| Author | Message | ||
     AleGenoa Rating: N/A |
Ok guys, I'm leaving ATI to get an NVidia. 'Nuff said. 1. I thought I'd want to go with a Geforce 6600, but I'm afraid that I may take a performance hit from what I'm used to with the 9700. (I know of the hit related to activating stereo3d, I'm referring to a hit due to 6600 architecture limitations). So: where is stereovision more demanding on the card? Is the 128bit memory bus a problem? Anyway: most people agree that 256Mb ram is overshoot with a 6600. Is maybe more ram used in stereo mode, in order to draw the 2, albeit very similar, images? 2. What about the development level reached by the NVidia stereo drivers: are they improving more and more, or they are on the contrary losing the pace of the rapidly evolving graphic market, with new features surfacing, like complex shaders, HDR, and so on? I just don't want to buy a new card only to find out that its performance is sub-par, and the games are not playable in stereo until some 9-15 months from release, waiting for the drivers to catch up. On the other hand, my glasses are collecting dust, and I WANT to play in 3D! | ||
| anonymous Rating: N/A |
First of all, you might rethink your assessment of ATI 9700 vs. NVIDIA 6600. The 9700 came out in late 2002, when NVIDIA offered the 5800. NV45 cards like the 6600 came several generations and a full two years later. In gfx, that's an eternity. I realize NVIDIA releases new "budget category" cards that are based on the new architectures but are crippled. The 6600 may be that; I haven't done the research on that particular card, but you can! I'd bet it's at least equivalent. 2ndly, I'd say the NVIDIA stereo support is as good as it's ever been. They do it by taking a regular D3D scene and switching between 2 camera positions as alternate frames are rendered. That process should have no impact on the rendering pipeline itself. That is, whatever the card is capable of - shader model 3.0, hdr, radiosity, subsurface scattering, transparency supersampling - if your game uses it, you should see it all, whether you have stereo on or not. | ||
| M.H. Rating: N/A |
ananymous: I am afraid you are wery wrong in the alst statement. To add stereoscopy to engine using havy shaders and GPU programing is unfortuantely not equivalent to simple generation of 2 stereoscopic cameras. The shaders-GPU based programing method use realys trange algorithem to cast shdows, reflections, atmospheric effect e.t.c. ... A lot of such thisng is incompatible with stereoscopic view on the scene - the view form camera position diferent from the expeced one can produce anything. i realy do not see celar answer for thsi problem (if I do not count stereo optimized game engines). | ||
| AleGenoa Rating: N/A |
Ty anonymous. I went for a 6600 GT, which is undoubtedly much more than a 9700 (while in some benchmarks the vanilla 6600 was struggling). If I interpret correctly your saying, the 128bit-only interface is even less important for stereovision than for normal use, since less new data is gathered for rendering each frame, althought in an ideal world the card would be able to increase the number of rendered frames by 2, thus requiring the same stream of vertex/texture data as in normal use. I mean, if in an actual application, my fps go down from 60 to 40 when switching to 3d, the card needs to calculate 80 frames, or 40 pairs of very similar frames, but the bus is only required to keep a 40 fps pace. Good. As for NVIDIA rendering, I assume it's up to the developer not to add some odd postprocessing. Oh, well, I can buy only stereo-ready games. To hell the others. | ||
| AleGenoa Rating: N/A |
(Wow, we posted nearly at the same time!) M.H.: well, I guess it was as I expected: less and less possibilities for stereo gaming in the future...  But we can anyway expect to get a rendering based on cutting exactly in half the fps... Not ideal but doable with not much effort, I guess... So is this the future? Stereovision at 1/2 fps? |
