I got to "beta test" a new release of Fear Factor - Page 3

reese · 07-25-05, 03:30 PM

i think you purposly try to confuse and mislead people..

hmm... /me thinks about starting an everyone ignore star882 until he/she makes sense and uses real names unlike brittney and so on!

You are either intending to confuse people, or you are deeply confused yourself.

Reese adds Star882 to ignore list!

derekivey · 07-25-05, 03:53 PM

Chris should add him/her to the Tachy goes to Coventry list (adds them to everyones ignore list). Lol.

* derekivey adds Star882 to ignore list

07-25-05, 07:15 PM

Originally Posted by reese

i think you purposly try to confuse and mislead people..

This appears to be the trend of star. :rolling:

star882 · 07-25-05, 09:12 PM

Quote:

Yes, it is. It is the GeForce 2 Ti 3d core with a slighly improved memory controller and slightly higher clock speed.

The GeForce 4 has features that are not present in the GeForce 2 (e.g. more complex pixel and vertex shaders). I don't know about most of the circuitry, although at least some of it should be backwards compatible. But there are some circuits not present in the GeForce 2. There is a substantial hardware difference. It's something like the difference between a Pentium 2 and a Pentium 3; while a lot of the hardware is the same, there's more than enough difference that it's impossible to flash the older one to the newer one.

Quote:

My 66mhz Pentium could render the same scene as my 3.2gig P4 could at 'realistic quality', it would just take longer. It would be no more or less realistic.

Maybe I'll add "in real time" to the list. Good luck getting the 66MHz Pentium to render Fear Factor in real time for anything other than the pure GPU test. Even my Athlon 64 gets 20% CPU usage during the most of the tests and (of course) 100% during the CPU test. Also, the limited main memory bandwidth and quantity will likely make even the pure GPU test have difficulty rendering real time. If there is not enough RAM (somewhere around 512MB) to store a whole "page" of the Fear Factor file, it will swap more frequently than usual to access the data. Better have a fast hard drive in that case! You'll also likely need at least SDRAM to get enough bandwidth for real time rendering. You won't get very far with EDO, or worse, FPM.
Note however, that an Athlon 64 can render Fear Factor at a higher quality than any 32 bit chip because 64 bits offers more precision. (OK, you can emulate 64 bits on a 32 bit CPU, but that will slow it down even further. I'm not aware of any 32 bit CPU that is still fast enough to render Fear Factor in real time in emulated 64 bit mode. You could use SMP, but then you may as well start with a hardware 64 bit CPU.)

07-25-05, 09:19 PM

Didnt understand most of that

07-25-05, 09:54 PM

Thanks Star882 :approve: I was a bit unclear after reading your first post, but you've certainly cleared up anything I was unsure about!

Just one thing, do you think the 350Mhz RAMDAC of the GeForce 4 is throttled by only haveing a 250Mhz core clock speed (Even with a 512Mhz RAM CLock!)? What performance increase would you expect with Fear Factor if the core speed was increased to match the RAMDAC?

transcout · 07-26-05, 01:27 AM

Originally Posted by star882

The GeForce 4 has features that are not present in the GeForce 2 (e.g. more complex pixel and vertex shaders). I don't know about most of the circuitry, although at least some of it should be backwards compatible. But there are some circuits not present in the GeForce 2. There is a substantial hardware difference. It's something like the difference between a Pentium 2 and a Pentium 3; while a lot of the hardware is the same, there's more than enough difference that it's impossible to flash the older one to the newer one.

Maybe I'll add "in real time" to the list. Good luck getting the 66MHz Pentium to render Fear Factor in real time for anything other than the pure GPU test. Even my Athlon 64 gets 20% CPU usage during the most of the tests and (of course) 100% during the CPU test. Also, the limited main memory bandwidth and quantity will likely make even the pure GPU test have difficulty rendering real time. If there is not enough RAM (somewhere around 512MB) to store a whole "page" of the Fear Factor file, it will swap more frequently than usual to access the data. Better have a fast hard drive in that case! You'll also likely need at least SDRAM to get enough bandwidth for real time rendering. You won't get very far with EDO, or worse, FPM.
Note however, that an Athlon 64 can render Fear Factor at a higher quality than any 32 bit chip because 64 bits offers more precision. (OK, you can emulate 64 bits on a 32 bit CPU, but that will slow it down even further. I'm not aware of any 32 bit CPU that is still fast enough to render Fear Factor in real time in emulated 64 bit mode. You could use SMP, but then you may as well start with a hardware 64 bit CPU.)

I'm not talking about 'Fear Factor' as it's still not proven to exist. Something like 3d MAX could render just as well on a slow CPU than on a good one, it would just take longer.

Kamokazi · 07-26-05, 10:10 AM

There are two distinct versions of GeForce 4 Ti, and MX. The Ti versions were typically the 4200's, 4400's and 4600's. They were the true new technology. Then, as a value line, they got some GF2 processors, upped the clock speeds, and called them GeForce 4 MX's, usually the 2000 and 4000. They probably had a few other minor enhancements, but 95% of their power increase was in clock speeds. The MX's did NOT have the enhanced pixel and vertex shaders present in the GF4 Ti's or even the GF3 Ti's (the 3 Ti's are actually ahead of 4 MX's). The GeForce 4 MX's are still on retail shelves as the entry level 3D card, the 4 TI's have pretty much dissapeared, as you can get a FX or Radeon 9000 series for the same price.

star882 · 07-26-05, 12:04 PM

Quote:

There are two distinct versions of GeForce 4 Ti, and MX. The Ti versions were typically the 4200's, 4400's and 4600's. They were the true new technology. Then, as a value line, they got some GF2 processors, upped the clock speeds, and called them GeForce 4 MX's, usually the 2000 and 4000. They probably had a few other minor enhancements, but 95% of their power increase was in clock speeds. The MX's did NOT have the enhanced pixel and vertex shaders present in the GF4 Ti's or even the GF3 Ti's (the 3 Ti's are actually ahead of 4 MX's). The GeForce 4 MX's are still on retail shelves as the entry level 3D card, the 4 TI's have pretty much dissapeared, as you can get a FX or Radeon 9000 series for the same price.

Doesn't the GeForce 4 MX have VPE for decoding MPEG data? (It won't be helpful for rendering Fear Factor but it will help for displaying a MPEG capture of Fear Factor Live.)
And also note that if you actually run Fear Factor, you'll discover a lot of 2D effects as well, like crossfading. I don't know if it's done by the CPU or GPU, but I think it's the GPU as the GPU has hardware 2D processing and the CPU usage doesn't go up by much during the crossfades.
Note that crossfading is one effect that is not in Fear Factor Live as it would be too complex to implement in real life. (It will take a partial mirror, two scenes, and complex lighting controls to do it. In real life, it's more trouble than it's worth. It's easy to implement in computer software, though.)
BTW, for some very odd reason, some versions of Fear Factor on Windows will not correctly capture with the printscreen key. I believe that this is because most of the processing happens in the GPU. However, the odd thing is that very few 3D programs have this odd problem. Maybe it has to do with how Fear Factor accesses the GPU... Can someone with a better knowledge of GPU programming explain this?

Kamokazi · 07-26-05, 12:17 PM

Originally Posted by star882

Doesn't the GeForce 4 MX have VPE for decoding MPEG data?

It's very possible, but as far as 3D rendering is concerned it's just a GeForce 2 on steroids. I'm not as up to speed on older cards as the newer ones, and I am primarily concerned with the 3D rendering side as opposed to multimedia enhancements. As for your print screen question, I am not sure. With DirectX I would imagine there is probably some simple function call to create a true screenshot, and since you speak of it running on Linux, that means it is probably not using DirectX (although maybe one of the Linux variants?). So creating a screenshot is probably not as simple, and throwing in different OS's definately does not make it any easier.