It's happening again. Yet another state-of-the-art video card is about to go on sale, offering a step further along the road towards absolute fidelity in computer graphics. The GeForce 3, NVIDIA's latest incarnation, is packed with enough features to make any self-respecting Quakehead involuntarily drool and slobber with excitement. But what will it mean for flight simmers? Should you be raiding your children's piggy banks and selling your furniture to get your hands on one, or should caution be your byword? Read on to find out.
Obsession I had the pleasure recently of an evening spent listening to music on a friend's new Linn hi-fi system. His set-up of minimalist black boxes cost more than some new cars do, and takes up an inordinate amount of his life. He spends hours fiddling about with it, trying different speaker configurations, adjusting his listening position and generally tweaking in order to wring every last drop of high-fidelity sound reproduction from it. He even wants to leave the power supply on 24 hours a day, so that it's fully warmed up every time he wants to listen to some music. Does this pattern of behaviour sound familiar at all? It should; a cursory scroll through the Avsim forums reveals an endemic obsession with performance among flight simmers that would put any hi-fi bore to shame. We all want faster, smoother, better. Fewer stutters. Reflections. Dynamic lighting. You name it. And it's to this end that we spend large sums of money on the latest CPUs, monitors, memory sticks and, of course, video cards. Enter NV20, or the GeForce 3, the newest in a line of 3D devices that now enjoy a virtual monopoly amongst the gaming community. Put simply, there hasn't been anything to touch the GeForce range in terms of speed, power and features. Is this a good thing? It is for NVIDIA, of course, but a lack of real competition hasn't exactly resulted in lower prices for buyers. Each new card in their line-up has been expensive, and the GF3 will be no exception. There's still no official word on likely retail prices, but there's been talk of anything up to $550 (when this review was published, Hercules was selling their 3D Prophet III for US$429.99). Think of how much beer and pizza that would buy….. Of course, there will be some hardcore geeks who'll have to have one whatever it costs, even if it means dining on fish-head stew for six months. But what about the majority, the sort of simmer who has a mid-range system and a finite supply of money to spend on his or her hobby? It's with this sort of person that this article is concerned. Hopefully, by the end you'll have a better idea of what the GF3 can do for your simming, and whether you should be thinking of upgrading. Ahead of its time First, a word of caution; this is not a techie's review. There'll be no mention of how many tera-whatnots it can fit up its pipeline, no endless bar graphs showing gigatexel throughput or anything like that. If you're interested in such details, there's a particularly long and sleep inducing (but very thorough and well-researched) article at Tom's Hardware that will satisfy the most depraved of technoheads. It's important to bear in mind that the GeForce 3 will not truly come into its own until developers write more programs which fully support its feature-set. It's DirectX 8 compliant, which means existing software, which uses DX7 or earlier, will not make the most of what it can do. When the original GeForce 256 came out, it wasn't for some time that games which supported Hardware Transform and Lighting, the unique selling point for the board, began to appear. But when they did, GeForce owners really had something to shout about. Titles such as CFS2 and B17 looked fantastic with a GeForce, and with better frame rates. The sample GF3 board kindly loaned by NVIDIA is a substantial piece of kit. An oversized heatsink and fan cools the main GPU (graphics processing unit,) while additional heatsinks extend over the memory chips. Installed, it's noticeably louder than my existing card, a GeForce 2 GTS, although it should be noted that I run my PC with the case open. Once closed, the noise is reduced to a barely audible whine.
Benchmarks We have a range of examples to consider, from the venerable to the brand spanking new. There are benchmark results from four popular sims here, two of which you might not expect the GF3 to have much impact on, and two which you might. Flight Unlimited 3 and FS2000 are both a bit long in the tooth now. FS2002 is on the horizon, while it looks like we'll sadly never see Flight Unlimited 4. But CFS2 is a relative newcomer, and Fly! 2 has just hit store shelves. I've also spent several bleary-eyed sessions with B17, Falcon 4 (eRazor) and Enemy Engaged: Comanche Hokum, mainly because these titles support Hardware T&L. I've included some subjective ramblings about how well these are served by the GF3. I've also provided some screenshots of all the titles, but I'm not sure how useful they are; some of the quality is lost in the process, and static pictures don't tell the whole story. But we all like looking at aircraft, so I had to include a few. They're all taken with the GF3 at 1024x768, 4x anti-aliasing and 32-bit colour, with the exception of the FU3 shots which are 16-bit. For the benchmarks, I took snapshots of the sims from their cockpit views, and also from a three-quarter external perspective. All details were set at maximum, and for FS2000 I used Barry Perfect's excellent Heathrow scenery, which is quite taxing on your system's resources. Weather details were set to moderate in all cases. The frame rates shown were those recorded at the moment of capture, rounded up to the nearest whole number. Another important point to remember when considering these benchmark figures is that the GF3 and GF2 use different methods of anti-aliasing. The GF3 provides three options for reducing the jagged edges on your aircraft and scenery - 2x, Quincunx and 4x. The former is supposed to put performance before image quality, the latter sacrifices speed for beauty, and Quincunx (don't ask me) is designed as a compromise between the two. By way of comparison, I've provided figures from the GF2, with AA set at 1x2, 2x2 and 4x4.
With Flight Unlimited 3, there are no surprises. It's an old (but great) sim which doesn't exploit the feature sets of either boards, and both the GF2 and GF3 return almost identical frame rates, whatever the resolution and AA settings. Both boards produce corrupted panel images when maximum AA is enabled, resulting in a rather pretty psychedelic pattern which melts away into a blur. There are no problems with AA disabled. So what about FS2000? Everyone who has this is only too aware of its problems with stuttering and poor frame rates, and there have been enough forum discussions on these issues to fill several books. (How Microsoft had the temerity to suggest FS2000
would run on a Pentium 166 is beyond me.) Many people have upgraded their video cards to try and boost performance, and many have been disappointed with the results. As we all know, this is because FS2000 needs a very fast CPU and truckloads of memory if it's to run really well. So you might not expect the GF3 to make much difference to the frame rates - but you'd be wrong. They're lower in every instance on the new GeForce 3 than they are on the GeForce 2 GTS. I was a bit surprised at these results, so I ran the tests again just to make sure. Second time round, the results remained virtually the same. But there are other issues to consider here. The frame rates in the benchmarks may be lower on the GF3, but overall they're more stable. Flying
through thick clouds is a smoother experience with the new board, and there are fewer stutters. It's not a dramatic difference, but it's significant enough to be mentioned. So overall, do FU3 and FS2000 benefit from the GeForce 3? Yes they do. The anti-aliasing on the GF3 is much better than on the GF2, particularly at maximum setting, and the resulting image quality is superb. The picture is sharp, and the outlines of aircraft and buildings are cleaner than ever. The screenshots don't do the quality justice. You have to see a moving image to really appreciate it, but they may give you some idea.
The results for FU3 and FS2000 are rather predictable, given that neither of them was written to support a board like the GeForce 3. But what about CFS2 and Fly! 2? They both support Hardware T&L, and Fly! 2 is DirectX 8 compliant, so you might reasonably expect to see improvements in both image quality and performance.
Let's look at CFS2's results. At 1024x768, the GF3 wins hands down, especially in exterior views when there's lots of information to be processed. At 1280x1024, however, the frame rates drop as the AA is increased. More importantly, though, the GF3 is the clear winner when it comes to image quality and smoothness. At maximum detail, flying through thick cloud, I couldn't get CFS2 to stutter no matter what I tried. I pulled turns, banked, wiggled and rolled to try and induce jerks and pauses, but there were none. The clouds glided by serenely and it was the smoothest flying imaginable. If FS2002 performs as well as this, there'll be some big smiles on a lot of people's faces. The GeForce 3 also provides some gorgeous lighting effects; the colours
at dawn and dusk are really something, and cannon fire illuminates the cockpit both inside and out. In all, CFS2 is very well served by the GF3 - a clear victory to the new board.
And so to the final benchmarks. Fly! 2 caused a bit of a stir when it was announced, with talk of new effects, reflections on water, moving airport vehicles and even flocks of birds. There's been some concern lately that the developers were forced to wrap it up before they were finished, so no-one really knows if these goodies made it into the final program. The copy supplied for this review is a pre-release version, so I can't make any observations on these aspects of the sim. The developers are on record as saying the GeForce 3 would bring out the best in Fly! 2, and of all four of the test sims, you'd expect this one to benefit most. The frame rate results suggest that this is only the case in external views. As in CFS2, the GF3 seems to
really pull its weight when there's lots of detail on the screen. You get a better frame rate in the cockpit with the GF2. But once again, the new board is King when it comes to image quality. You get better anti-aliasing at a higher frame rate with the GF3, and when this board is used, an extra button is enabled in the settings menu, allowing high detail textures to be used. The aircraft look fantastic with Hardware T&L, there's shiny metallic textures and dynamic lighting which illuminates on the fly as you pan around your aircraft. Fly! 2 and GeForce 3 make good bedfellows.
Fun And Games
I couldn't pass up the opportunity to test the GF3 on some other sims, so I've been wasting away at my PC for hours on end, subsisting on little more than coffee. B17 has taken up most of my time. It loves the GeForce 3. The aircraft have always looked stunning, but now they look even more weighty, metallic and clearly defined.
Special effects like explosions are far better, and there's much less stuttering in periods of high graphical activity. Gunnery used to be spoiled for me whenever there was a lot of tracer or an explosion onscreen. Every time an aircraft blew up, everything paused and jerked until the smoke dispersed. But now you can lead an attacking fighter with your tracer stream, and watch the tiny explosions on its fuselage as your shells find their target. When it blows, the explosion is handled with ease. It's made a huge difference to the experience. Finally, Falcon 4 and Enemy Engaged: Comanche Hokum both benefit from the improved anti-aliasing and Hardware T&L, with impressive smoothness and frame rates. Falcon looks great. But the improvements were less remarkable with EECH. The subjective experience of flying the helicopter sim was only marginally better with the GeForce 3.
Conclusions
The GeForce 3 is clearly an impressive and desirable piece of kit. It shows good results on the latest sims, and it's the future you should be looking to when investing in new hardware. So should you buy one as soon as they hit the streets? That depends. If you've already got a GeForce 2, I would think not. The new board is superior, there's no question of that, but the improvements you'll see today wouldn't justify the outlay. But it's Catch-22. New titles will be written which will require a GF3 to run at maximum detail, and when they start appearing, you'll wish you had one. Hopefully by then, the prices will have come down. But there'll probably be a GeForce 4 available by then. The only way you can ever be at the cutting edge is to buy a product as soon as it becomes available, and only you can decide if that's the way to go. But I suggest you wouldn't be getting good value if you were only moving up from a GF2.
If, on the other hand, you were upgrading from an earlier board like the TNT or early Voodoo, the GeForce 3 would represent a good investment. Ideally you'd be building a new system, with a minimum 1Ghz CPU, 512MB memory and a 19-inch monitor. For this sort of setup, which will keep you going for some time, the GeForce 3 would be worth it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going off to man the top turret in my B17 before NVIDIA takes its toy back.
Acknowledgements
NVIDIA for providing the GeForce3, and Terminal Reality for kindly sending the pre-release copy of Fly! 2.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
