Well, the 5200 will let you experiment with some shaders. The 5xxx series was a real disappointment from nVidia when compared with the ATI cards that were available at the time, but they more than made up for it with the 6xxx series. That said, don't let me dissuade you. ;) The 5xxx will let you try lots of things that are not possible on integrated graphics. ;)

I cringe when I see the 5200 for $99 at retail stores when for $20 more you can get a card that's 5-10 times as fast.

I only paid $49.

More bubble experiments - 1000 bubbles still doesn't slow the program down, but 2000 knocks off about 5 fps. 5000 looks great, but cuts the frame rate in half. This is not doing the bubble calculations in a Shader yet, just in the normal program code.

Lovely. :)

Since you waited so long with the upgrade in the first place - any chance of exchanging it for a 6200?

/Tiny Won't Hassle You More Now

I would like to know what the 8800 limit I have here is. I know you want to compose for the lowest that you can, but 5xxx series are pretty far down the scale now. Is this one of those points where we can have a slider to increase the bubble amount?

OK.

:)

Here's another treat - a rare glimpse behind the scenes. A pic of the bubble column so far. Still a lot of work to do, but coming along nicely. In this experiment, I've got the bubbles emerging from one of the barnacle shells.

Very cool!

Ooooohhhhh!

Nice!

So do the fish disturb it if they swim through it? ;)

Working on a way of doing that.

:eek: :cowboy: :TU:

Sounds great!!!

Here's a short "real time" video in lower quality using the 8800 and shaders.

Great. Now I'm depressed. That kind of work is going to take some real Shader programming, and probably math, done by teams of hundreds.

Ever notice that there's no "Shaders for Dummies"?

Hey, that sounds like a bestseller hit you can write when you finish the aquarium. :TU:

It is a VERY realistic head. It's definitely a leap forward. However, as with all of these demos, it will be a few generations of video cards until we see that inside of games. If there were some more of these heads with bodies and gun fire flying around, I doubt it would ever render 1fps.

The nVidia 5200 arrived today, and I just installed it. I'm sure glad I decided to test MA3 on this platform, because none of the objects show up - just the background wash!

That's too bad, Jim. :( (If you fix it and want to alpha test on a 7800GT - send me a PM, ok?) :D

Y'know, I gave that pic to Linda and asked her what was possible to do with it. She came back very frustrated with this and claimed it was an extremely annoying photo - especially the flash... :)

/Tiny Attempt

For some reason in that picture you remind me of grandpa Joe from Willy Wonka, cept for the tropical shirt. :snorkel:

Kinda interesting comment from the girl who refuses to post any pictures of herself here...

It wasn't meant as an insult, just something about him reminded me of that guy.

Ha, ha - When I was young people told me I looked like James Garner, then in later years Regis Philbin, then Johnny Carson. Now I've evolved into Jack Albertson.

well this is my face i look different every few seconds... check my avatar

now its your turn grape_jellyfish (sandy)

OK, I fugured out the problem with the nVidia card, and have the MA3 Beta working properly on it now. The issue was so technical that it wouldn't make any sense to anyone here, so I won't go into it.

Regarding the nVidia 5200 card: except for the Pixel Shader capability, the card is actually a step DOWN from the on-board Intel graphics chip in this HP machine. Everying runs a little slower in every mode - about 10% fewer frames-per-second. First I tried it with the default Microsoft XP drivers, then I loaded in the nVidia drivers that came with the card. I haven't tried downloading any drivers yet.

(And yes, I did remember to disable the on-board card. The nVidia card is the only device being seen by the program.)

Jim,

Make sure that if you go to nvidia for drivers that you look in the "Products Supported" section on the drivers page before you install anything. Some of the later driver will not work well with older cards.

nVidia Drivers from Microsoft = bad
nVidia Drivers from the CD = bad
nVidia Drivers from the website = good

All three had identical performance in this case.

That's really crappy results Jim (nVidias - not yours). I looked around a bit and found a Video Card Performance Chart on Tom's Hardware. They rank the 5200 somewhere in between a fast GeForce 2 and a slow GeForce 3. The 6200 ranks about the same as the performance models of the GeForce 4 series.

Though the card itself is disappointing, I'm REALLY glad I got it. It might have been a long time before I caught that bug otherwise. Now I have two platforms in one machine, and can easily switch between them. We're heading back up to Oregon on Monday, and my machine there has a different Intel chip, and a weak ATI card. That pretty much covers the three major manufacturers, now I just need something with more power. I guess I'll have to break down and buy a bare-bones computer with a PCI-E slot.

Building a new rig?
"Paging doctor Fish. Paging doctor Fish!" :)

Even the briefest of web searches will reveal massive criticism of the 5xxx series of nVidia cards. They really fell on their face with that series and ATI took full advantage of their weakness. Of course nVidia got their stuff together and came out with the serious 6xxx series. I have a 6800 XT 512MB and love it.

One thing to watch for though is value priced 6xxx series cards. It is almost impossible to tell looking at the box whether you are holding a card that is severely crippled either in memory (some have 64MB on board and use 256MB of your RAM, also some use cheaper RAM like the 6100's and some 6300's which use DDR1 instead of DDR2 or DDR3), GPU (some have memory pipelines intentionally turned off), or bus speed (some are really hobbled).

Unless you can heavily research what you are buying, I wouldn't get any number under 6400. And I realize you are in a strange situation where your motherboard has neither AGP nor PCI Express.

I was going to resist but I'll bite...

Jim, bare-bones? Come on, us über-users are craving something that will bring our mega-rigs to their knees... :D Scalability; build it so the masses can run it and the power users can sell it. If your system can render 1,000 bubbles mine can render 50,000, or using a different technique it could probably be made to look like it's rendering countless hundreds of thousands... ...I know that imperfections look worse the more realistically things are rendered but that's where the artist part of the job comes in... Anyway, I'm already rambling... *smack*

My suggestion, get a 8600 based card and a Core2Duo based computer, that way you could always retire it from development in favor of a life as a HTPC... :TU:

I'll build it, stress test it, and ship it to you at cost. ;)

Back in the day, the MS nVidia drivers did not have OpenGL support. Now, they pretty much jsut release manufacturer drivers. Although I 'm guessing they are WHQL drivers.

Jim has a bubble that looks like a ball of mercury that a Banshee can render. :D

I hope Jim wants PCIe for R&D and not as a requirement for running 3.0. :snorkel:

Doc - by "bare-bones", I meant just a fast video card and CPU. No giant hard drive, card readers, DVD-writers, surround sound, fancy case and such. I won't be building one, I have much better luck buying off-the-shelf units. I'll probably get something with Vista on it next week in Oregon.

Please go to a small computer store instead of a mega big box store like Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. :)

They are all gone. Of the 50-or-so computer stores I used to visit when selling Saucer Attack, only one remains - and they just do repairs.

Yep, they are all dropping like flies. It's too hard for the little guy to compete with the big chains. In the lates 90's, it was obvious that the mega corporatiosn were trying to increase the cost of upgrading. The little people had to start buy no-name brand junk to survive. Usually those parts are not good. At the same time, the big corporations started discounting whole systems. That leads us to today. It's really sad.

We'll all be happy when 3.0 launches.

There are about a dozen places in Houston. Go figure.

Sorry Jim, I should have known you'd use the right term... It's just that so many people I deal with day to day use "bare-bone" to describe a low end system... :o

In that case get an 8800 something (the system should least support DX10 even if the aquarium won't) and maybe even a quad core CPU like Jav and I have. :D