"John Lewis" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 15 Apr 2004 22:59:53 GMT, "John Reynolds"
wrote:

Your post would be. . .hmmm, what's the word. . .more legit if you
weren't
coming off as a nVidia fanboy flaming away at Valve, John. Newell simply
voiced what every developer knew about the FX parts: they sucked at
running
DX9 code at floating point precision. Hell, these NV40 previews show
that
more clearly than anything else. And what do Carmack and Newell have in
common? Their companies' new engines both required special code paths to
get good performance out of FX boards? Think about that, John. Oh, and
for
Far Cry whether those new screenshots require SM 3.0 support is still up
in
the air. I've heard they're created using offset mapping, not vertex
texturing; this was written by Democoder, the guy who got that Unreal 3
engine movie and some Far Cry shots from yesterday (he's a regular poster
at
B3D).

Anyways, the 6800U looks like a very impressive part. The only real
negatives are the power consumption/heat

the NV40 GPU consumes ~ 25 watts more than the NV35 or R350.
The whole board consumes a max of 110 watts. Compare the
Prescott 3.4 CPU @ 103 watts max. ( Northwood 3.4, 89 watts )

I read so many previews yesterday that I don't remember which one, but one
of them did show under load the 6800U hitting around 200 watts.

and the fact that both AA and AF
could be better.

In what way... please be specific...

The AA is limited to 4x for multi-sampling, and it lacks gamma correction
and programmable patterns. It's an improvement from previous nVidia parts,
but still lags behind ATI's AA. And the AF is now angle-dependent like
ATI's, which is an intentional step-down in quality.


It'll be interesting to see if the R420 from ATI can
compete

Let's hope that they have a VPU on board that is competitive with
that in the NV40. For professional video applications, that feature
is almost as important as the graphics-engine features.


Anthony "Reverend" Tan just quoted Tim Sweeney on B3D's board and
Tim said, about R420, that "It rocks!". This next generation is
definitely
going to be much more interesting than last year's, that's for sure.

John "fanboys suck" Reynolds

aka John "Ati fanboy now, past- 3dfx and nVidia fan-boy" Reynolds.

I used to be a 3dfx fanboy years ago. I'll never make that mistake again.
Though I've been running ATI hardware since Sept. of '02 when the 9700 Pro
came out, I'll switch to a 6800U in a heartbeat if I think it's the better
part (gotta' wait for those R420 previews).

John