Bought a 5900 Ultra, my observations

[Particleman]

Well I went back over to the darkside at least for one of my systems, my other system still has a 9700 Pro. My observations so far, anything other than quality AF seems to stink on the 5900, I thought nVidia supposedly improved the image quality of their performance modes in recent drivers, but I am using the latest 45.26 drivers and the Performance and High Performance modes are absolutely horrid. With my 9700 I happily played at 16X performance AF with great IQ and pretty much no performance hit, after seeing first hand how bad nVidia's performance AF is I have lost all respect for any site that ran benchmarks with that mode. I am happy that all my old games work fine again though. I really wish ATi would implement supersampling on the R3XX, but I got tired of waiting and not being able to play a lot of my old games with FSAA on. Overall I'm happy with my purchase since it does what I want it to do, which is play my old games better, but for the games that I worked fine on the 9700 Pro I feel like I've taken a step backwards in terms of Image Quality. nVidia's Quality mode seems to be on par with ATi's but they really need to do something about their performance mode, FSAA quality isn't as much of a step back as I thought it would be, ATi's FSAA does look a little better but the difference isn't as big as I thought it would be. If only ATi would realize that a lot of us still like to play our old games in our collection.

[fivefeet8]

Hmm. I didn't realize the Dets 45.26 were out. Thought only the 25.24 were out today. Doesn't much matter anyways. I'm using the Omega 44.03 drivers and the quality/performance is top notch. For older PC games/emulators, I use atuner or rivatuner and enable the hidden FSAA modes.

[Particleman]

Whoops I meant 45.24. Omega still makes nVidia drivers? I though nVidia's lawyers got him to stop making and distributing them?

[Yeloazndevil]

Originally Posted by Particleman

Whoops I meant 45.24. Omega still makes nVidia drivers? I though nVidia's lawyers got him to stop making and distributing them?

nah Nvidia is letting him now, but I think he won't ever make Nvidia Omega Drivers

[fivefeet8]

Originally Posted by yeloazndevil

nah Nvidia is letting him now, but I think he won't ever make Nvidia Omega Drivers

Hehe. He's gonna make Omega Detonators now.

[Galway no Sora]

I heared that he's back after allowed by nVidiot .

[Particleman]

How well does the Dusk Ultra demo run on your system? I am finding that it runs a bit choppy, I'm not sure if FSAA is stuck on enabled or something on this demo since it does appear antialiasing is being applied even though I disabled it in the control panel. I am wondering if there is something wrong with my settings or something since I find it hard to believe they would release a demo that would run choppy on their flagship card.

[Yeloazndevil]

Originally Posted by Galway no Sora

I heared that he's back after allowed by nVidiot .

yea he's allowed again, but I wonder if he will make them again

Yes Omega is going to continue the Nvidia drivers. On his site he HAS indicated that he will.
Particleman, Dusk may be a little choppy, but I can overlook that due to the fact that the 5900 Ultra (yes, I have one also) will run ATI's demos as well as Nvidia's. I've run the Chimp and the Car paint w/my Ultra and they work great. Even Rachel looks really nice on the Ultra. As for Dawn and the Ogre, flawless.
sincerely,
sx/amiga

[GSDragoon]

http://www.omegacorner.com/

NVIDIA DRIVER NEWS
(07/19/03)


Nvidia have recently contacted Driverheaven with a statement allowing Omegas drivers to continue development.

Omegadrive and Driverheaven will be hopefully working closely with nvidia in the future regarding drivers and support to further aid the community.
Zardon

[Demigod]

The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra looks good in benchmarks but I guess benchmarks don't say everything. From what I've heard the FX 5900 U only runs well in certain optimized situation while the R300 cards run standard in every situation (runs well without any optimizations). I had thought they fixed AF with the newer drivers though. I was actually considering buying a GeForce FX 5600 Ultra over my recently purchased Radeon 9500 Pro (not currently in use). Looks like I made the right choice in sticking with my card. I am thinking of buying a FX 5200 Ultra for my sister's computer though (she has a TNT2), but I'm not expecting anything that great from it. I'm thinking I might just be better off with a Radeon 9200. ATI does have a great line-up of cards, even without the Radeon 9500 Pro. My respect for ATI has just gone up a few notches.

[Particleman]

Originally Posted by sxamiga

Yes Omega is going to continue the Nvidia drivers. On his site he HAS indicated that he will.
Particleman, Dusk may be a little choppy, but I can overlook that due to the fact that the 5900 Ultra (yes, I have one also) will run ATI's demos as well as Nvidia's. I've run the Chimp and the Car paint w/my Ultra and they work great. Even Rachel looks really nice on the Ultra. As for Dawn and the Ogre, flawless.
sincerely,
sx/amiga

Thanks for the info, I thought for a while that I was the only one who had problems with getting Dusk to run at a decent framerate. It's just weird seeing a demo that's made for that card run so choppy. Not really the best way to show off the benefits of your hardware The gas station demo resembles a slide show too.

[fivefeet8]

Hm. Here are a few shots of Dusk Ultra and Gas station. Using fraps, I was able to see the FPS. I'm getting around 18-23 fps with Dawn Ultra and 20-25 fps with the Gas Station. Both with 8xSFSAA enabled through atuner!. Strange thing though, is that even disabling FSAA doesn't increase the fps at all. FSAA is getting enabled though. I can notice it with and without FSAA, but the FPS doesn't change at all. 20 fps isn't all that framey actually.

Originally Posted by Demigod

I had thought they fixed AF with the newer drivers though.

The infamous AF problems are only occuring with UT2k3. Other pc games using Trilinear filtering with quality AF are fine with the newer Dets.

BTW Particleman. Welcome to the Dark Side.

[Razor Blade]

Is FRAPS really that accurate though? In ePSXe In Petes OGL It says Im getting like 60 fps and in FRAPS if I have it on sometimes it will say about 5 or 10 fps less.

[Melhisedek]

Originally Posted by Razor Blade

Is FRAPS really that accurate though? In ePSXe In Petes OGL It says Im getting like 60 fps and in FRAPS if I have it on sometimes it will say about 5 or 10 fps less.

Well IIRC there is something different between PC games and ePSX emulation. Like when your game is running 200 fps it will go normally, but if ePSX is to run at same speed you wouldn't be able to catch it =)

I think Lord Kane explained it once beautifuly!

@ Particleman
What is the rest of your spec ?

Thank you for your time!

[Kane]

PSX emulators will actualy run at 25/30FPS but 50/60 Virtual updates IIRC because TVs are interlaced....

[Particleman]

The 5900 Ultra is in a Athlon 2800+ with a Asus A7N8X deluxe nForce 2. If might be @20 fps but it feels very choppy, might have something to do with how rapidly dusk flails her arms and legs. When you compare it to how smoothly the other demos such as Vulcan etc run, it just makes the contrast even greater. I also find that changing FSAA levels seems to have very little impact on the performance of these 2 demos, and also even when I disable FSAA it still looks like some FSAA is being applied, though not as much.

As for the performance AF, the UT2003 issue is with the quality mode not doing trilinear filtering. What seem to be seeing is that the performance and high performance modes seem to be doing very little no matter how high I turn up the AF. Infact the high performance mode actually seems to decrease texture detail from the defaults of what you typically see on a graphics card. I'm just used to the performance mode on the 9700 where it produced ultra sharp textures and pushed the mip maps well back into the distance, the only drawback with ATi's performance mode was that it didn't smooth the texture transitions with trilinear filtering. nVidia's performance modes actually produce blurrier textures than their quality mode and the AF seems to do less.

[Kane]

If you wanna change the mip bias, you can play around with that in Rivatuner.

[Melhisedek]

Can you do some benches in UT 2k3 with 4xaa+16af everything @ quality using UT2k3 built in benchmark? ( Don't know if it's possible with Nvidia but I guess it should be if not than closest possible )

And also do you have any benches with Raddy ? Thanks you for your time!

[DarkAurora]

Hey Particleman, are you doing anything with that spare Radeon 9700 you have? *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*