NV30 - last chance to speculate - reactorcritcal specs

[Ante P]

-I haven't seen a screenshot where 6x FSAA has any bad edges (somes sites said it was even better than Matrox's 16x FSAA due to the latter's ordered grid), so I doubt 8x will be much improvement

Well at 1600x1200 it's almost picture perfect. Even 6x FSAA at 1280x960 leaves a lot to be desired though so I for one would most certainly like 8x FSAA.

My fps nevers drops below 99 (ie the max of the framerate reader in CS) in CS when I'm playing at 6x FSAA and 128 tap aniso in 1280x960 so I for one would LOVE to have 8x FSAA to remove some of those jaggies I see.
Dropping down to 70 fps would be fine by me. Perhaps lowering the res to say 1152x864 would bring good balance so it perhaps could stay vsynced at 85 fps/hz for an example.

The hardware should be capable right? Only a driver question, or am I mistaken here?

My monitor does 1600x1200 but IQ isn't really good but most of all it only does 75 Hz at that res: I know a lot of people with similair problems and we sure'd like 8x FSAA.

I recently asked ATi if they were ever to implement it in their drivers or something like that. Perhaps on 256 MB versions or the DDRII version if nothing else. (I also asked them about supporting FSAA at resolutions higher than 1600x1200, I don't see the point of brining in artificial limitations here. Especially not on the 128 MB 8500 I mean the ONLY FSAA mode that works on 1600x1200 is 2x Performance... that simply sucks. Hehe not that it would perform more than single digit fps with anything more but ya know... hehe)

 

[Nagorak]

I recently asked ATi if they were ever to implement it in their drivers or something like that. Perhaps on 256 MB versions or the DDRII version if nothing else. (I also asked them about supporting FSAA at resolutions higher than 1600x1200, I don't see the point of brining in artificial limitations here. Especially not on the 128 MB 8500 I mean the ONLY FSAA mode that works on 1600x1200 is 2x Performance... that simply sucks. Hehe not that it would perform more than single digit fps with anything more but ya know... hehe)

I think the artificial limitations are actually good. I'm sure they know about the workings of the card enough to decide what is just not going to offer up any performance whatsoever (or even just cause the game to crash). It saves their customers a lot of time having to "crash test" the settings in the game. That may be something that hard core graphics junkies get into, but you have to realize that 95% of people don't want to have to deal with that sort of BS (myself included). If it's just going to run like crap anyway, they did the right thing by just disabling it so it isn't there even as a distraction.

Also you need to realize that the difference between 6x and 8x FSAA is likely to be negligible because it's a very small jump compared to the past. Going from 1x to 2x doubles your FSAA amount, same with going from 2x to 4x. 4x to 6x is only a 150% improvement and 6x to 8x is even less: only 133%.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Its also going to depend a lot on what sample patterns are used.

As for 8X on R300 - I don't think thats going to happen as its likely that this is a hardware limitation. I would imagine the only way it would be possible is by mixing supersampling with mulitsampling like NVIDIA's 4xS.

 

[Ante P]

I recently asked ATi if they were ever to implement it in their drivers or something like that. Perhaps on 256 MB versions or the DDRII version if nothing else. (I also asked them about supporting FSAA at resolutions higher than 1600x1200, I don't see the point of brining in artificial limitations here. Especially not on the 128 MB 8500 I mean the ONLY FSAA mode that works on 1600x1200 is 2x Performance... that simply sucks. Hehe not that it would perform more than single digit fps with anything more but ya know... hehe)

I think the artificial limitations are actually good. I'm sure they know about the workings of the card enough to decide what is just not going to offer up any performance whatsoever (or even just cause the game to crash). It saves their customers a lot of time having to "crash test" the settings in the game. That may be something that hard core graphics junkies get into, but you have to realize that 95% of people don't want to have to deal with that sort of BS (myself included). If it's just going to run like crap anyway, they did the right thing by just disabling it so it isn't there even as a distraction.

Well I don't agree. For an example: The game simon the sorcerer 3d, in that game I was fully capable of running it with 6x Performance smoothvision at 1024
2x Quality could have worked also.

And as a reviewer it sucks ass not to have it.

For an example: I can't produce ANY FSAA results in CodeCult except when running with 2x Performance Smoothvision.
All benchmarks with 1600x1200 are the same. (ie benchmarks that run all resolutions after another)

I can't use scripts for benchmarking making my test miserably slow. Instead of just using s cript that runs all benchmarks letting me leave the computer and then coming back an hour later is simply not possible with older radeons.

Sure the limitations are "valid" sometimes, but when benchmarking and in a handfull of games it's a pain in the butt.

They allready have the limitations quoted in the control panel, why not leave it at that.
If those "unhardcore" users you are talking about want to try their luck then let them. They could just leave it there as a recommendation.
or they could provide us with a registry key which enables all possible combinations.

What's next nVidia preventing me from using 4xs FSAA and 8x Aniso at the same time (hey I can't play a single game I have at those settings so why should I be able to even try, let's just decide that all users are morons )

About 8x FSAA, sure of course I realize that it would be that much greater than 6x. But enough to keep me satisfied when running games at 1280xXXX(X) me thinks.
It's not like it's jaggies the size of "Lego blocks" that I want to get rid of.

 

[Humus]

Are you sure those limitations really are "arteficial"?

 

[Ante P]

Are you sure those limitations really are "arteficial"?

I'm fairly certain they are. Do you have any other information?

 

[Nagorak]

I'm not so sure that they're artificial...what happens if the card just runs out of onboard memory for the framebuffer. Can you swap the framebuffer over AGP...I don't think so, so it looks to me like it would be 1 big hard lock/reset situation.

 

[Humus]

I'm fairly certain they are. Do you have any other information?

No I don't. They may be arteficial, but I wouldn't assume they are. I suppose there are other limitations that just memory, perhaps such as fixed size onchip buffers used by stuff like HyperZ and all the compression schemes storing additional info about blocks etc.

 

[Ante P]

No I don't. They may be arteficial, but I wouldn't assume they are. I suppose there are other limitations that just memory, perhaps such as fixed size onchip buffers used by stuff like HyperZ and all the compression schemes storing additional info about blocks etc.

Ahh ok, I just assumed they were since there's no difference in limitations between the 64 and 128 MB cards. (Something that bothered people at Rage3D when the 128 MB versions were launched..)