R420 might only support pixel shader 2.0

They didn't for PS 1.4... who said biased ?

After all the problems nVIDIA gave them, they would surely be keen to follow nvidia a little....

B3D is in the béta program, isn't it ?

 

Yes. Although I can't comment on what Futuremark are doing next I would suggest that Joe's scenario is highly unlikely.

 

Is nVIDIA a kind of a sect ?

 

Well.... I'm a bit lazy minded this evening, do you mean that, there won't be an update to 3DMark other than cheat-disabling ?

 

Not including score-changing tests which one IHV can't run != Nothing more than cheat-disabling.

 

No need to speculate on the meaning of my post, Dave interpreted it correctly. My theory is, no matter how much one can try to remain objective, one can be persuaded to be nice or favorable (even unconsciously) towards another company if they are nice to you. For example, giving one early pre-release information, "scoops", per se. You see it even in the NYT as reporters treat their sources with kidgloves, lest those sources be cut-off.


That said, I apologize to Dave for questioning his credibility. I remember Rev implying that Dave has secret info ("those in the know") and has been gradually trying to leak info, but without actually saying it. Then when the no-3.0 post showed up, I remembered Dave's "3.0 inflection or deflection" article which seem to fit Rev's statement, and everything else fell together, so Dave's article to me looked like an early attempt to talk about the R420, but without talking about it.

Apparently, Dave didn't know about the R420's specs when he wrote that article. I hereby retract my theory. Sorry, Dave.

 

Why are so many already convinced the R420 would be faster in ps2?

Is it based on inside rumors or the fact ATI uses their transistors only for ps2 performance instead of flexibility (=+ps3)?

I mean, the real truth was always hidden until the reaviews where out.

I mean, what do we really know about the NV40, apart from a very few rumors?

 

Well, at least half-kidding...but there is an awful lot of truth in the statement too.

 

Okay, that's fairly explicit, thanks to you two

 

^^ I tend to agree with this ^^

 

If, as rumoured, R420 doesn't support PS 3.0 then it better have one heck of a lot more performance than NV40 in PS 2.0 shaders.

I assume that it will support VS 3.0 as we've heard rumours that R420 uses the VS capabilities of the 'original' R400?

Even if R420 has much better image quality (through AA and AF) if PS 2.0 performance is only slightly higher than NV40, ATI will be in trouble for this generation of chips. As can be seen from most reviews on the net, as long as the check boxes for AA and AF are filled, little attention is paid to image quality. We've seen that because NV34 is a DX9 chip it has greatly outsold the competing DX8 Radeon chips despite it's rather poor performance. It just goes to show that extra features, however unusable, have a great effect on how well a product sells.

All IMO, of course.

 

In the mean time, if ATI don't play the cheat/play fool on people like some other IHV's, they still stand a chance to limit damage.

 

especially if they enhance their already great AA IQ and tweak the AF IQ, it should be a stormer of a card. A lot depends on how good the NV40 is in PS2 & IQ and how the game developers react really.

If Nvidia ca produce a car5d which is an all round better bet than the R420 I'll go with them. If not, ATi's got my money for another round.

 

Arent we forgetting a little something called price here? If R420 features faster PS2.0 performances, better image quality and lower price than Nv40, why buy NV40? Im talking about gamers here, all they'll see is performances and price in the end, image quality is not really high on the list of priorities and let alone PS3.0. Its sad but its like that, geforce3 didnt suffer against the 8500 because it didnt support PS1.4

 

Prices will likely be roughly identical, and the GF3 succeeded over the 8500 because of the latter's bad driver support (at least initially) - the strong nVidia/GF brand name also helped.

Two things really: ATi had a far better base from which to build from, and secondly they concentrated significant resources on PS2.0 performance. Did nVidia do the same (and more, to make up for the initial deficit)? I'd suggest not.

 

Also the lack of trilinear filtering with aniso on, that was my personal grudge against the 8500.

 

Good evening everybody,

as no-one has provided a proper translation, yet, I'll do a free-form paraphrasing:

"The information came to us directly, it's nigh impossible to get that sort of info in a more direct way. Not only is the person in question a direct contact, but the way he/she got the information is as straightworward and firsthand as it gets. Those in the loop might know what I'm talking about. "

We're also taught that R500 will be PS4.0 capable. Gods know what that means, I wasn't even aware that the PS4.0 specs were done, yet.

93,
-Sascha.rb

 

Looks like more and more FUD to me....

 

Devs I talked with about PS3.0 were, on the whole, quite giddy to get their hands on it. I am not a tech guy myself, so I understood only a fraction of it, but the word "texkill" was featured prominently in those discussions. Apparently, PS3.0 is considered more of an elegant way to get rid of unwanted work in existing HLSL shaders than an eye candy update. Demirug did a short worst-case (for PS2.0, best case for PS3.0) example program that should run about 8x more effective on PS3.0 than PS2.0, on the same hardware, simply because it can skip stuff that's not needed for the final result. HLSL shaders apparently don't take more than one more compile run to make them use those PS3.0 extras. Perhaps a dev here can get more into it.

We'll probably see PS3.0 support in the not too distant future, simply for speed / efficiency reasons. As a last restort, there's still NV's Unified Shader Compiler.

93,
-Sascha.rb

 

Thx nggalai 8)