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."

Comments

Open source drivers

[mcelrath]

Let us remember that nVidia does not have open source drivers. I have an nVidia card and their drivers manage to hang the linux kernel. Egad, there's nothing worse than to have a known bug, and not be able to fix it, or be able to do anything about it at all! Of course, nVidia said "they'd look into it". It's been several months...haven't heard anything, and no new driver versions.

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

Re:Open source drivers

[Temporal]

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.

Unfortunately, you are incorrect. Compare NVidia's drivers to 3dfx's Voodoo 5 drivers. It seems as if 3dfx was simply expecting a few hundred developers to show up as soon as they made the drivers open source. As it turns out, only a couple of people outside 3dfx have made contributions, and one of them was paid to do it. It's sad, but it's true.

NVidia, on the other hand, uses the same codebase for both their Windows and Linux drivers. As a result, one could pretty much say that most of NVidia's in-house developers (over one hundred of them) are actively working on the Linux drivers. That's far more people than are working on the Linux Voodoo 5 driver, and because they are all in-house, they are much better prepared to write the drivers. After all, if one of them has a question about the hardware, they can walk down the hall and ask the lead designer.

I get this funny feeling that someone is going to say, "Well, they only have a few people working on the Linux-specific stuff." This is true, but the Linux-specific code is a very small part of the driver (less that 5%). In contrast, the far fewer 3dfx people have to implement the whole Voodoo 5 driver, including all the non-system-specific stuff, on their own. DRI helps, but it doesn't do everything.

You think your problem with the NVidia driver would be fixed if it were open source? Well, maybe, but open source really isn't the software development Utopia that you think it is. At least the NVidia driver supports all of the features of the hardware (all of them), and at (almost) full speed, as opposed to the Voodoo 5 driver which still does not support the V5's trademark parallel SLI processing or FSAA.

Disclaimer: I am by no means against open source software. Hell, I write open source software.

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Re:Tiling?

[Xevion]

No, the NV20 does not use Tiling, but it uses something called hidden surface removal, which uses the standard rendering techniques that most cards use today, but it does to a small extent what tiling does. It is not nearly as efficent, but it will probably increase performance 20-30% realistically. The 7x performance gain number is in environments specifically made to take advantage of the NV20 over the GeForce2 Ultra (A lot of overdraw, high res textures, lots of polygons all at the same time), similar to the inclusion of T&L allowed the GeForce to walk all over the TNT2 Ultra in treemark.

One other big feature of the NV20 is the programmable T&L unit. That way you can add in small features you want to what the video card processes instead of relying on the CPU.

Another performance advantage that people will see is from the increased theoretical max fillrate. The GeForce 2 runs at 200Mhz, and has 4 pipelines each capable of processing 2 textures per clock, which gives you a fillrate of 800 Megapixels/second or 1.6 Gigatexels/second. The NV20 will likely run around 250Mhz with 4 pipelines that can handle 3 textures per clock, which will give fillrates of 1 Gigapixel/second and 3Gigatexels/second. This would allow for a theoretical performance increase of about 30% with single and dual textured games and a performance increase on the order of 100-130% in games that use 3 textures per pixel and more. This is of course assuming that there is enough memory bandwidth to push all of those pixels left.

Price wise I would expect a 32MB version with ~200Mhz DDR memory for $300-$350 when it comes out, and a 64MB version for $600 with perhaps 233Mhz DDR memory.

Re:Still closed drivers

[Temporal]

Their drivers are among the most unstable drivers around for linux.

Odd... they have not crashed on me in... umm... two driver versions ago... and then the only crashes I ever had were when switching VC's. The only problem is the memory leak when OpenGL programs crash. My OpenGL programs crash alot when I'm writing them. :) But restarting X once every few days isn't much trouble.

Also when updating kernels that driver break a lot since it is binary only.

The NVidia kernel module is different from the old SBLive binary module in that the NVidia module has a source code layer between it and the kernel. To make the driver work with a new kernel version, you just have to update the source code layer, and in most cases you don't have to make any changes anyway. The binary part of the distribution is in no way dependent on your kernel version.

The SBLive was also different in that Creative didn't really give a rat's ass about the Linux support, whereas NVidia has basically made Linux an official supported platform and is keeping the Linux drivers exactly up-to-date with the Windows drivers.

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.

Don't forget that NVidia's OpenGL driver is the best in consumer 3D graphics. A significant portion of this driver could easily be used to enhance any other company's drivers. The software T&L engine, for example, which contains optimizations for all those instruction sets -- I'm sure 3dfx would love to get its hands on that! Graphics hardware manufacturers typically don't even support OpenGL since writing D3D drivers takes far less work, but NVidia has gone so far as to have better OpenGL support than D3D support. They would lose a significant edge if they openned their drivers.

Let's not forget why we use open source software. I don't know about you, but I use whatever software is of the highest quality. I don't care if it is open or not. In many cases, open source produces better quality software than closed source, which is why I use it. In some cases, though, closed source is better. NVidia's closed Linux drivers are far and away the highest quality 3D graphics drivers available on Linux, and the GeForce 2 has been fully supported since before the card was even announced. The open source Voodoo 5 drivers, on the other hand, are crap to this day. I'm sure you won't have much trouble finding a Linux user who will trade you a Voodoo 5 for whatever NVidia card you have, if that's really what you want.

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Developers will hit the wall sooner or later

[electricmonk]

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...