There are 2 problems
1) Quicksaves/Saves are excruciatingly slow when AA is enabled. Fixable but somewhat silly of them to miss this (since the docs to the function 'GetFrontBufferData' flat out say 'this function is extremely slow by design). They should have re-rendered the game to a...
After following all the links I've seen a few different artifacts (and each piece of hardware is quite different in this department), but I've seen several different things all lumped together as 'shimmering'. In the end its all the same thing: Something is aliasing.
1) The City of Heroes...
1600x1200 with 4x AA requires 95 MB of RAM, so don't discount that possibility. Models and Textures (and shaders but they are tiny) all take up space.
If the game uses any other screen sized images for blur effects, that also quickly chews up space, as the effects usualy require several of...
I suspect the loss of SoundStorm has everything to do with the memory controller being moved into the CPU core. The audio processor would naturally want to be integrated into the memory controller to pre-empt everything else on the system.
The lightmap in that screenshot looks 16 bit or DXT compressed to me. Going from memory on the older ATI drivers, I could have sworn there was a dialog in the display properties->advanced on the ATI tabs, that contained an option to force textures to be 16 bit (or maybe it was worded to make...
The reference software rendering device that the DirectX SDK provides developers will never exactly match any hardware. Its primarily used to enable interactive shader debugging, and can also be used as a simple test to make sure you don't have a graphics driver bug (i.e. does your hardware...
why do they make a 5200 fx 256meg pci?
For people that need to run 4, 6, or even 8 monitors. And with PCI you want extra security that everything you render with fits on the card since its so slow to upload in realtime.
The image quality complaints about FarCry and the 6800 are compltely the fault of FAR CRY.
Even with the 1.1 patch, the game is running with the Geforce FX fp16 shaders instead of the general 2.0 shaders they wrote. I'm sure the code was very simple in this (if NVIDIA use fp16 2.0 shaders)...
I'd get a Radeon 9700 or 9800 unless you can afford the $$$ and time waiting for an NV40 (for shader 3.0 features it brings). For D3D, shader 3.0 development requires the "DirectX 9.0c SDK Summer Update 2004" (currently in beta, but very easy to acquire from MS), otherwise any 3.0 hardware is...
In response to:
Q: Don't games like prince-of-persia and halo-2 have blur/glow effects in them already?
A: Yes they do. For the curious, they achieve this by rendering to a texture (in video memory of course), manipulating that texture with gpu operations, and then drawing a single...
Maybe its a reason similar to the apple cinema display resoloution (1920x1280), allows you do do widescreen 1080i fullscreen video editing, while leaving some room at the top or bottom for some buttons. I never cared, always getting 1600x1200 displays or better :P
Haven't found any yet aside from the overpriced niche FireGL from ATI (~$800). NVIDIA Just annoucned some variant of GeforceFX Quaddro for PCI use (for those crazy people that need 4-8 monitors). Hopefully this next generation will have some versions with dual DVI at more humane pricing.
You guys act like the only bottleneck could possibly be fillrate (the very very end of the graphics pipeline). Most games are CPU bound (the very beginning of the pipeline). Modern CPU's are only 3x faster than what's in the XBOX, and I'm sure you guys can do the math on that one. Not to...
ALL PC equipment is very toxic and should be recycled. CRT's are full of leaded glass and some other nasty stuff. Printed circuit boards and other electrical components are also not very nice (very poisonous when burned, contain mercury, cadmium, barium, phosphorous etc) to be around or have...
NEC 2080UX+ ? (A third rev of the 2080 line, with a faster response LCD. looked good on paper but I bought a 2001FP at the end of December so stoped my search on others)
Several kinds of leaps have happened before however most of them share a common theme:
A) Major memory bandwidth increases
B) Faster GPU
C) More versatile GPU to get more work done at once, reducing the need to split the work up into multiple chunks.
D) More efficent use of existing...
During some development a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I swapped out the following cards in a single WinXP machine over the course of about 3 months:
TNT2, Geforce 2, Geforce2 MX (pci), Geforce4 MX (pci), Geforce4 MX (AGP), Geforce4, Geforce FX 5700
ATI Rage 128, Radeon 7xxxx...
There's a bunch of little differences but here are the big ones.
VS 3.0 and PS 3.0 add logic statements (loops, if's, etc). Right now you have to write a rather linear program which brute forces all the work you need to do, which can be quite wasteful. For example you write a Vertex shader...
I wouldn't worry about it, Half-Life 2 is never coming out. It would be nice if they hit their FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSERY of HL1 in Nov 2004, but I'm not holding my breath.
. . . openly kicking Valve in the balls until they get their act together . . .
Lots of random points for everyone:
A) Moore's law is more of a marketting plan than anything.
B) Video cards are limited predomintantly by memory bandwidth, which has historicaly had trouble getting advanced as fast as CPU's do (thus long CPU pipelines, lots of CPU cache, lots of...
Ok heres how I see it :
DX10 coming with the next major version of windows (that much has been said), which is quite some time off.
With said version of windows being delayed, this drives up the likelyhood of DX9.1 or DX10 coming out sooner (due to hardware catching up, DX10 being...
When I was shopping around I found that the NEC 2080UX+ seemed to be worth checking out (Note: Not to be confused with the previous model without the '+'). Definitely more expensive though.
Display Properties->Appearance(Tab)->Advanced(Button)
Select each item in the list, if it has a font the bottom half of the dialog gets unlocked and you can change the font and the point size. In many cases this is preferable to change instead of changing the overall DPI of windows (which...
I usually just kick up the font sizes up 2 points, and if the monitor is an LCD, make sure cleartype is enabled in the display/appearance/effects settings (assuming you are running WinXP)
Vendors have been known to cripple line drawing performance of the gaming cards so as not to eat into their pro level cards. FireGL and Quaddro vs their gaming equivalents come to mind . . .
I'm looking for manufacturers of ATI (something on the order of a 9800 or 9800xt) video cards that have two DVI outputs instead of the usual 1 analog 1 dvi configuration. I seem to remember seeing one somewhere but trying to find them all is a pain.