Shadowcaster on 20/5/2002 at 00:43
Well the GeForce 4 MX is going to become the new "poor man's card" just like GF 2 MX was.
GF 4 MX has performance on par with GF 2 GTS/Pro/Ultra/Ti (nVidia's nomenclature is freaky).
Actually if I were to buy a cheap card, I would got for Radeon 7500. Unless you play Thief since Radeons have problems with DX 6 fog :-(
Personally im going to buy a GF 3 Ti 200. Relativley cheap and damn effective, plus all these nice effects. Neat.
Cold_Brains on 20/5/2002 at 02:40
Am I the only one to find the pixel water effects terribly overrated? Its an effect applied to a flat, non-moving water surface (look at where the water meets the shore - it never rises or falls), and it just looks too metallic - hop in and its like you're wading through mercury.
A cheap effect, designed for screenshots and advance press. Look at 'Outcast' - better water, and done in software! No spesh hardware required.
Vindicar on 20/5/2002 at 02:41
They're a little more then 'mildly overclocked'. When I say they use the geforce 2 chipset, what I mean is this:
There are certain advancements that nVidia made in the geforce 4 line. One of the more prominent ones that I remember is that they finally figured out a way to draw ONLY what you see, and not draw anything that's hidden (behind say, an avatar, or a weapon model).
They took these enhancements to the geforce line, tossed in some stuff like higher core clock speed, more/better ram .. and in the MX line they did it to the geforce 2 chipset, and in the regular line they did it to the geforce 3 chipset.
And what's the difference between a geforce 2 and 3? .. vertex shaders? pixel shaders? .. The same differences between geforce 4 mx and ti lines.
:thumb:
Edit to add: Outcast!? OMG I thought I was the only one that played that game. I had a crappy comp at the time, so the voxels looked real nasty but that game was AWESOME. Best computer game before morrowind.
Eberon on 20/5/2002 at 03:13
Quote:
Originally posted by Cold_Brains Am I the only one to find the pixel water effects terribly overrated? Its an effect applied to a flat, non-moving water surface (look at where the water meets the shore - it never rises or falls), and it just looks too metallic - hop in and its like you're wading through mercury. No, you aren't, actually. I was viewing the XBox trailer for the game and noticed that too, but I thought it was perhaps a glitch in the encoding or result of the low resolution. It did look pretty nasty and overly (what's with that?) shiny.
Chibboleth on 20/5/2002 at 05:27
Looks nice in actual gameplay. It does look stupid when you happen to be wading in water at about shoulder level, but that doesn't happen very often. It looks especially nice when you're looking down at water from above, it's nicely translucent with light reflecting off the surface.
