Friday, March 19th 2010
NVIDIA Claims Upper Hand in Tessellation Performance
A set of company slides leaked to the press reveals that NVIDIA is claiming the upper hand in tessellation performance. With this achievement, NVIDIA is looking to encourage leaps in geometric detail, probably in future games that make use of tessellation. NVIDIA's confidence comes from the way its GF100 GPU is designed (further explained here). Each GF100 GPU physically has 16 Polymorph Engines, one per streaming multiprocessor (SM) which helps in distributed, parallel geometry processing. Each Polymorph Engine has its own tessellation unit. With 15 SMs enabled on the GeForce GTX 480 and 14 on the GeForce GTX 470, there are that many independent tessellation units.
NVIDIA demonstrated its claims in the presentation using the Unigine Heaven, where the GeForce GTX 480 was pitted against a Radeon HD 5870. In many scenes where tessellation is lower, the GPUs performed neck-and-neck, with the GTX 480 performing better more often. But in scenes with heavy tessellation (particularly the "dragon" scene, where a highly detailed model of a dragon needs to be rendered with densely tessellated meshes, the GTX 480 clocks nearly a 100% performance increment over the HD 5870. NVIDIA has been confident about the tessellation performance back since January, when it detailed the GF100 architecture. The GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards will be unveiled on the 26th of March.
Images Courtesy: Techno-Labs
NVIDIA demonstrated its claims in the presentation using the Unigine Heaven, where the GeForce GTX 480 was pitted against a Radeon HD 5870. In many scenes where tessellation is lower, the GPUs performed neck-and-neck, with the GTX 480 performing better more often. But in scenes with heavy tessellation (particularly the "dragon" scene, where a highly detailed model of a dragon needs to be rendered with densely tessellated meshes, the GTX 480 clocks nearly a 100% performance increment over the HD 5870. NVIDIA has been confident about the tessellation performance back since January, when it detailed the GF100 architecture. The GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards will be unveiled on the 26th of March.
145 Comments on NVIDIA Claims Upper Hand in Tessellation Performance
If they were faster in games, they'd be advertising that - and they arent.
Fermi looks like its still going to be a massive fail.
3D gaming is awesome and until you experience it first hand, you have no idea what your talking about or smoking. The glasses are not that expensive and I have yet to hear one of my friends (both male and female) say 3D gaming is not amazing on my 56" DLP.
I agree that Nvidia dropped the ball this round. But your other statements make absolutely no sense and you're a fanboy. Owned. :slap:
They sucked then, and they suck now.
Multi monitor gaming is not as bad as you think it is, LCD's have fairly thin bezels, and thats the point of running 3 monitors - you dont have a bezel in front of you, you just have extra peripheral vision if you turn your head.
Am i interested in 3 monitors for FPS games? no, not at all. But at the same time i know just how flawed 3D gaming is and how problematic it is. Its doomed to failure all over again.
Heres a few facts: it requires 120Hz screens, and your in game FPS to be 120 (or in some cases, just 60FPS doubled) - thats a CONSTANT 60FPS, not a max, not an average. you drop your FPS to 30, and you're getting a nauseating slideshow.
it requires powered 3D glasses to use - that means batteries or corded. they're expensive, and a pain to replace should they break.
DirectX 10 has no way to force refresh rates, i assume DX11 is the same. That means in most games you play these days, you cant force 120Hz - so 3D wont work (this ofc may get fixed over time... but its taken several years now, so i dont see it happening any time soon)
Again. Perhaps you should try it now. I have a GTX 285 FTW from EVGA and my E8500 OC'd to 3.8 GHz. Works great with 3D gaming like I mentioned above. Sadly, I think I'll sit out this round until the next gen of cards that are worth the price. My GFX card is awesome and runs great with everything except Crysis.
I'm waiting for some real reviews before I make any judgement. Personally, if they both perform equally in DX10 games, I don't care as they will both destroy DX10 games. I'm more interested in DX11 performance, mainly tessellation, so if the GTX280/270 is better at that, then that IMO is the imporant thing.
I am not a fan of 3D glasses, I think its stupid that you have to where glasses to play games IMO. Some may like it and others may not. What would be interesting is if they can do it without wearing glasses.
Just like 3D HDTV's which companies are trying to sell to us, it stinks and I hope it fails unless they stop ripping us off by forcing us to pay $300+ for one pair of 3D glasses. Most if not all HDTV's out today can already do 3D "WITHOUT" 3D glasses. That is what they should be pushing for, not this nonesense 3D glasses and so called 3D HDTV's.
3D Glasses Tech is such a gimmick, it was just a money stealing technique when you can make your own 3D glasses tech for about 25 Cents?you can include no Vista and 7 Support for NF2 and 3 motherboards from them either (greedy Bastards)
If you ever tried 3D gaming you would be absolutely amazed. Games like Bioshock (wow), Left 4 Dead, Mirrors Edge, Crysis (low), etc ... the list goes on. They all run at 120 fps so they run very smooth in 3D. Like I said, eveyone guy and girl I've had over my place just to whitness it was absolutely stunned, like me. You absolutely must try it.
I can't understand why you're saying you hope it fails. I hope it catches ground if anything.
There is a possibility of having 3D without glasses. I forget which company showcased it at some trade show (maybe Samsung) but it was preliminary and still a ways off from mainstream production. Without glasses would be much better, I agree with you there.
I have no idea where you're getting $300 for glasses. Mine cost me $50 for one pair for the tridef setup. Shop around and you'd be amazed what you could find.
multimonitor never took off in games because until now, very very few (matrox only really) video cards allowed THREE monitor at once. HD5K is the first gaming grade cards to offer that, so you dont have a gap right smack bang where your crosshair would be in an FPS game.
so you're saying you can run all those games at 120FPS constant, at what resolution and settings, on what hardware?
I specifically mentioned DX10 and 11 for both performance and refresh rate reasons and you told me that yours works fine - but if you're in XP, you cant use DX10 or 11.
Please dont try and tell us everything is awesome and great, when you arent running at even medium graphics (DX10) in modern games.
(stalker CoP, Metro 2033 and bad company 2 all offer DX9, 10 and 11 modes - and DX11 is the best looking and most demanding in all of them)
Tell me what I'm majorly missing from DX10 & DX11 from DX9. My buddy has Windows 7 and an ATI 5850 card. Far Cry 2 looks "barely" better in DX10. Halo 2 looks like a high rez X360 version in DX10. It's another game that could have been done in DX9 (and others have made it work on DX9 on the net) but it was a ploy by MS to push Vista, just like Crysis "Very High" mode which is easily done on DX9 with a few changes to the files. We both have BC2 also, and I do see a little bit of a difference in DX11. But not enough to make me excited. Actually, I'll bet Dice could have made it look just as good under DX9 but they didn't try perhaps because of MS. Heck, FSAA isn't possible in BC2 in DX9, and that's just BS in my book because it runs better on my PC than my friend's without FSAA on either system. FSAA in DX9 is possible in the rest of the games I own.
I have no interest in stalker CoP, Metro 2033 , or the new AVP game. Maybe DIRT2 but I'll wait until later this year / next year when I upgrade and I'm sure it will be packaged with the DX11 card I buy. Look at people's opinions around the web on DX11 games thus far. People aren't that enthused about how much "better" games look compared to the DX9 version, nor how much slower they run.
All my games that are DX9 I run at max settings with at least 2XFSAA (except Crysis) and they run at a very fluid frame rate without slowdown. I don't have any games that are DX8 or below installed on my system. Only DX9.
Until we see the Xbox 720 & PS4 we are stuck at a stalemate for mainstream technology progression.