Geforce FX has 4x2 marchitecture: Part Two

[Robin B]

Kansje hvorfor Nvidia skjøt seg selv i foten når det gjelder nyere spill.

Iallefall god lesning.

 

http://www.driverheaven.net/#article_1285

 

 

We carried on talking to our friends and learned quite a few more facts about the 4x2 Nvidia marchitecture. First, we were contacted by some of the developer community who had this to say.

 

While multitexturing is a great technology and being able to do more textures is a "good thing", that doesn't imply that it's always necessary. For example, if you need a plain room without any fancy things inside you only need to use single textures, as otherwise you'd kill your bandwidth unnecessarily. Multitexturing is more important for creating much more realistic scenes and effects and while it will be heavily used in new games, it won't be used all of the time. If a developer can create one environment using just single texturing he or she will certainly use that, since it will make the code zip along. It's horses for courses. Using a lot of effects such as FSAA and anisotropic filtering will hurt Geforce FX performance, and we've seen in some early reviews that this is exactly the case with games like Unreal Tournament 2003.

 

Using extra Nvidia features in Doom 3 will hurt performance even more because of the complexity of the game, and only having a 128-bit memory interface doesn't help either. This could be the real reason why Nvidia is not happy with 3dmark03, since this benchmark uses single texturing. Nvidia has outlined its reasons for not liking benchmarks using single texturing, and Futuremark replied in a four page long PDF we've seen.