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At the weekend, I downloaded and tried out every demo nVidia have ever
made. (Well, except for the first one, which wouldn't download. And the
last few, which require a GeForce 8 series.)
The first one was literally a crystal ball. In other words, they were
showing off using environment mapping to simulate reflection. Hmm. Oh
well, it does say "Requires GeForce 2 or better"...
Anyway, actually most of the demos were pretty unimpressive. I mean, I'm
sure they're technically quite advanced. But not much fun to look at.
It wasn't until I reached "Dawn" that I was impressed. That's one pretty
impressive fairy. (Um... and the reason she's wearing almost nothing
is...? Hmm, I wonder who their target demographic is? *wink*) Her sister
"Dusk" is impressive too.
And then we have "Nalu", the mermaid. Fairly technically-impressive, if
a little uninteresting. (She doesn't really "do" much.) Being
underwater, the skin tones don't seem quite so "wow!", if you see what I
mean.
Well anyway, the thing that really blew me away was "Luna and the
Occular Oracle". I mean... woah. 0_0 Watch it and you'll see what I
mean. Graphically it's fairly impressive stuff. But scenematically...
Seriously, WHAT THE HELL where these guys smoking when they came up with
this stuff?? It's like a far-out acid trip or something... wow. Just
wow. Oh, yeah, and the graphics are fairly impressive. But that's not
what I was most looking at... heh.
Oh, and now half the demos won't uninstall cleanly. But then, a few of
them wouldn't run properly in the first place. In general, all the demos
seemed pretty buggy. Hmm... great advert!
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Oh yeah, and "Smoke". Simple little demo, but I have *no clue* how it
manages to do that in realtime...
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Do these demos work in ATI cards, or do they have special code which
checks the type of card you have and refuses to run if you don't have
an nvidia one?-)
--
- Warp
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"Orchid XP v7" wrote:
> Seriously, WHAT THE HELL where these guys smoking when they came up with
> this stuff?? It's like a far-out acid trip or something... wow. Just wow.
> Oh, yeah, and the graphics are fairly impressive. But that's not what I
> was most looking at... heh.
Nice, but you need to have a look at demos not made by companies.
For a real far-out acid trip (and the best demo I've ever seen) have a look
at the Assembly 2007 winner "Lifeforce":
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=31571
Rune
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Warp nous apporta ses lumieres en ce 2007/10/29 16:10:
> Do these demos work in ATI cards, or do they have special code which
> checks the type of card you have and refuses to run if you don't have
> an nvidia one?-)
>
They will probably install and run, but also, probably, with deliberately
cripled performances.
A dirty trick by those making the demos (independent from where they come from):
Let install on the concurent maker's card, but disable some features and replace
others with some DEoptimised versions that deliberately run slower.
To get the real results, you need to use demos and benchmarks by independant
devlopers, and hope that your drivers don't have special codes that lowers the
settings like resolution, polygon count and colour depth, to artificialy make
the benchmark run faster. nVidia DID use that dirty trick, and there is no proof
that ATI used it or not at this time.
--
Alain
-------------------------------------------------
WARNING: The consumption of alcohol may cause pregnancy.
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Alain <ele### [at] netscape net> wrote:
> To get the real results, you need to use demos and benchmarks by independant
> devlopers, and hope that your drivers don't have special codes that lowers the
> settings like resolution, polygon count and colour depth, to artificialy make
> the benchmark run faster. nVidia DID use that dirty trick, and there is no proof
> that ATI used it or not at this time.
You mean that nvidia deliberately put some code in their display driver
that detected that you are running, for example, 3DMark, and if so it has
a special code which converts the triangle meshes given by 3DMark to the
driver to ones with less polygons so that the graphics card will appear
to run faster than it really would?
I suppose there's no way for a program to detect such trickery...
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> You mean that nvidia deliberately put some code in their display driver
> that detected that you are running, for example, 3DMark, and if so it has
> a special code which converts the triangle meshes given by 3DMark to the
> driver to ones with less polygons so that the graphics card will appear
> to run faster than it really would?
Yep! And you wonder why video drivers under Windows crash the system so
often.
They also tend to do stuff like notice they're being tested by microsoft
for approval and stop skipping steps they don't think they "really"
need, but which they normally skip in order to get better performance at
the expense of correct results.
I've seen it done with other programs, too, like C compilers noticing
they're compiling SPECmark suites and such.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
Remember the good old days, when we
used to complain about cryptography
being export-restricted?
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Yep! And you wonder why video drivers under Windows crash the system so
> often.
And this isn't illegal? Doesn't it fall into something like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising
I suppose the law will always be behind technology.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> And this isn't illegal? Doesn't it fall into something like
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising
Depends what you advertise, I suppose. "Passed the WHDL tests" is
correct, after all. :-)
But yah, I guess if you really wanted to sue someone, you'd have a case.
You might not win, but you'd have a case.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
Remember the good old days, when we
used to complain about cryptography
being export-restricted?
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"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote
> And this isn't illegal? Doesn't it fall into something like
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising
It's a complicated matter. Systems tailoring their behaviour to running
applications can have a perfectly valid reason. Sometimes, OS's and drivers
will do that to enable older applications that used, let's say,
unconventional or undocumented behaviour, to keep functioning. MS goes to
great lengths to accomodate badly written applications to maintain backwards
compatibility. Graphics card drivers work closely with major games and CAD
application vendors to maximize their performance, which benefits both
parties. So, a driver reconfiguring itself to maximize performance of CATIA
is not much different than a driver doing the same for 3DMark. Why should a
graphics driver optimized for many such applications let itself be
underspec'd through a synthetic benchmark, if it can help it?
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