Urmel aus dem Eis wrote:the Nvidia FX5200 is not that bad as mentioned. It's the ideal card for those who have weaker/older rigs. I play on it in my lunch breaks at work and it's running not worse than my colleagues ATI X300 PCIe (and still it's fun playing with both of them even on higher resolutions).
The 5200 is so slow that Nexuiz is barely playable with particles, let alone dlights, it is one of the worst cards I've seen in years.
Urmel aus dem Eis wrote:The Nvidia Quadro Cards (all of them!!!) are no DirectX Cards at all. They are built for CAD and DTP and are completely different architecture than the Geforce ones. ATI's counterpiece is called "FireGL". Both have an extremely poor game performance.
Ever notice that Nexuiz uses OpenGL not DirectX? This card list is aimed at OpenGL performance, not DirectX performance, I am judging the Quadros by their OpenGL performance, so what does DirectX have to do with this?
They are perfectly adequate cards for playing games, and if you did enough research you would notice that the Quadro chip codenames are identical to the consumer chips, they have only some manufacturing differences in the chips, board differences (different kind of framebuffer memory), and driver differences, they are 99% the same chips as consumer cards, and perform similarly other than driver differences favoring different application calls.
The driver differences on the Quadro cards affect hardware T&L and related features, NOT fragment shaders performance, which is the main bottleneck for Nexuiz rendering performance (especially at higher resolutions, where the pixel count goes up tremendously but polycount does not change at all).
So Quadro cards work fine for Nexuiz, if they have enough fillrate to be useful.
Whether they are worthwhile purchases for Nexuiz is another matter entirely - multi-thousand-dollar cards for playing a free game? you decide.
Urmel aus dem Eis wrote:Another thing is it looks quite funny the Nvidia GF5600 is listed as slow under "don't buy!" while the GF Ti 4200 is considered decent.
The Ti4200 has more consistent performance than the GFFX5600, it is true that the GFFX5600 is often comparable to the GFTi4200 when GLSL is turned off, but people expect a GFFX card to do GLSL shaders, so in their relevant domain of graphics features, the GFFX5600 ranks worse than the GFTI4200 due to very poor GLSL performance.
The entire GFFX line has very inconsistent performance in Nexuiz, due to their poorly designed shader architecture. (Which I am told is NOT NVIDIA's fault, Microsoft was apparently withholding DirectX9 specs from them during development of the GFFX, because of the ongoing litigation over whether or not NVIDIA was obligated to produce at-their-own-cost replacement chips for the first batch of XBox chipsets whose firmware encryption key was deciphered... So NVIDIA had to guess what feature set would be most used in DX9 without being able to read about it... they ended up with subpar DX9 pixel shader performance as a result)
Urmel aus dem Eis wrote:OnBoard VGAs should be listet under "You won't manage running Nexuiz".
I'd tend to agree on this, unfortunately there are a lot of these things in the wild and their owners are quite sad when they can't play Nexuiz, so I keep trying to find ways to make these things playable.
Urmel aus dem Eis wrote:Last but not least it should be mentioned that Nvidia users are currently better supported when running under Linux.
I really do wish ATI would put some real effort into their Linux drivers, but hey I'm still wondering when they'll make less buggy Windows drivers!
Urmel aus dem Eis wrote:[LDB]C.Brutail wrote:AND, on sloweer systems, prefer linux more then Windows. I got sometimes 20-30 + more FPS with the SDL version on linux then under windows.
tsass CB! off topic !!!! This is about hardware!
Could make another thread for operating system discussion and compiler optimizations, but it may devolve into flame wars.
