1 ghz Graphics Cards? Let me pick your brains!

Lucutus

Lo All...

We're getting close to the day when we will all be running very powerful graphics cards for gaming.

I know there's already very powerful gfx cards out there for workstation use, AutoCAD and 3dStudio etc. but something tells me *a little bird* that the power of some of these mainly OpenGL based and proprietary chipset based cards will be available kinda soon.

Does anyone know of, or has heard thru their vast array of contacts about graphics cards of this type?

I'm looking at people who are working for/in OEM manufacturing companies here who have access to 6/12 month 'roadmaps' etc.

Any thoughts on this and/or discussion welcome, I'm interested to know.

Luc

Dr_Teeth

Companies whose graphics cards up until now have never been used to run a single game will not suddenly burst onto the scene and 0wn Nvidia into the ground. The consumer space is a very separate market, needing a large investment of time and money in not only the hardware, but drivers, game developer support, API/technology envangelising etc etc.

Also note that the reason that 'professional' graphics systems are so fast is the HUGE amount of memory and processing chips that they are made up of. They're not faster because they're 'better' or more efficient than something Nvidia could come up with, they're faster because they're made of so many expensive components.

If you want to see what the next 6/12 months will look like for consumer graphics cards, look at what Nvidia, S3, ATI and Matrox have said they're planning to do.

Teeth.

Hobbes

Dr Teeth is right.

btw, Devore once wrote this cool piece on how technology appears to the consumer which sums it up nicely.

Can't remember where he posted it though (it wasn't on the boards).

Fidelis

£25,000 = 32 VSA 100 chips = a ridiculouly powerful card.
Called the Firebird or something totally different.

Void

You've missed an important point lads.
A professional PC graphics card (note: not talking about SGI jurassic park type stuff) - FireGL or whatever, costs about a grand and is "very powerful". HOWEVER, you will get much less FPS with it in Q3 than with a GeForce 2 which costs about 1/10th the price. www.tomshardware.com explained all this. Professional graphics card are designed to do different stuff than games cards.

For example, the Nvidia Quaddro. This is actually the "same" (??close??) chip as the GeForce2, but the GeForce2 has some features disabled, preventing it being used as a CAD gfx card. The TNT had line antialiasing, the GeForce 2 does too but it's disabled on the hardware. Wierd, but games don't really use line antialiasing, and CAD programs do, so Nvidia get to market their Quaddro to the professional market.

[This message has been edited by Void (edited 12-01-2001).]

Lucutus

Interesting Void, never saw where Tomshardware.com explained that before, however, I did suspect that it would be the case...

Void, knowing that yer into this sort of stuff, would you be interested in a Quatro 2 at a knockdown price?

Luc

_CreeD_

Or perhaps the relatively simple hack to turn a std. Geforce2 to A Quatro2.
One or 2 bits of soldering involved....

It's on the web somewhere....

[This message has been edited by _CreeD_ (edited 12-01-2001).]

Gerry

yeah, you should look at tomshardware. They review the new diamond fire professional opengl card. It has way lower clock speed and texture rate, the quadro even has more theoretical polygon throughput. But in practise, the diamond card, which uses an ibm chip, destroys the quadro in every opengl benchmark. tomshardware have excellent articles explaining the differences between the cards which accelerate a subset of opengl for games, and full opengl cards.

Void

Heheh, thanks for the offer lads, but I wouldn't have any need for a "professional" card. I know jack about 3d studio type stuff, I'm a programmer not an artist (god knows, I SHOULD know more about it though...). I might look for that soldering trick though....cheers. Actually, what's a "knockdown price"? *whistle* I'll give ya a score for it.

Disclaimer:
Necrosoft Corporation in no way endorse Nvidia products yaddayaddayadda.

[This message has been edited by Void (edited 12-01-2001).]