185787

NVidea FSAA

March 15th, 2000 07:37 AM

Come on guys, play fair. Everyone slated 3Dfx for not commiting hardware T&L to the V4,5,6. So we'll be left with software rendering (which apparently can be done even faster than the NV10 chipset can on a seriously quick pentium).
Yet when 3DFx announce FSAA in hardware and NVidea can only reply with a software version that sounds pretty shabby, nobody cares.

Shouldn't we all be slagging off NVidea for not giving us what we want?

(Don't get me wrong, after all the above, I'm waiting for the release of the NV15 chip and I can't imagine me buying the Voodoo 4 or 5 cards).

185788

March 15th, 2000 08:37 AM

There's one big difference. The software FSAA is for an older card. The V4 and V5 will not be competing against the GeForce, but against the NV15. That's why it's silly when Gigapixel has a booth comparing V5 FSAA against GeForce FSAA. That's not a fair test, and it is not representative of the product choice that consumers will make when they go to the stores next month. The software FSAA that nVidea has right now is just to give old GeForce users like me a choice. Personally, I love it, but that's very subjective since I don't mind 30 frames per second but some people do.

Second, there is no evidence that software rendering can be done faster than Geforce. All the games and benchmarks that have come out so far were almost complete when T&L was tacked on at the end. Real support comes from games that were designed around it. The game developers who started making their games in early 1999 will have much better support, but those games are still 6 months to a year away from being released.

The problem is not that 3dfx or nVidea flagrantly left out something. They simply chose something different to make a priority. Different people like different things, so some of us support one and some of us support the other. Personally, I'd bet that the NV15 (the true competitor to the V5) will have hardware T&L AND hardware FSAA with the fillrate to back it up.

By the way, you mentioned V6 not having T&L. It will. The next generation is called Rampage (so far) and it has built in T&L.