I am starting to wonder whether SLi was "created" due to bandwidth needs, or the need to sell two cards instead of one... Why don't they just spend money on GPU research, or memory speed..?
Personally, I can't wait for realtime bicubic interpolation when scaling down for SSAA ...
How about if they let us pick our own convolution kernel for custom realtime filtering?
If only all photoshop/premeir functions were fully accelerated on GPUs ...
But I digress ... these guys have enough to do that would actually enhance the end user's visual experience in a significant way before the tiny little details are tackled ...
Hmm ... I wonder if it's possible to write a shader program to do bicubic interpolation to resample a hires image to fit the display ...
Frankly, I'm really hopeful that with the big two fighting over SSAA, that we'll see a return to SSAA being an option in the high-end market; while MSAA was a necessity due to speed, I still pine for SSAA on the days I'm not video card limited.
We'll have to wait till we get the hardware to really see if it's all fluff, but I suspect that we will be able to see a good bit of difference in places multisampling doesn't help.
You get two extra benefits from 4xMS + 4xSS AA -- the 4xSS AA applies to the entire scene -- all textures. This improves the look of textures that alias easily. Granted, this is not as much a problem as mipmapping and anisotropic filtering vertually eliminate the problem.
But (oddly, as ATI pointed out to us) we also see a benefit of sharper anisotropic filtering with increased levels of SSAA. This is because textures at SS subtexels can have AF applied to them. Using 16x AF and 16x AA we would end up with each pixel inside a polygon the result of 4 subpixels that have had 16x AF applied to them. As ATI has told us that their implimentation essentially double the number of AF sample point, could we call NVIDIA's solution 64x AF? Honestly, I doubt that the result of 16x AF and 16x AA (in terms of AF) will result in the same image as 64 AF, but quality will certainly be increased.
But the final measure will be in visual impact. We just want to wait to test it to make the final call.
By the way -- If NVIDIA named their AA modes the same way that ATI is naming theirs, current 8xAA would be called 10xAA, and their 16xAA would be refered to as 20xAA ... Just to make that clear.
That is retarded. AA and AF sort of work like an exponential function; once you get so far, the increased image detail is so sharp that you're not going to notice any further increases in sharpness. 4x AA looks pretty sharp. 8x hardly looks any better. 16x is going to be very hard to distinguish between against 8x, and it's hard enough seeing a difference between 8x and 4x. Therefore, this is merely marchitecture at its finest. Who cares?!
Higher AA modes than 8x have been available for nvidia cards since a very long time by using external tools like ATUNER.I´ve been playing with 16xAA, 2x2 SSAA and even 4x4 SSAA (that´s 16 supersampling samples!!!) and they all work! For 4x4 SSAA SLI is recommended, but it looks absolutely fabulous.
Just check out www.3dcenter.de, there you can find atuner.
In related news, ATI announces 17xAA for CrossFire, which is followed by nVidia's 18.5xAA announcement for SLI. Questioned on how they will acheive 18.5xAA, nVidia said 'We'll let you know when we figure it out". ATI quickly counters with a 21.99113xAA announcement, though they admit it won't really be available until they add their PI-based rendering engine in late 2005. NVidia ups the ante almost immediately with their Multi-Super-Quincunx 96x AA method that will require 4 dual-core GeForce 8900 Ultra cards. Questioned about frame rate, nVidia said 'Frame Rate? We don't need no stinking Frame Rate! We've got 96xAA!". ATI is left strangely silent...
"If performance takes more than a 20% hit when 16AA is enabled, then I fail to see how this would be a feature worth trumpeting."
Because if you've already got mucho excess FPS, your game will look better while remaining smooth. I think I can spare a frame or three in older games.
"it's a much harder sell to convince a customer that 16AA is worth $500 more than 4AA"
Except SLI doesn't have to cost $500 more, or even near it, unless you want it to. Especially if you were upgrading mobo anyhow. And remember, just because SLI exists, you're not required to buy both cards today. You can have one of todays great cards (maybe a 6600?), and get a second one down the line for much less, instead of buying today's $500 card and losing it to next year's $500 card.
"Now, if they can guarantee increased frame rates along with the extra image quality (compared to a non-SLI setup) ... that would be something worth hanging a hat on."
I think that's a pretty safe bet.
If performance takes more than a 20% hit when 16AA is enabled, then I fail to see how this would be a feature worth trumpeting.
You wouldn't want the framerate penalty for 16AA to cause your 2x WhizBang SLI to perform about as well as a 1x WhizBang set at 4AA. After all, it's a much harder sell to convince a customer that 16AA is worth $500 more than 4AA.
Now, if they can guarantee increased frame rates along with the extra image quality (compared to a non-SLI setup) ... that would be something worth hanging a hat on.
Did anyone try to convince Nvidia that their time would be better spent improving driver compatibility than adding complexity to the driver? Honestly, they will only be increasing the number of things broken in the driver just so they can match ATI's AA marketing maneuver.
I won't be getting Crossfire nor SLi. The fundamental problems of high power consumption, noise and heat is not making the solutions attractive enough to me.
#3 - It's only a dead end if you don't have the extra cash to buy two video cards. Really, what games reasonably require that kind of processing power, and should anyone be so devoted to a computer game that they invest so much money and time to it? I'm not at all convinced pc games are a healthy form of activity for young or old. Flame if you will but I feel like a recovering UT2003/4 gamer. Whenever I see it on screen I just want to join in on the carnage.
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18 Comments
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Crucify - Monday, June 20, 2005 - link
I am starting to wonder whether SLi was "created" due to bandwidth needs, or the need to sell two cards instead of one... Why don't they just spend money on GPU research, or memory speed..?patrick0 - Tuesday, June 14, 2005 - link
Doss that mean I need a SLI setup to use 16x AA? I just ordered a 7800GTX, are they saying those 24-pipelines aren't suficient?Sabresiberian - Tuesday, June 14, 2005 - link
#4 Just because you are a gaming addict doesn't mean everyone else is :) Congratulations on being in recovery!Also, Everquest 2 can benefit from SLI or Crossfire. No games 'require' such of course, but it's not about 'require' for enthusiasts.
JarredWalton - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
14 - If you figure that one out, Derek, write it as a plugin for Photoshop and you can probably make a decent amount of money selling it! ;)DerekWilson - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
Ahh ... if quality were the only concern :-)Personally, I can't wait for realtime bicubic interpolation when scaling down for SSAA ...
How about if they let us pick our own convolution kernel for custom realtime filtering?
If only all photoshop/premeir functions were fully accelerated on GPUs ...
But I digress ... these guys have enough to do that would actually enhance the end user's visual experience in a significant way before the tiny little details are tackled ...
Hmm ... I wonder if it's possible to write a shader program to do bicubic interpolation to resample a hires image to fit the display ...
/me runs off to read his orange book
ViRGE - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
Frankly, I'm really hopeful that with the big two fighting over SSAA, that we'll see a return to SSAA being an option in the high-end market; while MSAA was a necessity due to speed, I still pine for SSAA on the days I'm not video card limited.DerekWilson - Sunday, June 12, 2005 - link
#11 --We'll have to wait till we get the hardware to really see if it's all fluff, but I suspect that we will be able to see a good bit of difference in places multisampling doesn't help.
You get two extra benefits from 4xMS + 4xSS AA -- the 4xSS AA applies to the entire scene -- all textures. This improves the look of textures that alias easily. Granted, this is not as much a problem as mipmapping and anisotropic filtering vertually eliminate the problem.
But (oddly, as ATI pointed out to us) we also see a benefit of sharper anisotropic filtering with increased levels of SSAA. This is because textures at SS subtexels can have AF applied to them. Using 16x AF and 16x AA we would end up with each pixel inside a polygon the result of 4 subpixels that have had 16x AF applied to them. As ATI has told us that their implimentation essentially double the number of AF sample point, could we call NVIDIA's solution 64x AF? Honestly, I doubt that the result of 16x AF and 16x AA (in terms of AF) will result in the same image as 64 AF, but quality will certainly be increased.
But the final measure will be in visual impact. We just want to wait to test it to make the final call.
By the way -- If NVIDIA named their AA modes the same way that ATI is naming theirs, current 8xAA would be called 10xAA, and their 16xAA would be refered to as 20xAA ... Just to make that clear.
Gerbil333 - Sunday, June 12, 2005 - link
That is retarded. AA and AF sort of work like an exponential function; once you get so far, the increased image detail is so sharp that you're not going to notice any further increases in sharpness. 4x AA looks pretty sharp. 8x hardly looks any better. 16x is going to be very hard to distinguish between against 8x, and it's hard enough seeing a difference between 8x and 4x. Therefore, this is merely marchitecture at its finest. Who cares?!tombman - Friday, June 10, 2005 - link
Higher AA modes than 8x have been available for nvidia cards since a very long time by using external tools like ATUNER.I´ve been playing with 16xAA, 2x2 SSAA and even 4x4 SSAA (that´s 16 supersampling samples!!!) and they all work! For 4x4 SSAA SLI is recommended, but it looks absolutely fabulous.Just check out www.3dcenter.de, there you can find atuner.
johnsonx - Friday, June 10, 2005 - link
In related news, ATI announces 17xAA for CrossFire, which is followed by nVidia's 18.5xAA announcement for SLI. Questioned on how they will acheive 18.5xAA, nVidia said 'We'll let you know when we figure it out". ATI quickly counters with a 21.99113xAA announcement, though they admit it won't really be available until they add their PI-based rendering engine in late 2005. NVidia ups the ante almost immediately with their Multi-Super-Quincunx 96x AA method that will require 4 dual-core GeForce 8900 Ultra cards. Questioned about frame rate, nVidia said 'Frame Rate? We don't need no stinking Frame Rate! We've got 96xAA!". ATI is left strangely silent...fishbits - Friday, June 10, 2005 - link
"If performance takes more than a 20% hit when 16AA is enabled, then I fail to see how this would be a feature worth trumpeting."Because if you've already got mucho excess FPS, your game will look better while remaining smooth. I think I can spare a frame or three in older games.
"it's a much harder sell to convince a customer that 16AA is worth $500 more than 4AA"
Except SLI doesn't have to cost $500 more, or even near it, unless you want it to. Especially if you were upgrading mobo anyhow. And remember, just because SLI exists, you're not required to buy both cards today. You can have one of todays great cards (maybe a 6600?), and get a second one down the line for much less, instead of buying today's $500 card and losing it to next year's $500 card.
"Now, if they can guarantee increased frame rates along with the extra image quality (compared to a non-SLI setup) ... that would be something worth hanging a hat on."
I think that's a pretty safe bet.
Houdani - Friday, June 10, 2005 - link
If performance takes more than a 20% hit when 16AA is enabled, then I fail to see how this would be a feature worth trumpeting.You wouldn't want the framerate penalty for 16AA to cause your 2x WhizBang SLI to perform about as well as a 1x WhizBang set at 4AA. After all, it's a much harder sell to convince a customer that 16AA is worth $500 more than 4AA.
Now, if they can guarantee increased frame rates along with the extra image quality (compared to a non-SLI setup) ... that would be something worth hanging a hat on.
Tanclearas - Friday, June 10, 2005 - link
Did anyone try to convince Nvidia that their time would be better spent improving driver compatibility than adding complexity to the driver? Honestly, they will only be increasing the number of things broken in the driver just so they can match ATI's AA marketing maneuver.AnnihilatorX - Friday, June 10, 2005 - link
I won't be getting Crossfire nor SLi. The fundamental problems of high power consumption, noise and heat is not making the solutions attractive enough to me.bupkus - Friday, June 10, 2005 - link
#3 - It's only a dead end if you don't have the extra cash to buy two video cards. Really, what games reasonably require that kind of processing power, and should anyone be so devoted to a computer game that they invest so much money and time to it? I'm not at all convinced pc games are a healthy form of activity for young or old. Flame if you will but I feel like a recovering UT2003/4 gamer. Whenever I see it on screen I just want to join in on the carnage.Brian23 - Friday, June 10, 2005 - link
I still think SLI is a dead end solution.Quintin - Thursday, June 9, 2005 - link
It's good to see SLI getting some competitionBlackMamba - Thursday, June 9, 2005 - link
Sounds good, but here's hoping the performance is decent too.