GPU review, done, Half Life 2 here I come

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• Locut0s - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link

  crtfanboy: As a long time mamer I could like very much to see this too however there is a problem with this idea and that is that technically it would be illegal for them to actually run these benchmarks since you need the roms. While I have no problem with using these roms, I've got an insanely large collection of roms on my HD, I would hate to see AT get into any legal issues over something as silly as that. I agree though it would be a very interesting benchmark. Some of the newer games emulated by mame now require so much CPU power to emulate that no current or future CPU will be able to run them "realtime" for quite a while, read maybe 10 or more GHz before you start to see smooth frame rates.

• crtfanboy - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link

  I agree with everything owen said, and would like to add this:
  for cpu tests, I'd like to see some mame benchmarks
  it supports some new games that wreak havoc on my system (granted, it's a p4 @1.7ghz with rambus), getting like 3fps when it should be getting 60
  
  also, I'd like to see stepmania with gigantic video clips for memory and cpu benchmarks... since it really lets you know how consistant something is
  (and uncompressed video capture for hard drive benchmarks, you know, like highest bitrate supported before frames are dropped and all that, at least some multi-tasking so you know how efficent that buffer is, or those seek times... it would be nice to know more about the overall feel of the system with said component)
  
  I guess I shouldn't tell you how to do your job, but here's what I'd like more of:
  
  1 multi-tasking (you know, like how well does halo run with bit torrent in the background)
  2 how well new hardware runs with old hardware (for us poor people who want to upgrade one thing at a time...)
  3 hd-video playing benchmarks... (1920x1080 in divx makes my computer cry)
  
  just some (worthless) thoughts, even if you disregard them I'll still read your articles

• Owen - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - link

  The GPU article is a thorough, interesting read, as usual. Thanks for that. One thought:
  
  It has been extremely interesting to me to follow the evolving differences between ATI and nVIDIA cards in individual games... a la the HL2 versus Doom3 numbers of late. And I realize that most of the "enthusiast" 3D-gaming market centers around either action- or strategy-oriented first person shooters, since those games tend to be ahead of the curve in terms of graphical requirements, but...
  
  ...one other, rather different game also comes to mind these days: EverQuest 2. Less hyped than Doom 3 or Halo 2, no doubt, but the game still has a huge following, and it was intentionally designed to exceed the capabilities of current graphics hardware on its higher quality settings.
  
  While it is DirectX-based and extremely shader-heavy, Sony Online Entertainment (the producer) is also very much in bed with nVIDIA... so I think a lot of people would be extremely interested in seeing high-end ATI versus nVIDIA performance comparisons for the game. I, for one, would specifically buy my next card based on such a review. Just wish I could afford to do it on my own. :-)
  
  That having been said, I'm sure you are far more than busy enough as it is... so I hesitate even to suggest that you make the list longer. Only a thought!
  
  As always, thanks for the incisive hardware coverage.