G800 to have FSAA ???

[Darin]

This is off topic for the thread, but I just have to ask: Leech, what do you mean your computer is too fast to run QIII at 1600x1200? Were you being sarcastic, or serious? If the former, my bad, didn't get it, but if it's the former, how is that possible? It plays at the same speed regardless of how fast your frame rate is (unlesss you turn timedemo on, which is only for benchmarking). At the risk of ME sounding sarcastic, are you saying it played too smooth? And even if it could be too fast, I don't think the G400 would fall in that category at 1600x1200 all features on. I think at best you'd get framerates in the teens, regardless of the processor, due to fillrate limitations, which is about 1/4 of what I consider to be smooth enough.

Not raggin on ya, just struck me as an odd comment.

[Himself]

Real FSAA is something you want in a $$$ video card. Just having it enabled whether the game supports it or not would be a big bonus, if there is no speed hit, super bonus. Right now, the problem with AA is that it has to be enabled on a game by game basis, and really you want it that way because it is extremely slow on all current video cards, having it enabled all the time would halve or quarter the performance of the current lot of cards out there. And of course if you like jaggies and other artifacts of aliasing, you can turn it off and see how fast your cpu can make a game run.

Your G400 can do AA right now, check out the demo of X, there is a dramatic difference at 800x600 using a minimal version of AA, now imagine it with no speed hit using a good implementation.

[Allan123]

Hey "Himself". Read the articles! FSAA does NOT have to be programmed for. T&L has to be programmed for. The editors that are making the comments have seen true FSAA in hardware and one has even said it has made the most dramatic impact of the visual appearance of games since the first VQuake and OpenGl Quake.

[Rags]

Hey "Allan123",

Read Himself's post again. ". Right now, the problem with AA is that it has to be enabled on a game by game basis, and really you want it that way because it is extremely slow on all current video cards"

Note he said Right NOW, AA, not FSAA when it is feasable.

*Sigh*

Rags

[Allan123]

My apologies. I guess I misinterpreted what "Himself" was trying to say.Sorry.I hate when people do that! (>_<)

It's certainly true AA is not really viable on today's vid cards. From what I've read it's going to be a real usuable function sometime this month if 3dfx actually can deliver the product on time.

And to get this back on topic a bit, I wonder how well supported a feature it will be in the "next-gen" Matrox hardware.Matrox understands the importantance of image quality so let's keep our fingers crossed that if they don't have it in hardware they have some damn good software drivers and a HUGE fill-rate.

[vanguardian1]

Compared to S3, Nvidia, 3dfx, and ATI, I still think that matrox has the best drivers.

From my experience anyways....

If you were to ask me, FSAA is a lazy and costly way of doing things. It will look good on polygons, but what about readable text and such? From what I've seen, it makes those look worse. I don't think "jaggies" are a problem, even at 640x480. I think the G800 with T&L and EMBM would look far superior to 3dfx's fsaa. For games that support embm at least.

[CHHAS]

vanguardian1:
How would you define FSAA as being a 'lazy' way of doing things ?

The interesting part, IMHO, is that on one hand you have FSAA, which will instantly make all games, new and old, look better,
and on the other, T&L, which still, after 6 months and a helluwa lot of hype, isn't widely used, and may still take years to break through in large scale.
Personally I think 3dfx is on the right track, if only they could get their image quality up to Matrox' standards *sigh*


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P3 500, 224 MB ram, G400 16SH,
Maxtor DM 40+ 30GB, IBM Deskstar 16GP 10GB, Maxtor 4320 13 GB
SB Live Value

[Jutai]

OK Full Scene Anti-Aliasing the voodoo 5 way... it is really an awesome feature for a number of reasons 1 the backwards compatibility with All games. Because itis done in hardware bypassing the program itself it works with all games immediately o add-ons no plug-ins. 2 look at it it is really great looking (almost makes 3DFX picture quality as good as Matrox when implimented)and shows if Matrox can do it right they can make great picture quality even better. 3 clarity, some of the distant objects become clear with FSAA enabled 4 toggle with the voodoo 5 solution you can toggle between "off" "2X" and "4X".
Having said that if Matrox implements this well it would be a strong addition to the G-800 it would hlp those with those 20" 1024x768 max res monitors enjoy a form of psuedo 1600X1200 picture on the monitor they spent $1000+ on. With the ability to "Toggle on the fly" you can turn it on and off depending on the situation ie. reading game text, or avoiding slowdowns. And of course the backwards compatibility (i'm partial to this one if you hadn't noticed) it is good to have useful technology on any product GeForce T&L is far too premature (nobody's using it) but any game can use FSAA with the voodoo 5 solution meaning all YOUR games will look better no matter if you have the latest FPS or the oldest flight sim. Unfortunately the voodoo 5 solution is on the chip with their T-Buffer technology and would be hard to impliment for Matrox... but M if your listening we would love to see it.
-Chris k.

[leech]

ok, sorry I'm butting in here, and a bit off topic, but I don't know how it is, but I can't play it. If it played smooth that'd be great. Actually I think all I need to do to really make it playable is to lower the mouse sensitivity. Yes, it ran damn smooth. Don't ask me why, I don't know if it does on other people's computers with even the same configuration. But let me ask, how is it that you do run a time demo on quake3 and I'll tell you the fps it gets. I know it's far higher than the teens, sir. Looks just as fast in any other resolution. I'll try it again here, I pretty much installed it, then uninstalled it and let my brother play it on my mom's computer (200mhz pentium 1 with 64mb of ram and a 6 meg Voodoo1 card. Not exactly a powerhouse and it played quake3 pretty well) Laters.

Leech

[Darin]

Leech, (everyone else, sorry for the OT)
Pull down the console by hitting the button with the ~ on it, then at the prompt type disconnect <enter> (don't kow why, everyone says to do it, I've skipped this step with no noticable difference), then type timedemo 1 <enter>, then type demo demo001 (this will use demo001 to run the benchmark, you can substitute any other demo you have loaded on your system, but I think this is the most commonly used one).

QIII should run the demo, just like it does when you run the demo from the standard menu, but it's speed will not be in real time... it will be really fast if you have good framerate, or even slower than normal (but will all frames displayed) if your framerate is slow. Once it's done, pull down the console again, and the last line will show you your fps, then you should type timedemo 0 <enter> to return to normal playing speed (all this from memory, I'm on my work computer now, so I might have a couple of errors).

I'm real interested to see what type of framerates you get, the QIII settings, and your hardware. I currently am running a C366@490 w/128M on a BE6-2, G400 vanilla @ max speeds, and at 1024X768, medium geometry, slightly below medium texture detail, 16 bit textures and color depth, bilinear filtering, lightmap lighting high quality sound, but a3d off (I leave sound on for benchmarks, because I play with sound on). Did I leave anything out? At these settings, I get around 47.5 fps. I'm using the latest point release (ends in an n), the optimzed dlls, and turboGL. Bumping up to 32 bit color depth (but leaving textures @ 16bit) takes me to around 40 fps. From what I've seen, that's not bad for my hardware.

I'm planning on getting a PIII 600 in the next month, & OC to whatever it will do, and was hoping for some big increases allowing me to play in 32bit, bump up some settings, use A3D, etc., but I've seen some tests that make me believe I'm already approching the fillrate limit of the G400. I'm curious to know where more processor will take me. I should be able to enable A3D without a hit, but I'm not sure about everything else. As it is, my 47.5 fps timedemo is the lowest I'm comfortable with. With the FPS counter enabled (sorry leech, don't remember off hand how to do that), the numbers do dip into the teens once or twice during a timedemo. If I do something to lower my average to 40, the mins become even worse. BTW, does anyone know of a way to run a timedemo and get the MIN fps (as opposed to the average)?

Sorry for the long OT post. Leech (and anyone else), looking forward to your results.

[This message has been edited by Darin (edited 07 April 2000).]

[CHHAS]

Darin: Just for fun I decided to try Q3 demo1 on my system. I used the exact same settings as you did.

<table>
<tr><th>G400 speed</th><th>16 bit</th><th>32 bit</th></tr>
<tr><td>125/166</td><td>39,9</td><td>33</td></tr>
<tr><td>160/180</td><td>47,2</td><td>38,2</td></tr>
</table>

Not really any surprices, but at least I got confirmation that my system isn't running slower than it should (unless yours is too )

It would be fun to see what people with really fast systems (like 800+ MHz) scores with the same settings, that way we could find out if the G400 is fill rate limited, or it has more to offer with faster processors.


------------------
P3 500, 224 MB ram, G400 16SH,
Maxtor DM 40+ 30GB, IBM Deskstar 16GP 10GB, Maxtor 4320 13 GB
SB Live Value

[This message has been edited by CHHAS (edited 07 April 2000).]

[This message has been edited by CHHAS (edited 07 April 2000).]

[Randy Simons]

Pfft, sure FSAA looks nice, but IMO it's not worth the impact on framerate it will have. Hell, I wouldn't even pay $20 for it if I had the choise.
When do they start to add something else, like voxels in hardware? *that* could make a real difference..

[Himself]

I bought my TNT 1 mostly on the promise of real antialiasing and trilinear filtering, or more image quality relative to a Riva 128 in general, (fixed the texture gap bugs, but the rest was spec sheet filler, totally unusable and/or emulated features). Companies asking $400-$500 CDN for cards without real antialiasing is just depressing. I mean a decade ago I could play a game without noticeable aliasing on an Amiga 1000 at 640x256, come on.

[alessandro]

From AnandTech "3dfx visit to Anandtech" you get the following results when you use FSAA:

V5 5500 667-733Megapixels/s------->166-183Megapixels/s when using 4 sample FSAA

V5 6000 1.33-1.47Gigapixels/s------>333-366Megapixels/s when using 4 sample FSAA
hihihi

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Pentium II 450Mhz@504,Asus P2B rev1.04 (biosrev.1011),17" Sony Multiscan 200PST,128MB PC100 ram,Matrox Millenium G400 MAX 32MB 5ns SGRAM,Quantum Firebal EL 10.2Gb,Epson Stylus Color 740,Sound blaster Live!,Cambridge Soundworks 5.1,Creative PC-DVD 5X,CDR-RW Ricoh MP7040S@MP7060S(Tweaked from 4x--->6x with no problem),Adaptec SCSI 2920C,Diamond SupraExpress 56e PRO,Iomega Zip Drive.

[This message has been edited by alessandro (edited 07 April 2000).]

[This message has been edited by alessandro (edited 07 April 2000).]

[This message has been edited by alessandro (edited 07 April 2000).]

[WereWolf]

I guess 3dfx's so called hardware FSAA has a "small" (sarcastic smile) performance hit.

better take off my glasses then...
LOL

[This message has been edited by WereWolf (edited 07 April 2000).]

[This message has been edited by WereWolf (edited 07 April 2000).]