The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-08-14, 17:57:

Inno3D also made those. And I think one other Taiwan/China based company too. But they probably just bought unsold chip stock f […]
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just about the only implementation of this chipset

Inno3D also made those. And I think one other Taiwan/China based company too. But they probably just bought unsold chip stock from VIA.

candle_86 wrote:

R600 and all its deratives had broken AA/AF

First of all, AF wasn't really broken on R600 series. It's just wasn't very spectacular due to low amount of texture units. And secondly, was AA really broken? I doubt that. More likely it was just designed that way to be more flexible with upcoming technologies (deferred rendering, etc). R600 was very forward thinking chip, which failed due to lack of raw processing power.

No R600 used the shaders instead of decidated hardware like nvidia was to do AA, they corrected that with the R700 series, and went back to not processing AA/AF on the shaders.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2021-08-19, 20:43:

386SX wrote on 2021-08-19, 20:23:

I remember every review underlined the 16bit "problem" even if far from be a real problem it was on the marketing side and nothing could solve that.

The thing with the 16-bit color mode on 3Dfx cards was that they were using dithering techniques so it won't look ugly as an actual 16-bit color mode and this led to people say that the image quality was blurred and smeared.

it's the filtering tech, not the dithering. There's multiple ways 3dfx dithers on the textures:

-2x2 matrix (often seen in Direct3D and UnrealEngine games)
-4x4 matrix (Often seen in Glide and OpenGL games)
-dither subtraction (tries to delete the dither out of blended polygons leading to larger noticeable dither-looking artifacts on overdrawn effects, often in Glide and OpenGL games)
-dithered LOD/mipmapping (applies a 2x2 matrix to the mip level switching leading to quasi-trilinear,optional)

and in many cases where there's plenty of blend overdraw, the filtering won't catch that since it works with a threshold so you'll get blurred details, purple bleeding, *and* obvious dithering! There's still no support for 24/32-bit textures either, so the 16-bit limitations can't be handwaved off with a leaning to filtering reliance on making up for it at a time when gamedevs were just starting to use true color texture formats, many with alpha layers that'd look terrible as RGBA4444.

If you really want top 16-bit rendering, there's those PowerVR cards as it's all an internal true color buffer which gets dithered to 16-bit in post, so there's never any of the overdrawn dither effects common with everyone else.

leileilol wrote on 2021-09-12, 19:15:

it's the filtering tech, not the dithering. There's multiple ways 3dfx dithers on the textures: […]
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it's the filtering tech, not the dithering. There's multiple ways 3dfx dithers on the textures:

-2x2 matrix (often seen in Direct3D and UnrealEngine games)
-4x4 matrix (Often seen in Glide and OpenGL gmaes)
-dither subtraction (tries to delete the dither out of blended polygons leading to larger noticeable dither-looking artifacts on overdrawn effects, often in Glide and OpenGL games)
-dithered LOD/mipmapping (applies a 2x2 matrix to the mip level switching leading to quasi-trilinear,optional)

and in many cases where there's plenty of blend overdraw, the filtering won't catch that since it works with a threshold so you'll get blurred details, purple bleeding, *and* obvious dithering! There's still no support for 24/32-bit textures either, so the 16-bit limitations can't be handwaved off with a leaning to filtering reliance on making up for it at a time when gamedevs were just starting to use true color texture formats, many with alpha layers that'd look terrible as RGBA4444.

If you really want top 16-bit rendering, there's those PowerVR cards as it's all an internal true color buffer which gets dithered to 16-bit in post, so there's never any of the overdrawn dither effects common with everyone else.

I stand corrected about techniques used on 3Dfx cards. I was confusing the things there.

How seriously do you guys consider the GeForce FX 5200 the worst graphics card because it didn't show any performance gains in 2003 compared to the GeForce MX440 from 2002, "merely" adding support for DirectX 8 and 9.0, as well as Shaders 2.0. Besides games, this allows rendering the Aero interface in Windows Vista and 7.
Meanwhile, in 2013, Nvidia released the GeForce 505 for OEM manufacturers, which was a rebranded GeForce 405 from 2010, which was a rebranded slightly tweaked GeForce 310 from 2009, which was a rebranded GeForce 210 from the same year, which was only a slightly improved and energy-efficient, but slower version of the budget GeForce 9400GT from 2008, and budget GeForce 8400GS from 2007.

I think the problem was thinking of it as a replacement for the GF 4200, whereas if you went from top down of the series, rather than bottom up, you'd place the 4200 market position as a 5600 maybe. It was the bottom of all, so closer in position to a 420, where the 440 was more the "is it really a 5200 or a 5500?" level cards.

However, as a retro piece, the 5200 is a good "Geforce 3" just keep it off stuff that's gonna force it to DX9.

Kruton 9000 wrote on 2026-05-01, 10:08:

How seriously do you guys consider the GeForce FX 5200 the worst graphics card because it didn't show any performance gains in 2003 compared to the GeForce MX440 from 2002, "merely" adding support for DirectX 8 and 9.0, as well as Shaders 2.0. Besides games, this allows rendering the Aero interface in Windows Vista and 7.

aero doesn't matter when it's 2003-05 when it was really pushed around (and sucked). there's also a huge variance of confusion performance variants with different capabiltiies (evga fx5200 super sucks), combining all that with nvidia's extremely arrogant "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" slogan really rubs it in. No amount of phils computer crap gffx showering will change its reputation as the s3 virge of the 2000s to those who lived through it. A Mobility Radeon 9000 even outperforms it. Even if it's a simple GLSL fragment shader to apply gamma correction the FX5200 will falter.

If aero's a reason to use a FX5200 in 07-09.... uhhhhhhhhh good luck trying to play anything. I didn't even use aero when I had much better hardware than that when it was current.