graphics posts

Crysis. The name just means photorealism in graphics these days. It's what people expect from Crytek now, and there's no going back for that company. They've built their brand around the latest and greatest rendering technology, so full of buzzwords that it virtually takes a degree in advanced mathematics just to understand how amazing the tech is.

But is all of that realism worth the effort? Does it really matter if you can see individual grass stems waving in the wind? Sure, the ability to see individual pores on your opponent's face is kind of cool, but does it make for a better game?

There is a not-insignificant portion of humans on this planet who love controversy. They love to argue, love to take the contrary position, love to complain. Frequently found on game forums, this breed enjoys nothing more than to explain to anyone who will bother to read them how the latest iteration of their beloved franchise has destroyed the game, and how much better version x was compared with version y.

Sometimes there is even a kernel of truth to their ire, as in games like World of Warcraft, where the developers are constantly updating the game with bug fixes and game balance patches. The word "nerf" is typically heard, and stories of the good old days abound. Functional changes I understand. But occasionally a different sort of complaint is heard, and it's this type of whingeing that puzzles me. How seriously can I take arguments that revolve around a game's graphics?

The big news of the past week for desktop gamers was the official release of Nvidia's GTX 295 dual-GPU card to the wild. Not content to sit on their hands, AMD announced, via the ever-thrilling Press Release, that they're undertaking development of a platform to provide high-shiny graphics to devices that don't sport the hardware to create them, as well as a realtime rendering system for photorealistic content that developers and cinematographers can utilize.

So, it looks like both ends of the spectrum are getting some love. Maybe even a three-way kind of thing.

At some point, BI's mind will leave the gutter it currently inhabits, but we don't advise anyone to hold their breath waiting for that to happen. (Hey, at least there hasn't been a "Two chips, one card" joke made yet. Oh, wait....)

FPS (as in frames per second, not first-person shooter) is a quick-and-dirty way of judging whether or not your rig has the cojones to support your chosen display resolution and eye candy predilections. Simply put, can your system churn out the graphics fast enough to keep up with the demands of the game(s) you're running?

If the answer is "yes," do you have any headroom to up the graphical ante? If the answer is "no," what are your options? Okay, options other than spending lots of money; spending money is always an option, but we do occasionally want to be practical around here.

Yesterday, Nvidia launched its new GTX 200 series graphics cards. Despite their hefty prices, they're the fastest graphics processing units on the market right now. Nvidia published a press release on Monday to promote the new hardware, but a lot of it was sales-speak. What do these new GPUs really do to push the envelope forward for gaming, and how do they do it?

Gamasutra had a man on the ground at the unveiling event in Santa Clara, CA, and he reported more detailed information than that which was found in the press release. Read the coverage of the event for developer quotes and plain descriptions of the nature of the new technologies and their potential applications -- gaming and otherwise.

Accoridng to Nvidia marketing VP Tony Tomasi, the GTX 200 series cards run at 93.1% of the hardware's theoretical limits -- much higher than previous generation GPUs. Developers working on everything from Far Cry 2 to Bionic Commando to Folding@home described applications of these new, 240-core beasts for their particular projects.