[CaryMG]

The other day I was playing a 1st person perspective game that intuition tells me I shouldn't mention the name of.

During a sequence, in game, the character looks at his hands & I literally involuntarily fliched back from the screen & gasped in astonishment !
I never see the better.
The smoothness of the hand models ....
The quality of the textures ....
The fluidity of movement as he moved & turns his hands to examine them ....

Is it "Crysis"-level ?
No.
Does it have motionblur ?
No.
But breathtakingly realistic nevertheless.

This happens on an Intel MacBook with the GMA X3100 GPU & it's rendering capability is incredible !

This makes me think: is all the hoohah about GPUs & 15% framerate increases exactly that ? HooHah ?
Sure -- the SOTA nVidia GPU'll give me Flight Simulator X at 10, 000 FPS but does a game have to be a hardwaremelter to be admired graphically ?
Again, I don't believe so -- and, as such, we Macintosh gamers [fans of a company that calls the computergame it's own invention]
shouldn't at all feel quote/unquote "left out in the cold" while those PeeCee guys get all the good stuff.

Thoughts ?

[teflon]

Was it TMFPPG? I hear that when you get to the second level you start to feel remorse for all the pink ponies youve killed, which would explain the "looking at your hands" part...
Of course, at the end of the second level, the pink ponies take your mum hostage and you have to rescue her in the 3rd level...

Anyway, hands are easy to do. I mean, its right up close, you throw enough polygons at it to smooth out any edges, apply a decent skin and some minor lighting effects and your done. Its also because its so close to the screen that hands, weapons and their related animations get a lot of care an attention. Even a small mistake there can shatter the suspension of disbelief.

But when you come to Crysis, its got all the hand and gun animations and then the best looking jungles ever seen in a game. Now if you thought hands were difficult, then trees are something else. Even for a basic looking tree youve got to have a decent looking model, add several sheets of foliage and then apply decent bark textures and some leaf textures to go onto those sheets of foliage. now those sheets will have gaps in them, so you need to get the transparencies going and throwing shadows from the sun, which leads you onto needing to get some good looking shadows, which on a console is still pretty tricky because they tend to be fairly low res shadows, and so have some obvious pixelation and blurring. Now add wind and movement to the shadows via dynamic lighting.

now multiply the number of trees by 1000

now add destructibility to the trees.

so if you thought that hands looked good, just think all the effort that has to go into making a single tree... And thats not even current gen.

[Eric5h5]

CaryMG, on May 26th 2009, 05:10 PM, said:

GMA X3100 GPU & it's rendering capability is incredible !

If you're living in 1997 and this is the first 3D game you've seen, yes, I suppose its rendering capability would seem incredible.

CaryMG said:

This makes me think: is all the hoohah about GPUs & 15% framerate increases exactly that ?

A halfway decent modern GPU gets a heck of a lot more than 15% framerate increase over a GMA X3100. More like 1500%. Even a halfway decent old GPU performs a lot better than a X3100.

Anyway, if you're OK with playing 10-year-old games with the resolution turned down to 1024x600 and all the effects on low in order to get 30fps (if you're lucky), then sure, an Intel integrated chip is fine, but otherwise an actual GPU is necessary. I have a Mac mini with a GMA 950...there's no way I'd game on it, and the X3100 isn't much better. My G5 + X800 kicks the pants off it even though the CPU speeds are very similar (I got it primarily for iPhone development). The next Mac I get will be a Mac Pro with a Radeon 4870 or whatever the best GPU is available when I get it.

--Eric

[Floxwoop]

CaryMG, on May 26th 2009, 11:10 PM, said:

The other day I was playing a 1st person perspective game that intuition tells me I shouldn't mention the name of. [...]

Marathon IV?

I'd say we are really close to the point where better graphics aren't really necessary. Existing and somewhat older technology combined with good graphical design can give really good results. I recently played KotOR for the first time and while the game i six years old the slightly dated graphics didn't bother me at all. If I go back a bit further to, lets say the first Elite Force, I have to turn on my retro gaming mode to cope. Graphics doesn't make or break a game but really bad/old graphics can hurt the experience.

[Frost]

Eric5h5, on May 26th 2009, 05:36 PM, said:

A halfway decent modern GPU gets a heck of a lot more than 15% framerate increase over a GMA X3100. More like 1500%. Even a halfway decent old GPU performs a lot better than a X3100.

^ That.

Check the benchmarks. The X3100 is slower than the GeForce 6600 that was standard in my G5. I've heard the X3100 doesn't even play Call of Duty 2 acceptably. I'll pass.

Maybe if you got integrated graphics from someone who wasn't HORRIBLE at making GPUs (i.e. not Intel), then you might be getting somewhere, but that's probably not happening.

[Eric5h5]

Frost, on May 26th 2009, 06:50 PM, said:

Maybe if you got integrated graphics from someone who wasn't HORRIBLE at making GPUs (i.e. not Intel), then you might be getting somewhere, but that's probably not happening.

Well, Apple is using integrated graphics from nVidia now. They are in fact a lot better than the GMA stuff (Apple says 5X faster, which seems to be true), but still not a good replacement for a discrete GPU if you're serious about gaming at all. It does help the low end a lot though, so it was definitely a good move.

--Eric

[Sneaky Snake]

I would say that a dedicated GPU is essential for any gamer that wants to move past the interactive slideshow level of performance the intel's GMA 950 and X3100 give.

[Atticus]

Until OP identifies said "amazing" integrated-graphics-driven game (or admits that he was stoned out of his mind), this thread is an epic fail '09.

Atticus

[J'nathus]

I'm sorry to say you'll find few on your side when it comes to an argument that integrated graphics are 'good enough' for gaming.

Even mid-range graphics cards from 4 generations ago will blow the Intel integrated graphics setups out of the water. I agree that we seem to have reached a point where we don't really need to push the hardware much farther, but that is not to say that Intel integrated graphics are sufficient.

I think we shouldn't be trying to so aggressively push the graphics barrier and instead we should focus on good art design that runs on EVERYTHING, but that doesn't mean 'runs PERFECT on everything.' The problem is, the price of entry level machines aiming lower and lower, it's getting to a point where accommodating those low-end configurations is just getting outlandish. You want to go a certain speed with confidence in your car, you need a certain type of car. You want to game with a certain level of quality, you need a certain type of machine.

[AussieMacGamer]

I'm absent for a week and a thread like this turns up.

[teflon]

yeah until we know what the game is we cant really talk about it and its graphics.

[jackdawsson]

Floxwoop, on May 26th 2009, 11:36 PM, said:

I'd say we are really close to the point where better graphics aren't really necessary. Existing and somewhat older technology combined with good graphical design can give really good results. I recently played KotOR for the first time and while the game i six years old the slightly dated graphics didn't bother me at all. If I go back a bit further to, lets say the first Elite Force, I have to turn on my retro gaming mode to cope. Graphics doesn't make or break a game but really bad/old graphics can hurt the experience.

I think PC games will continue to push graphical boundaries & I don't expect that to change anytime soon, however I'd go along with your viewpoint regarding consoles.

I imagine both Sony & MS may be thinking along similar lines after the $billions lost on PS3 & particularly the Xbox franchise (some $20 billion). Who's gonna spend these kinds of $billions again developing new console hardware with a useful life-span of barely 5 years? I'll wager, not Sony; probably not MS either.

[the Battle Cat]

Floxwoop, on May 26th 2009, 03:36 PM, said:

Marathon IV?

Damn it CaryMG! That sounds like the cut scene dream sequence from Marathon IV: For Four Fore Pfhor!! You signed an NDA!!

[Mr. Selvetarm]

Before I got the card in my sig, I was left with integrated graphics (HD 3300) for several weeks. It could barely handle KOTOR 2 on high settings, the x1300 in my brothers Dell could run better. It defeated the purpose of having a large monitor. It defeated the purpose of spending hours upon hours researching and building a computer. No, integrated graphics are not ok. Yes, dedicated cards are a complete necessity if you want to watch a high quality video, or play a game newer then 4 years old.

[bookman]

I've used all the integrated graphics Apple has used to date:

950 - it could play WoW, Doom 3, Prey, but lots of other games/demos wouldn't even load. Still, you could get acceptable performance on quite a few games.

3100 - Much better than the 950. Every game I've tried, either PC or Mac, has run fairly well, with the exception of Company of Heroes, which ran at a playable but low rate.

9400 - Again better still - I haven't actually tried many games on it, but the Quake 4 demo ran like butter on it compared to the 3100.

In response to the OP, I think the progression here shows that they integrated solutions have gotten massively better in a pretty short time. The nVidia 9400 kicks all kinds of ass over many of the dedicated cards Apple has shipped in the past. Sure a dedicated card will perform better, but I think integrated solutions have become an acceptable substitute for notebook and other pro-sumer iMac type computers.

[Brad Oliver]

bookman, on May 28th 2009, 08:35 AM, said:

The nVidia 9400 kicks all kinds of ass over many of the dedicated cards Apple has shipped in the past. Sure a dedicated card will perform better, but I think integrated solutions have become an acceptable substitute for notebook and other pro-sumer iMac type computers.

Even the Radeon 8500 in the PPC Mac mini bested the GMA 950 in the Intel Macs, so the bar hasn't exactly been high lately for integrated video Mac chipsets.

[teflon]

But thats because the 9400 isnt so much an integrated graphics chip, its more of a GPU with an integrated southbridge. Yes, a low end GPU, but a GPU none the less. Its limitation is that it doesnt have dedicated VRAM, but at that speed, it probably cant really utilise it anyway.

The original question, mind, was if a dedicated GPU was really worth it. In comparison to all current integrated GPUs, the answer is still yes. For light gaming and non-gaming uses the 9400 is perfectly adequate (the X3100 less so, but still), but for modern gaming theres nothing that can compare.

[PeopleLikeFrank]

teflon, on May 28th 2009, 01:03 PM, said:

But thats because the 9400 isnt so much an integrated graphics chip, its more of a GPU with an integrated southbridge. Yes, a low end GPU, but a GPU none the less. Its limitation is that it doesnt have dedicated VRAM, but at that speed, it probably cant really utilise it anyway.

The original question, mind, was if a dedicated GPU was really worth it. In comparison to all current integrated GPUs, the answer is still yes. For light gaming and non-gaming uses the 9400 is perfectly adequate (the X3100 less so, but still), but for modern gaming theres nothing that can compare.

Er. So what is an integrated graphics chip then? The Intel ones are GPUs integrated with the northbridge (or were anyway), and use main RAM same as the nVidia ones. The only real difference is that it's a really bad GPU.

Anyway. This thread is epic fail '09 regardless of whether the OP reveals the game name - dedicated GPUs provide moar better shinys than integrated. If we want to shift the conversation to "graphics >/< gameplay" or "graphics are already fine, get on with it" then I might have some sympathy.

I would like to point out that graphics horsepower can contribute to more than attempting photorealism (or the grey-brown-sepia version of 'realism' we currently get inundated with). TF2, for all it's cartoony look, does some interestingly complex things to get to what it looks like. I'd wager games like Love will be much more exciting when played proper GPUs. Even if we all suddenly decided we were totally sick of games starring Pvt. Grunty McGeneric of the 123rd Bland Squadron, I'd still advocate further development of graphics capability.

[teflon]

Pretty much, I could have worded it better though. What I meant was that the priority was shifted from being a Northbridge and a rubbish GPU thrown in to being a half decent (relatively speaking) GPU with the added capabilities of a Northbridge dropped in.
Another concern was, of course, power consumption and heat output since NV wanted this to be part of the netbook and net top craze.

I'd also say that graphics need to keep developing. Current graphics cards still limit the most ambitious developers, and they are constantly pushing them so that only the top end machines can play the game how it was meant to look. Its only when developers stop pushing this boundary that we can think about slowing the pace.

[J'nathus]

teflon, on May 28th 2009, 01:15 PM, said:

I'd also say that graphics need to keep developing. Current graphics cards still limit the most ambitious developers, and they are constantly pushing them so that only the top end machines can play the game how it was meant to look. Its only when developers stop pushing this boundary that we can think about slowing the pace.

That's interesting, as I think Infinity Ward did the opposite with Call of Duty 4.. it was DX9 not DX10. It'll be interesting to see what they do with Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. I support the 'we've pushed graphics far enough, let's just work on 'design' over 'features' ' ideal.

There are 2 problems with that . ..

First I think hardware is reaching the limits of what we can do with it. Without SLI or Crossfire, the graphics cards of ensuing generations aren't quite the upgrades they were from the 6 to 7 to 8 series of GeForces... the 9 series and the 200 series are very incremental (using GeForce as my example).

Secondly if we reach a point where mainstream graphics become pretty much the low / midrange (lower power requirements), how will these graphics GPU makers fund their next big projects as we don't need or won't need the super high end.

I like the idea of getting away from the 'keeping up with the jones' and making hardware require less power, less cooling, more efficient and less of the issue in upcoming systems. I doubt we'll ever get to that point, but I would like it if we did reach that point.