I'm back; Can someboy give me a review of the last year? :)

[AzBat]

A few may remember me[Joe you there?! ]. For those that don't, my name is Tommy McClain. I was the webmaster for Jon Peddie Associates and Dimension 3D just over a year ago. Unfortunately like most people in the computer industry I got laid off back last April. My life hasn't been the same since. I had a hell of a time finding a job especially considering I moved to Fort Smith, Arkansas to live with my girlfriend. So I collected unemployment till January and then went to work for my dad in his land surveying business working as his GPS/GIS Tech. I also got married last December too. I got tired of being a bachelor for 9 years.

Anyway, why now after so long? With no job and no money I no longer had a phone and Internet access. I had to resort to checking my personal email about once a week at my local library or at my dad's house. No more 24-7 access for me. Talk about withdrawals. If it wasn't for my wife I would have went insane. Anyway, I finally convinced my dad to get a cable modem for his office last week. So now I can access it all day. This is going to take some getting used to that's for sure.

I figured I would scout out the 3D scene to see what I've missed the past year. Looks like a lot. If anybody is up to it, I would appreciate some kind of review. Or if you would like to talk about old times that would be fine with me.

Take care and it's good to be back.

Tommy McClain

 

[pascal]

Well come back !!!!!

Not much really meanigfull news.

Games:
-People still use Q3 for benchmark.
-No Doom3 (maybe this Xmas), no Unreal 2 (probably this Xmas too), UT2 for june/july.
- This I liked very much RTCW (return to Castle wolfeintein).

Cards:
-ATI is doing good with the Radeon 8500 (or R200, Radeon 2, etc..).
-Nvidia is pushing some new expensive GF4Ti and some ugly GF4 MX (GF2 on steroids) cards. They will discontinue GF3
-Matrox will probably come back this year.
-Creative bought 3D Labs because they will launch a new chip this Xmas (75millions transistors )
- No DX9
- No news from Bitboys

 

[Joe DeFuria]

Hiya, Tommy!

First off...Congrats on the wedding! One piece of advice for you on that front...an ancient Chineese Proverb:

"Happy Wife: Happy Life!"

Pascal pretty much summed up the "sate of 3D" for the past year. Technology wise in terms of actual products we can buy, nothing really interesting. I'll exand on this in a bit...

Rumor wise, things should get a lot more interesting "the next product cycle or two." (Of course, that's the way it always seems to be in this industry, no?)

The current performance leader is the recently released nVidia GeForce 4 Ti 4600 series of boards. Most people would agree that for the price (Street of about $350?), this product is not worth it compared to the "best buys" of today: The GeForce3 Ti-200, and the Radeon 8500/LE.

Perhaps in a month or so, the GeForce4 Ti-4200 will become available, and that might raise the bar on the "best buy" cards depending on the available street price. (MSRP is suppossedly $200). GeForce3 and GeForce3TI cards are being phased out, so we're all looking for the next sub $200 card to have greater than GeForce3 / Radeon 8500 performance and features.

ATI has a rumored "RV250" chip coming out "real soon", but no one knows what exactly it is, or when. But it's supposdly to be a direct competitor to the GeForce4 TI series.

There are still no "new value" parts shipping with DirectX 8 support. (sub $150 MSRP).

PowerVR: don't know if you've heard, but ST Micro (current sole producer of PowerVR PC chips) has decided to exit the PC graphics board industry, and was therefore looking to sell it's graphics division. Rumor had it that VIA was going to buy it, but now that's up in the air. VIA might just end up licensing PowerVR tech directly from IMG Tech. It's been pretty quiet on the front since CeBIT, so I don't know what's going on there. We've been anxiously awaiting the so-called "STG-5000" part (the "next gen" PowerVR chip"), but we have little idea if, or when, we'll see it. Before the whole ST thing went down, we were hoping for this spring or Fall, depending on who you talked to.

Matrox: Rumored to be coming out with their next gen dubbed Parhelia "real soon". The most reliable(?) rumors put this chip as more targeted toward the 3D Workstation market, but also with direct application in the high-end gamer market. The rumors would have us believe that it will be the fastest and most feature complete card to date by a significant margin....but at a high price.

3D Labs: As pascal mentioned, Creative Labs has announced their intended purchase of 3D Labs...with the intention of not only continuing 3D Labs workstation graphics business, but also re-entering the high-end gamer market with 3D Labs next chip. Creative is hoping to have a card for the "high-end gamer" market out by x-mas.

DirectX9: There are rumors that the API itself, and hardware based on that API might be delayed until next spring (2003). It was hoped (still hoped) that we'd see the API and relevant hardware (nVidia NV30, and ATI R300) this fall.

Kids: Jack will be 2 years old later this month...and number 2 is due by the end of June.

 

[AzBat]

Well come back !!!!!

Thanks Pascal! Good to see that you're still around.

Not much really meanigfull news.

Games:
-People still use Q3 for benchmark.

Hahaha

-No Doom3 (maybe this Xmas), no Unreal 2 (probably this Xmas too), UT2 for june/july.

Bummer. I may have to buy UT2. I liked UT better than Unreal. Doom3 I'm not so sure about. Never liked Q3.

- This I liked very much RTCW (return to Castle wolfeintein).

Cool. I saw it on the shelves at CompUSA last week. Is there a demo?

Cards:
-ATI is doing good with the Radeon 8500 (or R200, Radeon 2, etc..).

The last I heard of ATI was the first Radeon. Can you explain the differences in the new chips/cards since?

-Nvidia is pushing some new expensive GF4Ti and some ugly GF4 MX (GF2 on steroids) cards. They will discontinue GF3

Last I heard from NVIDIA was the GeForce3. I heard some blurb about the GF4. What's the difference in their new chips since?

-Matrox will probably come back this year.

You mean they were gone? Did they release anything since early last year?

-Creative bought 3D Labs because they will launch a new chip this Xmas (75millions transistors )

I heard about the buyout. About time. I thought it would never happen. Creative better get it right this time. The 3D card shelves are looking too empty.

- No DX9

I barely remember DX8. Didn't it add programmable pixel shaders? Any updates to 8.0?

- No news from Bitboys

Wow, they're still together? Last I heard in the Peddie Report they were trying, but that was over a year ago. I would like to see it if they can ever get it out.

Thanks for the brief review. I sure do miss the good ol days when 3Dfx was still around. Whatever happened there? Anybody ever find out what Napalm was going to be?

Tommy

 

[pascal]

AzBat:
Cool. I saw it on the shelves at CompUSA last week. Is there a demo?

In the download section: http://www.activision.com/games/wolfenstein/

The last I heard of ATI was the first Radeon. Can you explain the differences in the new chips/cards since?

Is not a real explanation, but I will list the new features:
-More memory bandwith (230MHZ DDR to 300MHz depend on the model)
-DX 8.1 support with pixelshader 1.4
-6 level multitexturing in an single pass
-Truform (RTCW support it)
-New FSAA

edited: Also the ATI drivers are much better than before.
Joe has a Radeon 8500, he can explain the details.

Last I heard from NVIDIA was the GeForce3. I heard some blurb about the GF4. What's the difference in their new chips since?

For GF4Ti series:
-More bandwith
-Higher core frequency
-Multisampling FSAA
-Two vertex shader units
-Its is some kind of GF3+

GF4MX series:
-GF2 with Multisampling
-Higher bandwith and core frequency
-No pixel or hw vertex shader.
-edited: only two level multitexturing, very bad for future games.

You mean they were gone? Did they release anything since early last year?

IIRC the G550, but it is like a Radeon 1.
People speculate they have some new DX9 card coming. See Joe post above and also the G800/DX9 thread.
My bet is no really interresting DX9 game until Xmas 2005, by then id and EPIC will have their future engines.

I barely remember DX8. Didn't it add programmable pixel shaders? Any updates to 8.0?

Really dont know the details, specially because by the end of the year we will have few super games using a DX7+ level of technology running on fast DX9 cards

 

[AzBat]

Hiya, Tommy!

Hey Joe!!

First off...Congrats on the wedding! One piece of advice for you on that front...an ancient Chineese Proverb:

"Happy Wife: Happy Life!"

Thanks for the advice. I was slowly learning that.

Pascal pretty much summed up the "sate of 3D" for the past year. Technology wise in terms of actual products we can buy, nothing really interesting. I'll exand on this in a bit...

Rumor wise, things should get a lot more interesting "the next product cycle or two." (Of course, that's the way it always seems to be in this industry, no?)

Yeah, the rumors and the upcoming was always more interesting.

The current performance leader is the recently released nVidia GeForce 4 Ti 4600 series of boards. Most people would agree that for the price (Street of about $350?), this product is not worth it compared to the "best buys" of today: The GeForce3 Ti-200, and the Radeon 8500/LE.

Hmm... How does the Ti-200 compare to the original GF3? And how does the 8500/LE compare to the original Radeon?

Perhaps in a month or so, the GeForce4 Ti-4200 will become available, and that might raise the bar on the "best buy" cards depending on the available street price. (MSRP is suppossedly $200). GeForce3 and GeForce3TI cards are being phased out, so we're all looking for the next sub $200 card to have greater than GeForce3 / Radeon 8500 performance and features.

That sounds good. I've been waiting for the GF2 boards to come down below $80 so I can pick up one. No more free boards for me. In fact I'm still running a Voodoo3 3000 in my P2-400 desktop. In other words I haven't been playing very detailed games.

ATI has a rumored "RV250" chip coming out "real soon", but no one knows what exactly it is, or when. But it's supposdly to be a direct competitor to the GeForce4 TI series.

Wow. Weird seeing ATI trying to compete with NVIDIA on the speed and features. I also saw at CompUSA that they have now started selling their chips to 3rd party board manufacturers. Definitely a different ATI since I saw them last.

There are still no "new value" parts shipping with DirectX 8 support. (sub $150 MSRP).

If I remember right considering the significant changes to DX8 I was thinking it would take some time for this to happen. Though I didn't think it would take this long.

PowerVR: don't know if you've heard, but ST Micro (current sole producer of PowerVR PC chips) has decided to exit the PC graphics board industry, and was therefore looking to sell it's graphics division. Rumor had it that VIA was going to buy it, but now that's up in the air. VIA might just end up licensing PowerVR tech directly from IMG Tech. It's been pretty quiet on the front since CeBIT, so I don't know what's going on there. We've been anxiously awaiting the so-called "STG-5000" part (the "next gen" PowerVR chip"), but we have little idea if, or when, we'll see it. Before the whole ST thing went down, we were hoping for this spring or Fall, depending on who you talked to.

I hadn't heard anything about PowerVR, STMicro or Img Tech. Though I remember seeing a complete line PowerVR cards from Hercules. What was up with that? From what you're saying about ST Micro, I have a bad feeling that PowerVR might be dead. VIA has never showed mean anything that they want to get into the "better than value line" graphics business. That reminds me. What happened with S3?

Matrox: Rumored to be coming out with their next gen dubbed Parhelia "real soon". The most reliable(?) rumors put this chip as more targeted toward the 3D Workstation market, but also with direct application in the high-end gamer market. The rumors would have us believe that it will be the fastest and most feature complete card to date by a significant margin....but at a high price.

That would really cool if true. But that doesn't sound nothing like Matrox. They had always tend to be safe. Maybe they're getting tired of that. Who knows.

3D Labs: As pascal mentioned, Creative Labs has announced their intended purchase of 3D Labs...with the intention of not only continuing 3D Labs workstation graphics business, but also re-entering the high-end gamer market with 3D Labs next chip. Creative is hoping to have a card for the "high-end gamer" market out by x-mas.

Would be nice, but we'll just have to wait and see.

DirectX9: There are rumors that the API itself, and hardware based on that API might be delayed until next spring (2003). It was hoped (still hoped) that we'd see the API and relevant hardware (nVidia NV30, and ATI R300) this fall.

Interesting. But considering the changes to DX8 and the amount(or lack) of DX8 hardware I think it was evident that the next version would be a little farther off. Especial considering with Xbox out.

Kids: Jack will be 2 years old later this month...and number 2 is due by the end of June.

Congratulations!! Can't believe it's been that long. Now I definitely feel old. Thanks. If it makes you feel any better I have a 7-year old stepson that lives with me and 2 stepsons(10 and 11) that live their dad.

Tommy

 

[Teasy]

Though I remember seeing a complete line PowerVR cards from Hercules. What was up with that?

Hercules liked the price/performance of Kyro based chips so they brought out a full range of cards based on Kyro 1 and II to replace their Geforce 2 MX and Geforce 2 GTS line of cards.

From what you're saying about ST Micro, I have a bad feeling that PowerVR might be dead. VIA has never showed mean anything that they want to get into the "better than value line" graphics business.

Nah even if VIA didn't make PowerVR cards PowerVR still wouldn't be dead.. IMGTEC have made that clear. VIA recently announced that they are reshaping their business to enter the desktop 3d graphics chip market... wether thats value or not is another thing. But they are looking at PowerVR because of Kyro III AFAIK and IMGTEC recently said Kyro III is a highend performing chip.

That reminds me. What happened with S3?

AFAIK they have no new 3d tech so VIA need to go elsewhere to get into the desktop graphics market.

 

[Ty]

IMGTEC recently said Kyro III is a highend performing chip

Can you point me to that link? Tks.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Can you point me to that link?

Try Beyond3D

 

[marco]

Good to see you man!
I still remember your site, woaw has it been that long...
You're one of the oldies (like me) in the industry now.

Anyways, hope you enjoy the form/site here

 

[mboeller]

Maybe this link will help You too :

http://www.penstarsys.com/editor/SO3D/SO3D.htm

 

[Simon F]

G'day Tommy,
I still have a link to Dimension3D on my"start page" in the vain hope that it might magically re-appear. All the best to you and your wife, and may I pass on the wise words that were on were on one of our wedding cards...

The secret of a happy marriage are those 3 magic words......"You're right dear".

 

[Reverend]

If by "last year" you mean all that's happened prior to your post (including this year) :

The most important thing is that Beyond3D is back up and running, even with a URL that is almost impossible to remember easily .

The less important stuff, of which some are quite funny :

- Bitboys are still talked about by the public
- NVIDIA came out with the GF3 (and later, the faster versions), of which almost all developers were/are enthusing about due to it being the first programmable 3D chip
- Beyond3D came back
- the above is useless with API support, of which DX8.0 is and has been released, with a newer Pixel Shader version in DX8.1
- ATI continues to remind NVIDIA that they are still around and can challenge them, especially in the form of their Radeon8500 although there were lotsa noise made about ATI cheating in Quake3 to boost benchmark scores as well as their promised AA not working out of the box (or even now)
- Beyond3D came back
- Simon Fenney still cannot understand why Beyond3D needs to have ads on its pages, and continually offers various ad-related complaints
- Kristof joined PowerVR in 2000 (did you miss this since it is more than a year old?)
- Dave Barron joined Bitboys in 2000 (ditto above re Kristof)
- NVIDIA came out with a faster version of the GF3, called the GF4 Ti (not the GF4 MX versions)
- I am incapable of running Beyond3D and Wavey was the best candidate and has proven to be the absolute correct choice
- Billy Wilson got kicked out of Voodooextreme (hey, that IS news!)
- I was told 3dfx would be "resurrected"
- Beyond3D came back
- Medal Of Honor : Allied Assault
- still no real DX8 games after a year of hype
- "The Matrix" game ala Max Payne (altho there will be an actual Matrix game later)
- WindowsXP!
- CPUs are no longer deemed to be comparable via pure MHz speeds in terms of performance, all courtesy of AMD
- Beyond3D came back

... and lastly, still not enough reviews of video cards that actually help a person to make a purchasing decision.

There are more, but being on a pay-per-minute dialup in Malaysia, I want to save money!

 

[Simon F]

Simon Fenney still cannot understand why Beyond3D needs to have ads on its pages, and continually offers various ad-related complaints

Oi! I won't stand for this outrageous slander I have no objection to the ad's that are well behaved!

 

[Nappe1]

well, as feeling as a newbie (I started actively follow Beyond3D board in January 2001.) here I still decided to reply, because I think I can bring something new too... Anyways, Hope you and other old school 'ers can find something interesting.

-Matrox will probably come back this year.

You mean they were gone? Did they release anything since early last year?

well, their G800 project officially never surfaced. G550 is what is left for and that's almost nothing. Unofficial sources stated that because many engineers left from matrox and went to the nVidia, Matrox had to decide which of two going project would be end and they decided kill G800. the second project that continued is now known as "Parhelia". No one knows (except people under NDA.) exactly what this Parhelia is, but if even half things that are flying around are true, we will see something that changes a lot of things.

Matrox is preparing a launch for something that should not be missed. ( I am not sure what to believe. all things that I heard are nearly outerlimits. ) Only thing which sounds reasonable is that it is going to be DX8.1 compliant and only have few DX9 features.

- No news from Bitboys

Wow, they're still together? Last I heard in the Peddie Report they were trying, but that was over a year ago. I would like to see it if they can ever get it out.

well, basically you just missed one round. Glaze3D never hit the shelves, but it made to silicon after all. Their next try was Avalanche chip. it hasn't been officially released but very close sources to Bitboys stated that because Infineons economical situation, Avalanche will never find it's way to sheves either. But this time they are getting Press Samples, so it will be shown and tested byt major web sites.

And their Next Gen. (if you can say so, DX9 part) is in the works. Officially last press release at Bitboys site is from August 2000, but at last year Assembly they give pretty good presentation and showed their development tools. So they aren't given up.

 

[Rookie]

Sorry,Tommy,here Beyond3d have substitude Dimension3D.. to become the most popular 3d tech community.

everyone here except me r all tech-junkies...

 

[duffer]

Don't forget, in the last year two consoles shipped: (GameCube and Xbox), and one console was discontinued (Dreamcast)

 

[DemoCoder]

q3

People won't stop using Q3 as a benchmark until someone else ships a game that scales with CPU, bus speed, and video card speed. Q3 seems to be engine that shows significant improvement on much faster CPUs, or DDR/RDRAM systems, or on fast cards.

If you run a game that is locked at 40fps because of some bad coding or bottleneck, and runs the same on a 500 Mhz Celery + TNT2 as it does on a P4+GF3, it's obviously not a good benchmark.

Some of the other engines are getting better, but I still haven't seen any engine that scales so beautifully with cpu, bus, and vid card.

 

[Mark N]

Q3 seems to be engine that shows significant improvement on much faster CPUs, or DDR/RDRAM systems, or on fast cards. If you run a game that is locked at 40fps because of some bad coding or bottleneck, and runs the same on a 500 Mhz Celery + TNT2 as it does on a P4+GF3, it's obviously not a good benchmark. Some of the other engines are getting better, but I still haven't seen any engine that scales so beautifully with cpu, bus, and vid card.

But doesn't this in itself make its use a poor way of evaluating real-world gaming performance? I mean, if you took the top twenty selling 3D games and ran them on a GF2 and on a GF4 and the framerate is about the same, doesn't that say the speed of the videocard at that level is irrelevant? Didn't UT tell us that it didn't matter if you were running a Voodoo3 a GF2 Ultra because the framerate was about the same? So image quality and featureset mattered more than raw speed? Or that CPU speed mattered more than videocard speed?

I think that might be part of the problem with such broad use of Q3 benchmarking - it doesn't really relate to real-world videocard use, doesn't address PC hardware balance issues very well since CPU scaling went by the wayside, and drives the manufacturers to emphesize speed and framerate (particularly in this game - look at the initial 8500 thing) over quality and driver and game compatability and development. It's not even a real-world test anymore, rather is a theoretical test - who can really tell the visual difference between the 220fps a Ti 4600 can make vs. the 150 or so an MX460 can do?

 

[DemoCoder]

Potential performance

No Mark, it doesn't go against using Q3, for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, a benchmark should show the potential of what a piece of hardware is capable of if used correctly. Shoddily coded games that don't scale are no reason for us to give up on buying higher performance video cards. They are a reason to stop buying games from that manufacturer. Consider for example, a game that runs at the same framerate on a V3+Celery as it does on a P3+GF3. Does this mean that high performance video cards are irrelevent? Should manufacturers just NOT BOTHER making new cards because crappy games fail to scale? Should we just keep our 400Mhz V3/TNT's and go back to 1998?

This situation would never be tolerated on consoles where programmers micromanage away every bottleneck they can and squeeze maximum performance out of their systems. Yet many PC developers make few attempts to optimize away stalls and bottlenecks. Granted, it is harder to do on the heterogenous PC, but that is no excuse, Q3 being an example that it is possible.


Secondly, Q3 is a very popular engine and is used in a large number of games, so performance in Q3 dictates potential performance for all Q3 licensees (but not guaranteed of course, since you can always screw it up)

Third, what I find really sad is CPU/GPU and texture memory bottlenecked sims that don't scale with CPU or texture memory.

(Carmack praise begins)
The industry is lucky to have someone like Carmack, who not only is good at evaluating the right algorithms to use in a particular situation, but is also very good at optimizing the implementation as well. Carmack doesn't just implement for the sake of shipping a game, but actually spends significant time researching and performing experiments. I think the Doom3 engine is going to prove once against that iD is king.

Did I mention the poor networking code that every other FPS game engine seems to have? Just try playing Global Operations. It's almost unplayable with a hand ful of people, meanwhile, I can join 32 player counter-strike/Q3 games with no problem on laggy connections. Let's not even talk about the ATROCIOUS C&C Renegade.



IMHO the only thing that Unreal's poor performance scalability showed was that Sweeney is no Carmack. Later optimizations of Unreal showed that it was a coding problem, not some kind of fundamental "unreal is doing harder stuff than Q3" Many game development houses, IMHO (perhaps because they are strapped for cash), concentrate on hacking together the game ASAP and shipping it (bugs and all) I'm sick of shovelware and amateur engines. Hopefully many of those hacking Q3 wannabees will just license the doom engine when it comes out. It would solve the same mistakes being made on graphics/cpu/network performance. You won't have to buy a commercial game, and then wait 6-12 months for the patches to fix the performance problems. (e.g. giants, global ops, c&c renegade, etc etc etc )