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Denathis Arabar
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Posted - 2004.02.06 00:19:00 -
[1]
OK i know this is probably the wrong place, but this is to do with eve, and i find you all to be a mine of information so here goes.
I currently have a ge force 2 gts and its cool but some of the effects are missing nowadays on new games. I want a new card which will run eve in all its glory and also the new games coming out soon. But im overwhelmed by the amount of different types...
Basically here is what i am aiming for, something which works for the new generation of games (DX 9) and will run well but is not ú300 nearer ú100-180 max.
Through my research and asking in eve chat i narrowed it down to a Radeon 9600xt 128mb or a creative 5700 ultra 128mb. But i have been told by a supplier the power colour 9800 is better then both these and only ú20 more... Im not sure about the brand though because i hear this matters too... 
Any ideas on which card to get or the final choice, i see there is a new generation of cards coming out soon, in the next couple of months i think, would it be better to wait for this (not to buy but because the cost of the others will all drop)
Well sorry if this is in the wrong place but it is mainly for the eve graphics  thanks in advance for all your help guys, also i would be very impressed if people with the cards i mentioned could say how pleased they are with the cards and how they run.
Again thanks everyone.
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Cao Cao
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Posted - 2004.02.06 00:40:00 -
[2]
Personally, I stick with nVidia just because I know nearly every game and program is specifically programmed to run well on them ...
I have an nVidia GeForce 4 Ti-4800 with I believe 256mb (or something along those lines) and it runs EVE super well. Dunno, I just like the nVidia cards for some reason.
I heard the Radeons have problems, but that's neither here nor there.
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Carmen Electra
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Posted - 2004.02.06 00:45:00 -
[3]
Edited by: Carmen Electra on 06/02/2004 00:48:55
Ok, Cao Cao is a little out of the loop  but that's ok...
Currently ATi cards provide superior Image Quality, Performance, and stable drivers.
I run EVE at 1280x1024 at 4x Anti-Aliasing and 16x Anisotropic Filtering, smooth as butter. My card cost me $200, voltmodded and cooled at 466/351. Which makes it faster than any card you can buy all for a modest price.
The nVidia FX series is terrible mainly due to a unified compiler and a whole sham with DX9 vs CG support that I'd rather not spend 10 pages elaborating on. The GF4 series rocks though.
If you want top of the line performance, IQ, go for the R300 series (9500,9600,9700,9800)
__________
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Kruppe
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Posted - 2004.02.06 00:54:00 -
[4]
haha Cao Cao owned
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Atandros
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Posted - 2004.02.06 00:57:00 -
[5]
I'm playing with a 9800XT with all the bells and whistles on and everything's silky smooth at 1600*1200. [/bragging]
Antialiasing is allegedly better quality than Nvidia's (haven't seen a direct comparison tho, so can't comment), as well as the image quality (ditto). I also heard of some problems, particularly with planets, but the newer cards like XT's don't seem to have it.
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Carmen Electra
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Posted - 2004.02.06 01:05:00 -
[6]
 Quote:
I'm playing with a 9800XT with all the bells and whistles on and everything's silky smooth at 1600*1200. [/bragging]
Antialiasing is allegedly better quality than Nvidia's (haven't seen a direct comparison tho, so can't comment), as well as the image quality (ditto). I also heard of some problems, particularly with planets, but the newer cards like XT's don't seem to have it.
That is correct, ATi uses a rotated grid algorithm with gamma corrected anti-aliasing (blends edge properly with whats behind it), this makes for a much crisper smooth line than nVidia drivers support.
__________
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Rinji
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Posted - 2004.02.06 01:14:00 -
[7]
PLus sun occlution (sp?) always works on Radeon cards. 
Vice Admiral Rinji Morisato
Logistics Division
Commanding Officer of Logistics Division |
t0rfiFrans
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Posted - 2004.02.06 01:17:00 -
[8]
EVE was originally developed so that it would run on Geforce I (!). At the time the decision was taken, the release date was expected to be sometime in 2001 (!). It soon became obvious that GeForce II was the minimum and I think it says so on the box. We still had one PC with GeForce I during development, much to the distress of the person who used that PC, our composer RealX.
We built our shaders using only two texture stages per pass, as is the maximum on GeForce II cards. There are no per-pixel effects or vertex shaders, as we found we could achive the same effects people were using them for ( bump maps / anisotrophic lighting, fresnel effects ) via smart cube map usage. This enabled us to keep everything compatable with GeForce II. Obviously, there are no CG effects either, it's all vanilla DirectX 9. So when choosing a graphics card and comparing benchmarks there are two things to look out for:
1. Texture memory. 64 Mb feels good, 128mb feels better.
2. Fill rate. No numbers here, but our particle effects and multi-pass shaders can be real fill rate hogs when you are sitting in a 100 ship fleet battle. I tried optimizing them, but our perfectionist art director kept slapping on my fingers.
3. AGP Bandwidth. Obviously 8x is better than 4x and 4x is better than 2x.
Of course there are other issues, like AA crispness etc, but there are the main factors in rendering performance.
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Carmen Electra
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Posted - 2004.02.06 01:26:00 -
[9]
There is also a problem with depth buffer precision, but I know ATi is fixing this now. Also, the AA crispness has been an issue, but Catalyst 4.1 has done a fantastic job with fixing that.
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j0sephine
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Posted - 2004.02.06 01:27:00 -
[10]
"We built our shaders using only two texture stages per pass, as is the maximum on GeForce II cards. There are no per-pixel effects or vertex shaders, as we found we could achive the same effects people were using them for ( bump maps / anisotrophic lighting, fresnel effects ) via smart cube map usage. This enabled us to keep everything compatable with GeForce II. Obviously, there are no CG effects either, it's all vanilla DirectX 9."
... t0rfiFrans, while your attention is on the subject, EVE has been having ****load of graphics errors on low-end Radeon cards (9000 etc.) since quite a few official patches. Stuff like badly rendered character portraits and icons (missing geometry, untextured or partially textured geometry, no graphics at all) as well as planets (again, missing parts of texturing or in some cases no texturing whatsoever)
Was chalking that up to some high-level shaders you might've been using, but reading your description i figure it's not the case and you might want to look into those issues. (they were reported in the patch review section, trying to issue actual bug reports always wind up with "internal server error" for me. :/
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WhiteDwarf
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Posted - 2004.02.06 01:28:00 -
[11]
I have an NVIDIA FX5900 Ultra card, gfx look quite awesome, in all my games...
Used to use ATI, switched to Nvidia, have had no reason to switch back...
"Trust No One" |
Nwalmaer
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Posted - 2004.02.06 01:32:00 -
[12]
Quote:
Currently ATi cards provide superior Image Quality, Performance, and stable drivers.
Only they can't even render character portraits correctly, but whatever floats your boat. 
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Primo x
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Posted - 2004.02.06 01:32:00 -
[13]
Edited by: Primo x on 06/02/2004 01:36:02
I run the Nvidia FX-5950 256mb card($528 US dollars) and i actually had to turn the settings down on it. Never had a bit of problems with it since and i do recomend it if you have the money.
I also play alot of FPS games and my frame rates are crazy good.
Good luck with what ever card you all run and enjoy the eye candy in this game. 
"There is only one way out of this system,, to bad you are warp scrambled" |
t0rfiFrans
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Posted - 2004.02.06 01:32:00 -
[14]
Quote:
... t0rfiFrans, while your attention is on the subject, EVE has been having ****load of graphics errors on low-end Radeon cards (9000 etc.)
Noted. There have been many issues with them, especially laptop chipsets. We are aware of these bugs and they're addressed one by one. Some need to be fixed by vendor's drivers, while others could possibly be bypassed by some black magic programming.
The issues you speak of are all areas where we are rendering the frame buffer to a texture so they're related.
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Carmen Electra
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Posted - 2004.02.06 01:35:00 -
[15]
Quote:
Quote:
Currently ATi cards provide superior Image Quality, Performance, and stable drivers.
Only they can't even render character portraits correctly, but whatever floats your boat.
Uhh...no probelms on my system. Could you be more specific?
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j0sephine
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Posted - 2004.02.06 01:40:00 -
[16]
"Noted. There have been many issues with them, especially laptop chipsets. We are aware of these bugs and they're addressed one by one. Some need to be fixed by vendor's drivers, while others could possibly be bypassed by some black magic programming."
Ohh, great to hear. ;o
Something i was wondering about, at least as planets are concerned. Wouldn't (temporary or not) switch to using Emerald texture bank you have in the resCelestialTextures file... instead of those layered textures that doesn't seem to combine correctly... improve the appearance on the low-end cards, even though the diversity would suffer a little? ^^;
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Carmen Electra
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Posted - 2004.02.06 01:45:00 -
[17]
Planet texturing appears to work correctly on my system; in fact they're the best looking planets I've ever seen in a space sim 
__________
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t0rfiFrans
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Posted - 2004.02.06 01:58:00 -
[18]
Quote:
Planet texturing appears to work correctly on my system; in fact they're the best looking planets I've ever seen in a space sim
Did you know the moon texture maps are made from pictures of food upstairs in our kitchen. We shot splatters of soy sauce, ketchup and milk on a circular plate, did some photoshop magic, made them black and white and converted to depth maps. Converted that then to "bump maps" ( embossed overlay maps ) and then prepared them for spherical projection. Hope I didn't ruin the immersion for anyone by sharing that.
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Negotiator
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Posted - 2004.02.06 02:02:00 -
[19]
my card does have problems with rendering portraits...
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Carmen Electra
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Posted - 2004.02.06 02:03:00 -
[20]
Quote:
Quote:
Planet texturing appears to work correctly on my system; in fact they're the best looking planets I've ever seen in a space sim
Did you know the moon texture maps are made from pictures of food upstairs in our kitchen. We shot splatters of soy sauce, ketchup and milk on a circular plate, did some photoshop magic, made them black and white and converted to depth maps. Converted that then to "bump maps" ( embossed overlay maps ) and then prepared them for spherical projection. Hope I didn't ruin the immersion for anyone by sharing that.
I thought you used the hubble telescope
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DigitalCommunist
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Posted - 2004.02.06 02:18:00 -
[21]
while we're on the subject of graphics;
the last patch did wonders for improving UI response time, but will we see more optimizations with the UI? Right now with the GUI on I'm down to 12-ish FPS, without it, its 30-40.. I know that's the general case on all cards since you have less to render, but it seems to me that the UI is taking a damn lot of resources.
can you also modify the alt+tab (hide UI) command so it shows target icons and displays damage messages, that would make it very useful for combat since it would increase my FPS vastly without suffering from lack of functionality
basically I don't need to see chat, and all the damned windows open when im in the middle of combat
for anyone who's interested:
upgraded from Geforce 4 MX 440 to a Geforce FX 5600 (256mb), very tiny difference in performance, essentially the same but with sun occlusion on.. while I hear of people with the same card up in the 40-50's and sometimes in the 20-30's where I'm only 10-15 fps
but I also have a p3 550, so that's my bottleneck *sigh* 
_____________________________________
Perpetually driven, your end is our beginning.
"Can I be a consultant for EVE II?" - WhiteDwarf |
RussianBazilisk
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Posted - 2004.02.06 02:31:00 -
[22]
u know Ge Force 4 is working for me.
But u know u dont need much for a wallpaper .
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Denathis Arabar
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Posted - 2004.02.06 02:39:00 -
[23]
Quote:
Obviously, there are no CG effects either, it's all vanilla DirectX 9. So when choosing a graphics card and comparing benchmarks there are two things to look out for:
1. Texture memory. 64 Mb feels good, 128mb feels better.
2. Fill rate. No numbers here, but our particle effects and multi-pass shaders can be real fill rate hogs when you are sitting in a 100 ship fleet battle. I tried optimizing them, but our perfectionist art director kept slapping on my fingers.
3. AGP Bandwidth. Obviously 8x is better than 4x and 4x is better than 2x.
Of course there are other issues, like AA crispness etc, but there are the main factors in rendering performance.
Ok thanks for all the answers, im in England and really should be asleep but cant  . Where could i find information like this on the cards I am interested in then. I know the bandwidth is 8x on them but i dont know the texture memory im not clued up at all on technicalities of course as you can tell.
Also i was told that sometimes the cards run slower with 256 meg, is this why there is only about ú10 difference between the 128meg and 256 meg versions of lots of the cards. Also torifrans i know you cant say which card is best for impartiality but a mail would be nice lol i wont post it and of course it would be your opinion not the stance of the company...
Twists arm...
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Carmen Electra
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Posted - 2004.02.06 02:40:00 -
[24]
DigitalCommunist,
Yes, the UI does take up too much resources. I think it's all CPU, no GPU, and modifying transparency doesnt change it at all!!? 
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Aturayd
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Posted - 2004.02.06 04:13:00 -
[25]
With my old Radeon 9000 my portraits were getting screwed up. Occasionally, an eye would black out and little glitches would occur with the snapshot process. However, with my new FX 5200, the sun flickers like its a busted light bulb when i look at it in space. It doesnt matter... both cards do a lot of wierd **** in this game.
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about:blank |
Atandros
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Posted - 2004.02.06 05:27:00 -
[26]
Quote:
There is also a problem with depth buffer precision, but I know ATi is fixing this now. Also, the AA crispness has been an issue, but Catalyst 4.1 has done a fantastic job with fixing that.
Indeed, there's that. I had forgotten it when I was posting, probably because I'm so used to it by now.
Quote:
Did you know the moon texture maps are made from pictures of food upstairs in our kitchen. We shot splatters of soy sauce, ketchup and milk on a circular plate, did some photoshop magic, made them black and white and converted to depth maps. Converted that then to "bump maps" ( embossed overlay maps ) and then prepared them for spherical projection. Hope I didn't ruin the immersion for anyone by sharing that.
Hey, I'm dabbling in space art and I recently made a planet surface texture from a big pasta dish...so I'm no stranger to methods like this.
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HYDRO
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Posted - 2004.02.06 06:00:00 -
[27]
Edited by: HYDRO on 06/02/2004 06:00:58
Quote:
Did you know the moon texture maps are made from pictures of food upstairs in our kitchen. We shot splatters of soy sauce, ketchup and milk on a circular plate, did some photoshop magic, made them black and white and converted to depth maps. Converted that then to "bump maps" ( embossed overlay maps ) and then prepared them for spherical projection. Hope I didn't ruin the immersion for anyone by sharing that.
Thats pretty funny, gonna be feeling hungry everytime a look at the moon now
So those real bright orange moons are ketchup and milk mix lol  , often wonderd about them .
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Oburn
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Posted - 2004.02.06 06:53:00 -
[28]
ATIs new line seems to have Dx9 down very well (look at Halflife 2 for a reference of future games), . I build alot of systems at work and people are scared to go to ATI because thier old drivers sucked (its true) but with the introduction of the catalyst drivers things have changed. The only problem that remains is all ATIs old cards are still out there being used by people trying to play newer games and the newer the games become the more glitches, artifacting, whitewashing your gonna get with them cards and the drivers are no longer being optimized for these older cards as well (im talking about the early radeon series).
I ran benchmarks at work with that powercolor and it is a very nice card. If you can afford it go for it, it will not disappoint you and you will be set for awhile to come gaming wise.
The only problem i have come across building with ATI cards is the MSI 645 Max-U mobo and that card had major issues. Also stay away from the Saphire drivers from 3rd party "Powered by ATI" cards.
If you melt dry ice can you swim in it and not get wet? |
Maya Rkell
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Posted - 2004.02.06 09:43:00 -
[29]
I've used an ATI 9500 Pro and a GeForce 4MX, and the ATI worked better in every way.
ALl I need now is for the ATI to be fixed so I can stop using the blasted GF4MX
"As far as I can tell, It doesn't matter who you are, If you can believe there's something worth fighting for " - Garbage, "Parade" |
Gan Ning
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Posted - 2004.02.06 10:11:00 -
[30]
Anyone using a 256mb Radeon 9800 XT or Pro with EVE? Is it worth the moolah to get EVE gloriously perfect? |
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