R420 Hints from people under NDA!

Re: No indications of valid info on Rage3d

Man your 9700 must be better than my 9800pro b/c what they showed looked way better than what I see when I play farcry...

 

I ran it at what I thought was the optimum mix of fps and quality, as I am sure everyone does, or I would assume. However this is always different per person.

So is displacement mapping what is unique for the nv40 (and hey likely r420) over r3xx, I thought matrox was already talking about that back with the parahelia or something. In any case perhaps that is what it is. Regular bump mapping looks much more "fake" to me, I hope that new games do at least use it if it is available. I would assume it would be very easy to implement in games like D3, and HL2 where the source for the bump maps could simply be put thru some calculation to make displacement maps instead right?

 

i think if certain mods from rage3d knew anything it would be in there sig alongside there decree of being a rage3d mod.
the EGO is a wonderful thing

 

Did someone open the loony bin?

 

You make that sound like a positive thing....

It is amusing the fuss some people are making about this engine. I mean Tim Sweeney stated himself he doesnt expect to see games based on it until the late 2005/2006 timeframe. Nv50 and R500 will be on their way out by then...

 

Actually we'll be able to play U3 at 3-5 fps on our NV40 equipped PCs in about a month

 

It's not equivalent. How would you do motion estimation in the shaders efficiently? Only part of the MPEG pipeline is amenable to stream operations. The shaders help with removing artifacts, deblocking, potentially even block transforms, but there's alot more. There would be no need for the Theater chip otherwise.

(note: this is not a dismissal of ATI HW. It is a simple assertion of the non-equivalence of the pixel pipelines, and the video unit with ability to read/write data to a random access memory, looping and branching over it (in addition to framebuffer))

 

Ooop's....somebodies got some issues. Great second post

 

highpingdrifter

um if ANYONE has seen the R420 in action its GIbro he hangs out at ATI HQ as he lives just a little awhile away from their hmm and Mr B both are personal friends with Terry and have been in on the info for quite awhile so u need stop talking now tahnks now bye

as for the rest of thee thread im not gonna comment on performance until the R420 is out

 

did YOU used to be a mod over there?

 

I didn't read the whole thread yet since I'm pretty exhausted and on my way to bed, but I did read the first few and skimmed some on this page and just wanted to say that if GI Bro or Kombatant said they know something than you can bet your last dollar that they KNOW SOMETHING! 8)

I've known 'em both for years, and bumped heads with them a lot and disagreed too...but I have never known either to be untruthful or to brag about anything serious unless they had something to back it up.

Call it a voice-o-confidence, but it's my contribution before bedtime. Bro and Komb are good people, there words have weight with me.

 

All of the mods and admins are good ppl

and all the betatesters are great people

the mods and admins that are betatester are godly people (except alpha he has been tainted no body wants to touch him anymore)

Have a nice night Digi well be fun reading your response in the morning

 

Not to kill the joke, but I thought the previous gen ran UE3 at 5fps, and NV40/R420 ran it at 10-15fps? A couple more gens and we may just reach playable framerates!

 

I think Sweeney said ".. 6800 .. first card to run at decent framerates" in the Unreal E 3 video. Decent is imo higher then 10-15 fps but i'm guessing that it isn't that much more.

 

Quoted for emphasis.

trinibwoy, are you really trying to convince us that his first post was not trolling to the extreme?

 

Re: No indications of valid info on Rage3d

While i agree that you shouldn't put to much emphasis on the Unreal Engine 3, i think it's a bit of a stretch to say that the NV40 won't be used for Unreal Engine 3 games. The 9700 will be around two years "old" when Half Life 2 is released and i think that there'll be a lot of 9700 owners playing Half Life 2. And not only 9700 but 9600 Pro's, XT's and so forth.

 

Huh! Ignorance Abounds Here

Flow Control is a good thing?

NOT!

Maybe on a CPU flwo control is good, but in what is essentially a super-scalar processor, flow control is bad-bad-bad. Let's pretend each pixel path in a pipeline quad (which is how both nV and ATI stuff is organized) has two ALUs. Now I can use those two ALUs to do a couple of different thing OR I can use those two ALUs to do the same thing going down two paths. In the case of NV40 do my 32Z pixel thing OR do flow control and execute down both paths of the branch.

To me flow control is at best a half-speed performance decelerator.

I will wager there will be no games with any flow control until at least mid-2005, and very little after that.

Those in the know can tell you SM3 gives you absolutely no visual effects that SM2 doesn't give you. This is totally unlike the comparison between SM2 and SM1.x. The whole SM3 thing is some MS program managers idea of something cool but pointless. HLSL is so dominant and will generate SM2 & SM3 code with equal facility that no ISV will care. After watching their SM3 code run slower on NV40 than SM2 code runs on NV40, guess which switch nV will pull (hint-hint: what they did for the last 18 mos, where they swapped out SM2 code for SM1.x code when their HW sucked on SM2 code)?

In the end just about everything will be SM2 until DX10 comes out.


P.S. As for nV being ahead of ATI, they finally have some video capability only two years later, and at that at least two reviews I read said the "video processor" is broken. Bah. The whole lack of un-readiness of this product smells of panic and poopy pants. One would have expected nV to do better after two years of suckage.

 

Will they ever top the legendery stuff like this?

On NV40:

On the source of ATI presentation/slide/comments:

On R360:

On R350:

On NV 35:

 

Owned, thoroughly.

Ok I just couldn't resist