What about HD3D?

nVidia had a Press release about gaming is more than just fast frame-rates and hits my mind-set ever since GPU's could hit 60 frames. Was honored to be quoted twice in that release. The pursuit or crusade, hehe, for gaming experiences and the quality of the pixel was much more important then a number on a screen. Obviously performance is important but at what expense? Lower quality? Less immersion? What's the point of having all this raw performance if immersion and the gaming experience bars are not raised?

nVidia has changed from the long and winding road of aggressive optimizations and ever since 2008 it's been a very nice experience having their hardware in my gaming rig. From flexibility, quality, to gaming experience potential because I can only play one title at a time and enjoy having the most immersion when I play them. I don't just desire to just play a game or good enough but experience the gaming titles.

While many gamers enjoy sharing benches, for me, it was dissecting filtering or the quality of super-sampled or polygon edges. I do hold both in high regards and do respect their engineering teams very much so but am pro-nVidia at this time.

When is the last time that you had an AMD graphics card? Have you recently had a chance to put it against a Nvidia card to compare IQ?

Sure, I investigated 2900Xt, 3850, CrossFire 4850's, 5870's and 6950's. One of my best friends has AMD platforms. When I was pro-ATI always investigated nVidia products as well. Don't trust many sites or gamers blindly with my own eyes and don't believe they're the same. I've been with nVidia ever since they improved their filtering and multi-sampling transparency feature. Have no reasons to leave them and would sacrifice too much going AMD.

It sounds like you could do IQ reviews for publication.

It has been wonderful to see how filtering has evolved and watched closely how ATI did improve their filtering or what some may say rip-mapping with the Original Radeon. I remember a discussion at Beyond 3d and was such vile and venom for this filtering but it wasn't a lod trick but angle dependent filtering -- it is known now but back then it wasn't. Did try to investigate as many angles and investigate the mip-map transitions on them. It really did improve with future drivers but did suffer mip-map banding on higher noise textures but with just a x2 super-sampled setting in conjunction did a great job of cleaning it up.

Another area that wasn't discussed too much back then was FSAA and 16-bit color --- where 3dfx didn't suffer from 16-bit color banding -- both ATI and nVidia did. However, around Feb of 2001, I watched ATI implement 16-bit FSAA dithering and it was amazing how the FSAA banding, after a few months, vanished. With ATI improving these two aspects, I knew they were serious about gamers and improving the experiences.

It's been wonderful to see the companies fight with each other, sometimes too aggressive, too disingenuous but over-all brought so much joy to millions, which creates such passion and defenders of the companies they like. I came up during the 3dfx days and where my passion was first ignited -- and remember Dave Baumann as a newbie posting away, hehe!:)

I'll reserve my comment on that until you do a review on HD3D vs 3D Vision!

Please don't wait. i'd love to hear your comments. And it is going to be awhile since the ViewSonic display that i am evaluating is not a fair comparison as it only does "passive" with specially written 3D SW just for it. i am arranging for a VS 24" display to be sent that also does active HD3D and that is when my comparison article gets published.

Passive interleaved where the horizontal resolution is cut in half to each eye is entry level 3D - great for the kids and the casual gamer. Maybe for 3D movies and several guests or family members can each have a pair of cheap polarized passive glasses.

What the heck are you even talking about?

And forget the 7970, i want to see what value the 7950 can bring us.

This is the card that will be 300-400$, and its the one i am waiting for.

Well, I have not yet really played much in HD3D except at the local Microcenter store with their "display" PC and 3D glasses.. and I have to say that it sucks. IZ3D actually has better support for stereoscopic 3D.. in fact, far better support for it. AMD is supposedly trying to use IZ3D and TriDEF, while making it look like as if it's AMD's own effort but I'm not still sure about that though, if things have changed already. For some games, the depth of 3D cannot be configured (user-configurable), and it hardly looks 3D at all - when the depth should be "full" rather than say, a literal centimeter into or beyond the monitor's surface.