Brand New G400 MAX review

[Indiana]

The article's author mentions the S3TC thing, but according to him the degradation in image-quality is not due to S3TC itself, since S3's cards with S3TC turned on don't show it...
So this seems to be a fault of NVidias S3TC implementation.

BTW, this review doesn't have any relation to the "happenings" at this site's last poll.
It's just that the site's author has a G400Max himself and seems to be quite Matrox-friendly - in spite of what many of the non-germans in this forum might think.


[This message has been edited by Indiana (edited 04 August 2000).]

[Rob M.]

Originally posted by Indiana:
The article's author mentions the S3TC thing, but according to him the degradation in image-quality is not due to S3TC itself, since S3's cards with S3TC turned on don't show it...
So this seems to be a fault of NVidias S3TC implementation.

By the same reasoning, people could argue that all Geforce vs Radeon reviews should have the Geforce in 32 bit colour and the ATI in 16 bit colour, because the Radeon has artifacts in 16 bit colour that the G400 doesn't show.

Doesn't make sense? Of course!

If you want to make quality comparisons, make sure that both cards are using the same settings! It's as simple as that.

[superfly]

Actually,the real reason why the q3 skies look awfull is because id didn't use s3tc's translucent texture format when it was developing the game,that's why when s3tc is enabled the skies look that way,it isn't a video card or driver problem,in fact there are alredy a couple of custom maps available(in ra3)that uses that texture format(for the skies)and it looks awsome.the reason why the ati card doesn't show this is because the card doesn't support st3c in opengl in the first place,they have to pay s3 to use it.

[Snake-Eyes]

Thanks for setting the record straight here, Superfly.

Also, since the G400 doesn't support the texture compression, the comparisons would have been more accurate comparing apples to apples, don't you think folks?

I mean, going back to the previous comment about 16bit versus 32bit- you wouldn't want the G400 at 16 bit color compared to the GeForce at 32 bit color. The intent is to compare the best quality available on each card, so use the best settings available, which, because of the iD bumbling in the original maps, means NOT using the texture compression on the GTS (unless of course, you'd like to try those custom maps that do it right).

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Ace

[mirp]

Take a look at the UT Benchmark 1024x768x32: OpenGL dominates D3D! I never saw OpenGL with a G400 under UT that fast. What's going on? Is it the new PD6.0x ICD? Or why is it so fast?