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nVidia GeForce 3
Coinciding with their European tour showcasing their X-Box hardware, nVidia have announced and demonstrated their latest graphics card offering - GeForce 3. Now if you want all the good gossip on exactly what it does and how many bells and whistles it has got to the nVidia site.
My question is this - Do we really need all this graphics power?
Now don't get me wrong, I am just as much a speed freak as any dedicated computer nut, but my GeForce DDR card has not yet met a game that it cannot handle. I bought it shortly after the card was released here in Australia for a couple of reason. The first was that it was soooo much faster than the cards I had at the time, and the second main reason was that I thought it would be a couple of years before I needed to upgrade it. This was a major factor as I was leaving my job to go back to Uni full time!
Now I find that I am, relatively speaking, back in the same position as I was in 12 months ago. I am behind the times! So do we really need all this graphics power in our computers?
Now if you listen to the graphics card manufacturers, then the answer will be a resounding YES!!!!! But if you take a look at the game production community, then the answer becomes, maybe! It is great to have all that extra power and things look a bit better and can go up to higher resolutions, but really, most games have maximum or pre-defined resolutions. Does it really make any difference?
This brings us to the old debate about how many frames per second the eye can detect. For a discussion on this check out Tim's News. Now while this is a fairly simple attempt to answer a quite complicated issue, it does attempt explain some of the basic facts. The fact is that the vast majority of people cannot see any more than about 60 frames per second!
So while these cards can put out 100+ frames per second, most of the extra frames are actually wasted on us. It is true that they are allowing more and more polygons to be drawn which allows curves to become smoother and more realistic, but are the games taking advantage of this?
In short, I would say no! While game graphics have improved greatly over the past couple of years, they still remain chunky in comparison to the hardware demonstrations that the graphics cards manufacturers use to sell their products! As I said, I have not yet found a game that really stresses my old GeForce DDR. THe most stressful thing I can do to it is benchmark it!
So, to keep this short, I will not be upgrading my graphics card until the game developers are producing in game graphics that exceed the capabilities of my current card. Now if I had the money.................... but that is a different thing!
Maybe the card designers should work with the game designers and develop both games and cards along the same or similar time scale. This would allow game developers to utilize the features of then next generation of graphics cards as they are developing the game, instead of having to bite the bullet and hope that they can predict the future of graphics cards and hope to design their games around that.
Part of the reason why games take so long to come out is the fact that technology is being released so quickly that their original designs are outdated months before release. In the last 15 months nVidia alone has released 3 new graphics cards to the market. Most games are in development for about 2 years. How can they possibly hope to catch up to the graphic possibilities that are available today!