GeForce3 Titanium Reviews 279
Paladin128 sent us
Tom's and Anandtech's respective reviews of the new NVIDIA GeForce3 Titanium series.
DX8.1 compatibility (What is that anyway?), Shadow Buffers, 3D Textures, assorted other stuffs.
Hey, but why is everything 'Titanium' now anyway? Laptops. Batteries. Video cards. I wonder if I can get titanium plating.
hey.. (Score:3, Funny)
Well, at least its not E-Titanium or iTanium..
Re:hey.. (Score:4, Funny)
"I'm so rich, I got ridda' all my platimun cards, and I got me a Uranium card..."
Re:hey.. (Score:1)
Re:hey.. (Score:1)
Re:hey..what about... (Score:2, Funny)
Darren
Re:hey..what about... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:hey.. (Score:2)
paraphrased:
have a pc? do you want to make money fast? for more information on our pyramid scheme contact us at eonlinework-dom
What kind of online "work" is not electronic?
Titanium is merely the next step in the progression of products from
[name]
[name]-plus
[name]-gold
[name]-platinum
[name]-platinum-plus
[name]-95
[name]-98
[name]-2000
[name]-millenium
[name]-titanium edition
Important information about titanium (Score:1, Redundant)
Now if you can find someone who will do the surgery, let me know.
Re:Important information about titanium (Score:2, Informative)
ps. Do you mean solid ti bones or hollow ones? :)
Re:Important information about titanium (Score:2, Funny)
Dell has these on the 8200 series (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dell has these on the 8200 series (Score:2, Offtopic)
RE: Not Funny, Just Informative (Score:2)
Why Titanium? (Score:2, Insightful)
Titanium implies that it's strong and modern. Titanium is stronger than steel, yet roughly half the weight.
It's all about the marketing. There's even Titanium credit cards, too.
Re:Why Titanium? (Score:2)
dude... (Score:1)
I also think it's what Linux should do, and drive home to IT PHBs.
I live for the day when the question isn't "Linux or NT?" but "Which distro of Linux?"
ok...off my soapbox.
JoeLinux
Re:dude... (Score:2, Interesting)
The Radeon 8500 is about to be released, and its got better hardware specs than any nVidia card. Check out Anandtech and look. Toms has a preview also I believe.
It's hardware is better, but the drivers are restricting it from performing to its potential. Once that is worked out, it will outperform the Geforce3 ti 500.
Re:dude... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's hardware is better, but the drivers are restricting it from performing to its potential. Once that is worked out, it will outperform the Geforce3 ti 500.
Sure it will...Seriously that particular sales technique of "oh it's just the drivers, but once they're sorted out it'll kick ass!" is absolute rubbish and should be treated as such. ATI has a horrendous reputation for drivers and it is, IMHO, a very deserved reputation: I'm certainly not going to buy anything on the premise that THAT company is going to improve their drivers. Another "funny" thing they do is orphaning products frequently: "Oh you want drivers for Windows XP? Sorry, you'll have to upgrade to our new product line." nvidia has set new standards in continuing to upgrade and improve drivers for long existing products and I give them great accolades for that.
So in closing ATIs theoretical performance means absolutely nothing if it isn't delivered and in the public's hands (what was that S3 card with fantastic T&L that never actually had drivers delivered that enabled it? Yet there were S3 pimps out there talking up the hypotheticals fo this super duper T&L engine). The fact that AnandTech pimped the 8500 using the driver excuse on page after page after page was absolutely despicable.
As a contrast, nvidia stays quiet about drivers and delivers what they deliver despite the fact that they actually do improve performance with each driver release. Hell someone with a GeForce 1 is still reaping performance improvements upgrading to the new Detonator XP drivers.
Re:dude... (Score:2)
There's really very little interesting here. Some minor tweaks to existing chips and upping the speed of the core and memory. Moreover, it's not every time we turn around, it's every 6 months a new graphics product is put out. That's their cycle, they stick to it.
DX8.1 compatibility (What is that anyway?) (Score:1, Redundant)
Lame filler to avoid lame filter
i just got a GeForce 3 64mb DDR Asus v8200 WHY?! (Score:1)
besides the fact that companies will get more money with new products every 6 months, why do they not offer a rebate or upgrade to the newest product???
Re:i just got a GeForce 3 64mb DDR Asus v8200 WHY? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:i just got a GeForce 3 64mb DDR Asus v8200 WHY? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:i just got a GeForce 3 64mb DDR Asus v8200 WHY? (Score:1)
I feel your pain (Score:2)
Received and installed the card Thursday night, heard about the new cards Friday afternoon.
(Granted I can get comparable speeds just by overclocking it a bit, but it's the principle of the thing.)
.sigh.
Relax (Score:2)
Same thing happened with TNT2, TNT2 Ultra, original Geforce, etc. They could've called this the Geforce3 Ultra but marketing decided otherwise. The performance difference compared to a regular GF3 is not that big, no sense in upgrading if you already have one.
There are no new features that the Titanium cards offer that can't be done on the older GF3's.
Just go to nVidia's site and download the DetonatorXP drivers (they picked up the XP moniker too... ugh) and you'll get all those fancy "new" features touted in the Titanium press releases. Those drivers are also considerably faster anyway, on older GF3's.
The next-gen product will be out next spring (assuming they don't break the 6-month cycle) and will probably have multiple geometry units like the XBox, even faster clock speeds, and some new hardware rendering features. Next spring's product will probably be nVidia's first hardware that uses some of 3dfx's tech, hopefully 3dfx's anti-aliasing which was the best around IMO.
Re:i just got a GeForce 3 64mb DDR Asus v8200 WHY? (Score:2)
Just so that idiots like you keep buying the latest and greatest.
Too few new features (Score:1)
Re:Too few new features (Score:1)
I'm holding out for the GeForce 4 to bring the price of the GeForce 3 down to upgrade to from my TNT2Ultra!
Cheers,
Tim
Re:Too few new features (Score:2)
Re:Too few new features (Score:1)
Re:Too few new features (Score:2)
Re:Too few new features (Score:1)
No kidding. I just got back from Toronto. I bought a #1 combo at Wendy's, gave the cashier a $20(US), and got back $119.23(Can) in change. Long live Canada!
You couldn't have spent that much (Score:1)
hardocp has had a review of this out for a while (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/vidcards/nvidia/
Shadow buffers (Score:4, Interesting)
As for titanium plating -- you don't want it, trust me. It scratches and stains far too easily, and you can't clean it when it does. Looks good when it's undamaged, though.
Re:Shadow buffers (Score:2, Informative)
So these new cards technically have 0 things different from them than the old cards - they are just shipping with newer drivers. If you get the XP drivers for the old Geforce3 it will enable the shadow buffers.
Try reading some of the reviews before you post.
Derek
And Pricewatch already lists them (with links)! (Score:1)
If you go to Pricewatch [pricewatch.com] and look under videocards/GeForce 3 there are already several place selling the 200 versions. Heck this place on Yahoo Stores [yahoo.com] is taking preorders for the Hercules GeForce3 Titanium 500 to ship on Oct 13! Talk about fast turnaround. Guess they had to step up or let the Radeon 8500 [ati.com] be king.
Wonder which one will ship a Mac version first?
Overclocked GF3 (Score:5, Informative)
Looking at Anand's Geforce 3 roundup [anandtech.com], all of the cards tested overclocked to the performance level of the GF Ti 500. Generally, the core speed was lower, but the memory was faster.
titanium taco (Score:1)
From what I remember, plated with Titanium you'd be able to survive 100 years of life in some large far-east city like Kuala Lumpur [google.com] without corroding.
Which is exactly what we need from you. Really.
Re:titanium taco (Score:2)
Even worse naming... (Score:1)
It partly our fault (Score:3, Insightful)
NVIDIAs marketing trick (Score:1, Insightful)
As you all will notice once you read Toms interesting review [tomshardware.com] there is not much new in the Titanium version of Geforce3 except a better price/performance ratio. All the added functionality is already available in current GeForce3 boards once you download the new driver.
Maybe now I will buy a Geforce3 TI200 instead of the Geforce2 Pro that I was planning on.
--
Keep your hats on. It's only money.
Why is everything titanium? (Score:1, Funny)
Now, if someone annoys me, I simply bite.
Yeah but... (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Yeah but... (Score:3, Informative)
TNT
TNT2/TNT2 Pro
TNT2 Ultra
TNT2 M64/M64 Pro
Vanta/Vanta LT
Aladdin TNT2
GeForce 256
GeForce2 Pro
GeForce2 GTS
GeForce2 MX/MX 400/MX 200/MX 100
GeForce2 Ultra
GeForce3
Quadro
Quadro DCC
Quadro2 MXR
Quadro2 Pro
Quadro2 EX
I'm sure that if there's an xFree86 driver for the GeForce3, then the new versions will have equal support from the manufacturer. NVidia, surprisingly enough, has always been pretty good about releasing really nice xFree86 drivers for their cards.
Re:Yeah but... (Score:1)
seb.
Re:Yeah but... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Basically, NVIDIA's drivers cannot be open sourced. They contain several components which are licensed technology, and we have no rights to share that source code with anyone. We do not even provide source code to OpenGL or our kernel module to our board customers"
seems like a reasonable explanation to me. (Interview from theDukeofURL.org [thedukeofurl.org].
Re:Yeah but... (Score:2)
Re:Yeah but... (Score:1)
Re:Yeah but... (Score:2)
" Can I get a Linux driver for it?"
Nividia is good about having all their graphics products use the same driver.
Details on titanium (Score:3, Funny)
[titanium.org][titanium.org] [titanium.org][titanium.org]
Here are some strength-to-weight stats [titanium.org], specifically.
What can i say... (Score:1)
Yey! more features, more FPS, more... what? (Score:2)
Featuring 28gigaflops, processing 2 billion antialiased pixels per second, 1000 voxels per seconds, support for surround video and all.
Nice!, no games supports geforce 3 to it's best right now
But serously, it's nice seeing the technology being pushed foward at a crazy pace like that, but the amount of data to assimilate for all the new stuff being shoved up at the programmers every 6 months is crazy... and you have to keep in mind that they gave a GAME to program, not only a technological demo. if there were 1000 carmack in the game community, I bet we would see stuff comming out a bit faster (imagine a beowulf clusters of Carmacks
It's exiting, but at the same time I'd feel a bit overwhelmed with working on a board or featureset and seeing it being crushed by something better even before I finish polishing the code on my current project
Titanium XP (Score:1)
It started with golf clubs... (Score:3, Offtopic)
Anyway, I'm sure this video card is really great but I have to admit calling it "Titanium" lowers my level of interest in buying it. It's like if I tried to sell you a "Titanium" watermelon... doesn't really make sense.
Re:It started with golf clubs... (Score:2, Interesting)
What's ironic is that Titanium is much less in value per ounce than silver. If you wanted to suggest a metal in value above platinum, you'd have to say Rhodium, Palladium, Irridium or Rhenium. But who's going to say they've got the newest in purchasing power with a "Rhodium" credit card. If you really want the next level in metal worth far more than platinum, flash out your "Plutonium" credit card.
As another view of how cheap Titanium is, you can buy Titanium crowbars from the old Soviet Union munitions factories now trying to privatize to make consumer products. They've got so much titanium lying around that they'll make just about anything out of it.
Re:It started with golf clubs... (Score:2)
Pretty Soon Credit Cards Too (Score:2)
Re:Pretty Soon Credit Cards Too (Score:2)
The next card up from Platinum is Black [americanexpress.com] from American Express. Available by invitation only to existing Platinum cardholders (which themselves are only available by invitation from Green or Gold).
Someday...
plating?? No but.... (Score:1)
I bet you will get the titanium pricing though!
Read the Articles (Score:1)
They will be cheaper.
Next credit card (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Next credit card (Score:2)
Why Titanium, you ask? (Score:1)
You think I'm kidding? Look at marketing trends. Apple released the iMac line in multiple colors, and then we immediately saw Irons, staplers, Nintendo 64, and Compaq PC's out, in all the same colors. Now, Apple has released the Titanium Powerbook: software, hardware, everything is now "Titanium.
I've received three offers for Titanium Visa cards so far. If the cards were actually made of titanium, I might actually get one...
titanium yeah but (Score:1)
hopey
It's just a price cut (Score:5, Informative)
John Carmack said, when the GEForce 3 came out, that developers should get one immediately, but gamers should wait. This new one is the "consumer product" version.
Remember that the GEForce 3 is the graphics engine in the XBox. So when the XBox games start shipping for the Xmas season, the PC versions will use GEForce 3 features. I'm looking forward to seeing somebody do something good with the vertex shaders. I have the Chameleon demo and a GeForce 3, so I can see what's possible.
Re:It's just a price cut (Score:2)
Graphics Processing Unit:
300MHz custom 3D graphics processor by nVidia
300 million micropolygons/particles per second
150 million transformed and lit polygons per second
100+ million polygons per second sustained performance (shading, texturing)
4 simultaneous textures
Compressed textures available at 8:1 compression
Full-scene anti-aliasing
Memory:
64 MB of RAM (unified memory architecture)
6.4GB/sec memory bandwidth
Titanium As Cheap As Aluminum? (Score:1)
At last, a board without a cooling fan (Score:1)
I mistrust those little fans you get on graphics cards and used to get on CPUs, because I've had a few die on me (or people I work with), which can also take out the chip. The Titanium 200 shown on THG just has a heatsink like ny trusty Creative TNT, no fan, less to go wrong. I suppose whoever buys the state of the art to keep up with the Joneses doesn't care if the board blows up after a year, but I do.
The Titanium Phenomenon (Score:3, Informative)
Someone paid extra for this ad banner (Score:2, Funny)
Nice ad placement, ATI. I know it's random, but there's got to be settings somewhere to avoid such things.
I think it's an X men thing.. (Score:2)
Actually I think that Titanium is supposed to be the strongest metal...
Re:I think it's an X men thing.. (Score:2)
Wolverine has an adamantium-laced skeleton with retractable adamantium claws as well.
Smooth, sheek, deadly.
All the chicks dig 'em.
Marketing. Ugh. (Score:3, Interesting)
While the GeForce3 is a pretty sweet card, I find the new marketing tactics of NVidia distasteful. The GeForce3 Ti-200 and GeForce2 Ti are actually slower cards [tomshardware.com][tomshardware.com] gussied up with new drivers and a new name. Not only that, but they timed the release [tomshardware.com] [tomshardware.com] of their new Detonator XP drivers to spoil the release of the Radeon 8500.
I know that "business is war" and all that, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Terminology (Score:3, Funny)
What now? Retro names? Something like the "NVidia Locomotive"? Nah. Probably coined words and numbers again.
Re:Terminology (Score:2)
I knew things got bad when I went to Taco Bell and ordered the "Extreme Number Two Combo."
For what... (Score:2)
I think the vid card companies are running in to a major problem. Games aren't keeping up with hardware. Developers have a much longer development time than the hardware companies do.
Titanium Brain Dump (Score:2)
Things about titanium I've noticed:
The "titanium" notebooks I looked at in Best Buys had such thin casings that I could easily deform the LCD screen with finger pressure on the top of the lid. They were the least durable laptops I've seen recently.
A lot of titanium (the metal, not Tio2 the pigment) is produced under brutal, slave-like working conditions in third-world countries. Participating in the titanium trade is thus contributing to the bankrolls of The Opressors [tm] unless you are certain of provenance.
Titanium is an AWESOME thermal conductor. Some of the Thiokol guys split a titanium rocket motor case in half and made a barbecue out of it; the damn thing radiated heat so fiercely it was essentially unusable.
--Charlie
Don't miss out! (Score:2)
No, but if you act now, you can afford all that and more with our new new low-APR, no monthly fee titanium **click** hello? hello sir?
just say no to credit
RE: but why is everything titanium...? (Score:2)
Get used to it. Titanium may surplant Aluminum and Steel for many uses. I've read this many times and seen many articles about how we are now entering into a Titanium Age.
In fact, Slashdot [slashdot.org] wrote about it nearly a year ago!
GeForce 3 Ti 200 (Score:4, Interesting)
NO FAN !!!!
That's why my video cards so far have been Voodoo3 2000 and Asus GeForce 2MX.
No fans. For the peace of mind. For the lack of the ugly wire. For _real_ advances from 0.18 to 0.15 microns, not just overclock-it-bruteforce-and-do-some-cooldown-patc
Good job! I'm looking forward to seeing faster no-fan video cards.
DirectX 8.1 (Score:2)
So, I guess, DX8.1 compatibility for GF3 Titanium means exactly nothing, just marketing buzzword.
-jfedor
DX8.1 (Score:2)
That would be DirectX [microsoft.com] 8.1.
Re:DX8.1 (Score:2)
Why Titanium (Score:2)
Re:My Experience With Linux! (Score:2, Offtopic)
Visual Basic has been a compiled language for several versions now.
Yeah, offtopic, but I hate to see incorrect info.
Re:My Experience With Linux! (Score:1)
Re:My Experience With Linux! (Score:2)
No. You are flat out wrong here. Visual C++ and Visual Basic share the same code generator. From Microsoft's VB feature list:
"High-performance native-code compiler.
Create applications and both client- and server-side components that are optimized for throughput by the world-class Visual C++® 6.0 optimized native-code compiler."
Re:My Experience With Linux! (Score:1)
It's as much compiled as Java or Python (Perl?). It's compiled to bytecode and then the byte code gets interpreted. Speed's things up a bit compared to pure interpreted code, but VB is still interpreted in the end.
Re:My Experience With Linux! (Score:2)
Well, no. (Score:2)
No, that's not so. There are a great many calls into vb.dll, but those are exactly analagous to calls into the C runtime. It's real object code, linked by pretty much the same linker used throughout Microsoft's toolset
As I posted below, I have written the same code in C++ and VB, and found them to run at the same speed - the performance improvements available in C are due to using techniques that are very difficult in VB (such as pointer arithmetic). What you say was sort-of true for earlier versions, but hey, it's not 1996 anymore.
Re:My Experience With Linux! (Score:2)
I know this is offtopic, but it's a good opportunity to bash the evil empire and their evil inventions, so here goes.
I have a friend who is a below-the-knee doctor. He stores his patient records in a Mafiasoft Access database. That by itself wouldn't be so bad, but he made the mistake of hiring a professional to set up a good system for him. Among other things, the professional wrote custom VBA (or VBS, something with Visual Basic in it) code for Access. This professional put together an elaborate user interface where you can't read any of the words because the background and foreground colors are so similar. To make a long story short, this eyesore looks very unprofessional. And it cost my doctor friend big bucks!
On one occasion, my doctor friend asked me to look at the thing and try to modify the colors and get rid of a few fields he never uses. Having no previous knowledge of Access, I went through all the menus and dialogs, thinking this change couldn't possibly be more difficult than clicking a few check marks. I discovered the Visual Basic noise (I won't even call it code) and spent the whole day trying to understand the unbelievable mess that was written there. Not only is the language syntax sloppy and obfuscated, the code^H^H^H^Hnoise was really horrible.
I never actually fixed the problem, because I know better than to mess with anything when the noise is so bad. I suppose this proves the theory that you can't make a programmer out of a BASIC luser.
Another friend of mine used Delphi 3 back in the days. I remember playing with it and (with no instruction) putting together a little database program for keeping track of books you have (and their author, etc). Although Delphi uses the Pascal language, the whole system from its user interface to the integration between visual stuff and code is excellent. I clicked together a simple window, wrote about 10 lines of code total, and the program functioned. I think this is what Mafiasoft tried to implement in VBS but they created an unbelievable mess instead. (Or rather, an innovative platform for compelling enterprise-wide virus solutions--remember, everything revolves around marketing, therefore sh*t is actually fertilizer, which will promote the growth and vigor of the enterprise.) To make a long story short, I don't care whether VBS is compiled, bytecode, interpreted or self-deleting. It's a crappy system and it promotes crappy programming.
Re:My Experience With Linux! (Score:2)
access has its problems, but bashing it on the fact the someone wrote spagheti is just ignorant.
this is like someone looking at obfuscated C code and claiming that C is useless.
One more thing, if you want people to take the dangerous of Microsoft seriously, then refer to them as Microsoft. If you choose some bastardization of their name, people will immediatly write you off and not even pretend to think about what your saying.
Re:My Experience With Linux! (Score:2)
I disagree, in fact Id say that is absolutely untrue. By bastardizing the Microshaft name, we very intentionally use their massive marketing muscle against them.
Doing these association techniques we are purposefully meddling with their mind control program (marketing) by dropping their name proper and forcing people to read "MS" but see "M$", or read Microsoft but see/think "Macroshaft".
Go read a little about memetics [lycaeum.org], culture jamming [adbusters.org] and propaganda. Then move on to some Chomsky [zmag.org]
It is very usefull vaccine to the marketing mess they blast at humanity.
Re:DX8.1 (Score:1)
here.
username: DX9Beta
password: DX9Gaming
Re:here's a review (Score:2)
Nope, actually that's not it. What they say is wow, for about $200 bucks, you can get something that performs close to a GeForce3, that's pretty cool. They also point out a product that is awesome and expensive and one which is cheaper but not so great, but the T200 (I think) has been fallen in love with.
Re:Why is everything Titanium? (Score:2)
Now, the Dreamcast game I'm working is a rewrite of spacewar: Super Spacewar EX3 Evolution Alpha (I love those Japanese game names).
Current naming fad seems to be '...ia' names. Prolly cause with fake words it's easier to get a domain name for them (and trademark, of course).
Re:cards outpace the crt again (Score:3, Informative)
60Hz is the lower threshold of the eye. The optimal minimum rate for a monitor is 72 Hz.
As for colors, it's pretty easy to distinguish over 4096, if they're lined up in progression. But saying red foo is different from red bar when they are against blues quux and baz is not so easy.
In general the difference between hi-color (16 bit) and tru color(24 bit). Is not discernible.
For a more in depth review of color discrimination
check out the PNG specifications which were designed for optimal viewing and compression
(as opposed to other formats which simply permute the colors ie same # of reds as blues and greens)