Creative
Labs 3D Blaster GeForce256
"Annihilator"
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Geometry
Performance
The
GeForce256 have a quad engine design utilizing a
QuadPipe pixel pipeline. The TNT2 have 2 engines
and 2 pipelines that can to 1 UV 4-tap, which would
result in one bilinear texture application per
cycle, per pipeline. The GeForce256 have 2 engines
and 4 pipelines, doing 1UV 8-tap, which results in
one Anisotropic texture application per cycle, per
pipeline. When discussing 32bpp rendering Creative
Labs confirmed that there would be a hit when going
from 16bpp to 32bpp, albeit not as large as found
on the TNT2 (we're not talking just 5 fps
here).
The
Transform engine is capable of 15 million
triangles/sec. The Lighting engine is dot product
based and is used with vertex lighting and is
capable of doing 1 ambient and 1 directed light in
full speed. Add more lights and performance will
start to go down. When running a game on a typical
CPU the processing power is split
between:
50% for graphics
calculations, 25% of these are dominated by T&L
calculations.
20-30% for computer AI.
20% general purpose I/O (audio, disk-writes
etc).
A few percent for when Windows screws up. ;)
With T&L on-board, you will get around 20% of
the CPU time back. Not exactly the 50%+ many
thought (or wanted), but remember, it's still much
better than what the competition can/will offer
(apart from S3).
Drivers
At
the press event, beta drivers where used and thus
the performance can only get better from that day
and on. Creative Labs are currently working on RC1
of their drivers and hopefully they'll be done
before their October schedule passes. They said
that they wouldn't ship a GeForce256 with
unfinished drivers, lacking bundle and/or other
faults.
We
too noticed that the drivers were very buggy when
the demos were showcased. During three occasions
the computer completely locked and reboot was
necessary. Of course, Creative Labs blamed the
instability on the drivers (actually the
mis-interaction between the way-too-frequently
updated DirectX/3D drivers and the beta nVIDIA
driver software) maybe heat had something to do
with it also?
General
Specifications
Graphics Core -
120MHz
Memory size - 32MB
Memory speed - peak 183MHz, default clocked at
166MHz.
No TV-Out (for the European version)
Sub $300 price (the upper sub $300
range)
What
may surprise many is the fact that TV-Output has
been dropped (at least in the European version) in
order to compromise the price. GeForce256 boasts
good video playback quality and excellent DVD
support, but how fun is it to watch a DVD on your
15" monitor? We would have loved to see a TV-O
connector and all the hype on great video etc makes
you go "blah!". But the price is definitely a big
issue, and the board is already expensive as it is.
Adding an additional 32Mb of on-board memory would
raise the price to the sub $400 level and make it a
very unattractive purchase for many of us. Two full
games will be shipped with the 3DBlaster
GeForce256, both ready to take advantage of
T&L. At the time of the press event what two
games would be bundled were still not fully
finalized. The question of shipping date was also
mentioned, and Creative Labs confirmed an early
October release date and reserving a few days in
each direction. Which mean that you should expect
Creative Labs GeForce256 boards around Sept 26th -
Oct 5th. But who knows...
Real
World Performance
Creative
Labs showed us a whole array of GeForce256 demos,
all of them mainly showing the T&L capabilities
plus a few new features such as Cube Environment
mapping. A few of the demos had framerate counters
and Creative Labs said that they were pretty
accurate counters. With most of the demos, we saw a
rather constant frame rate of 30FPS - with the
default features on and at default polygon rates.
In the fire truck demo, which contains 100k
polygons, the GeForce256 tugged along at roughly
15FPS, not the most impressive score albeit
anything else on the market would do that demo much
slower.
With
the introduction of their TNT2 Ultra board,
Creative Labs talked how important it was for
graphics chips to achieve a constant frame rate of
60FPS, which the TNT2 Ultra could actually do in
many games. This time around, they've completely
"forgotten" about their 60FPS commitment and when I
talked to some Creative Labs officials they indeed
confirmed that with the GeForce256, focus is now on
scene complexity and not 60FPS.
The
great benefit of the GeForce256 is that you can use
a slower CPU and still get the same performance,
and you can also run at a much higher
scene-complexity and still obtain the same FPS. But
when the question of fill rate performance arose,
Creative Labs were not shy to say that they would
most probably lose to 3dfx.
"When speaking
strictly about fill rate, we won't beat
3dfx."
This quote
brought forth a surprised faces amongst us. We felt
an urge to pop the inevitable question and decided
not to hold it back.
"Quake3,
1600x1200 32bpp, highest detail setting.
30FPS?"
We
expected (and wanted) a quick YES but that was not
the case. In fact they said that is has "most
probably not going to happen" but quickly added
that performance would indeed increase with final
drivers and final silicon. So you won't be able to
run Quake3 at 1600x1200 resolution, but who cares
anyway? They reported that Carmack was working on
adding an additional notch to the "detail lever"
for GeForce256 owners to enjoy. (*drool*
;)
Quake2
was also under discussion, and here the GeForce256
did much better. Creative reported that they had
Quake2 running at 170FPS in 1024x768 16bpp and no
AA. Pretty damn impressive.
With
GeForce256 in your machine, you would be more
likely to play at "lower" resolutions (1024x768)
but at a higher scene complexity. You won't
experience sudden boosts or slowdowns in the games
due to polygon intensity, rather you will have a
constant FPS set by the GeForce256 bottlenecks -
fill rate and memory bandwidth. Creative Labs said
that the time fill rate reached 1 gigapixel/sec you
would no longer worry about that and you can
basically do everything (fill rate wise). When that
happens, focus will truly be set on on-board
T&L and geometry performance. Until then you
will still be fill rate bottlenecked.
Overclocking
Many
have wondered why the graphics core is set to
120MHz and the main reason is heat and stability
(which go hand in hand anyway). With 23 million
transistors on board you will definitely have a lot
of heat. T&L computations on-board will also
account for the lower clock speed. The memory has a
peak of 183Mhz but Creative Labs will down clock it
to 166MHz to insure total stability.
This
time around, nVidia have not supplied manufacturers
with the solution on how to overclock the
GeForce256 as they did with the TNT2. What's the
reason for this? They don't want the same thing to
happen with the GeForce256 as with the TNT2,
meaning that many companies shipped TNT2 boards at
ridiculous clock speeds while just getting a small
yield. Creative Labs confirmed that their R&D
team have successfully figured out how to overclock
the GeForce256 and an overclocking slider will be
supplied with the 3D Blaster GeForce256. How much
you can overclock depends highly on the game. Dough
Hopkins explained that there are roughly 100 - 500
pipeline stages depending on what you do. When
overclocking, there is no chance for Creative Labs
to know where in those stages things might go
wrong. For a game that doesn't utilize T&L you
might be able to overclock the GeForce256 by 10MHz
(or more?) but in other games using other features
you might not be able to overclock at all. One
thing is certain though, the GeForce256 runs very
hot, and you barely survive with the on-board fan
and heatsink. So if you want to try and overclock a
GeForce256 card make sure you have efficient and
powerful cooling.
At
the end of the day, Creative Labs had made things
rather clear for us. In fill rate dependent games,
"Voodoo4" would most probably be faster, but in
polygon intensive games you will see GeForce256
taking the lead. The question remain, how many
games will we see take use of the awesome T&L
performance found in the GeForce256?
Conclusion
As
Creative Labs did not show any real game
benchmarks, we cannot give a good judgement on how
fast the card will be with real games. But a lot
have been said and it is very wise to wait for a
3dfx press release on their Voodoo4 before deciding
on what card you will buy. 3dfx have had a
reputation as the "kings of fill rate", whether
they will prove their position to the world has yet
to be seen with a Voodoo4 Press Release.
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