Geforce FX has 4x2 marchitecture: Part Two

First, we were contacted by some of the developer community who had this to say.

While multitexturing is a great technology and being able to do more textures is a "good thing", that doesn't imply that it's always necessary.

For example, if you need a plain room without any fancy things inside you only need to use single textures, as otherwise you'd kill your bandwidth unnecessarily.

Multitexturing is more important for creating much more realistic scenes and effects and while it will be heavily used in new games, it won't be used all of the time.

If a developer can create one environment using just single texturing he or she will certainly use that, since it will make the code zip along. It's horses for courses.

Using a lot of effects such as FSAA and anisotropic filtering will hurt Geforce FX performance, and we've seen in some early reviews that this is exactly the case with games like Unreal Tournament 2003.

Using extra Nvidia features in Doom 3 will hurt performance even more because of the complexity of the game, and only having a 128-bit memory interface doesn't help either.

This could be the real reason why Nvidia is not happy with 3dmark03, since this benchmark uses single texturing. Nvidia has outlined its reasons for not liking benchmarks using single texturing, and Futuremark replied in a four page long PDF we've seen.

As an example:

Why Does Game Test 1 Not Use Multitexturing for All Visible Surfaces?
"The use of single texturing in game test 1 has been criticized. It is claimed that the test does not measure DirectX 7 generation game performance.

Just like game developers, Futuremark develops its game test content so that the end result looks good and works optimally. Most games use single texturing for a skybox because more texturing does not necessarily make the end result look better. Examples of popular games that use single-textured skybox include Crimson Skies, IL-2 Sturmovik, and Star Trek: Bridge Commander.

"As this issue was brought up already during 3DMark03 development, we did a test by adding a second texture layer to the skybox. The performance difference stayed within the error margin (3%), and in our opinion the additional layer did not significantly add to the visual quality of the test. Thus, there were no game development or technical justifications for implementing a multitextured skybox".

This confirms there's no justification for multitexturing unless, of course, there is a justification for multitexturing.

Lot of developers, even those that attended the Dawn till Dusk Nvidia event, were not told about 4x2 marchitecture. This could mean Nvidia wants to gloss over the fact it doesn't use 8x1 architecture, which ATI has and will use on the 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro.

Developers appeared shocked to learn that FX is actually 4x2 in Color + Z rendering since developers were led to understand that the technology was actually 8x1.

One thing is for certain. The Geforce FX will enter the graphics history tomes as the most controversial chip of all time for Nvidia, and it will just stay in place until the plumber arrives with his NV35 fix. µ