Slashdot Mirror
Nvidia's NV20
Bilz writes "ZD Net UK has posted an article on Nvidia's upcoming NV20 video chip. According to them, they state that during complex 3D scenes the card performs up to 7 times faster than a GeForce 2 Ultra."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
well you are the most stupidest!!
My first nVidia card was a 4MB PCI Riva 128. As far as I know, their first chipset. It was half price for $125 and worth every penny. I was there when they were developing beta OpenGL drivers, I remember trying to get the nVidia working with SuSE Linux 5.3, all through it I was a solid believer in nVidia's superior technology..
Now I'm running a 3DFX Voodoo3 2000. It's fine. It's fast enough, I have full HW accelerated OpenGL under Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS (well, 4.5.2 in theory) and QNX. My next card HAS to be able to do all of that. Like 3DFX, I want full open source drivers or I will NOT buy the card.
Does Matrox's new card fit my criteria? Does the ATI? I know nVidia doesn't. So my next card won't be an nVidia. Plain and simple.
So, can any of you tell me what the status of the otehr card makers is??
Yeah, but hopefully what will happen is that there will become a market in rendered artifacts. So game developers will be able to go to a website and access a library of pre-built stuff, including textures, and just include it in their game.
I guess this would end up working in the same way as photo agencies - you'd get people doing nothing but contributing to these things, and surviving on only the royalties from the use of their objects, and other people who dabble but that do occasionally create something which is worth re-using and sticking in the library.
So when you make your game, you'd hit the web, saying 'I want a lamp, has to have on/off modes, must fit into Victorian era game' and up will come a list - sure, it'll take a while before a library has enough in it to make this possible, but once it does, you just populate your VR room much like heading down to IKEA to populate your RL room.
I like this idea.
~Cederic
I can remember going custom PC shopping with a friend in 1995, down Tottenham Court Road in London.
The guys in the electronics shops literally laughed at him when he asked for a 4MB graphics card - taunts of "You'll never need that, unless you're doing graphics for the movies" followed us down the street.
Of course, they also laughed at him for wanting as much as (gasp) 32MB RAM in the PC..
~Cederic
The article claims that, in simple 3D graphics, the chip will be just two times faster then GeForce. And it claims it will be faster as graphics get more complex...
Frankly I may understand that this may happen as GeForce does not have enough processing power to hold up more complex models. But that the new chip will get 7 times faster? If it is just 2 times faster on simple models, how does it get faster several times more, on complex models? The basics of the model don't change, wether it is less or more complex in details. The basics will be processed by the same channels and by the same math of the chip. Or am I missing something?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
IIRC, this is the chip they're developing with ELSA's help. It's being designed to replace their Quadro2 chip for high end workstation grahics cards. These won't end up in consumer or gaming cards, but some of the technology will probably find its way into future GeForce chips.
yes we can. My reasoning? I dont know.. But faster is better and big numbers makes me want to BUY it. Thats why..just makes it seem alot faster.
However they do crash for me when running and writing opengl apps. Also restarting x is just hiding the problem not fixing it. I don't think it is okay for software to fail ever with the exception of hardware error. There are lots of software I am upset with. Thankfully opensource seems to be very into fixing these problems.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
500 MHz, probably will come with 64/128MB ram, why not just add a mouse/keyboard/floppy and call a spade a spade? this thing will be as fast if-not-faster than my PC dammit! Now just imagine if other technologies, like cars, airplanes, space vehicles, moved at relatively the same pace as computer technology... we'd have colonized half the solar system by now! It's time for all you computer engineers to look beyond computers and start helping out in all other areas!
just my $0.02
------ Poo-tee-weet?
Yep - I'm confirming it - it's true. I read about twenty of his postings and they received on average 5 to 10 replies, usually for some kind of hyperbolic remark, or poor comparison. Unfortunately the above poster chose to rename the above guy kiss-the-d**k instead of his real name and got modded down.
Just an off-topic thought. Are there any provisions for limiting the number of posts for consistently troll or flamebait posters so as to decrease the noise? Maybe limit them to 1 -2 posts per week until the consistently post a few comments above zero? Just a thought.
..........FULL STOP.
Sorry, but this is incorrect. The specs have been released to VA Research, who has not yet finished the DRI driver. The specs were also released to Xig who released a proprietary X driver. When the DRI driver is released, it will become part of XFree 4. The rasterization parts are already in their. If you want 3d support now, you have to get Xig drivers.
Now the Radeon 64Mb Xig drivers(Alpha 2.0) are actually FASTER than some of Nvidias drivers w/ some of their faster cards. So the statement that NVidia has the fastest GL drivers currently is also incorrect. And I suspect that the next release of the V5 drivers(which BTW does support SLI and FSAA) will also be comparable to NVidias drivers. The DRI drivers are doing on hellofa job, and they all deserve our respect. And the fact is, that the open source developer DON'T NEED nvidias pipeline, the curent DRI/GLX stuff does it just fine.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
You know, "hidden surface removal" really doesn't mean that they have any special magic tricks up their sleeve. You can do pretty much correct HSR with a 16-bpp z-buffer, as long as you are careful with your near and far clipping planes. 32 bits per depth pixel is better, of course.
What I'd like to see is a hardware implementation of hierarchical z-buffering for occlusion culling. That'd be neat.
Psst, you're still looking at the damn computer screen while playing. Psst, the game doesn't hurt like discovering the foot of a stool in the dark with one of those small toes on your foot does. Psst, you don't play "real life" with a mouse and the WSAD keys.
Token-symbol-ish enough for you?
The next thing you're going to do is start claiming that each time you die "in the game", you die a little inside. Furrfu!
The word you're looking for is "hierarchical Z-buffers". "Hidden surface removal" is a blanket phrase that covers such things as z-sorting (used in early software 3d engines), BSP rendering without a depth buffer, S-buffers, the "active edge list" algorithm used in the software renderers in Quake 1 (and prolly 2 too) and the good old z-buffer.
Please, don't let some corporation smudge the terminology.
This may also be the real explanation for the drivers' closed-sourceness - a part of their business model is to have manufacturers ship boards that facilitate crippling of the chip's capabilities by the driver. Imagine what would happen if some open-source hacker could modify the driver to ignore the model ID and enable the Quadro-specific features anyway?
Not to mention that some companies (SGI comes to mind, also the company that did the Permedia {1,2,3} product line) have shipped products that have implemented most of the OpenGL pipeline (1.0 or 1.1) in silicon. Now, if that doesn't count as a GPU then I'm sure that "GPU" must be a registered trademark, like "Twinview" is.
Ugh. Not to mention the fact that the G200 and G400 chips from Matrox also have a kind of geometry processing unit, called a "warp engine" that's programmable using some sort of proprietary microcode (the utah-glx project used pieces of binary-only microcode received from Matrox, and I'm pretty sure the XF86 4.0 DRIver does too). As far as I can tell from lurking on the utah-glx list back when John C. was working on the driver, the g200 has one warp pipe while the g400 has two. It looks like the current drivers for the g200 and g400 use the warp pipes for triangle setup acceleration (they only seem to use one microcode routine for triangle setup, which I think is a shame...).
Based on my interpretation, that also counts as a GPU, programmable no less!
"By introducing better hidden surface removal"
Oh please, you've just given your own lack of knowledge away right here. Do you even know what a z-buffer is? Or are you suggesting nVidia have some *revolutionary* branch-off from z/w-buffers? Or, wait, don't tell me, they've invented (drum roll ..) *back face culling*, right!? Perhaps you actually meant to say something like "they've optimized the amount of geometry information that needs to be sent to that card by creating higher-level primitives such as curved surfaces, meaning less data to go over the bus (as a simple example, the new sprite primitives in directx8)" .. but I don't think you meant to say that, because it doesn't sound like you know very much about this yourself.
"If you don't know what it is, maybe you should not voice an opinion in the first place"
"Complex" does not imply "lots of triangles" in my book. If they meant "lots of triangles" they shouldn't have said "complex". Anyway, any moron knows that fill rate has become a far bigger bottleneck than number of triangles since the introduction of the first GeForce. Your poly count has absolutely nothing to do with "complexity" (go look up the word in a dictionary if you want to confirm that).
A q3a scene might be defined as complex: multi-texturing, lots of renderstate/texture stage state manipulation, multi-pass rendering etc. Making q3a-style curved surfaces hardware primitives might speed up games like quake, and perhaps this is the direction they're trying to go. "Complex geometry" isn't some specific 3d graphics terminology, it's some vague, undefined marketing BS, and that was my point.
"better than yours (seen your homepage)."
hehe .. yup, Dave Gnukem is pretty much stagnant, I haven't actually worked on it in literally a year, so I can't argue with you there (actually my entire web page is essentially stagnant, it's not a high enough priority in my life right now - my point is, my web page isn't exactly an accurate reflection of what I'm doing.) It's not mentioned on my web page, but I'm currently working on a 3d game with a friend of mine, a networked FPS (OpenGL for gfx, sockets for network, DS for sound etc). It's coming along quite well at the moment, if it gets anywhere close to a finished game we'll be putting up a web-page for it and I'll link to it. Also most of my time goes to my work, which as it happens is 3d graphics simulations, incl. networked (mostly, military and industrial training simulators ..) so I'm not completely clueless ..
This "secret document" sounds more to me like a press release crafted by their marketing department. Actually it smells extremely badly of something designed to manipulate stock prices, or at the very least to calm nervous shareholders.
"In environments where there are low detail scenes (large triangles, simple geometry, hardly any depth)) the NV20 is only twice as fast as the Geforce 2 Ultra"
What the hell does "hardly any depth" mean? What they are trying to say here, without it sounding too bad, is that although T&L ops are quite a bit quicker, fill rate is and will still remain your 3D app bottleneck.
"The performance of the chip doubles when handling geometrical data"
Uh, what the heck is "geometrical data"? 3D polygons as opposed to 2D polygons? ?? All your 3D geometry data is "geometrical data", whether the scene is simple or complex. Also I don't know where they get the number "7" if they say here also that the performance only doubles.
So the new chip sounds good, yes, but you can forget about it being 7 times faster, that is 100% pure marketing BS. Sounds like they've upped the clock and optimized the T&L engine and antialiasing. I might believe double the speed, but "7 times faster" goes way beyond lies.
What is "complex geometry" anyway? A polygon is a polygon .. multi-textured maybe? Sheez, I dunno, this whole article appears to have been written by a 1st year marketing student with zero technical knowledge.
Quake III, realistic?? Even with this super-new nVidia-chip I have a really hard time believing that FPS games like quake will ever be realistic. Nicer graphics doesn't equal more realistic graphics. But even if we managed one day to create technology that made games look exactly like reality (which would need 3D-monitors of course), I still doubt teenagers would have a hard time telling the difference.
I would like to see a token symbol placed on the screen that would constantly remind the player that he is in a game universe.
Isn't the icons representing your ammo, your armor, your weapons, and the frag-counter enough? I would think so.
A digital connection with the same bandwidth would be a lot cheaper (Fast and precise DACs are relatively expensive)!
of course, by the time he could take advantage of the 32MB RAM or the 4MB video card, the computer was so outdated, he had to just go out and buy a whole new box as his non-EDO RAM and VLB video card were no longer supported ;)
get nemulator
This is something that I wrote to the debian-user mailing list a while ago:
On Nov 03 2000, wulfie wrote:
> I'll second the anti-Nvidia driver lobby.
I'm planning on buying a new computer soon (a Duron) and one
of the things that was hardest to understand was which video
card to get.
It seems that there is an hiatus between el-cheapo, older PCI
cards and the super-hyper-duper-hi-end cards with 3D
acceleration with all bells-and-whistles. There's nothing in
between for someone like me that wants to buy a cheaper one
and that only cares for 2D performance (I don't play games and
I don't use 3D applications).
Since there were no options (or since the manufacturers don't
want to see that part of the market), I started looking for
cards that would provide a not so bad performance and not
hogging my future system performance, while having a
reasonable price.
In all reviews that I've studied, the NVIDIA cards seem to be
the winners of performance, but the fact that they don't have
a receptive attitude towards the community means that they
don't want people like me as their customers.
This is what made me choose a Matrox G400 for my new system
(together with the recommendation of a close friend that said
the G400 was running quite fast in his system).
2560x2048 is the wrong aspect ratio. Maybe they fucked up and actually meant 2560x1920.
1280x1024 is wrong too, for that matter. That's why I use 1152x864 in Windows (which doesn't support non-square pixels like X does).
Hands in my pocket
So, we can like use the technology for pr0n too then? Cool.
Seriously though, I think it has more to do with what sells than what is possible. Game makers could make less violent games using current technology.
I personally can't stand FPS because they give me motion sickness. How's that for real?
I'd rather put my 3d card to some good use, but I really can't think of anything that I'd be interested in. Anyone with ideas?
-- Jacob.
Final Fantasy isn't exactly a HW pushing program. Almost everything is pre-rendered, with a few low-poy 3d models. Its Myst plus a few polys.
If by 'A lot of PC game makers just aren't that skilled' you mean 'A lot of PC games dont have a place for pre-redered graphics' then you'd be correct.
FunOne
FunOne
But its pronounced X Windows ;)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Any single activity done for 14 hours is bad for you.
I disagree. I feel that prolonged involvement goes along with a certain intensity which I feel should be sought out over mediocrity any day.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Hey, i think you could use some cooling yourself. Chill out man, i was just speculating, mmkay?
You are the same decaying organic matter as the rest of us.
Ok, they say its going to be 7 times faster than a geforce 2. Now, what i wonder is, will this mean it will also be 7 times as heat-generating and power hungry? No, 7 times is not quite likley, but it makes me wonder just how much cooling will be needed? Muscle or Finesse?
You are the same decaying organic matter as the rest of us.
but what are they going to do with a 500Mhz ramdac
I think they may be confusing it with the DDR-memory clockspeed which will be 500 MHz. A RAMDAC of that speed would be overkill, there aren't any monitors big enough for those resolutions, and the upcoming LCD and digital monitors don't even need a RAMDAC.
300% increase in FSAA speed
Why not? You have to remember that the GeForces did FSAA in software. They probably added a hardware-based implementation, like 3dfx did with the VSA-100.
how crap the V5 are compared to GF2 if you talk about speed.
The V5 wasn't that bad when it came to speed per se (especially with FSAA), it's just that their top card with 4 VS-100 never panned out, thus giving the GeForce 2 and up the edge. nVidia is still far ahead in terms of quality though.
- Also Sprach Doktor Merkwurdigliebe
Exactly. I think people will adapt to any new development. Just like young people don't have any problem watching MTV-style fast cutting television. You'll still realise you're sitting behind a monitor, not a window.
;-)
Once we get to the level of holodecks, it's time to be worried
- Also Sprach Doktor Merkwurdigliebe
"7 times faster" usually means "up to 7 times faster", which in turns, would turns out that "GeForce 2 Ultra outputs 2 fps at 1600x1200x32 with 1M polygons/frame, now we can do 14 fps!!".
I doubt we are going to see even a 1.5x boost of fps at 640x480x16x20K polygons/frame.
A new generation of chips has always been able to outperform an older generation by about 2x ON THE RESOLUTION THAT MATTERS AT THE TIME OF RELEASE, because, my friend, 21" monitors are not exactly cheap.
Therefore, we'll most likely see about 2x performance increase on 1024x768x32 with 30-50K polygons/frame.
As I understand it, they have had some problems working page flipping into the XFree86 architecture, but the next driver version is supposed to support it. I don't know about the grahpics overlay, but it sounds like the kind of thing that they'd be working on supporting soon.
------
Yeah, that does suck... NVidia wanted to release specs (they even made a good start), but NDA's prevented them from doing so.
------
And I've been using it like this some months now.
The GeForce 2 Ultra is already at 250MHz (GTS is at 200MHz, MX is at 175MHz). The NV20 will most likely debut at 300MHz (note: The X-Box specs state a 300MHz NVIDIA processor, based off of NV20).
As time went on, we saw real powerhouses from NVida which put the competition to shame, performance wise. Now we are being flooded by enourmous framerates (who remembers BitBoys claims of 200fps at 1600x1200 in Q3?), GPU's, quad texel pipelines, DDR ram, and so on and so forth.
However, has anyone considered visual quality? Having millions upon millions of polygons drawn per second may seem a real treat, but if they look ugly, then what's the point (remember the Riva 128)? Not many games are taking true advantage of all the power available, and there's always going to be a bottleneck somewhere, so I think it's time to relax, acknowledge that we don't need 200fps, and hope to see some beautful images explode onto our monitors sometime soon.
I see computer games as an escape from reality. Surreal images, strange creatures, and worlds we'll never see sometime in our lifetime make for a perfect outlet. Trouble is, when we get to photorealism, the fantasia vanishes, and the magic is gone.
It's like going to an art museum and seeing a portait painted some 500 years ago, and then compare it some whiz kids photorealistic portrait. It's obvious that the "cruder" image has more feeling inside.
Yes, but can you run SETI on it?
Yes. I _need_ a HiRes head mounted display, i.e. two screens, i.e. double pixel freq.
KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing
7 TIMES FASTER THAN THE GEFORCE 2 ULTRA?!?!?! Man that's one serious Vid Card. It's good too see that NVIDIA is keeping up the good work. As soon as companies get into the lead they tend to get sloppy and try to push their products for as long as possible(intel with it's pentium core, ATI with the Rage 128). Of course these cards are gonna be expensive, right? ;-)
because nVidia chips are better supported by game manufacturers than ATI chips, so not only will it put your currently unsupported chip to shame, but it will be supported too.
Frag 'em all...
Their drivers are among the most unstable drivers around for linux.
/usr/bin/X11/X +bs -auth /var/gdm/:0.Xauth :0
Uh huh, yeah, right.
[davidj@matisse davidj]$ uptime
9:48am up 48 days, 22:37, 5 users, load average: 1.25, 1.15, 1.21
[davidj@matisse davidj]$ ps aux | grep X
root 1425 0.6 15.9 302312 40980 ? R Oct09 437:53
The only reason why the machine has a low uptime is because of a recent power outage, and my workstation isn't on a UPS.
Back to how they're unstable. The unstable argument holds absolutely no water. And I run a fair few OpenGL apps, gimp on a semi regular basis (I have it open now) and quite a few other graphically intensive apps that have made weaker X drivers die a painful death.
Having said that, I do have an objection to the driver source not being free beer.
A lot of their driver code is leased or licensed from other companies who probably aren't allowed to make the info public.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
would like to see a token symbol placed on the screen
Why didn't you (or whoever your family left in charge) take responsibility for your younger sister and stop her? Any single activity done for 14 hours is bad for you. There's something very wrong when society excuses itself from performing its basic obligations with the excuse that there isn't a warning label. Sigh.
The chip can do 100 gigaflops
Thanks to the /.er who pointed out to me you -can- compare apples and oranges, but I'll run with the metaphor for a while anyway
The nVIDIA figure is obtained by adding together operations in what is essentially a hardwired pipeline, and chances are not every so called floating point operation is done at even single precision. It would be a waste of silicon if nothing else. So an NV20 Gflop isn't the same as a CPU Gflop.
Someone will point out its not strictly a hardwired pipeline, what with pixel shaders and stuff, but my point is that if you did treat it as a programmable device, you'd likely only be able to get an order or two of magnitude less floating point performance on any other application than what it's designed to do.
Still, you can use a single OpenGL rendering pass as a SIMD instruction if it takes your fancy.
Actually the PSX had a GPU since 1995. PSX also has a GTE (Geometry Transform Engine). NVidia GPU is more like a PSX GPU+GTE.
So, the floating armor and health meters, plus the crosshair, plus the weapon, plus the fact that you're shooting at characters wearing science fictiony armor, are perfectly realistic to you? You see those every day in your own life? Moron.
Yes, you can now avoid that unconscionable slowdown when you run Quake Arena at 1,024,000x7,680,000 with 256 trillion colors.
--
Heh, you'd be surprised. There are business type apps that seriously need the speed at times. Case in point:
Borland's JBuilder series of Java IDEs. Kickass interface, really slick, and helps you along at every stage. I can't imagine doing Java without them. Problem?
Lots of popups showing you method prototypes, realtime analysis of the code you're writing, and the kicker -- the IDE itself is written in Java.
All these things are fairly processor intensive (and memory intensive too, of course) and running this IDE on anything less than a PIII 600 or so with less than 128 is an experience in wrecking your harddisk with swapping.
I'm sure that there are also other apps out there (Maya / RealSoft3D, etc. come to mind) that can always use more processing power, and a better graphics card (with a goodOGL implementation, of course!)
(this is somewhat off-topic)
Please don't even suggest such a horrible thing such as devoting yet another government agency for something that people should have control over.
IMHO, I think games should be rated by some sort of organization (which they are) much like the film industry. just like a 5 year old can't get into an NC-17 movie. And if it requires an ID to purchase it, then thats just great. But limiting the creativity/artistic talent of game developers because of things being just a little too real seems like a waste to me.
Okay I'm done,
Klowner
Bully for you. Unfortunately, as a FreeBSD user with a GeForce 256... I'm screwed.
It seems to me that *more* users would have been made happy if, rather than (or in addition to) releasing closed source Linux drivers, they had made information available to expedite the development of drivers using the DRI framework.
As it stands at the moment, I stand very unlikely to ever see a card I forked out good money for achieve its full potential under the operating system I prefer to use.
You see, its all about choice, and currently I don't have any.
Si
Yeah, that'll be it.
;-)
Si
I bought my TNT over a 3dfx because it offered a better feature set and because I liked what I saw of nVidia's intentions back then. I bought my TNT2 on nVidia's promises of Linux support. My card crashes. I have no hope of fixing it myself, and neither can anyone else I have access to. ATI have open-sourced their Radeon specs. I don't care how many times faster the new nVidia is over the Radeon, because I know how much faster the Radeon is over the TNT2 I have, and that it will be plenty fast enough for at least a year to come. Hey - I'm even willing to accept a buggy Radeon driver on the blind hope that it will stabalise better than the GeForce one. Oh - plus I know that because the Radeon uses XFree86's DRI that I won't get the compatibility bullshit I have to put up with now. Why can't my closed-source drivers properly integrate into my otherwise-perfectly running system? Why can't I compile KDE2 with OpenGL acceleration? It's all very well that the card can crunch a quad-zillion giga-whatits per nano-second, but how do I get it to work again??? I swear on my own Athlon_Beast, the minute I see mention of Radeon 3D acceleration in XFree86, I'm off to buy a Radeon. And when it crashes, I'll enjoy attempting to work out WTF happened. Can I have my Radeon now please?
Holy cow! The chip can do 100 gigaflops...where does the standard for a supercomputer start?
Ok, I can't resist.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
2560x2048 and 1280x1024 are 5:4, which is only a little different from the more conventional 4:3. To get your square pixels, adjust the horizontal size on your monitor.
I have a Voodoo3 and a 21" monitor. An older version of the drivers didn't correctly support 1280x960. At 1024x768, I didn't feel like I was getting my money's worth out of the monitor. At 1600x1200, things didn't look right--there are too many pixel size dependencies in Windows and on the web. I settled on 1280x1024 with a modest letterbox down the sides.
I agree that 4:3 is preferable for a conventional monitor, but I wouldn't call 5:4 "wrong."
The current 350 MHz can support a decent refresh at 1600x1200. Does a consumer graphics card really need more than that?
I don't know the details, but we see stuff like this in benchmarks all the time. If you're CPU limited, a faster video card won't buy you much. Likewise, texture compression and DDR RAM on a fast, wide bus won't buy you much if you're fill rate limited.
Granted, going from 2 to 7 times is a little unusual in practice, but it's perfectly normal for pre-release boasts.
According to The Register, the NV20 will support "250MHz double data rate (DDR) SDRAM."
Kids nowadays aren't influenced half as much as us, when watching TV commercials. Fortunately.
Just like movies - they look so real. The bottom line is, if you're not old enough to know the difference, you shouldn't play the game, watch the movies, or listen to ghetto violent rap sh!t.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
I know, what idiots! They look and they see: windows = gaming platform. Linux = server platform. A few geeks are trying to run Linux as a gaming machine... crap we'll go outta business unless we open the drivers! Please.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Troll .. you are the one that sounds like you dont know what youre talking about. Two big triangles overlapping have a lot more overdraw than 10000 tiny triangles overlapping. Overdraw is measured in pixels, not triangles, and apart from backface culling and polygon sorting there is fuckall your card can do to stop it, thats mostly a software issue. He is correct otherwise, 3d graphics don't talk about scene complexity and defnitely not about 'hardly any depth', which means nothing.
So game developers will be able to go to a website and access a library of pre-built stuff, including textures, and just include it in their game.
These sites/companies exist. The best known ones are viewpoint, zygote and 3Dcafe.
--
Funny, but there are no 3D drivers for the Rage 128 under FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD... Nor, AFAIK, 3D drivers for the i810 under those OSes. Both those chipsets have drivers under Linux.
Open Source drivers != drivers for any OS.
Ranessin
But one aspect of them has been increasingly worrying me over the last few years; their increasing realism. When this new graphics card is fully exploited, games scenes will be indistinguishable from reality.
It always amazes me that reality can keep up the framerate.
The effect you describe reminds me of autism, which someone once postulated was caused by the autistics internal universe being more interesting then the "real" universe. Austistic's have been arround long before killer 3d cards.
Veltyen-not even a pretty face
I want one now damn it! Too much is never enough in life, sex or vid cards. Wayward -- can't wait to O/C it.
Video cards, pretty much, just output to screen. They don't go back to the system, just funnel and output.
Or something.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Who are you, Jon Katz II: The Conservative? You should write an op-ed piece for Slashdot; you troll almost as well as he does.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
Well, make it crude then, photorealism gives level & game designers more flexibility which is good, they can make things more beautiful or as ugly as they like. If they feel the crude look is best in a certain area they can do that.
What this means is that this chip will accelerate more things. Take for example the GeForce and TNT2. the Geforce has built in T&L and if a game takes advantage of the OpenGL call that enable T&L, it's gonna be much faster than a TNT2 but is a game doesen't take advantage of the GeForce's T&L acceleration, it won't be much more fast than the TNT2.
PCXL Forever!!!!
So far as I know, there has been the GeForce, GeForce DDR, GeForce 2 MX, GeForce 2 GTS, GeForce 2 Pro (Same as GF2GTS but faster RAM), and GeForce 2 Ultra. 6 products in 6 months. Isn't this overkill? I would have been much happier if they just released the GeForce 2 GTS for hardcore gamers, and GeForce 2 MX for the consumer market. I don't think any other manufacturer has this many variations of their chipsets, and I don't really see what makes this any good. Sure there is something for everyone, but isn't this over-saturation?
The worst of it is that we aren't warned when or if NVidia's going to spring a better version of their video cards on us, making our very expensive purchase obsolete.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Come on. If you do anything for hours on end you feel dazed. I have slept for hours on end and then wandered around in a stupor. Games, like EVERYTHING else, are negative in excess. Temperance people, temperance.
No surge protector will protect my surge. - Commodore64
...and in another 2.5 years, a 2x1.5GHz system sporting a NV20 will be considered as absolete as my PII400/TNT is today.
:)
Good uses for all this speed? Faster compile times, more realistic scientific computing, faster Quake X. Something is going to have to come along to make Joe Consumer *need* this extra speed. Three years ago, the argument could be made that that speed advances were very useful... now I'm not so sure (but I love it just the same
HAH! Yes, someday we'll ALL be obsolete, and our kids will run the world.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Your point about the horribly complicated code for doing matrices is totally backwards - this is exactly the kind of operations that would be perfect for implementing in hardware.
I'm not sure you grasp what's involved here. I suggest you go and research what's involved in
- collision detection
- constrained rigid-body dynamics
- soft-body dynamics
CPUs cannot be accelerators by definition
Sure they can. If you're so intent on hardware-accelerated physics, get a 2nd CPU, rip off the Pentium sticker, write 'Phys-o-Mat 2000' on it and write yourself a multi-threaded physics library.
Same goes for PSX2 - as soon as an article mentions how it will enable the portrayal of emotion in games, I know I'm reading a press-release which hasn't been filtered through a informed human brain.
There are physics accelerators out there. They're called CPUs. Drawing a large 3D scene is a simple, repetitive operation that makes it a natural for hardware acceleration. Doing physics involves large Jacobian matrices and all kinds of horribly complicated code, making it a natural for software. a 1GHz CPU is more than enough to do realistic physics - take a look at the 'Actor' demo (on the MathEngine website, I think) for an example of the physics you can do on a CPU.
Can I just use that as my main proccesor?
We are now able to use our main system as video RAM.
So can we now do opposite?
depends on the application it is running on...
Reminds me of an old benchmark for the upcoming Itanium chip. Aparently Intel engineers' had the chip performing well for a variation of the classic 8 queens chess puzzle. Unfortunately, day-2-day applications don't often run such specific benchmarks.
-- Hob - Java Spectrum Emulator
Yes, I do know exactly what is involved in doing physics simulations for games. Perhaps you need to do some research on what exactly constitutes a hardware accelerator. The complexity of the operations involved is completely meaningless to whether it is possible to accelerate. What is important is that the operations can be formatted into a set of operations that can be implemented in hardware. All of the things you mentioned: collision detection, constrained rigid-body dynamics, soft-body dynamics, too name a few of the many applications of a physics engine are always going to be implemented in a particular fashion involving a pipeline of specific manipulations in specific order. This is perfect for hardware acceleration. The more complexe the better actually because that means its a greater burden lifted from the cpu.
As for CPUs being accelerators. The whole premise of an accelerator is that they ( surprise, surprise ) accelerate - ie. to make faster. Faster than what?? Faster than the CPU !! If you're using a cpu than it can't be faster than a cpu now can it??
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Great - more polygons, more beziers, more shiny surfaces and volumetric lighting. Wow. Yahoo.
Zippidee-doo-dah-day.
We all know what more of the same is - its more of the same. What I want to see is more realism in terms of actions not just models. What good is a ten million polygon monster if he still walks and flops like R2D2.
What I want is a common physics API so that we can start getting some acceleration in that - and then we can have some 3d puzzles that are a bit more exciting than just "wander the maze and kill things" or "push the box next to the wall"... (snore).
Better physics performance means more interesting use of the wonderful graphics we already have available - which leads more directly to better games than does yet another boost in poly count.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Exactly my point - the increased graphics acceleration has allowed game developers more cpu time free to concentrate on other areas of gameplay like physics and AI - while at the same time increasing the visual complexity and realism of 3d worlds. So if we could accelerate the physics we would yet again increase the realism of physics events and handling and allow yet more time for good _gameplay_ and _story_ - which IMHO is what its all about.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
The difference between knowing reality from fantasy is as old a problem as the human race. Ever since people have been having dreams in our sleep ( or while awake for that matter ), we have pondered whether we can ever be sure of the "reality" of any of our existence.
The advances in media over the last years have only given new form to the same fantasies we've always had. Every kind of media, from verbal storytelling to books to television etc. has had its own particular "alice through the lookinglass" type problems and tales of where does this fantasy begin and end.
Perhaps because we've been having something of a revolution in the area of advancing these media in the last years it might seem as though this is a pressing issue today, but it has really only just brought to the forefront something that is really just an inherent part of the human condition.
You can't legislate away the human condition with warning labels or censorship boards. There is no "this dream brought to you by..." floating in the corner of your field of vision while you sleep, nor when you daydream.
This is a problem of philosophy, not of technology.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
2 points.
1. CPUs cannot be accelerators by definition - an accelerator is a seperate piece of hardware that is designed for one specific task, and because it is hardwired for that one specific task, and not made to be as general purpose as possible ( ie like a CPU ) it can do it faster than a CPU can.
2. If you read my original post I did say that one needs a standardized physics API before one can make an accelerator. The creation of graphics accelerators weren't possible until the realm of 3d graphics had settled into a small group of APIs to handle this ( OpenGL and DirectX ).
Your point about the horribly complicated code for doing matrices is totally backwards - this is exactly the kind of operations that would be perfect for implementing in hardware.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
I wasn't thinking so much of gameplay and story taking up processor time as I was thinking of it taking up project time.
I agree there is definitely a different culture around PC games as there is around console games - I think to a large extent this has been the japanese / american cultural differences playing a large part. And also that console makers have always been used to having hardware that is really the cutting edge of what one can do graphically - so they end up devoting much more time to the depth of the story etc. I think this may come with time for PC games - but its still a relatively new thing in the culture of the game development community.
As for a unified physics API - I don't think it necessarily needs to handicap, it just needs to be flexible. When OpenGL was first being developped many said that it would flop because no single API could ever be able to do all the things developpers would want out of 3d graphics, and that we would always be living with custom coded rendering systems for every app. Thankfully that proved to be false - otherwise we never would have seen the emergence of 3d accelerators. I think for a physics API to be multipurpose enough one really needs only to attain the right level of abstraction to give it the correct level of variability to work all around.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
When is NVIDIA going to slow down and let gamers and game makers revel in the their latest creation. The Ultra barely came out and they're coming our with one that's 7 times faster than it. But..........7 times faster is pretty sweet!
I have played games for hours on end, and have personally felt distanced from reality at the end. Wandering around in a stupor. In the future, this effect will worsen. I cannot be as blase as you, my friend.
Another implication of 3D games is the annihilation of imagination. Why try to think of your own universes, when they are provided them on a plate?
Why do you make the assumption that a game looks like reality, therefore reality must act like a game? It seems to me that again, you must be mentally unbalanced if you are to make this leap in logic.
I don't make this assumption. I am saying that such an assumption is made at an unconscious level. People are not rational animals, Mr Coward, however much you may like to think so.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
Ah. You are curious about the floating point performance of the new video chip. A very valid concern, young man. Well done.
--
you are 100% right. ads try to kill our brain.
>In addition, the NV20 is said to have a ramdac >speed of over 500MHz as well as an faster clock >rate.
:)
I can believe that they'll increase the clockspeed, although that's not the bottle neck for current generation cards, but what are they going to do with a 500Mhz ramdac ? Even Matrox, king of the hill when it boils down to 2D image quality, has a lower clocked Ramdac (360).
Can anyone say 2048 x 1536 x 200 Hz 2D resolution?
>The performance increase is achieved through >better design, according to the documents: the >storage interface is a completely revised
>version compared with the Geforce 2. Downloading
>large quantities of geometrical data should now
>flow substantially faster, according to the
>documents.
Finally, they're tackling their memory bandwidth issues. They've had problems with that since the GForce1 SDR. Every upgrade was simply an increase in memory bandwidth.
OTOH, a 300% increase in FSAA speed ? Hmm, there's something fishy about those "documents". We'll see how it turns out.
We all remember how 3dfx was hyping their Napalm boards, and we all now how crap the V5 are compared to GF2 if you talk about speed.
Is NVIDIA going to take display clarity and color accuracy seriously, especially at high resolutions? If they could put together a card which would rival Matrox output quality with incredible 3D performance, I would be the first in line! I returned a GeForce2MX not long ago because anything above 1024x768 started showing annoying artifacts. My Voodoo3, while not perfect, blows the GeForce2MX out of the water in terms of image quality at high resolutions. There's a site on the net dedicated to helping people fix the image quality problems of some of the NVIDIA cards .. it seems the RAMDAC speed is really a bogus figure if the manufacturer puts cheap (or just badly designed) capacitors on the video output. In the GeForce2MX example, it looks like the reference board even NVIDIA used fell victim to this design problem ..
Mark
Not all the features:
1. Graphics overlay (for playing DVD's etc..) - driver still not supporting this feature
2. Page flipping - what gives the NVidia card a real boost under Windows - is not in the driver yet.
As a person who is working extensivley with lots o f graphics cards I can testify that their drivers are damn fast compared to any driver in XFree 4.0.x - but it's not as stable as the Open Source Matrox G200/G400 driver which is found on XFree 4.0.x
Hetz (Heunique)
Then this other poster was simply wrong. The large virtual size is due to memory mapping of the framebuffer (32/64megabytes on modern cards) and mapping of the AGP space (128megabytes or more).
The various "bit planes and color depths" are called visuals and they'll occupy at most a few hundred bytes each as structures within the X11 server.
I've seen you repeat this a number of times, but I'm afraid it's completely misleading. The information on the nvidia site is not specs at the register level, and it's not even useful information for writing an open source driver. As proof of this claim, try using that information to write a driver for FreeBSD.
This URL has been floating about for months now and every now and then someone repeats on the utah-glx mailing list "hey look nvidia has full register level specs on their website". Each and every time the person is corrected immediately. So please stop spreading this misinformation.
NVidia, on the other hand, uses the same codebase for both their Windows and Linux drivers.
Even for the enormous Linux kernel module that's required to use their drivers? Really?
Does their Windows driver, after less than a week of use, bloat to consume over 200MB of virtual memory? That's what their closed source XFree86 driver did with my GeForce DDR, on XFree86 4.0.1 and kernel 2.4.0-test9, even without using the 3D features at all. The open source nv.o driver that came with XFree86 isn't exactly a spartan RAM user either, but at least after it's sucked up a big chunk it stops asking for more.
Granted, they don't seem to care about keeping up with development kernels (their kernel module didn't even compile against 2.4-test for a while); I haven't exactly put much work into fixing the problem (but how can I, when I can't even recompile with debugging symbols?); and their drivers did seem to work OK with kernel 2.2.16.
Nevertheless, I don't intend to buy another NVidia card until I have an open source 3D driver to run it with. By contrast, my previous 3D acceleration in Linux came from Mesa on top of Voodoo2 glide; the frame rate may not have been as fast, but the rate of driver improvment certainly was faster.
The reason I noticed at all is that my machine was swapping like mad, even with 128MB of physical RAM, and even after turning the usual memory hog culprit (Netscape) off.
I never claimed it was easy! ;) It's kinda like being stuck in the middle of the ocean in a rowboat. With closed drivers, you have no paddles, and the rowboat is covered with a sealed, opaque top so you don't even know when you're near land. Open drivers is like having the top open, and a large soupspoon. Rowing yourself to shore with oars would be hard enough, and harder with a spoon. But at least it's possible.
Other benefits come for other OSes (NetBSD, FreeBSd, etc.) for which nVidia will never write drivers. Also companies don't in general last forever. What happens if nVidia goes belly up? All the people who bought their cards and are using their drivers are up shit creek without a paddle (to extend a metaphor too far). Having the code allows you to generate an extremely specific bug report, which can then be passed on to someone more knowledgable. It's very hard for core developers to fix bugs like "It crashes when I click on the menu in starcraft", which could be a hardware problem...
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Try that one on a musician friend one day and see how far you get :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Is that it apparently goes without saying that any new polygon pumpin' uberchip is only going to be used to give us Yet Another First Person Shooter.
When will this technology break out of this ghetto? Aren't there more interesting things to do?
Personally, I think 3D technology has been stuck in the "keystone cops" era long enough. In early film, the only thing people could think to show was chase scenes and other stunts. A lot of that had to do with the immaturity of the medium (no sound, poor picture quality). Eventually, I think "3D entertainment" won't by synonymous with "graphic violence."
Other benefits come for other OSes (NetBSD, FreeBSd, etc.) for which nVidia will never write drivers.
Actually, I gather from other posts in this thread that the abstraction layer between the driver core and the OS's driver interface is open (or at least published). This should make porting fairly straightforward, even with most of the driver being a black box.
There's also the option of wrapping Linux drivers in their entirity to run under *BSD, though I don't know if *BSD's Linux support has been extended *that* far.
Stick with the more open 3dfx, or Matrox. With them, if it crashes, you can track the bug down and fix it!
You'd have a lot of trouble doing that, unless it was a silly problem like a memory leak (admittedly worth fixing).
I've worked for a couple of years with a well-known software company that does third-party driver development (well-known cards, well-known platforms). Debugging a driver even *with* the standard reference texts for the card is a royal pain. Doing it blind - say, for hardware bugs or restrictions that aren't documented - is so much trouble it's not funny. This eats a vast amount of time even for us. Trying to debug a driver while having to guess at restrictions/errata in a register spec without support documentation - or worse, having to reverse-engineer the spec from code - would be at best a vast undertaking and at worst impractical.
It can be done, but not nearly as easily as you seem to think, by several orders of magnitude.
I doubt it. The tools they use to create the scenes will get more and more sophisticated. They might use fractal algorithms to generate super-fine detail in trees, landscapes, water, fog, etc. The point is, they won't be hand-placing every polygon--the same way you don't hand color-every pixel in any other form of computer art.
There will continue to be applications that push the limits of this and many subsequent 3D accelerators. Trust me.
I too have an Nvidia TNT2 card and I'm using
:0 -bpp 32
Nvidia's driver with XFree 4.
Here's what top says:
Size RSS Share
252M 252M 2024 S 0 1.7 100.4 5:18 X
Seems excessive, doesn't it? Well, I've only
got 256M on my machine, and guess what?
NO SWAP SPACE IS USED.
PS tells a different story:
VSZ RSS
276408 12704 ? S 10:00 5:21 X
VSZ is the VIRTUAL size of the process, 276M
12.7M is what it actually uses.
Another poster in another forum explained that
this apparently huge virtual size was due to
virtual-memory-mapping of various bit planes and color depths in the VRAM into virtual memory.
12.7M is still pretty high, but hardly burdensome on my 256M machine.
PeterM
This new card may be nice but I still will not support nvidia till they open their drivers. Their drivers are among the most unstable drivers around for linux. Yeah it is nice they are fast but not at the cost of stability. I also don't like binary only kernel mods. I have no idea what might be in that driver and what it might do in the kernel. Also when updating kernels that driver break a lot since it is binary only. If it were open it would probably work a lot better.
Look at the sblive for an example of this. In the beginning it was closed and a pain in the ass to get working under linux. There were kernel version mismatches etc. When they opnened the driver it progressed much faster and it got incorporated into the kernel. Now the sblive is one of the best cards to get for linux since it is supported by every major dist out of the box. In some dists they even use the alsa driver instead of the oss one which is even more capable.
I am not going to get locked into nvidias way of doing things again. When I bought the card they had announcements about how they were going to open their drivers. This did not happen. My next card is going to be an ATI, Matrox, or 3DFX. I am waiting a bit on the radeon till I see the open drivers for them. However the matrox cards and 3dfx cards do have open drivers. I do like 3d but I like stability more and the box with the g200 here has never crashed in x. The nvidia geforce box crashes a lot more often then that.
So please even if you like their hardware don't support them till they open the drivers. In the long run it will help us a lot more. Teaching companies that drivers alone are not enough.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Actually, right now, modellers first create the model they want, and then do their best to reduce the polygon count.
And you can kill a lot of polygons just modelling a realistic telephone. Which you can then reuse everywhere you need a telephone.
NVidia might have good video cards, but their way of handling themselves really sucks. Check here.
I quote from the article...
"Pioneer of the first ever GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), Nvidia is now introducing a programmable GPU, seven times faster than the previous Geforce 2 Ultra, the NV20."
Now, there are two possibilities here - either the article's author has a shocking grasp of the English language (wouldn't THAT be bad, considering he writes for ZDNet UK, the home of "The Queen's English"), or he hasn't done his research properly, and thinks that NV20 refers to the GeForce2 Ultra.
The GeForce2 Ultra is the NV15 if I'm not mistaken - simply a GeForce2 GTS with faster RAM. GeForce2 MX is the NV10.
The NV20 is the new GPU ZDNet's supposed "leaked documents" claim will be 7 times faster in complex scenes (ie TreeMark). You've gotta love it when the speed at which a product performs is judged by how it performs in a program designed to make it shine.
Bad journalism all round I think - not that we should be surprised....
Most consumers and compulsive upgraders don't realize how underutilized video cards are. We go through two or three generations of cards during the development of a single game, and more than anything we're just trying to keep up with it all. The bottom line, and I mean this sincerely, is that the kind of performance people are seeing from cards based on chips like the GeForce 2 could be coaxed out of cards from two years ago. It's not that the card is crap, but that the bottleneck is almost always on the code side of things. People don't want to hear that, though. Or maybe they do, because it validates their reasons for upgrading to new CPUs and video cards.
If you look at the PlayStation 1 hardware from five years ago, it doesn't even have bilinear filtering or zbuffering. It's also a total dog. And yet there are PS1 games that look as good or better than many current PC titles that require a TNT2 or better (maybe 15x faster than the PS1 hardware). So theoretically an "old" card like the Voodoo2, which is still 10x faster than a PS1, could do amazing, amazing things--much better than what people expect to see from a GeForce. But we don't bother, because things keep changing at a crazy rate and we're simply trying to get things out the door.
In a way, I'm starting to see new video cards as a way of getting suckers to part with their money.
I second that 'Moron'.
Son, I was wondering, you're playing that new hyper realistic game. How can you tell the difference between that and reality?
Er, we bought it at the store Dad. You were there, remember?
Yes, but when you've been playing it all day, don't the lines blur between games and reality?
Er, no? I load up the game, sit motionless for 10 hours. People shoot me and I feel no pain. I can carry a bazooka and 20 rockets without getting winded. My game guy picks up stuff with his hands, not mine. IT'S a GAME Dad.
I think you need protection from games. I'm going to start a group against realistic games. Uh, can you show me how to use this new 'HyperNet' to make a web page?
Dad, you don't make web pages anymore. You have to make fully interactive 3-D enviroments. Since everything went analog they haven't used IPv6 in YEARS.
Don't take that tone with me! I was a Unix guru back in the day!
Later
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Damn, I thought I'd had it ;)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The point is that Ring0 gives access to hardware that you'd otherwise not have. And yes, ASM will ALWAYS be needed. Think about it, the hardware platform won't change for several years. (upgrades have proved to be complete and utter failures on consoles. Nintendo couldn't sell the $40 RAM upgrade, and MS sure as hell won't be able to seel a new GPU.) In order to keep each generation of game looking better, you have to bypass standard APis and write to the metal. The first games will use OS features, but I can bet you that by the second or third generation games come out, people will have built up custom ASM libraries and will use as little of the OS as possible. Look at the Saturn, for example. The first few games used DirectX, then all games afterwords used custom routines and the to-the-metal Sega OS. Windows 2K doesn't work EXACTLY like the underlying hardware. Given that the hardware is constant, why bother to write to the OS when you can get a nice 10-15% speedup by writing to the hardware. DirectX doesn't work like the NVIDIA chip does, so why bother with an API? Its not that much harder to code, so why not do it? PSX developers still use a large amount of ASM, and only recently has there been a trend towards C-only games. However, even those access hardware directly. Unless DirectX8 is a hell of a lot thinner than it was when I was using it (yesterday) I can guarentee you that most of the good games will be XBox-only. Also remember than console and PC gamers are totally different demographics, and there is little incentive for many console manufaturers to jump the fence.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Not necessarily. When you don't have an OS in the way and you get to run in ring0, you do everything you can to show up your competitors and tweek the system. The reason ASM and direct access have little use these days is because of all the diversity in PC hardware. Given a stable platform, game developers ALWAYS find a way to tweek games beyond what would be possible by going through the standard APIs. Saying that people will use DirectX8 all the time is like saying PS developers will use OpenGL all the time. It just won't happen.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Graphics are graphics, physics are something else. Physics engines are incredibly diverse in what they do. A one-size fits API handicaps physicas designers MUCH more than it does graphics designers. Gameplay and story don't really take any processing power. If you can offload graphics and audio processing to dedicated processesors (a much more practical design) then the remaining 1000MHz of your CPU can be dedicated to physics and AI. Gameplay and story is totally unlimited by hardware, and just dependant on what the designers do. The Final Fantasy series has great graphics, sound and gameplay. A lot of PC game makers just aren't that skilled.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Umm, with 3DFx down until Rampage comes out god knows when (Q2 next year), and Matrox sitting this round out, GPL fanatics have no choice but to sit on their G400MAX's and hope that ATI takes pity on them and decides to GPL the T&L part of their drivers. (The Radeon drivers are not completly OSS, just the rasterization parts are) Lastly, GPL fanatics will most likely ONLY get low quality drivers. Besides the legal reasons why NVIDIA cannot OSS their drivers, there is the fact that the drivers kick serious ass. They are the fastest, most stable implementation of OpenGL (what did you think an OpenGL driver was? This isn't an ethernet card!) on the face of consumer hardware. Now why in god's name would NVIDIA just give away an entire OpenGL pipeline to competitors who could take advantage of it (eg, ATI) to make their cards competitive with NVIDIA's?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
They won't be compatible. Games written for XBox will be assuming Ring0 operation on a stripped down Win2K kernel. It's going to take some work to port, though probably not as much as it normally would. Of course, if the developers take advantage of the console nature, they'll start using custom ASM routines and bypassing the OS, in which case a port might be much harder.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Umm, complex scenes can be done just by setting MAX to not reduce the polygons so much. Trust me, people are FAR, FAR away from the day when the scene becomes too simple for the hardware.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Another implication of 3D games is the annihilation of imagination. Why try to think of your own universes, when they are provided them on a plate?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Actually, the columnist from MaximumPC (can't remember his name, forgieve me, he's the one with the beard) poited out that games are much closer to books than movies in that movies give you a prepackaged world on a plate, while games give a tool for you own mind to imagine things more vividly. I am inclined to agree. Well-done games take a lot of imagination to play, and can often stimulate the mind like a book does. (I'm not talking Quake, I'm talking Final Fantasy or Zelda.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The Radeon has a version of this implemented, but (to be honest), the Radeon isn't really too powerful. Imagine a powerful NVIDIA chip loaded up with HSR, and you'd get up to 7x faster in complex scenes, while simple scenes would only be a bit faster (less hidden surfaces to begin with).
They're the same boards, with the same chips. The only difference is the position of two chip resistors which identify the product type. In some models, the "high end" board was a part selection; the faster chips went to the high end. But with the latest round, the GeForce 2 Ultra, the low end is faster. So the reason for the distinction has vanished.
nVidia finally bought ELSA, the last maker of high-end boards that used nVidia chips. At this point, ELSA basically is a sales and tech support operation. It's not clear yet whether nVidia is going to bother with the high end/low end distinction much longer. I hope they get rid of it; its time has passed.
Did you see the claimed numerical performance for the new NVidia chip? 100 gigaflops. I can hardly wait until we have that kind of performance in the main CPU(s).
You think your problem with the NVidia driver would be fixed if it were open source?
No, I think a driver would exist for my OSes of choice if NVidia opened the driver sources. It's not all about Linux. On FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, recent NVidia hardware is as useless as an HP or Lexmark WinPrinter. Feh.
The maximum complexity for worlds will be a limit that won't be hit for a very long time. Look at the difference in world complexity between what is done for the highest quality 3d movies ( think Final Fantasy ), and compare with the most complexe real-time worlds.
Obviously the developers of 3d worlds in film have not yet maxed out their imaginations in terms of what to build, and how detailed to make it - and the gap between their work and the realtime 3d scene is a very big gulf indeed.
So I really don't think we'll be coming up to any significant blockages in terms of human imagination anytime soon. I suppose one might argue that as soon as we hit the point when 3d world complexity is visually indistiguishable from reality we may have hit the max. needed realism. But then of course there's always the visual effects of cosmic-zoom where you might want to soar through the microscopic cracks in someone's skin, etc. So there's plenty of room to keep plugging away.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Thats one helluva secret document Nvidia surely wouldn't mind to reveal...
The fact is, these "secret" documents are released as a form of cheap marketing. In fact, a large portion of todays "journalism" is written directly from the company spin doctors. PR twats wastly outnumber journalists and the trends are extending this.
Always look for hyperbole (like the zdnet headline) and emotive adjectives in phrases like "screaming chipset design". They mention that it will only double performance when large polygons are used. Well I haven't seen many games that are written only for the GeForce. Given the price of development these days, games companies are reluctant to alienate potiential customers by asking for huge specs (unless your name is Geoff Crammond). I think it is safe to assume that the new cards will follow the trend of Nvidia's chipsets since the riva128, at least until benchmarks are out. The next generation is about twice as quick as the plain vanilla flavour of their current best chipset although they can probably manufacture benchmarks to make it look better.
Corporate hype is not newsworthy (as much as they like you to believe it is), but I will be interested when someone reputable publishes benchmarks (and no, not Toms).
Me, I'm happy to run quake3 on my riva128/amd233. Sure it looks like crap and is choppy as hell but ..... man, I really gotta upgrade. Where was that link again ..
We've already seen that in the game industry. Teams of 20 to 100 people cranking out stuff for 2 or 3 or 4 (Daik... nevermind) years.
Sure, movies do it, we get some beautiful movies that kill anything gaming hardware will be able to do. But movies are, what, 2 hours long? A proper game has to have 30 hours of gameplay at the very least (I'm thinking Diablo II at about 25-30 hours to take one character through), I'd rather have 75-100 hours. And with a movie, you might visit a model/texture once, where with a game it might be something that you can look at from all angles, as long as you like.
So we'll have a couple of guys working on an engine to pass geometry and texture, another 5 or 10 working out AI and extensibility and 200 artists and modelers creating the world.
Bleh!
My argument is simply that there's nothing more frustrating than having a bug that you can't fix. I'm the type that at least gives a hack at it if I find a bug. Open source is not about open source developers fixing bugs for you. It's about coherent, concise bug reports that come from an examination of the code. It's also about (as you mention) fixing simple things that I could find and fix like memory leaks. Clearly I could not write or reverse engineer a driver in any reasonable period of time. Clearly nVidia are the best people to write the driver. Open source is most useful in the last 10% of the development process, fixing bugs and refining the code. If a company expects a magic cavalry of developers to appear to write their driver for them, they are sadly mistaken. But they can expect people to do a little hacking to get an existing driver to work with their hardware combination.
Open Source is not the panacea of magic software creation that some people (3dfx, apparently) think it is. But when I buy a product with closed source drivers and those drivers suck, I'm fucked. If those drivers are open, at least there is hope. I find that in general, if I depend on other people to fix my problems, they will never be fixed. I hack "open source" to fix my problems. nVidia can't own every possible combination of motherboard/processor/OS, and therefore can't fix every possible problem. Open source is simply the only way to go, and I won't ever again bother with companies that aren't open with their drivers.
--Bob
Egad, who modded my original post down as "Troll"? Do your worst, metamoderators.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Wow, a real non-gamer crowd! Doesn't anybody remember the PowerVR Series chips? The reason NV20 will be 7x faster for complex models and only 2x faster for simple ones is that it will use tiling (my hypothesis only.) In a tiling-based architecture, the 3D renderer first sorts all the geometry, and then splits it up into small tiles. The tiles are then loaded into small on chip buffers and rendered. This has several advantages:
A) It doesn't over-render. If geometry isn't going to be seen, it doesn't get rendered. Normally, cards have to render the pixel, and then discard it if the Zbuffer test fails. With tiling, there is no Zbuffer and pixels get discarded before they're rendered.
B) The sorting allows transparency to be handled very easily since geometry doesn't have to be presorted by the game engine.
C) It allows a hideous number of texture layers. The Kyro (PowerVR Series 3 chip-based) can apply up to 8 without taking a noticible speed hit. Also, it lower the bandwidth requirement significantly since the card doesn't have to access the framebuffer repeatedly.
D) It allows incredibly complex geometry. Even though the Kyro is a 120MHz chip, it can beat a GF2Ultra by nearly double the fps in games that have high overdraw (such as Deus Ex.)
The main problem with tiling is that standard APIs like OpenGL and D3D are designed for standard triangle accelerators. As such, the internal jiggering tiling cards have to do often outweight their performance benifets. Also, up until now, only 2bit companies have made tiling accelerators, so they haven't caught on.
If you want to read the Kyro preview, head over to Sharky Extreme.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The increase in speed doesn't just go to framerate. Newer game engines will have their framerate locked (at a user-specified value) and will vary visual quality based on how fast the hardware is.
How can that extra speed be used? More polygons, gloss maps, dot product bump mapping, elevation maps, detail maps, better transparency/opacity, motion blur, cartoon rendering, shadow maps/volumes, dynamic lighting, environment mapping, reflections, full screen anti-aliasing, motion blur, etc. I could go on forever. All this will be in my game engine, of course. :)
------
The problem isn't creating of complex scenes or worlds but rendering complex worlds. It has been estimated that one needs about 80M polygons in scene to render realistic looking image. Say you want 25 fps for your game - that equals to 2000M polygons/s - Even if NV20 is 7 times faster than current chips it's still far too slow to render images like this in real time. And the problem is you need those 80M polygons for just one frame. It's like you sit in a virtual room and it takes 80M polygons to present it to computer. Now imagine whole house with similar accuracy: if you had 10 "rooms" you would need roughly 800M polygons for it. Now imagine a city! The problem is how to decide 25 times per second which 80M polygons to render because you cannot even calculate whole geometry fast enough.
_________________________
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
I know they have carefully thought out arguments as to why their non-open source, crappy drivers are better than open source ones. But folks, it just ain't worth it. I don't care how fast their cards are, I'll never make the mistake of buying nVidia again. Stick with the more open 3dfx, or Matrox. With them, if it crashes, you can track the bug down and fix it! Or someone else can. The number of open source hackers that might fix a bug are much, much larger than the number of employees at nVivia working on drivers.
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I think that with all this new 3D hardware that has come out in the last 6 months, and then the addition of the rumor of this chip, developers are going to have a hard time actually creating worlds complex enough for gamers to actually tell the difference in what card they are using.
For example, this chipset is 7 times faster in rendering complex scenes, but only 2 times faster for rendering simple 3D scenes. I know that things like shadowing and lighting effects can be built into the gaming engine, but, still, isn't there a lot left to the developer's imagination (such as actually modeling and skinning characters and the objects in the world)? I can see this bumping up the development time for games slightly more every 6 months...
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.