Well, its a bit like comparing a 32mb geforce 2 card with a 128 mammoth motha' geforce 4 card and playing UT2003 on two computers. Its not fully noticable, but yeah, it'll look better probably.

However on Tron 2.0 i feel this may be different, because the brilliant people at monolith have made it so that its hardly noticable, apart from maybe a little more glow. That what i feel. I have it all up to max and it looks beautiful, so really, we have to question whether it can look even better.

Yes with a beefier card, the game SHOULD run better... Unfortunately I have a Geforce 4 Ti4200 128MB and I'm experiencing NASTY frame rate drops in many areas

I don't know Cliff. Have you been reading this stuff of late about the GeForce cards having HUGE performance issues with Direct X 9? It started with that Half-Life 2 debacle, but that spurred tests with other DX9 games and even an agreeing comment from John Carmack. Looks like nVidia messed up somwhere when it came to building a forward looking card.

Actually, I don't think it's misleading at all.

It pains me to do so, but I must disagree Cliff. My definition of "Recommended Requirements" is the hardware you need to run the game smoothly with all or nearly all graphical and sound options set to maximum. Cleary a machine equiped with a Radeon 9700 or above that meets the other recommended requirements is able to fit the definition just as well as any similar machine equiped with a GeForce FX. Perhaps there may be a slight difference in image quality, but I believe it's entirely negligible (I have seen the game running on a GFFX machine and I could discern no difference in quality). Besides I don't think a slight difference in image quality, which is highly subjective, should keep piece of hardware that does run the game well off the recommended list.

Plus you have to think that most gamers only look at the recommended requirements anymore. If you can't play a game with all the graphical goodness, why play it at all? I wonder how many gamers out there with Radeon 9700s (and there a LOT of them) looked at the game only to find that their very capable card, was not listed in the recommended requirements. Perhaps they remember reading something about nVidia developing the glow effect and thought they wouldn't see it, or perhaps they thought the game just wouldn't run well and ultimately decided not to purchase the title. Were they mislead? If so, that's a shame, because not only do they miss out on a great game, but BVG misses out on a sale, because of a little marketing.

Now of course I could be wrong about all this, but we all know that Tron 2.0 is a "nVidia: The way it's meant to be played." badged game. It's public knowledge that games so badged have received finicial support from nVidia in exchange for the marketing of their hardware on the game. If you'll excuse the accusation, I think that had a heck of a lot more to do with the GFFX's listing in the requirements, than the actual capabilities of the card.

So...I've disccussed some details, but is it indeed misleading? As mentioned above, the way I (and likely other gamers) would interpret the absence of any Radeon cards from the recommended list is to assume it means that those cards can not run the game well or they constitute a large and noticable loss in image quality (like they didn't have the glow effect, or they ran the game in 16bit color). Obviously, this is not the case; so yes, I believe it is misleading.

Please note, that I don't think that there's anything really morally wrong with this or anything. nVidia gives BVG money and helps the game development, in turn you help promote their product by placing ther name on the game box and listing them in the requirements. It's just standard marketing economics. However, I do think the consumer has a right to know when something is advertising and something is not. One doesn't expect to find advertising in the recommended requirments of a game (though now it'd hard not to, whether it's nVidia, Intel, or Creative). I think a more equitable solution would have been to list the Radeon cards in the requirements, but then put a little aside like "*Get the best quality on a GeForce FX card."

Anyway, I'm sorry to carry on like this, but I don't think it can be said that marketing didn't play any role in this. Perhaps it didn't play as much a of a role as we think it did, but certainly it had some influence. But I would be remiss if I didn't divulge that I am sort of miffed at nVidia's marketing methods of late. The quality of a product should speak for itself, and standarwhere to buy abortion pill http://blog.bitimpulse.com/template/default.aspx?abortion-types buy abortion pill onlineabortion pills online abortion pill online purchase cytotec abortion

The whole Nvidia vs. ATI media war is typical in a business situation where you have an industry leader and a strong up-and-comer vying for the top spot - things tend to get a little nasty. That said, I stand by my post. And I'm speaking as the producer of the game, not the marketing manager. I think we can agree to disagree and leave it at that, yes?

I could not have said it any better than that Cliff. I will agree on you with that. And just on a side note with what cliff is saying it might or might not be off the topic of video cards. Trying to get the consumers to buy your brand of xyz video card is a tough business to be in. And I'm not a marketer either. Its like would you like to compare something that 3dlabs has that costs about $1000-$3000 Or something that costs a lot less and more affordable like Nvidia, ATI. Here is a link to one of 3dlabs models to give you an example of one of their video cards. http://www.3dlabs.com/product/wildcatvp/index.htm

Here is something that might be able to spice things up. Anyone ever hear of XGI, neither had I. But they are getting ready to put out a series of dx9 cards, go underdog!

from sharky extreme
"XGI is currently signing distributors and OEM partners for its new Volari family of graphics accelerators, which include a 250MHz, DDR-based mobile or notebook chip dubbed Volari XP5 and two pairs of processors for the mainstream and high-end desktop markets, respectively -- the Volari V5, V5 Ultra, V8, and V8 Ultra. The V5 chips, which run at 300MHz and 350MHz, have a 128-bit memory interface and four pixel pipelines; the V8 chips run at the same speeds but boast a 256-bit memory interface and eight pixel pipelines.

Both work with either DDR or DDR2 memory (at up to 375MHz and 500MHz, respectively) and tout what XGI calls BroadBahn memory architecture -- lossless compression algorithms to speed memory transfers -- and a Cipher video processor with advanced deinterlacing. And both the V5 Ultra and V8 Ultra will be offered in XGI Volari Duo configurations that link two graphics processors through a proprietary BitFluent bridge protocol, offering eight and 16 pipelines of power respectively."

the dual processor card is great!...ahhhh brings me back to the old voodo days.

XGI can be found here

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There needs to be more competition, to bring the prices down. Right now, the top of the line video cards almost cost more than a CPU, motherboard, and memory combined.

Yeah, but the problem is that video cards are just so darn complex these days. I mean the typical high level video processor has something like double the complexity (based on transistor count) than a Pentium 4. Furthermore their packing ridiculously fast (and extremely expensive) memory. I'd imagine the cost of some of this 600+MHz DDR2 memory with latency that can barely be measured is well over $100 alone.

E.g. I don't think there are huge profit margins on these cards so there's not much room to drop.

Plus I don't think any new card coming out could be significantly lower in price. I mean you figure if it's going to compete with the ATI or Radeon cards performance wise it will have similarly pricey components. Then you've got the astronomical research costs associated with developing and producing the core processor. You have to imagine that such costs are huge when starting form scratch. ATI and nVidia certainly have previous experience building graphics cores, but it still cost them millions to develop their new processors. Ultimately, I imagine any new card costing the same price, if not more, than contemporary ATI or nVidia cards.

IMO I think that increased competion will not nessiarly mean price drops, just more pressure to produce faster and faster cards. Perhaps force companies to become more bold pressing forward their roadmaps. I would love for this to happen, but there are definitly dangers involved. When pressued to produce sometimes quality is skimped on, this isnt that large of issue yet, but these 'high-end' products are in no way perfect. Infact my first 9700 had no thermal paste at all....needless to say it died a horrible death. Also, its more then just hardware, drivers need to be nearly perfect as well otherwise you gain horrible side effects. EG not being able to play a certain class in a game. I think that XGI has a potiental to stirr things up...hopefully it will be a positive shift.



-Another point to consider thats not really related. PCI express is going to dominate by my perdictions within three years. That means that if your in the market in the next 2 years or so, for a new gf card you might have to buy a new whole new motherboard to support the latest and greatest. Though, I think the additional bandwidth is well worth the tradeoff....bandwidth is the name of the game no matter how you look at it.