PowerMac Dual 1-GHz Benchmarks

[mcbane]

Re: 8500 Better?

Originally posted by sturm375

Also nVidia's foundation is in OpenGL, where ATI has just entered, I believe Rage was the first to fully support it. Also, correct me if I am wrong in this, OS X is heavy into OpenGL. Having a video card with strong, constant support for OpenGL will be very important to OS X users.

I was under the impression that nVidia was designed with DirectX in mind and incorportated many features that openGL couldnt take advantage of. Also, I have read in several places saying the radeon 8500 and gf3 ti500 are very similar in power.

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Originally posted by Unregistered
800x600 is a good resolution for games, ok 1024 is better but the difference is not so noticeable in action games.

UhhmMM....When was the last time you played a FPS ? 1024x768 makes a BIG diffrence for an average+ player compared to 800x600!

and I think GF4 in 800x600 can run heviest game situations.

Hey, according to Apple's spechs it can even do it in 1024x768 at 115 fps, and that more than enough! It can probably do about 60 fps at 1600x1200 which is acceptable even for a hardcore gamer.

 

[dw1]

Anyone notice how ****ty Mac OS X.1 is?

Man those benchmarks blow for graphics intensive applications in Mac OS X as compared to OS 9.2.2. Apple better step it up in terms of performance.

 

[Unregistered]

Re: Anyone notice how ****ty Mac OS X.1 is?

Originally posted by dw1
Man those benchmarks blow for graphics intensive applications in Mac OS X as compared to OS 9.2.2. Apple better step it up in terms of performance.

At Last! we're getting to something more interesting than Quake's FPS count ;P. I noticed this too, A dual 1ghz G4 running osX.1.2 can scroll Appleworks pages HALF as fast as a 350 running 9.1 - Shockingly bad.

 

[sturm375]

Re: Re: 8500 Better?

Originally posted by mcbane


I was under the impression that nVidia was designed with DirectX in mind and incorportated many features that openGL couldnt take advantage of. Also, I have read in several places saying the radeon 8500 and gf3 ti500 are very similar in power.

nVidia has just reciently adopted DirectX heavily (since DirX8). Once opon a time when there were 3 major competing chipsets: ATI, 3dfx, and nVidia; ATI focused on DirX, 3Dfx focused on Glide, and nVidia focused on openGL. Take a look at the "Professional" grade chipsets on nVidia's website. These are designed for the high-end 3D CAD, and 3D Rendering. Basing most of their features on openGL. By the way, rumor has it that one of these pro video boards was able to RENDER the Final Fantasy movie real time! Probably on a Solaris workstation.

"Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within Rendered in Real Time on NVIDIA GPUs
SIGGRAPH 2001 – LOS ANGELES — AUGUST 14, 2000 — The graphics industry took a quantum leap forward today at SIGGRAPH 2001 when NVIDIA® Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) rendered Columbia Pictures’ computer-generated (CG) animated motion picture, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, in real-time. This groundbreaking demonstration takes place in the NVIDIA booth (#1701) and SQUARE booth (#1927) using NVIDIA’s Quadro™ workstation graphics technology, the industry’s leading workstation 3D solutions. Square USA Inc. research and development division developed the software for the technology demo. The real-time demonstration was made possible by NVIDIA’s nfiniteFX™ shading technology, including vertex and pixel shaders, to overcome the technical challenges presented in creating realistic skin, hair, clothing and other organic attributes."

-Found on nVidia's news room section of their website

My theory: You want a mess of features, with the distinct possibility of conflicts, Pick ATI. You want a powerfull Video card, pick somebody that hasn't messed with TV tuners, and sound through-put, pick nVidia.

 

[midiman]

Re: Re: Anyone notice how ****ty Mac OS X.1 is?

Originally posted by Unregistered


At Last! we're getting to something more interesting than Quake's FPS count ;P. I noticed this too, A dual 1ghz G4 running osX.1.2 can scroll Appleworks pages HALF as fast as a 350 running 9.1 - Shockingly bad.

Have you actuallyl SEEN a dual gig machine? Because I have one, and it FLIES!!! Please spew your uninformed, "unregistered", opinions where they belong - in the recycle bin....er, trash can.

 

[Unregistered]

Re: Re: Re: Anyone notice how ****ty Mac OS X.1 is?

Or

 

[Unregistered]

Re: Anyone notice how ****ty Mac OS X.1 is?

Have you actuallyl SEEN a dual gig machine? Because I have one, and it FLIES!!! Please spew your uninformed, "unregistered", opinions where they belong - in the recycle bin....er, trash can.

No I haven't, I have seen the webpage quoted in the article though and it reports that a G4 800mhz/os9 can scroll 500 pages of text in appleworks in 32.73 seconds, and a G4 dualGig/osX takes 123.78 seconds. I was trying to point out that os X still lags big-time in key areas. Personally I spend more time scrolling documents, sizing windows etc. than playing quake. I was having a dig at os X's lacklustre performance DESPITE it running on the latest and greatest hardware. By the way "midiman" if you feel my "unregistered" opinions are trashworthy then why bother commenting on them?

 

[DavidCL23]

b/c midiman is a moron, lol!!!!

 

[Rocketman]

Originally posted by mcbane


Sorry, have to respond to this. It has been proven that the human eye can detect up to at least 80 fps. Tests were done in the military where frames would be shown at 80fps, and a single frame would contain some type of plane. The people could not only say that they saw the plane, but identify the make of it. So humans can see the 80fps.

You are getting it confused with the number of frames per sec in film and video. Video runs at 30fps, film at 24fps. This is okay because you factor in motion bluring and many other things. Added to the fact that, in video games, the frames have to match the twitch reflexes a person may throw at it, but in film it is not a person controlling the actions, so there is no sense of delay.

Another poster proposed targeting 100nhz vor visual arts.

I ask this, not being a big action game enthusiast.

If I wanted to harness all this power for, say 3 large screen displays for my mac, I would need 2 cards, right? 2 monitirs per card, full resolution, full bit depth, full speed.

I agree also that drivers need alot of hacking and improvement.

BTW a SMALL effort on drivers would make a HUGE difference to THOUSANDS of people, but admittedly with a small cash flow to the author.

Rocketman

😛

 

[Goose]

Visible Frame Rates

I don't know alot about frame rates within games, but I can shed some light on the human eye/frame rate thang.

This is kind of long, so bear with me here.

I'm not sure what the eyes' "maximum" perceptable fps is but:

The commonly used frame rates for video and films were produced as minimums, not maximums.

In the early days of films, 24 fps was set as a compromise between an acceptable smoothness of motion vs. the least amount of film to be shot. Mostly a financial decision.

In the early days of television the electronics were not advanced enough in consumer recievers to generate their own consistent frame rate, so they (the National Television Standards Commitee, or NTSC) locked the frame rate to the electrical current powering the set. The wall socket literally drove the frame rate. That is why we have 30fps (60 fields) here in the States (60 cycle AC) and 25fps (50 fields) in Europe (50 cycle AC).

People from the States who travel to Europe notice and are irritated by the lower field rate until they eyes become accustomed to it.

This then brings us to the main issue: frame rates and field rates.
There are two seperate issues at work.

You go to a movie and drop good money to see a 24fps film because at 24fps your brain accepts the motion as smooth enough to be believable. But if each frame were actually flashed on the screen at just 24fps, it would be unacceptably irritating
because there is a seperate issue at work. Your eyes/brain are far more sensitive to brief flashes of light than to motion So as each frame passes through the projector gate it is held and flashed twice on the screen via the mechanics of the projector. Thus what you could call an effective refresh rate of 48, close to European TV at 50 fields. Your eyes/brain see motion and light changes as two different things.

Which brings us to what fields are for.

If video frames were refreshed at 30fps you wouldn't watch it.
The flicker would be unacceptable (think strobe light). So they split the information in one frame across two 60 times per second "fields". Fields are like frames but contain only half the scan lines. All the odd scan lines were refreshed on one field and the even scan lines were refreshed on the other. That is called interlacing.
Thus a true rate of 60 fields per second but at half the resolution per frame. Also, unlike film, where the motion is fixed at 24fps, fields in video continue to update the motion at the 60 rate. This is a component of the esthetic look of film vs. video.

So you get to enjoy that new high bandwidth Quicktime Star Wars trailer over the internet at a smoothly moving 24fps while your computer screen refreshes at a much higher refresh rate to reduce any perceived light strobing. Also, your computer monitor is progressive scan, not interlaced, meaning it redraws every scan line with every refresh cycle, not just half the lines.

Whew!

Now onto higher frame rates.

If you are playing a game that is displayed on a TV (Playstation, etc.), no matter how fast the machine can produce frames, they will be downconverted to 30fps or 60 fields. If game boxes really have higher frame rates, the downconversion might look somewhat better because in video processing the quality going in affects the quality you get out. This can be seen if you watch something shot in one of the new HDTV formats downconverted to standard NTSC. It looks better than if it was shot NTSC.

Your computer screen refreshes at higher rates than TV's and may actually be able to display higher frame rates as well, but I'm just guessing there.

But,

I think the real issue for video cards and games is that as video cards get faster, game developers make the games visually more complex. The video card has to balance the frame rate of motion against its ability to process the pixels. If the game overwhelms the card, it can fall below a visually smooth motion frame rate of somewhere around 24fps and become jerky. This is a seperate issue from refresh rates on your monitor.

Lastly, a mention was made in this thread about higher frame rate films.
One of these formats is called "Showscan". It runs at 60fps and uses a large film format (70mm). It is used as a "Special Venue" medium. It is indeed exciting to watch, but the impact comes from a combination of frame rate and film frame size. A 70mm film frame has far far more detail than even 1080i HD. Your vision is blasted away by the information/detail being thrown at you by that combination of frame rate and frame size.

These alternate formats go back aways. In the 1950's, when film studios were trying to battle the loss of audiance to television, they tried alot of methods to make films more visually interesting. Vistavision, Cinerama, 3D (with the glasses) were a few. They also experimented with higher frame rates. The 1955 film "Oklahoma" was shot in a custom high frame rate format which I believe was 60fps. There were only a few projectors built to show this and the film ran in this format only at a few theaters. All the other theaters got 24fps standard reduction prints.
A few years ago, at an event I attended at the Directors' Guild in Los Angeles, they ran a short segment of the film on the only projector left that could show it. They don't even have a full print in the original 60fps format, just two reels, I think.
Even after 40 years, it was visually stunning. I swear, on the shot riding through the corn field to "Oh, What a Beautiful Day" you could see the detail on, and count every ear of corn in the shot.
The shot seemed alive.

PS

Maximimum frame rates for HDTV are:
60 frames progressive for the 720p format
30 frames (60 fields) interlaced for 1080i
and, everywhere I said video is 30fps, well it's really 29.97fps,
but that's another long story.

Enough hot air!

 

[Unregistered]

Whoever mentioned Doom III was right in bringing it up. Quake is old and while using it to bench new macs is okay, it is probably is not revealing that much about the hardware. Doom was tested a short while ago on top grade PCs (high 1.X Ghz, GeForce3, blah blah) whith all the effects turned on and it only ran at 15-30 FPS. The game tasks a comp so much that current hardware can't even handle it. Excessive pixel shading!!! They are waiting for more powerful chips and GPUs to come out before they can release the game. And for all those who say 70FPS is good enough for a FPS (and balk at 100-200FPS), you really need to play more games...
The human eye persistence of vision stuff is irrelevant. If you character is moving slower than another guy running at 150FPS, you are going to get hit in the head with a rocket.
goodbye...
=)

 

[tadpole]

RADEON 8500 KICKS NVIDIA

You guys want real numbers?

okay:
www.anandtech.com , they have a shootout of all the hottest cards. Radeon 8500 is on top for all except the absolute highest resolution but losing by less than 5% to Gf3 ti500.



READ THE FRIGG'N article before you macnuts flame me.

Also, ATI has hardware iDCT built in, functional DVD hardware decoding, unlike Nvidia. So if you want framerates and nice video, ATI is the way to go. I have the Radeon 7500 running two 17inch monitors at their maximum refresh. Its a nice setup.

If some jackass starts a flame war over this, there will be hell to be had, I may be a geek, but right now I'm a pissed off little geek, I'll eat ur freaking pocket protectors for breakfast if i have to, to prove a freaking point.

 

[sturm375]

Re: RADEON 8500 KICKS NVIDIA

Originally posted by tadpole
You guys want real numbers?

okay:
www.anandtech.com , they have a shootout of all the hottest cards. Radeon 8500 is on top for all except the absolute highest resolution but losing by less than 5% to Gf3 ti500.



READ THE FRIGG'N article before you macnuts flame me.

Also, ATI has hardware iDCT built in, functional DVD hardware decoding, unlike Nvidia. So if you want framerates and nice video, ATI is the way to go. I have the Radeon 7500 running two 17inch monitors at their maximum refresh. Its a nice setup.

If some jackass starts a flame war over this, there will be hell to be had, I may be a geek, but right now I'm a pissed off little geek, I'll eat ur freaking pocket protectors for breakfast if i have to, to prove a freaking point.

Just call me a J@ck@ss than. Oh and by the way I don't own any pocket-protectors.

Quote from artical's final words:
"With that said we have discovered a few interesting things through this initial investigation of performance:


1) The Radeon 8500 does exceptionally well, only losing out to the GeForce3 Ti 500 at the highest resolution. The only question that remains is whether the performance will remain high with the fog issues fixed.

2) The original GeForce3, although very expensive for those that were early adopters, ends up being one of the top performers out of today's GPUs. It's good to know that not all year old technology is obsolete.

3) If these results are any indication, moving forward, GPU clock will actually play a much more important role than it has in the past. A delicate balance between GPU clock and memory clock, such as what was made possible on the GeForce3, will be ideal to obtain.

4) The low-end ATI and NVIDIA solutions don't perform very well at all, thus making it worth while to upgrade to one of the higher end cards.

There are still some questions that remain unanswered, including how effective hardware T&L actually is on slower systems. This is just one of many topics that we will be covering as our investigation continues. "

Unless I am missing something here, it appears to me that the Geforce3 is nearly neck and neck with ATI's 8500, and exceeds ATI at Higer resolutions. Not only that, but ATI's card was just released a couple of months ago, while nVidia's was releeased 1 year ago. I have no doubt in my mind that when nVidia releases the non-MX version of the GeForce4, ATI will look like the Half-Fast(say it fast, you'll figure it out) card it is.😀

My name is Doug Logsdon
email: sturm@core.com

In the immortal words of "The Rock", "Just Bring IT!!"

 

[pc_convert?]

sturm375 wrote,
Also nVidia's foundation is in OpenGL, where ATI has just entered

nVidia's foundation is DirectX I believe. ATi maybe new to OpenGL but they have brought up FireGL - probably one of the most respected high end OpenGL card manufacturers. Expect this technology to incorporated into the Radeon with a couple of generations.

Disclamer: Economic Theory - Compitition
ATI is the only ones making ATI cards, no competition.
nVidia only makes the chipset, others make the boards. Lots of competition, brings about much better tech because all manufactures want theirs to be the best.

Actually ATi does have card partners, as stated here.

I dont' think there is a lot between Geforce/Radeon cards, expect the Radeon has better DVD decoding hardware.

 

[sturm375]

openGL Foundataion

Check out this site: http://www.opengl.org/users/apps_hardware/accelerators.html

It lists all the 3D Accelerator boards compliant with openGL. The first nVidia board I can remember is the TNT. If you look, the TNT is compliant. Also, like I said ATI's support started with the RAGE boards, specifically RAGE 128 GL and one integrated chipset.

More proof?:

"NVIDIA's RIVA TNT processor is the first high performance consumer desktop graphics accelerator that does everything right without having to make bone headed compromises," said Brian Hook at id Software. " Joining the ARB emphasizes NVIDIA's support for OpenGL, which in turn reinforces our confidence in OpenGL's future in the consumer space."

Taken from: http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=IO_20020114_5538