When Tuesday does the G70 NDA expire?

[digitalwanderer]

So I'll just keep banging my drum --people would be a lot more eager to buy this card [y'hear me IHV's?!] if they could put some of that excess power to use in their current favorite games by ramping up (in the control panel, damnit!] AA and AF without taking any fps hit (or minimal; or at least not below whatever their personal favorite magical number is). "Eye Candy FOR FREE!" Yippee!! Why is this so hard for them to understand?

Keep on banging, it's a good tune you're playing on that drum and I think they're starting to hear. I'm kind of expecting both IHVs to have some more AA & AF options in their standard control panels real soon. (Just a geek feeling, I don't know nothing that isn't publically known right now I don't think...at least I know I ain't under any NDAs. )

 

[Jawed]

SC:CT, Chronicles of Riddick and EQ2 all respond well to 7800GTX. These games aren't CPU limited. So do the BF2 and FEAR demos.

Let's stop with the excuses that 7800GTX hasn't got software to feed on. It has.

Jawed

 

[DemoCoder]

So I'll just keep banging my drum --people would be a lot more eager to buy this card [y'hear me IHV's?!] if they could put some of that excess power to use in their current favorite games by ramping up (in the control panel, damnit!] AA and AF without taking any fps hit (or minimal; or at least not below whatever their personal favorite magical number is). "Eye Candy FOR FREE!" Yippee!! Why is this so hard for them to understand?

Isn't transparency/adaptive supersampling exactly what you want?

 

[digitalwanderer]

SC:CT, Chronicles of Riddick and EQ2 all respond well to 7800GTX. These games aren't CPU limited. So do the BF2 and FEAR demos.

Let's stop with the excuses that 7800GTX hasn't got software to feed on. It has.

How did it fair on those three games compared to more CPU limited ones? (I'm having a real bad day, I've barely managed to squeeze in reading Hanner's most excellent overview of the 7800 technology at EB...I haven't even started Dave's review yet! )

 

[BrynS]

I'm wondering if the SS transp AA should also work on nv40 or does the G70 some special hardware support for it?

Doubt it. From the simplicity of the technique and the apparent "unfreshness" of the architecture, i'd take a venture and guess that it's more of a driver-related option that will open up for current-gen users after the new drivers are released and a reg-key is enabled.

To be effective, it does require new hardware. It requires centroid texture sampling that is multisample-mask aware.

So, no possibility of this feature being "unlocked" on current ATI cards (R3xx and later) then?

Edit: Just saw this thread which, if I understand correctly, confirms that Radeon 9500 and higher should be capable of MSAA on Alpha textures (at least in OpenGL) -- so surely SSAA on Alpha textures should be possible (feasible?) on R300 as well? Could this functionality be exposed in DirectX, or is it limited to OpenGL?

Cheers,


BrynS

 

[Geo]

Isn't transparency/adaptive supersampling exactly what you want?

Yup, good step. And I said so on Wavey's review thread. So is ATI's SuperAA, and NV's moves in the same direction, even if only for SLI/Crossfire. Look at 7800SLI absolutely CREAM SC:CT at 4x/8af 12x10!

When I look at all those flatline cpu-limited graphs on games that are still pretty popular, it seems to me there's a lot of room across an impressive variety of popular games to crank IQ without sacrificing much in the way of FPS.

 

[Geo]

Rescuing this from the review thread as it interests me:

What's up with this?

The ROP's do support Gamma Adjusted MSAA, however this is not enabled by default in the current drivers, but can be selected via the control panel.

That suggests there is a performance penalty, otherwise I can't imagine why you wouldn't want it on all the time. Does ATI's have a performance penalty involved?

In truth I didn't try testing it, but I don't think the issue is performance I think its more the case that Kirk isn't a fan of it.

While it is "good to be king", can someone explain why someone as techie as DK could possibly be "isn't a fan" of something so obviously a Goodness?

 

[Jawed]

Politics I reckon. Same as the reason that 7800GTX doesn't support 3Dc - instead the driver converts 3Dc textures into U8V8 textures on the CPU and then loads them onto the 7800GTX.

Jawed

 

[Clootie]

I'm wondering if the SS transp AA should also work on nv40 or does the G70 some special hardware support for it?

To be effective, it does require new hardware. It requires centroid texture sampling that is multisample-mask aware.

But PS_3_0 requires support for centroid sampling, so...

 

[Geo]

Politics I reckon. Same as the reason that 7800GTX doesn't support 3Dc - instead the driver converts 3Dc textures into U8V8 textures on the CPU and then loads them onto the 7800GTX.

Jawed

Y'know, I don't accept that (at least yet). I don't think he (Kirk) could be that petty on "NIH", given that they did the work to include it as an option in the first place.

 

[Brent]

The one option that temps me to buy this card is TSAA. Damn it looks good and fixes the single biggest problem in games today (or atleast the two games I play: HL2/CSS and BF2). Moreover, the technique being used is cheaper than supersampling the entire screen, and can be used to eventually fix other AA problems that multisampling can't fix, like aliasing introduced by shaders, such as the floor specular shaders in HL2.

Kudos to NVidia for offering supersampling options.

A agree, this is the single killer feature. [H] reported that supersampling is buggy in HL-2. Not sure about other sites - fingers-crossed it's an easy fix.

Jawed

Just Transparency SS

the 8xS mode works fine

NVIDIA is aware of it.

 

[Clootie]

While it is "good to be king", can someone explain why someone as techie as DK could possibly be "isn't a fan" of something so obviously a Goodness?

Because Gamma Adjusted MSAA requires you to have gamma calibrated monitor for best expierence? And if you didn't calibrated it, when plain MSAA may look better?

 

[Brent]

Isn't transparency/adaptive supersampling exactly what you want?

Look at 7800SLI absolutely CREAM SC:CT at 4x/8af 12x10!

When I look at all those flatline cpu-limited graphs on games that are still pretty popular, it seems to me there's a lot of room across an impressive variety of popular games to crank IQ without sacrificing much in the way of FPS.

or SC:CT at 16x12 with HDR and Soft Shadows with a single 7800 GTX

 

[Geo]

While it is "good to be king", can someone explain why someone as techie as DK could possibly be "isn't a fan" of something so obviously a Goodness?

Because Gamma Adjusted MSAA requires you to have gamma calibrated monitor for best expierence? And if you didn't calibrated it, when plain MSAA may look better?

Well, that's a serious answer anyway. I want to hear from Xmas in response as to how the "best" and "may" weigh out relatively speaking.

 

[psurge]

Also - maybe the ability to switch between MSAA and SSAA for certain surfaces is why they stayed with a rotated grid pattern. If the MS pattern is uneven, then wouldn't using that same pattern for SS really complicate accurate LOD calculation?

 

[EasyRaider]

Well, a simple rotated grid is about optimal with 4 samples. An uneven pattern might look better in some cases, but worse in others, probably a wash.

 

[Jawed]

Come on 20% I feel the ATI force is still strong on this bulletinboard

BF2 uses a D3-like shadowing tech, I believe, which is an advantage that 7800GTX won't have over R520, prolly (who knows, though...). Also, ATI was locked out of optimising its driver for BF2. So right now it's not a useful data-point

I read a ton of reviews today and in eyecandysettings its mostly ~1,4-1,6 faster then a X850XTPE.

Well I read a different tonne

Jawed

 

[nAo]

BF2 uses a D3-like shadowing tech..

Umh..I think BF2 uses shadow mapping not stencil shadows ala DOOM3.

 

[digitalwanderer]

For some odd reason I took a look at a place I don't go anymore to see what their head guy said about it in his conclusion and it kind of slayed me:

Opinions will be formed that the GeForce 7800 GTX is only a minor update to the previous generation GeForce 6800 Ultra. While that depends on what the definition of a minor update is, I believe that the GeForce 7800 GTX represents a significant technology update. It runs faster, it renders higher-quality graphics, and it consumes less power. These benefits are certainly not indicative of what NVIDIA would achieve by only "tweaking" the architecture of the GeForce 6 Series.

Is it just me or is it a tad tacky to include PR damage control as part of your review?

 

[nAo]

Is it just me or is it a tad tacky to include PR damage control as part of your review?

It doesn't seem damage control to me..de gustibus non disputandum est