Saw Nvidia, saw ATI, seen Geforce, seen Radeon: no big deal actually... Radeon is better in terms of quality, but on par, or even worse in terms of drivers compatibility.

Belive-it or not, it's not a problem of how the textures are handeled. Unrealistic textures happend because everyone pushes the limits of textures size more and more, and most of the textures are designed by computer programmers, rather than coming from real life. And when you draw a leaf, no matter how much you try, it will still be a computer generated leaf, and it's never as near to the reality.

To demontate some miths. Interleaving means the creation of one screen from 2 or more sources. Basically, in a 2 chips system, one will draw all the odd lines, the other the rest. In 4 or more chips, 1 in 4 lines are handled by each chip. It does not improve quality but speed, doubling or quadrupeling, or even more...

Still, believe it or not, the main problem these days, if a game runs well on a voodoo (no graphic corruption), sometimes the difference between 3dfx and Nvidia gets less evident, because when both has to create the same jagged and blurry textures (aleready worse), some good filtering (even the best and precise), still offers an unpleasant result. Eg: you can't put a rocket inside a car, and turn it into a space shuttle. Even if it's faster than any car, still is not air-tight to live in space...

Games are mostly worse than they were 3 or more years, because there are less and less enthusiastic, trained people, that are left to work on long-term projects. All that is important these days is how fast they can finish a game, and how it costs them less... In this cases quality may be resonable for ones, but for the others who have seen and enjoyed the state of the art quality, it's just crap...

Radeon are quality wise: at least the FSAA is better, faster, and the texture seem to be less blurry than on Nvidia. But when you try a game as MS Train Simulator and Radeon fails with a crash when you try to see the winter with snow, it's more than strange. And another, not so praised card, S3 Pro SavageDDR, has no problem with running the game with snow, and it looks less blurry than the Radeon...

Also, to confuse even more, older games like those for Dx7 don't work properly, and some of the games run misteriously faster on the opengl than on d3d, even if most of most of the cards (that you buy for a PC, not for CAD), are first DX compliant, then OpenGL.

Also, the good old Unreal Tournament is a good test for how compliant the cards are: GeForce make for some strange Z-buffer problems and flicker when moving near lights, Radeon is having problems with the detail textures, which appear and dissapear sometimes, and even the overall look is not very good.

On contrast, you have to admit that each and every card runs extremely whell on 3dMark2001, Quake3. Never seen a card to have problems with these tests, since Quake3 and 3DMark is what sells the card. A few fps more in these games and the PC magzines notice and give 10+ score. Better performance in a game as NFS HP2 would bring no reviews.

More, all the cards can do a type of BumpMapping, and although it is a basic thing that enhances the realism in games (used in Max Payne, Slave Zero), hasn't been used in race games, in fps (Quake3, Unreal Tournament 2003 seems to lack it also, Alien vs Predator). Even a simple 1 channel bump mapping can increase the realism when you look at a paved footpath.

To make problems even more complex, lot of games use 32 bit color, but as a test proved on the Banshee, nor the Quake3, nor the Vice City nor the Serious Sam (1 or 2), put such a big difference when changing from 16 to 32 bits on another card than 3dfx. On 3dfx, even if no 32 bit is available, the filtering and way of working makes that you see no artefacts on smoke and fire, even if Nvidia and ATI are doing it...

Most of the games are 24 bit color, not 32 bit. 24 bit means 8 8 8 in R G B. The 32 bit mean that an alpha channel would exist in the parameeters, and you would see realistic bump-mapping, different as the light is casted on the object, which obviously never used in a game until now... So true 32 bit games were near sure never released until now, with the danger of broking some hearts...

In fact, mostly important is to have a constant, or as near to constant number of frames per second, rather than a fluctuating one. It is better to have a nice 30 fps all the time, rather than a go from 60 to 100 downto 13.

There exists good example of games that have constant framerate, and with a decent accelerated D3D card, it would go very fluent: GTA2, on a Vodoo, no matter if it is V2, V3... This game run extremely fast (over 60fps) on a Banshee with a CPU at 450Mhz AMD. Setting the framerate limiter, everyting is very nice.

I doubt that today games can run similarly, even on the best CPU/GPU combination. Games are just not designed in the way they used to be...

But you can't win the competition with others, when everyone sticks to number rather than near reality, and good sense...

To bring back the talk with the color depth...
3dfx intended to release the Rampage using 52 bit internal color processing. They knew very whell that this would be "photorealistic" quality. And the funny thing is that the 52 as oposed to 32 bit color depth wouldn't bring any performance penalty (as 22 bit did no overall stress over 16 bit in the Vodoo2/3 days).

What is interesting is that 3dfx was aiming to enter with very big respect into the high-end professional market, since Rampage could do in hardware some Adobe Photoshop effects, and probably it would have evolved to bring us near 3DMax full acceleration...

256 bits... If everyone would want to do that, the only reason would be to show how big they are. Think about the days in which Nvidia pushed 32 bits with the TNT/TNT2. No matter how much magazines will reccomend, 32 bits bring the TNT to loose more than twice the speed and bring maybe 10% more quality. but the 22 bit filter of Voodoo: 50% more quality, 1% performance penalty. So with 256 bits, the producer will only find a mean to push ultra-fast memory and GPU bandwidth into the market. Results may be nearly 0 in terms of true visual output, but the costs will be so big, that luckly competition will vanish in front of the large numbers of buyers that push eachother to buy, in the big numbers race. You will need 10 times more speed (fillrate, texture space, bandwidth), to use 256 bit colors reliably.

And when we think that the 8-bit color game consoles bring so much fun, and they were so cheap, 256 bit colors seems a huge stupid stress, with no real proof, very costly, wastefull...

<quote>How to enable 22 bit filter in V3s ?
Bye ! </quote>

Go into your 3dfx Advanced Features, and in the Direct3d and Opengl/Glide settings, change the 3d Filter Quality to High and the Alpha Blending to Sharper.

IMHO, those 96, 128, and maybe soon 256bit internal accuracy are only needed to allow complex Shader Programs to run without rounding errors affecting colours (they don't require equivalent Texture Colordepth of course, which would make Textures waaaay to big to handle).

Still, even the latest available DirectX9 Cards are far from using anything exceeding 40-50 consecutive Shader commands (they're still too slow for more complex operations).

I agree, one always has to check the fine line between true, usefull "Gamer's Happiness" (3dfx style) and pure Marketing (the NVidia way currently)