On Sun, 14 Sep 2003 23:30:23 +1200
william bell wrote:

On Sun, 14 Sep 2003 02:36:37 GMT, "TheHasselhoff"
wrote:

I am beside myself with how the Nvidia line is suddenly being
considered second-rate compared to the ATI line, simply because of
one game. Now, I realize HL2 will be immensely popular. But, Valve
has basically come out and acted as if their new game is 100%
representative of how video games will be made in the future. That's
certainly egotistical, and downright incorrect. The other 100s of
game developers are not going to suddenly say,"ooh, here's how Valve
does things, so we need to copy it." I guess what really frosts me is
that Valve (obviously in bed with ATI) comes out with their own
benchmarks - which are not being validated by any independent source
- and all of the other benchmarks out there, showing the GeforceFX
line beating the ATI line in many other games are thrown out the
window. Valve can say all they want that Nvidia shouldn't make
"game-specific" drivers - but I'll bet that the last few Catalyst
revisions have had updates for HL2 in them. They'd be dumb not to -
but Valve acting like the supreme entity in all of this is
ridiculous. I think I'm going to pass on HL2, just out of principle.





This is the Article about no F Buffer in the 9600.


"

No F-buffer - Unlike ATI's high-end R350 chip, the RV350 doesn't have
an F-buffer. Without an F-buffer, the Radeon 9600 Pro will be unable
to handle shader programs more complex than what's called for by
Microsoft's DirectX 9 spec, but it's still unclear how much of a
limitation that will be in the real world. It will probably be some
time before games exploit all of DirectX 9's shader capabilities, much
less move beyond them. You can read more about what exactly an
F-buffer is and what it does in our Radeon 9800 Pro review. "


http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2...o/index.x?pg=1

I don't see anything in the post to which you were responding concerning
the F buffer, so I find myself wondering why you bring it up. FWIW, the
F-buffer is an ATI-specific performance enhancement, and the only chip
in the world that has one is the R350, so I don't see where it's absence
in the RV350 is a particularly earth-shattering issue.


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--John
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(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)