GeForce256 and the First T&L-Title
Редакция THG,  12 октября 1999


Introduction

Yesterday we published our first evaluation of NVIDIA's new GeForce256 GPU using the classical set of game-benchmarks that represent the current crop of 3D-games. However, GeForce256 has been designed for the next generation of 3D-games.

Higher Polygon Count - What Does It Mean?

Sample Image
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Future games will offer a lot more detail by using significantly more polygons than what we were used to so far. More polygons mean more 'real' detail in comparison to more complex textures. That may sound flat, but let me give you an example. Think of the face of a player in e.g. Quake2. In terms of polygons, the head is a simple cubic shape with a facial texture slapped on it. You notice that it's a simple shape with some 'wallpaper' when you walk around the player and look at it from different angles. Now you can put the most detailed textures on this simple cube, when you look at it from different angles you will still notice that this is not a face, but a simple shaped object with some great detailed textures on it. In this example, increasing the polygons could e.g. mean adding the shape of a nose, a chin and ears. The more polygons you invest in this face, the less you need high definition textures, because the actual facial structure is there, you don't need to 'cheat' with textures. Additionally, the nose will stay a nose as you look at it from different angles, the ears will always stick out as well, and the shadow of those structures will always fall in the correct direction, something that's pretty much impossible with textures. The same is valid for any kind of structure. Increasing the polygons means a more detailed wire frame. The more detailed the wire frame the less you need complex textures to make it look something that it isn't.

So far texturing has been much cheaper in terms of computing power than complex polygon structures. A simple shape can look great with complex textures, but it will never look like the real thing once your viewing angle or the lighting changes. Bump mapping for example is another way of 'cheating'. A simple structure, like e.g. a square, looks as it has little impressions or protruding areas, although the wire frame shows just a flat surface. Instead of using bump mapping you could of course model the surface structure into the actual wire frame, therefore eliminating the need for bump mapping. However, bump mapping doesn't require near as much computing horsepower as a high polygon surface, which is why bump mapping was invented in the first place.

Let's Look at some Sample Pictures

Quake3 Sample Image
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This is a usual player in Q3 Test. It doesn't consist of many polygons, but Id increased them significantly compared to the amount of polygons used for a character in Quake2.

Quake3 Sample Image
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This is the same player with reduced polygon count. The textures used are still the same, but e.g. the shoulder and the weapon consist of a lot less polygons and present a lot less detail, thus the player looks a lot less realistic.

Let's Look at some Sample Pictures, Continued

TreeMark Sample Image
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Here is a scene out of NVIDIA's TreeMark. The displayed picture represents a complexity of about 25,000 polygons.

TreeMark Wire Frame
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This is the matching wire frame.

TreeMark Sample Image
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This is the same view, but now the picture represents over 400,000 polygons. You can see that the detail is awesome and it looks pretty realistic.

TreeMark Wire Frame
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The wire frame shows the huge amount of polygons used.

I don't say that we won't need high-resolution textures anymore, but once the detail of the wire frame has been increased, textures can start showing details we've never seen before, like e.g. a mole in someone's face, eyebrows or black teeth.

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens

WXP Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens

Creative Labs will ship their '3D Blaster Annihilator' with WXP's technology demo "Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens". This demo is using the engine of WXP's upcoming fantasy action title 'Experience' and it's the first independent application that is using GeForce's T&L-engine. The demo is not a real game, but you can walk around and explore the beautiful scenery that soothes your mind by looking at it. I have to say that I never saw a game-demo as impressive and as beautiful at the same time, but some of you might be very disappointed about the complete lack of blood and violence.

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens Sample Image
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Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens uses a whole lot of textures, scenes range from several ten thousand polygons/frame to almost 100,000. There are monsters and animals running around, which are very detailed and so are the mountains, trees, buildings, caves and what not that you occur in the demo. Here are some sample shots with the according wire frame:

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens Sample Image

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens Wire Frame

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens Sample Image

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens Wire Frame

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens Sample Image

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens Wire Frame

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens includes a benchmark as well, which makes it the very first T&L-benchmark available. We ran this benchmark on GeForce256 and the other contestants from our first review and we also included it into our CPU-scaling suite.

The Benchmark Setup

Hardware Information  
CPU PIII 550
Motherboard (BIOS rev.) ABIT BX6 2.0 (BIOS date 7/13/99)
Memory 128 MB Viking PC100 CAS2
Network Netgear FA310TX
Driver Information  
NVIDIA GeForce 256 4.12.01.0347
ATI Rage Fury Pro 4.11.6713
NVIDIA TNT2 Series 4.11.01.0208
Voodoo3 Series 4.11.01.2103.03.0204
Matrox G400 Series 4.11.01.1300
Environment Settings  
OS Version Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222 A
DirectX Version 7.0
Quake 3 Arena v1.08
command line = +set cd_nocd 1 +set s_initsound 0
Shogo v2.14
Advanced Settings = disable sound, disable music, disable movies, disable joysticks,
enable optimized surfaces, enable triple buffering, enable single-pass multi-texturing
High Detail Settings = enabled
Fortress Demo
Expendable Demo Version
Setup = use Triple Buffering
Audio = disable sound
Descent III Retail version
Settings = -nosound -nomusic -nonetwork -timetest

The Benchmark Results - Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens 16 Bit

It's pretty easy to run this benchmark; it's set up automatically when you install the game. Our expectations are clear. GeForce is the only one of all the chips that has a T&L-engine, and that or a very powerful CPU is what's definitely required in a game that uses so many polygons. Thus we expect GeForce to score well ahead of the rest and to only drop a bit at very high resolutions and 32-bit color depth, where memory bandwidth restricts GeForce's performance.

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens 640x480x16

This may be pretty much the only resolution and color depth that lets you get some kind of pleasant experience with a card that lacks a T&L-engine. GeForce scores around 60 fps, which is certainly good enough.

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens 1024x768x16

At 1024x768 it's already getting touchy, average frame rates around 30 fps aren't really good enough for future game play of Experience. GeForce scores around 50 fps, which is still respectable.

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens 1600x1200x16

I doubt that it's fun running Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens at 1600x1200x16 with any of the cards. GeForce scores some 25-30% ahead of the rest, but 30 fps don't really cut it.

The Benchmark Results - Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens 32 Bit

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens 640x480x32

At 32-bit color and low resolution GeForce scores way ahead of the rest.

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens 1024x768x32

Things start to get touchy at 1024x768 already. GeForce w/SDR doesn't look too good, the memory bandwidth interferes nastily with its scores. Even the DDR-model doesn't really score great, but still far ahead of the other cards.

Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens 1600x1200x32

Take a quick look at the results and then forget them just as quickly. The only thing of this chart worth to remember is that there's currently no 3D-card available that would run Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens at 1600x1200x32, and that includes GeForce.

There's not much to comment on the results. GeForce scores well ahead of the competition, just as expected. Again we see that especially the SDR-part is slowing down at high resolutions and color depth. All in all it's pretty obvious that T&L is a requirement for this demo, unless you're pleased with an average frame rate of just above 30 fps, but GeForce could still use a bit more power for this demo as well.

CPU-Scaling

I included all the games we used for benchmarking GeForce into this chart. The question is if GeForce with its T&L-engine is still depending on CPU-performance. We saw yesterday, that GeForce scaled rather similar to TNT2-Ultra in today's games except for NVIDIA's TreeMark. TreeMark was so far the only application that explicitly used the T&L-engine and it was impressive to see that GeForce reached the same scores regardless if running on a Celeron 400 or a Pentium III 550. We were excited to see if we would get the same results with Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens. The benchmarks were run at 640x480x16 to avoid any impact of the rendering-pipeline or memory bandwidth, then the Celeron 400 scores were compared to the Pentium III 550 scores.

Before you look at the chart I'd like to remind you how it works. It compares the CPU-scaling between Celeron 400 and Pentium III 550 of GeForce w/DDR and TNT2 Ultra. The percentages you see reflect the Celeron 400 scores relative to the Pentium III 550 scores for GeForce and TNT2. A score of 100% means that the Celeron 400 score was a 100% of the Pentium III 550 score with the according 3D-chip, the higher the score the lower the scaling. Thus we expect GeForce to score higher percentages than TNT2-Ultra, especially in games that use its T&L-engine.

CPU Scaling GEFroce256 vs TNT2 Ultra

GeForce's Celeron 400-score in Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens is with 79% way ahead of TNT2's 57%, but it still relies a lot on the CPU. We will have to see if this improves with better drivers for GeForce. The difference between the TNT2 and the GeForce-score shows however, that the T&L-engine makes indeed a serious difference in games that are using high polygon counts.

Summary

Well, things haven't really changed significantly since our first review of GeForce. The T&L-engine is a great feature as long as an application makes use of it and GeForce was able to show its muscles quite well in Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens. However, the performance of the rendering pipeline really doesn't knock me off my feet, especially when single data rate memory is used on the card. It constrains the rendering pipeline with its low memory bandwidth even more.

Dragon Moor Zoological Gardens however did knock me off my feet. I want to see more games like this. I want tons of polygons and 3D-worlds that are worth being looked at for a change. Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens is definitely the way to go. Now we only need the hardware for it. GeForce, the pioneer of all 3D-chips with integrated T&L, is a step in the right direction. Games like Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens will soon make an integrated T&L-engine a common requirement. NVIDIA is with GeForce256 right where the rest of the 3D-industry wants to be. Future 3D-chips without T&L will probably have a very hard time.

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