je_saist

Yes and no.

Yes, there is evidence still on the web, like this piece by Charlie from The Inquirer back in 2006 : http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...-hardware-rant

Other evidence can be found on some blogs, like this 2007 post : http://scientiasblog.blogspot.com/20...-its-soul.html

And the Inquirer brought it up again in 2007 as well : http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...-hardware-sold

The allegations first came around back in 2001, and the first proof reached the web, and I think Slashdot, in 2002. The topic was discussed again when THG was up for sale since one of the hopes was that THG would regain it's credibility.

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and no. The old slashdot discussions and forum postings I had saved now go to defunct links, such as ThatForum, StarEmu, and the old Gamenikki.com forums. Theoretically the content may still somewhere in http://www.archive.org/index.php ... which as far as I know, the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing / LiveSearch don't index.

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edit: yes. I know. citing the TheInquirer is a bit like citing a politician. You just know it's going to come back and bite you on the rump. TheInq, and Charlie in particular, also have reputations for stretching the truth. Not as bad as TheReg's Andrew Orlowski whose posts could often be used as a foundation for a drinking game. The problems with THG's credibility was actually one of the few cases where Charlie, a couple of his hardware reviewers at the time, and I agreed on something. I'm a bit sad I didn't save the information as it happened... but I don't think it really occurred to anybody back in 2001 or 2002 that the information put on the web would one day be unavailable or dead linked.

... I think if I saw somebody actually wearing those in public, I'd either asphyxiate myself by laughing too hard, or look for the camera-man shooting the latest Vanilla Ice music video.

Yes / no / not really

Yes, two 9800 GTX's in SLI are pretty powerful, but you are dependent on software support of multi-gpu rendering. It'd be a cheaper way to gain more performance while you wait for Nvidia to go bankrupt or get bought out. (and no, that's actually not a joke, I think Human Being addressed the financial problem Nvidia has trying to move GTX chips right now... or somebody did in the thread)

No, I'm pretty sure that a single GTX 275 would outrun two 9800's. Granted, I can't actually test this. I don't have a GTX 275 on hand, although I do have GTS 250's... which are pretty much just die-shrunk rebadged 9800's.

I'll get to the Not Really at the end.

I mentioned this earlier in the thread, but I'd keep a barrel of salt on hand if you're reading Tom's. The site has been busted multiple times for accepting money to slant reviews one way or another. Now, while I can come up with dozens of reasons of my own not to buy a GTX 2xx card from Nvidia, most of my concerns simply won't matter to the average gamer.

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Okay, here's the Not Really part for those not interested in a soft analysis.

Not Really: it's a toss-up. If your an Nvidia fan, well. To broach the subject again, it's really questionable whether or not Nvidia is actually going to matter in a few months. Fermi's going to be launching against Larrabee and shortly before the product refreshes on the RadeonHD 5x00 series. Intel and AMD are also going to be pushing CPU's with Integrated GPU's in a 6months to 8months... and that's going to once again create a three-horse race in the low to mid-range graphics processor segment. I'm not too entirely sure Nvidia can survive as a vendor of gaming graphics cards if it's traditional bread and butter market, the low end market where the likes of the Geforce2 MX, Geforce4 MX, Geforce FX 5200, and Geforce 6600 dominated, goes away.

Nvidia's going to have to launch Fermi with parts at all segments, from the low-end to the High-End, and deliver large quantities. Since they are dependent on TSMC, that's... not really something I'm sure Nvidia can pull off. AMD is having enough problems pulling their own 40nm parts that are completed out of TSMC.

In order for Nvidia to survive, they are going to need a megabucks deal. One of the hot rumors that is going around now is that Nvidia has won the contract for the next Nintendo handheld. Personally, I doubt it given Nintendo's decades long relationship with AMD. Remember, the N64 was created with help from SGI, and that SGI team left to become ArtX. ArtX did the design for the Gamecube's LSI, but were bought up by ATi shortly before 2003. ArtX turned ATi around, helping to launch the Radeon 9700 series of cards and revamp ATi's... broken... driver program. ATi then did the graphics design for the Wii, something AMD was rather grateful for after the merger as Nintendo's profits helped shore up crashing processor revenue streams. At one time ATi had a contract to do the GPU for the so called GameBoy 2, a console that was halted, then dropped, after the DS went from side-toy to main-show.

With this kind of history, Nvidia would have to offer an astoundingly good deal to beat what has been a financially successful string of consoles for Nintendo. So I don't think this kind of guaranteed income deal is in store from Nvidia.

We also know that Nvidia's president has very kind words for Apple, and has been developing mobile platforms targeted towards the markets serviced by PowerVR / Imagination... a company that Apple has invested in. Some have suggested Nvidia is trying to maneuver themselves into a position to be bought out by Apple.

Now, with this sort of background, and multiple questions surrounding what's going to happen to / with Nvidia, the sensible thing to do is wait it out. Wait for Fermi parts to be delivered.

TL;DR version: Honestly, I'd save your money for next year rather than rushing to upgrade now.

Yes and No.

Yes, you'll be able to run all of the Going Rogue features. There's nothing in the feature sets of the cards listed by Mr. Miller that are not found in their lower counterparts.

However, the question is performance. You may have to accept a low resolution, like 1024*768 in order to obtain acceptable frames per second performance.

Can do. Probably take me a bit to get something setup that's... benchmarkable... across all 3 systems. I've gotta work LaserTron support for Adventure-Crossing tomorrow, so I'll likely not have something till Sunday or Monday.

no you can't, or at least not anymore. Nvidia disabled this with recent driver updates. It's one of the reasons why Intel and AMD are pushing OpenCL as a gaming physics solution.

(still reading the rest of the thread since my last post)

... and I see you actually mentioned this as I read further.

I've been running CoH under Xp / Vista with Crossfired RadeonHD 3870's and 4850's, and under Vista on a GTS 250 Triple SLI setup. Honestly, at the resolutions I run (1920*1200 on the Radeons, 1680*1050 on the Nvidia), there's not really a heap of difference in speed between the cards in single mode and multi-GPU mode.

This will likely change as of Going Rogue as the new engine supposedly will take advantage of multi-gpu rendering.

I'm sort of tossed on XFX. My first couple of cards with them were the AGP Geforce 6600 GT's I had... which had bloody awful heatsink designs. However, it seems that Nvidia's 6600 AGP design was something vendors couldn't deviate from, so I really couldn't blame XFX for the cards. I've been meaning to try a couple of their Radeon offerings, but everytime I went to buy, Sapphire was cheaper.

Sooo.. quick note on Sapphire. Sapphire's traditionally been a bit closer to ATi than other vendors. Back when ATi was selling their own branded cards, Sapphire was the actual manufacturer. One of the things to keep in mind is that for a long time ATi didn't sell chips to 3rd party vendors.

However, I did pay for that cheapness on the RadeonHD 4850's I picked up. They actually are the most annoying fans since the 6600 GT's I had, and remind me quite a lot of an FX 5800 Ultra I borrowed. At full tilt it's like a Banshee Howling fest.

Human Being beat me to this.

A GTX 275 starts around $240.

A good one with 1.7gb of memory is around $320.

A GTX 295 starts around $530.... well, the only one Newegg has is $530.

So you're basically paying a $50 premium to use up 2 slots in your computer rather than 4 slots... since i'm not aware of any single slot GTX 275's.

Now, if you've got the cash, yeah, the GTX 295 is a freaking monster. And the one on Newegg is actually cheaper than a 4870x2 I found on Dell.

But I can get a Stock 4870 from XFX for around $154. Two of those are only $308...

I can also find RadeonHD 4890's for around $200... and two of those in Crossfire are going to set you back around $400... and you'd be running away from GTX 285's just on single cards.

So, I wouldn't be buying a GTX 295. I can save a lot more money by being willing to sacrifice space in the case.

Just commenting on this, but I wouldn't really cite Tom's site as a reference on how processor's perform. THG has been busted multiple times in the past accepting vendor money to slant reviews.

Question for you: How many of those cards are from the The Way It's Meant to be Played program from Nvidia? I think you'll find that most shipping games with ATi card issues have been built with money / assistance from Nvidia. Which is actually technically illegal and grounds for a class action lawsuit, although Nvidia has enough of those types of problems as is.

Well, ATi has better drivers. The hardware specifications and programming guide are actually available if you are interested. On the hard issues of performance and image quality ATi and Nvidia typically trade blows. As I referenced with an earlier comment in this response, Nvidia has been caught out / busted for paying game developers to sabotage games on AMD graphics cards.

Have an easier time telling you who NOT to buy. Don't buy a Diamond Multimedia Card. Other than that, most of the AMD vendors, like Sapphire, Asus, PowerColor, HIS, and XFX are pretty much the same in physical quality.

Yes / no / not really. AMD redesigns the memory controllers on their GPU's about once every 5 minutes, and the efficiency is... pretty good. AMD has also been using GDDR5 memory on their mid-range to high-end graphics cards for a while now. Nvidia won't be using GDDR5 until Fermi... so Nvidia sort of needs that extra memory to make up the difference in speed.

*shifty eyes to the left and to the right*

Ecchi Shibari! The demon summoning Mastermind out for a stroll through Atlas Park!

There's really not much performance difference between a PCIE x16 and a PCIE 2.0 x16 slot. As much as I detest referencing Wikipedia, I have no desire to scrounge through PCI-SIG's site for the correct data, so take a look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Exp...CI_Express_2.0

Really depends on who you ask and when.

For the purposes of gaming in resolutions of 1280*720 (720p) or 1440*900, two common resolutions for low end LCD's, even Socket 754 or late Pentium4's can deliver enough punch for most games.

For the purposes of gaming in resolutions like 1680*1050, 1920*1080 (1080p), or 1920*1200, processors from the Intel Core2 Duo lineup and the AMD Socket 939 and AM2 dual core CPU's can deliver enough back-end power.

Right now, for most shipping games against the Socket AM3 Phenom's or Intel I5 / I7 processors, you'll run into a limit on your graphics card long before you run into the limit on your processor.

From a price for performance standpoint I have a hard time suggesting people buy Intel processors and motherboards. Earlier in the thread I was talking about the Intel D975XBX. This board was a contemporary of the Asus M2R32-MVP as both were launched in 2006. The M2R32-MVP cost... well... quite a lot less than the Intel board. I think I paid around $130 for the Asus board, and the Intel board was somewhere in the neighborhood over $250 if memory serves correctly. The Asus board had more PCIE bandwidth for each PCIE slot (both slots were 16x, the slots on the Intel were 4x, 8x, then 16x, and if you ran in crossfire it was 8x,8x) The Asus board used less power. And so on and so on.

What really got me though is that as AMD introduced new processors, Asus pretty much kept updating the BIOS to the literal physical limits of what the board could handle. That M2R32-MVP of mine is currently running with a Phenom 9600 that's overclocked.

The Intel board, as noted earlier, never had a bios update with new processors. Rather, as I found out when researching the board name for this thread, if I wanted to utilize new processors from Intel, I would have to buy a completely new $200+ motherboard... with the same exact physical hardware. I'm sure some accountant somewhere is sitting there, nodding his head, saying Yeah, that's how we make money. I'm sitting here going that's how you *CENSORED* your customers!

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Now, we do know that AMD intends to keep the ongoing Socket Compatibility that they have right now for future processors. The upcoming Bulldozer will have a new socket, but reportedly will also work on currently shipping Socket AM3 motherboards.

So if you bought an AM3 motherboard today, there's some assurance that just like Socket AM3 processors will work on most Socket AM2+ motherboards, consumer oriented Bulldozer designs will work on most Socket AM3 motherboards.

You don't get that kind of... assurance with Intel. Rather, you get the opposite. Case in point is the recent release of the LGA 1156. Rather than re-using the existing LGA 1136 and maintaining Socket Compatibility across processors, Intel simply releases a new socket design. Which is rather rotten if you want to stop and think about it for a minute.

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So if you were buying now, I'd push you towards a Socket AM3 motherboard with a Socket AM3 processor.

I'm just not sure which motherboard I'd push you too.

DFI burnt me pretty badly with a couple of their Intel I7 motherboard offerings that refused to run in Triple Channel memory mode, so I'm a little hesitant at pointing out the nice looking DFI LANParty DK 790FXB-M3H5. Sure, all of the DFI AMD boards I've had have been awesome, so maybe it was just an Intel thing or something. Asus makes a wonderful Quad-Crossfire board... but it's almost $200, which is Intel board territory. MSI has the 790FX-GD70... but it's an MSI... and every single MSI board I've had with an AMD chipset has been complete and utter *CENSORED.

I'd actually be tempted to live with the ASUS M4A79XTD EVO. Yeah, it's only got dual 8x PCIE slots, so you do lose a bit of bandwidth if you run in Crossfire mode. It's also available for around $110, so it's a bit of a deal for it's feature set.

*hits the High Power Mode on the Laser, with predictable mouth on fire results*

I have one the D975XBX motherboards: http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/D975XBX/

As far as I can tell, Intel doesn't actually specify what's different between the d975xbx and d975xbx2. Never mind, found it. The 2 model added several processors that really should have been added in a BIOS update to the first motherboard...

D975XBX 1 Processor List

D975XBX 2 Processor List

The only reason you'd buy one is if you wanted to run a really early Core 2 Duo with Crossfired Radeons, since this was one of, if not, the first Intel board to carry Crossfire support. It does not, however, support SLI as later and more modern Intel motherboards do.

I'd also have a hard time suggesting this board on it's own merits. The BIOS for the original model is rubbish, and since it looks like Intel just re-released the board with an updated BIOS for new processors instead of... you know.. actually releasing the BIOS so that if you had the original board you could use the new processors... I somewhat doubtful that the 2 model is any better.

Getting a SATA drive to boot from the system was difficult. And it chewed through more power than it really should have with it's feature support.

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If I mis-read this as you actually having one and aren't just looking at buying one, yes, it's PCI-Express slots will support Nvidia cards.

Just not in SLI.

and you didn't edit Wikipedia to state that Thanksgiving is celebrated in your country?

*head tilts*

Um... the Cedega overhead on Nvidia cards is closer to offering 85%-95% of the same performance on the same card at the same detail levels with CoH, and I'm basing that on Geforce 6200, Geforce 6600 GT, Geforce 6800, Geforce 7900 GT KO, Geforce 9500 GT, and Geforce GTS 250. I'm sort of curious as to why you'd only be getting 40% of that same performance on Cider. Although given my propensity for knocking Nvidia on the quality, or lack-thereof, on their drivers, that could be why.

mewit. I should have been checking the combat log more closely. I always presumed that extra damage was from the ghost axe undead damage.

This actually has been answered as well, although not directly.

CoH uses OpenGL as it's rendering API, which is why the graphics in Going Rogue aren't tied to NT6 / DirectX 11. We also know that neither Nvidia, nor ATi, have had different feature sets in differently named graphics cards for years. The last time Nvidia had different feature sets in graphics cards that were branded the same came back during the Geforce 4 years. The Geforce 4 TI series were DirectX 8 cards, the Geforce 4 MX cards were simply overclocked Geforce 2 MX's with DX 7 support.

There are a couple of oddities on AMD's mobile lineup... exampling the Mobile Radeon 2100 and x2300... which were DirectX 9.0c cards. They weren't branded with the RadeonHD tag that signified DirectX 10 support.

Anyways, since the RadeonHD 4850 was named by Ghost Falcon, and the 9800 GT was named by Positron, we can compare the technical specifications of these cards. For the purposes of OpenGL, most of the features of each card should be exposed to a developer through OpenGL 3.0, although it's possible that the developers are building off against OpenGL 2.0 ES.

Since the feature set in the cards listed by the developers is pretty much identical to lower end cards, like the Radeon 46xx series, or the Geforce 9500 and 9600 cards, we can pretty much say that the limiting factor is performance. Not features.

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edit: also, Positron uses the terms : best bet and recommend

which also enforces the point that it's about performance more than features.

If the developers are using OpenGL 3.0, all of the RadeonHD series and all of the Geforce 8x00 series onwards should be able to drive Going Rogue's graphics, although maybe not at 30 fps. Crossfired 3870's, for example, should be able to match a single 4850 since they can do so in most other shipping games.

If the developers are using OpenGL 2.0 ES, theoretically, you could go back to the Radeon 9700 series or the Geforce 6x000 and still have all of Going Rogue's visuals... I... somewhat doubt... that OpenGL 2.0 ES is the break point though.

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double edit: doh. I forgot that ATi also did the renaming / rebranding thing with the Radeon 8500 series. They kept re-releasing the 8500 as the Radeon 9000, then the 9200, and used the Radeon 8500 in the integrated chipset, the Radeon 9100. Again though, that was also years ago.

It's... pretty much already been answered. Hardware is hardware. If the RadeonHD 4850 is the hardware performance starting point... that's the hardware performance starting point, regardless of what OS you are using.

that'll pretty much only happen if the game switches to OpenCL for physics. Nvidia's behavior with PhysX leads me to doubt that they'll... actively... develop acceleration on CPU's.

Yes / No / Not really.

One of the big problems with game development coming off of the Xbox, Gamecube, and PS2 systems onto the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii consoles is that the current crop of consoles are built to be multi-threaded with multiple cores. If you want to get technical the Gamecube was actually ahead of that curve with it's split 32/32 bit - 64bit processor pipeline. The change-over produced ill feelings from a development industry trained on single threaded production techniques that had to start working on developing techniques and code that would be able to utilize a larger number of instruction threads, rather than just a faster instruction thread.

The basic problem is that software written to perform well with multiple instruction threads generally doesn't work too well on single threaded / cored processors. This is one of the reasons why Microsoft Windows systems do so poorly in server related tasks: since Microsoft's main money making market is the desktop, they've never really been able to optimize the NT kernel for multi-threaded enviroments. You'll actually find that Microsoft tends to maintain a separate kernel, the HPC kernel, for tasks that require multi-threading. One of the big deals about Windows 7 is that the kernel's ability to handle additional processing cores and threads had been improved for consumers, which theoretically means that those with Triple, Quad, Hex, or Oct cores / processors will see larger performance gains in basic tasks.

If you are actually interested in the coding side of making SMP and Single Thread instructions work together, and how to optimize for each, you can check out the Linux Kernel Mailing list and look up the work that went into making SMP-enabled Linux kernels work properly on single thread-systems.

If you aren't interested and just want to know how this relates to CoH, keep reading.

One of the points of development we can take away from HeroCon is that the developers are interested in maintaining the existing playerbase and system specifications, which are largely based against processors around the 800mhz mark from the Pentium III and original Athlon line-ups. One of the theorized reasons is that NCSoft wants the game to be viable on netbook type systems, where something like an Intel Atom has around the same instructions per clock (IPC), as the years old PIII and Athlon designs. Looking ahead the netbook / notebook market is going to do nothing but grow, and there's the huge problem for Microsoft that Google's getting into the act...

No, I'm not saying that we'll see a downloadable app for ChromeOS on launch that installs CoH to an SD card or USB memory stick and runs through Transgaming Cedega... although Transgaming is working with both Google and Paragon Studio's in different capacities. As a future option to keep the customer base growing, it's something that NCSoft, as a publisher, and Paragon Studios as a developer, would have a hard time not thinking about or considering.

Since the developers seem to be interested in maintaining that older performance profile, there's only so much that can be done with the base engine to harness multiple cores or processing threads. Thus, while CoH can take some advantage of multiple cores, short of an update that enables a new underlying CPU engine, it's never really going to be able to take advantage of quad-cores, hex-cores, or oct-cores.