You mean the DET. 50's that also use:
-Camera path-specific occlusion culling
-Visual quality tradeoffs
-e.g. lowered filtering quality, disabling fog
-Screen-grab specific image rendering
-Lower rendering precision
-Algorithmic detection and replacement
-Scene-specific handling of z writes
-Benchmark-specific drivers that never ship
-App-specific and version specific optimizations that are very fragile
And revert many PS2.0 operations back to PS1.4? Read nVidia's own words:
Rel. 50 driver will be public before the game is available. Since we know that obtaining the best pixel shader performance from the GeForce FX GPUs currently requires some specialized work, our developer technology team works very closely with game developers. Part of this is understanding that in many cases promoting PS 1.4 (DirectX 8) to PS 2.0 (DirectX 9) provides no image quality benefit. Sometimes this involves converting 32-bit floating point precision shader operations into 16-bit floating point precision shaders in order to obtain the performance benefit of this mode with no image quality degradation.
http://www.driverheaven.net/articles/aquamark3/index3.htm
http://www.techreport.com/
Also, read DH's report on Aqua-MArk3 and the DET50's in testing w/ aquamark3, a BENCHMARK:
their conclusion about the DET. 50's
Now, im sure most of you have read Gabes recent comments regarding the detonator 51.75s, and Nvidia's offical response but I really do have to say, having seen this first hand it confirms to both myself and Veridian that the new detonators are far from a high quality IQ set. Alot of negative publicity is currently surrounding Nvidia, and here at driverheaven we like to remain as impartial and open minded as we possibly can, but after reading all the articles recently such as here coming from good sources and experiencing this ourselves first hand, I can no longer recommend an nvidia card to anyone. Ill be speaking with nvidia about this over the coming days and if I can make anything public I will.
I don;t see how a driver set that dumbs down IQ in a benchmartk can be used in a valid fashion for comarisons..kind of defeats the puprose, don't you think?
Another conclusion from 3DGPU
The Detonator 51.75 drivers loses even more details over the 45.33 drivers. Especially note how the green on the foreground landrover is darker than the other two shots. Now, these drivers are beta, and not available to the public, so let's hope by the time they're released, the lowered image quality won't be in them. Because frankly, I'm just shocked how much better the Radeon 9800 Pro looks over the new Detonator 50 drivers on a GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, and any self-respecting gamer will choose the image quality on the Radeon 9800 Pro anyday.
http://www.3dgpu.com/modules/wfsection/article.php?articleid=74&page=0
How about other develpers, and what they think?
Lead Developer of Silent Hill Speaks out.
Yesterday I went to Mojo Reloaded (ATI, MS and Intel game developer day) at Guildford. These events are always a combination of interesting presentations and catching up with the industry gossip. This one for me was far more gossip then prensentation, not that the presentations weren't interesting, My favs were the PRT/SH and non linear post-processing streaks (I'll give a better description in a minute). As this will be up on the web for some time its worth stating what day yesterday was, a day after the HL2 benchmarks were released.
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7873
Remember what nVidia did to futuremark when they published that nVidia was cheating.......I don't think they will succeed with VALVE in the same fashion, but they will try.....it's not drivers, it's poor hardware choices, what I've been trying to explain to you all along...not enough FP registers and a 4x2 design that operates like a 2x2 design in DX9
EDIT: If you're really inot the GPU side of compuiers, I'd suggest a visit to nVidia's fan website,
www.nvnews.net and
www.beyond3d.com... I think after reading from many of the developers @B3D, you'll understand the NV3X has made some very poor hardware choices for DX9 app's...they underestimated the amount of time b4 real DX9 apps would come, and underestimated the R300 core....and it's dedicated FP registers
now off to find the HL2 thread..this has been about the only part of the forum I visit
