Major bug in GF4?

[Dr Mordrid]

According to the poster:

if you turn ON anisotropic filtering it turns off the second TMU, which also disables multi-texturing

HardForum thread

BRING ON THE PARHELIA!!

Dr. Mordrid

[EvilDonnyboy]

Didn't read the thread, kinda lazy. But from what I've read before, this is only a bug in drivers. It can be fixed. But ppl don't buy Nvidia for reputation of image quality, so i'm not so sure toom any GF4 owners miss aniso. "Free" FSAA is still nice though, although decent anistropy would be nice to reduce the effects of blurr-o-vision.

This Radeon 8500's "free" anistropy is great. 16X (64tap in nvidia works) is beautiful, with almost no fps decrease. Hopefully I'll enjoy just as good or better anisotropic filtering in Matrox's next product.

[Dr Mordrid]

Dunno...some are suspecting it's in the part and not the drivers.

Time will tell.....

Dr. Mordrid

[Joel]

You would think if it is a driver issue that they could have patched it by now knowing that they have known about this for several weeks or have they actually known longer and are just now knowledging it publicly. Guess that's what happen when you rush a product to market, trying to beat the competition because you know what they have coming, without throughly testing everything.

Joel

[Nuno]

Sorry, but it´s a driver issue. It´s fixed on openGL on the latest leaked drivers, GL_ext_reme now gives texel fillrates double the pixel fillrates (so multitexturing is obviously on). D3D remains the same, though.

Fortunatly it isn´t an hardware issue, but it definitly shows Nvidia isn´t the great driver maker that many intend to be.

I´ve got the card for like 3 weeks now and I´m already gone throught 3 driver revisions, one fixing one thing, one breaking another. Not good.

[Kosh Naranek]

I think they do a pretty good job considering the amount of different GFX cards their drivers support.

Ranging from TNT to GF4 4600.

[Wombat]

Just because it's working now doesn't mean it isn't a hardware issue. They may have just found a workaround for a bug.

[Nuno]

Either way it´s working, that´s what counts. But I still don´t believe it´s a hardware issue. If the GF4 wasn´t capable of multitexturing when doing aniso, there´s no way a driver hack would get around it.
Anyway, here´s some results with a Ti4400@310/620 from GL_ext_reme
Aniso off:

Results:
--------
Overdraw/HSR:
-------------
Overdraw factor 3, back to front: 308.58 fps
Overdraw factor 3, front to back: 505.11 fps
Overdraw factor 3, random order: 398.66 fps

Overdraw factor 8, back to front: 138.99 fps
Overdraw factor 8, front to back: 352.97 fps
Overdraw factor 8, random order: 256.26 fps

Fillrate:
---------
Pixel fillrate: 529.74 MegaPixels / s
Texel fillrate: 1485.71 MegaTexels / s

T&L/High polygon count static display list:
-------------------------------------------
Pure transform: 17917445 vertices / s
2 point lights: 13346351 vertices / s
8 point lights: 5515771 vertices / s
2 directional lights: 15667507 vertices / s
8 directional lights: 7900495 vertices / s

High memory bandwidth load/texture cache efficiency:
----------------------------------------------------
One 1024x1024x32 texture: 542.26 fps
Four 1024x1024x32 textures: 539.56 fps

Aniso 64 tap:

Results:
--------
Overdraw/HSR:
-------------
Overdraw factor 3, back to front: 221.23 fps
Overdraw factor 3, front to back: 413.58 fps
Overdraw factor 3, random order: 300.67 fps

Overdraw factor 8, back to front: 94.14 fps
Overdraw factor 8, front to back: 305.18 fps
Overdraw factor 8, random order: 197.08 fps

Fillrate:
---------
Pixel fillrate: 373.57 MegaPixels / s
Texel fillrate: 1147.77 MegaTexels / s

T&L/High polygon count static display list:
-------------------------------------------
Pure transform: 17931730 vertices / s
2 point lights: 13368930 vertices / s
8 point lights: 5515850 vertices / s
2 directional lights: 15692033 vertices / s
8 directional lights: 7900822 vertices / s

High memory bandwidth load/texture cache efficiency:
----------------------------------------------------
One 1024x1024x32 texture: 446.57 fps
Four 1024x1024x32 textures: 444.81 fps

[Dr Mordrid]

What's not helping NVIDIA on the driver side is that not all of the companies using their chipsets are also using the recommended parts with them. Very often they're using lower spec'ed parts to save $.05 - $.50 a board

Dr. Mordrid