Carmack and Video Cards

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John Carmack has been visiting Slashdot again, giving his opinion on the Rendition Verite V1000 and general consumer video cards vs workstation cards in a story about 3dfx.

When the consumer cards first started posting fill rate numbers higher than the professional boards, it was mostly a lie. They got impressive numbers at 640x480 in 16 bit color, without blending, depth buffering, and filtering, but if you turned on 32 bit, depth, blend, trilinear, and ran at high res, they could fall to 1/4 or less of the quoted value.

<snip>

We bought three generations of intergraph/intense3D products, but the last generation (initial wildcat) was a mistake. We use nvidia boards for both professional work and gaming now. I still think the professional boards are a bit more stable, but they fell behind in other features, especially fill rate. Being an order of magnitude cheaper doesn't directly factor into our decisions, but it would for most people.

He also answered two questions, one regarding the amount of passes in the new Doom and the other regarding 3dfx not supporting T&L.
From The Chatty
  • reply
    September 25, 2000 10:58 AM

    Now thats a first post. I think

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