope its (32bit colour+ 24 bit z+8 bit stencil) x 4 pipes
So how is Parhelia 512-bit?
Heh-Heh...the nVidia description of "256" has nothing to do with current conventions in naming things like this--it was entirely a nVidia invention designed primarily to foster the impression of a "256-bit internal bus" when in fact none existed. At least, that's what I think. This all takes me wa-a-a-a-ay back in the way-back machine....
nVidia marketers have been clever in the past. They never "lie" outright (usually.) What they do is mislead, and then sit back and wait for the person they are trying to manipulate to reach an erroneous conclusion, and then they don't bother to correct it...
We saw a smidgeon of that in Dave's interview with Geoff. Dave did not allow himself to be led. Anyway, Dave asked Geoff whether or not the FX still took only 8 samples for AF. Geoff did not say, "yes." Instead, he said:
"Eight trilinear filtered samples." (Working from memory here, so pardon me if I'm not exact on the wording.) I thought that was a very strange answer considering that Dave hadn't asked anything about Trilinear samples....
Then it hit me: the hope was that Dave would say something like, "So you mean the ATI 9700 Pro does 16 bilinear samples?" (Because what else could Dave's question really concern since only the 9700 does > 8 AF samples?) If Dave had said this I think Geoff would just have shrugged, grunted, or winked--and let Dave merrily go on to repeat the error to the whole world. Dave's not that shallow--thank God!....
Seriously, I don't know how many times I've seen nVidia PR people work that same kind of trick on less knowledgeable people--and my stomach churned as the people fell for it and glibly repeated whatever fundamental error it was the nVidia PR person had led them into. It was amazing to watch them do this sort of thing when 3dfx was trying to tell everybody that AGP x bus speeds weren't a big deal for 3D performance--and some of the "pundits" were screeching about AGP x4 as though it was a critical feature. The beauty of it is that nVidia never directly repeats or states the errors--it's the people they deign to grant interviews who do all of that (except for Dave B....
) All nVidia PR does is skillfully lead them into the errors--they do all the rest.
(Sorry if this is a bit strong for some--but I've honestly seen it many times. Perez was a master.)
