[mainemanx]

According to PowerPage, the new 15" will ship with an ATI Video card ...

Good or bad?

[AssassyN]

Oustanding I'd say...ATI's mobile (and non-mobile, for that matter) chips are very impressive. Apple's choice to put the GeForce 4 440 Go in the 17" PB was pretty poor in most ppl's eyes, as the Radeon 9000 in the 15" TiBook *outperformed* it in many cases even thought it was in the "mid-range" machine.

[forcelite]

I have been following the video card scene for many years.

It flip flops all the time.

People swore by the vodoo's in 97-98. Some would even put 2 cards in to increase their video performance (one would process horizontal lines while the other processed vertical lines).

Next came the TNT2's and TNT2 Ultra's. These were the baddes cards around in 99. If you had a Riva TNT 2 Ultra you could overclock it and be topp dog.

Then came the first geforce. People swore that Nvidia was here to stay as top dog and "who could ever beat a video card with its own independent processor?"

I remember seeing the very first geforce for sale on ebay for $1200. That is not a mis tping. The guy did not even have drivers to go with it. Some how he got one from headquarters and sold it (the guy later posted on its perfromce with hacked drivers)

Then came the mainstream geforces, geforce2's, 3's and so on

Today we have ATI back in the mix. Everybody wants the radeon 9xxx

My point to make by all this is dont write off Nvidia yet. Yes the geforce might not be up to par at this very moment, but I would not frown upon a new mac with a geforce whatever, or anyother video card for that matter. As long as apples focus is on performance then let it be.

good thoughts but things change

Force

[RooneyX]

Originally posted by forcelite:
I have been following the video card scene for many years.

It flip flops all the time.

People swore by the vodoo's in 97-98. Some would even put 2 cards in to increase their video performance (one would process horizontal lines while the other processed vertical lines).

Those were the Voodoo 2s. When paired they rendered alternate vertical lines. If one was rendering vertical and the other horizontal they'd be rendering the same pixels

[arekkusu]

Good. But, speaking as an OpenGL programmer, the situation is still bad.

Basically, ATI and nvidia each implement features that the other does not, making programming for both chipsets a real pain. I'm not just talking about the new shader technology, either-- old features are compromised as well.

For example (comparing Radeon mobility series with GF4MX series):
* The Radeon can draw lines up to ten pixels wide. The GF4 can only draw one pixel wide lines.
* The Radeon can render-to-texture to either POT or rectangle textures. The GF4 must use rectangle textures.
* The GF4 can draw antialiased points. The Radeon can't.
* The GF4 supports paletted textures. The Radeon doesn't.

What you end up with is a lot of compromises, either supporting the lowest common denominator (which is pretty low, considering the GF4MX only implements OpenGL 1.1!!) or a lot of extra work on the developer's end to come up with creative workarounds.

So, given that the feature comparison is kind of pointless, I say just compare on raw speed and energy conservation (in a latop, very important.)

Looking at it that way, the ATI chipsets seem to be clearly ahead.

[arekkusu]

I must amend my previous post:

The ATI R300 chipset (Radeon 9600, 9700, 9800) is a piece of ****.

Antialiased polygon support has been REMOVED from this chipset. GL_POLYGON_SMOOTH simply doesn't do anything.

In addition, antialiased point and line support, while present in the hardware, is not available in the current (10.2.8 and 10.3) drivers. ATI is supposedly "working on" adding support. Based on their previous driver bugfixing history, we'll get driver support sometime around 10.3.5.

ATI/Apple's suggested workaround is to use FSAA to smooth the entire frame. Now, let's take a look at this:

On a Radeon 7500, regular polygon antialiasing uses 3 subpixel bits, for 8 shades, and runs with barely any speed hit compared to aliased drawing.

On a Radeon 9600, FSAA is available with 2, 4, or 6 multisample buffers, giving you 2, 4, or 6 shades, respectively. And running 200%, 400%, or 600% slower than aliased drawing, because of the extra memory and fill rate needed.

So, the suggested workaround is slower, eats more VRAM, and doesn't look as good. Hooray!

I will not be buying any more ATI products, or Apple computers using ATI products, until polygon antialiasing support returns.