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A Brief History Of NVIDIA And SEGA
Alan writes: "FiringSquad just posted an article on the history of NVIDIA. What makes this interesting is that they include a little bit about the NV2 chip which was developed originally for the Dreamcast. It was using quadratic texture maps (a derivative of NURBS) rather than polygons! The article is over here."
PowerVR was on the PC long before the Dreamcast.
The PowerVR PCX2 was the highest-profile chip from PowerVR (an alliance between VideoLogic and NEC), which shipped mid-late 1997 as an add-on solution from VideoLogic and Matrox. The cards had 4MB of RAM on them, but that was all texture memory as it was able to share the framebuffer with the 2D card. That also enabled it to run 3D in a window, something the Voodoo1 couldn't do. Its MiniGL drivers for Quake-based games were really good and put them on par with a Voodoo1, but their Direct3D drivers stunk. Power SGL games ran great, but they were very few and far between, and the most high-profile one was probably Unreal. The PowerVR Second Generation chip (PVRSG) was supposed to ship mid-late 1998, but it kept getting delayed until it finally appeared on the Dead-On-Arrival Neon 250 around the end of '99.
I don't know about NVIDIA being a monopolist like Microsoft, but he's sure on to something that has some insight. Look, the HW/SW graphics development areana is only controlled by a few seledct vendors and now that hold is merging between the console industry and the desktop industry. As a consumer i want as many choices as I can get and if NVIDIA becomes the top playah with their rep, it will surely drive competition down and prices up.
I don't thing the whole console market would fall but I would sure like to get the next gen console without having to pay upwards of $350 US to get it.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
The hardware folks like open, certified specs [PCI, AGP, USB, etc.] that they can conform to. Any company with a few talented chip engineers could make a card that outperforms the GeForce 2's, make it plug into any AGP board, and compete.
While to some extent that's true, in practice you'd get your arse sued off until you could prove in court that you really *weren't* violating any of nVidia's implementation patents (or anyone else's). There were a few sabre-rattling sessions last year in this vein.
There are only a few straightforward approaches to building any given part of a graphics pipeline. Just about all of these are patented (usually preemptively) by the big graphics card companies. It's not as bad as the software patent arena, but it's still not nice.
If you have lots of money, you can hold out long enough that the big companies will offer to cross-licence technology with you. Otherwise, you'd better pray that they don't consider you a threat.
Perhaps it's not quite this bad, but you'd have to do quite a bit of patent research to avoid stepping on anyone's toes.
Lastly, a nit-pick re. AGP, PCI, and USB. For some of these, you have to pay licensing fees to get the specification manual. For all, if I understand correctly, you have to pay licensing fees to build any hardware that talks to them. The standards bodies are money-driven too.
In practice, the cost will be low compared to the cost of the rest of your card, but it's still there.
If you're using Linux, Radeon is arguably a better choice. Open specs, free (as in speech) drivers. It's also a (slightly) better performer than the GF2 in 32-bit land. I'm using a CVS snapshot of the new X server with Radeon-enabled DRI right now. It's pretty sweet. Quake doesn't run on my set up fast enough yet, but GL-enabled Doom sure is nice!
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
But it's perty.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
This is flamebait if I ever saw one..
/decrease/ the levels' size and use smaller textures. (Especially the n64 because of the small video ram in it)
You will never have a console game that looks better than a computer counterpart.. consoles just can't keep up with the dev cycle of computers.
Sure, they might look good for 4-6 months, maybe a year after release.. but computers will always surpass them (and consoles are usually around for 4+ years..)
In fact, when quake2 was being ported over to the psx and n64, they had to
Plus there's the addons that you can't use on a console version of a comp game.. no hope of adding user made maps, mods, player models, etc.
And on top of that, you can't play the same game on the latest console.. they're all incompatible (The same way comps were back in the early 80's)..
If I wanna play quake1, 2 and 3.. then I need quake 1 and 2 for psx or n64 and then 3 for my dc.. If I was doing the same thing with my comp then I'd just need to install them and start playing.
hrm.. this is too offtopic as it is..
-since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?
What makes this interesting is that they include a little bit about the NV2 chip which was developed originally for the Dreamcast. It was using quadratic texture maps (a derivative of NURBS) rather than polygons!
I'm sorry but this makes no sense. NV2 chip used qudratic surfaces and not quadratic texture maps. This is like comparing apples and oranges.
The Evil Kyro is a fairly good budget card because it uses tile based rendering and 64MB of RAM for around $120. It's real failure though is the absence of hardware T & L. The next generation will have it and should be a worthy competitor in some niche, although I don't expect it to hold up to the NV20.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I agree that nurbs, and most other patches suck, But that is why Subdivision is so greate, you have the arbitrary topology, yett it is curved. Some argue that subdivisions do not have a natural uv space and is therfor "broken". To me this is allso a great becouse it gives us the same level och control as whit polygons to define our own texture space. A creased subdivision implementation can do everything a polygon implementation can and more.
Dont bash curved surfases just becouse patches doesnt do what you want them to.
Sub division really is the future, maybe it is too early to implement in a game today. But it is defenetly possible to implement a engine based on subdivision surfaces and get goor results. I have done it.
http://verse.sourceforge.net/
Unfortunately I have to say that nVidia has cleaned up in the consumer market. Matrox has religated itself to building solid business cards (which is why the g450 ended up being slower than the g400) and ATI has completely lost in my mind because thier drivers suck.
With the loss of 3dfx as a resonable competitor I would have to say that nVidia has a virtual monopoly in home gamer 3d graphics arena. I just hope they don't stop building significantly better cards for that arena just because they are able to make money at the status quo.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Nvidia was the underdog. They developed all of their own chipsets in-house, and only bought 3Dfx after 3Dfx had already been dethroned.
I've been in the PC industry for many years, so I am quite aware of the market. I bought my first Nvidia card quite cautiously (the Riva TNT), and installed it in a machine which sat right beside a machine with a Voodoo 3 2000 inside. The differences in graphic performance was minor, but the Riva TNT had drivers which were updated more frequently, seemed more stable, and the card was cheaper. This process has been repeated with the Riva TNT 2, Voodoo 3 3000, the Voodoo 3500 TV, Voodoo 5500, and various incarnations of the Nvidia GeForce/GeForce 2, both in my personal computers and in the machines assembled for customers. Starting towards the middle of last year, most of our more knowledgeable customers weren't buying the Voodoo series, but were asking for cards in the Nvidia series.
Plain and simple: Nvidia conquered 3Dfx by better pricing, equal or better technology, and a more rapid development cycle. No one expected it, any more than anyone expected AMD to ever better Intel.
This happens in software as well:
Wordstar, WordPerfect, Word.
VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Excel.
Dbase, FoxPro, Clipper, Access.
Christ, it was amazing when CP/M was dethroned by MS-DOS, or when CD's bested LP's or tapes.
The technology doesn't have to be better (Motorola versus Intel, VHS versus Beta), but Nvidia was at least the equal, and arguably better than, 3Dfx. It wasn't a matter of buying "the little guy, re-lable the IP and sell[ing] it as their own."
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Actually, it appears that ATI lost out to Nvidia a while ago per this article. And with Apple Computer's recent decision to not only offer Nvidia chips on their new macs, but make them the default option, how long before Nvidia rules the world? Don't get me wrong, I like Nvidia, I have an original TNT in my computer. I just think that a little competition is a good thing.
No thanks. I don't smoke anymore.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
How do you know? Have you been tweaking around with a prototype? I'd sure like to hear NVidia's announcement on the NV20 being named and released, or at least know when to expect it to be released.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
> and the implementation of games thereof.
Er, games of subdivision? I think the word you're looking for is "therewith".
OK, I'll fuck off now.
One VAR has already hinted to the fact that there will be an NV20 product in March. nVidia is on track with this. I'm sure high profile devs such as Mr. Carmack have samples.
JC: I am on record as saying that curved surfaces aren't as wonderful as the first seem, though.
I know, you didn't turn up at GTS....
The bad thing is that Hardware vendors are trying to come up whit hardware that can do nurbs and other patch surfaces that basically suck instead of creating some thing general.
All points on a NURBS/Loop/Butterfly/catmull-clark surface are basically just weighted of a number of CVs in the control mesh. This means that you can for each vertex create a list on CVs that it depends on and quickly re-shape the curved mesh if the control CVs are moved. This could be done in hardware, and would really be a easy way to accelerate all types of tessellated surfaces (even polygon reduced meshes).
I have implemented this in my experimental api: www.obsession.se/ngl
I don't think it's bashing it. Curved surfaces have their problems too, like they don't add detail. Curviness isn't detail, it's smoothness, and even though it looks a lot better with low-poly models most of the time, subdivision doesn't add much to a model over 8000 polys. Very often you see yourself adding polygons that are not smooth, but tend to have detail (hard edges) in them.
John Carmack pointed out the texturing problems, but there are loads more, like level of detail, texture coordinates and material seams. Triangles are about as stupid primitive that you can have as a graphics primitive, but they are extremely convenient. For example, their bounding volume is bound by their control points, they are discrete (i.e. can be detached and manipulated individually) and they can be textured in any way possible.
I have the feeling that most graphics primitives (such as curved surfaces, maybe not including subdivision surfaces) are going to lose from triangles.
Put it simply: complexity of geometry tended to be a problem in 3D graphics, but with the extreme bandwidth and pipeline increases we see today, the stream of triangles is becoming less of a problem. A good LOD algorithm can get the triangles/pixel ratio down to around 1 which will be a very feasable ration in a very short while.
Most of the added processing time nowadays goes towards shadowing, detail maps, projective lights, motion blurring/oversampling/other frambuffer tricks, but it seems the triangle limit is diminishing.
All of these new techniques get easier with triangles. With adaptive subdivision these techniques get worse to implement. Try to do animated soft-skinned subdivision surfaces with adaptive subdivision and shadow-casting.
Triangles are stupid, but in the end, all graphics cards draw triangles. I think that curved surfaces won't be all what they were hyped up to be, they simply add too little at too much cost.
Michiel
I find it interesting that the earliest NVIDIA engineers were from Sun. To me, this explains A) their pre-occupation with surfaces as a primitive, long a tendency within Sun due to their MCAD focus, and B) their appreciation for the value of short cycle times. 3dfx, by contrast, was founded in part by engineering from SGI (e.g. Gary Tarolli) who had a stronger appreciation of how to optimize great 3D technology and astutely balance technological tradeoffs, but perhaps less cultural appreciation for obscure business issues like cycle times and ability to execute.
:)
Just as in the workstation market, Sun was able to muscle-out SGI by steadily raising the bar and focusing on good-enough-for-my-core-markets improvements, so NVIDIA beat 3dfx. Although one could always argue that 3dfx beat itself. Still, in my mind, the turning point was when NVIDIA hired a lot of key engineers fleeing SGI which was in the process of spiralling downward. If 3dfx had gotten that team, we might be looking at a different story.
In any event, it's remarkable that engineers from either Sun or SGI were able to shift their mindset from product cycles of 3 years (workstation graphics) to product cycles of 6 months (PC 2D graphics a la Cirrus Logic). If you've grown up building projects the slow way, a faster tempo is not easy to adjust to! I've always thought that besides his brilliance, the psychological development of John Carmack's early exposure to 1 month product cycles helped him learn the focus needed to keep his current 18-month(?) product cycles going, something his competitors have really struggled to match.
It'll be interesting to see if the lack of discipline and business focus so evident within SGI engineering begins reasserting itself at NVIDIA as pressures on them ease and the early SGI engineers look at the comfortable value of their options which should be fairly vested by now. As a consumer, all I can say is that thank goodness ATI is around to keep the pressure on them.
People matter. There's an interesting book about how the 3D hardware market was won and lost just waiting to be written.
--Greg
Right after a lawsuit by SGI against nVidia over a PCI DMA technique was settled, they allied and nVidia now has a lot of SGI IP at their disposal. The OpenGL stuff they got from SGI is probably why they can't open up the source to their XFree86 drivers.
Just my 2 cents.
It scares me too. Any decrerase in competition (ha, I said tit) is bad, and will ultimately lead to higher prices and less selection for us.
anyone know how similiar that is to what NVIDIA tried with quadratic surfaces?
Not at all. Quadratic surfaces were a fundamentally better way of explaining what shape something was in three dimensions. The tile based rendering still has polygons, but breaks the screen up into tiles to do the final render. IIRC the optimisation runs something along the lines of "is this tile entirely covered by something, all of which has a 'nearer' Z? if so, bugger it, I won't even try".
They scale particularly well, BTW. The PowerVR chip was designed to minimise bandwidth and be scaleable to 16 ways for arcade machines. The tiles glue together in a kind of smarter SLI fashion.
There were also early PVR1 accelerators around that rendered to a lump of memory for the 2d card to then actually display. Obviously a bit flawed for today's framerates but a perfectly valid option at the time. Again, driver shiteness killed these off and I have a suspicion that NEC/Videologic signed an exclusive deal with Sega for the PVR2.
I hope they can get PVR2 accelerators together for the PC. Toms' benchmarks give the impression of an altogether more interesting approach than the Nvidia 'hit it with more grunt' thing that's oging on at the moment - and potentially a greater advantage as the number of vertices increases over sheer fillrate requirements.
Still. I'm relatively happy with a voodoo3, so don't look at me.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Although it would be kind of nice to get a free console in the mail once a month :P Unfortunately it will only cost $200 a month to get it activated and you will have to download your games from the net every time you want to play.
They will also put rotating banner ad's at the top of the games and a little display that sucks your mind out in the control, and if you call thier 1-800 number they will install a device in your wallet that automatically sends all your money to them.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
What in god's name is a quadratic texture??? I can imagine 2D or 3D procedural textures defined in terms of quadratic equations, but i somehow doubt this is what michael is on about.
He's probably talking about these cards having hardware support for quadric surfaces.. but since its been fairly-much decided that its generally faster to decompose these kinds of surfaces to triangular meshes for rendering,especially in pipelined graphics architectures such as OpenGL, features like this don't get used much.
Raytracers like POV-Ray and others evaluate quadrics and other classes of curved surfaces on a pixel-by-pixel basis, and other renderers subdivide them down to sub-pixel sized triangles for rendering. However, this approach is seldom suitable for realtime application.
Most likely, this 'quadratic texture support' is just hardware implementation of OpenGL evaluator functions which simply assist in the decomposition of quadric surfaces to a triangle meshes.
Get a clue michael.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
> The OpenGL stuff they got from SGI is probably why they can't open up the source to their XFree86 drivers.
That's stupid and doesn't make any sense at all. SGI open sourced the OpenGL reference implementation and GLX. Smart money is on the AGP code that nvidia licensed.
Of course, none of this explains why they won't released the fucking info needed to write an independent Mesa + DRI driver for their cards. Their drivers are great, but an open source one would be even better. Since we can't really expect them to release the source for their drivers, releasing the programming info would be a reasonable substitute.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Really? Does it support full 3D accelleration? If not, I don't cound that as a "driver". A GeForce without 3D is just a generic 2D graphics card.
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I work for a low-profile SMALL game company, but we are making an X Box game, and we have NV 20 samples. In fact, I believe it would be possible for me to buy an NV 20 for about $500 directly from nVidia. I'm sure Id has a few.
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
The article hints that the NV1's quadratic surfaces might have actually been a good thing, and it was held back by Microsoft's push to conformity with triangles.
:-)
Er, no.
For several years now, Nvidia has been kicking ass like no other graphics company, but lets not romanticize the early days. The NV1 sucked bad, and it would have been damaging to the development of 3D accelerators if it had gotten more widespread success. Microsoft did a good thing by standing firm against Nvidia's pressure to add quadratic surfaces to the initial version of D3D.
There is an intuitive notion that curved surfaces are "better" than triangles, because it takes lots of triangles to aproximate a curved surface.
In their most general form, they can be degenerated to perform the same functions as triangles, just at a huge waste in specification traffic.
Unfortunately, there have been a long string of products that miss the "most general form" part, and implement some form of patch surface that requires textures to be aligned with the patch isoparms. This seems to stem from a background in 2D graphics, where the natural progression from sliding sprites around goes to scaling them, then rotating them, then projecting them, then curving them.
3DO did it. Saturn did it. NV1 did it. Some people are probably working on displacement mapping schemes right now that are making the same mistake.
Without the ability to separate the texturing from the geometry, you can't clip any geometry in a general way (not even mentioning the fact that clipping a curve along anything but an isoparm will raise it's order), and you either live with texel density varying wildly and degenerating to points, or you have texture seams between every change in density. No ability to rotate a texture on a surface, project a texture across multiple surfaces, etc. You can't replace the generality if a triangle with primitives like that.
Even aside from the theoretical issues, NV1 didn't have any form of hidden surface removal, and the curve subdivision didn't stitch, frustum clip or do perspective. It was a gimmick, not a tool.
All water under the bridge now, of course. NV20 rocks.
John Carmack
I already mentioned that they were not the only company, just the only one with much power in the market. I don't put nVidia down for it, just wish other companies would jump in and make a new good product.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
HeLLo I AM JokEmon And I DEclARe MySElf ThE RuLer Of SLaSHDOT FEGGETS
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Video card makers actually ASK HIM what he wants to see in the next generation video cards, then scurry off and figure out how to do that. I don't doubt that they send him a few engineering samples once they have working prototypes.
No company is so suicidal that they are going to create a video card that won't run Doom2001 (or whatever its going to be called) Perfectly.
In a word. . . Bullshit
Heres why. First the product development efforts was less than agressive and the execution of the implementation was so poor that most mods were never even tested. NVIDIA is one of those companies that never really understood that the eighties were over. Leverage buyouts of other peoples IP based solely on future profits is a recipie for disaster. The GeForce2 efforts are not ready for delivery to Toshiba and Toshiba is pissed. Unfortunately Toshiba is on the hook for delivery and the'r going to be stuk until NV20. The X offering is only a pipedream at this point.
Look, efforts like this are based upon the waiting for little companies to develop a similar offering and then they buy up the little guy, re-lable the IP and sell it as their own. We in the end are the ones who get screwed because product hits the street late and is not ready for prime time.
Can you buy a fast pc that runs unix for the price of a console? do you need to run a server if all you want to do is play games? consoles aren't silly. they fit their niche perfectly.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
Although the NV1 was technologically superior to other chips of that era from a number of perspectives, the proprietary quadratic texture mapping of the NV1 was its death sentence. When Microsoft finalized Direct3D not too long after the NV1 had reached store shelves, polygons had been chosen as the standard primitive, and despite NVIDIA's and Diamond's best efforts, developers were no longer willing to develop for the NV1.
This is nonsense and self-contradicting. Microsoft's direct3d didn't kill nv1, a closed source proprietary texture mapping procedure that was incompatible with any other card killed nv1. Had nvidia worked closer with developers before direct3d became the standard, nv1 could have been accepted and implemented on a larger scale. True, direct3d replaced nv1, but blaming microsoft for the death is pointless: proprietary policies killed nv1, not its competition.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
I inadvertently bought a video card a few years ago called the Diamond 3000 or somesuch. It was able to play Sega Saturn games, I believe, or maybe just Sega Saturn games lightly modified to play on the PC using this card. It had 2 Sega Saturn joystick ports, and I think it came with 2 joysticks... a friend of mine had a Saturn and tried those instead, and they worked. I still have that darn card... never really used it to it's potential.
Nvidia is a known monopolist. No one can touch them in the graphics field now. They are surprisingly simalar to Microsoft, except there is no equivalent Apple in the graphics field to provide a counterpoint.
Sega almost reached the levels of monopolist in the console industry, but fell short. If they work with Nvidia, it's conceivable the console market would fall to this conglomeration.
Is this really what we want? Even less choice in the console market than we already have? An even stronger assurance of Nvidias monopolistic dominance in the graphics card market?
Personally, it scares me.
Ben Schumin :-)
However, the PC does not have those high speed wide busses for interchange between main and graphics ram. I fear that this may cause some performance loss, as although the chip will still be good, it will not be optimal.
The limiting factor on games and graphics performance these days is not calculation speeds;it is bandwidth, pur and simple. In ten years, everything will be bandwidth. If you consider that in one clock cycle on a mosern chip in the 1 GHz range light travel only a foot or so, we can see that information interchange between CPU's and memory will become fundamentally limited by the speed of light within 18 months, as the distance from CPU to memory exceeds the distance that light travels in a clock cycle. The only way to improve is via bandwidth increases, and better use of cache.
But that is the future, and it is the future that this chip was designed for, in the form of consoles, which are always technologically ahead.
I fear this chip will suffer through being ahead of its time.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.
The article mentions Sega dropped NVIDIA in favor of PowerVR for producing their console's graphics processor. What's interesting is PowerVR is now trying to move in on the PC graphics card industry itself with the Evil Kyro, which uses a tile-based rendering system; anyone know how similiar that is to what NVIDIA tried with quadratic surfaces?
--
The impression you got from the linked article was right. The impression I got from Diamond's marketing was wrong. GGNNNNNN!
I guess the idea was that you could buy one card and have all your gaming video/sound/control needs taken care of.
More or less, in theory. In practice of course, none of the games I wanted to play on it ran on DirectX. Oh well.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Nvidia never used unfair marketing tactics. They have used some questionable ones when it came to a few websites, but that has been fixed.
Nvidia achieved market dominance by providing good products at good prices, and coming out with new ones so fast to overwhelm their competitors. This is not an unfair business tactic, they are just completely ruthless competitors.
When Nvidia came out with the Riva 128, it had one advantage over the Voodoo. It could do 2D. And everyone had a 2D card, so it really didn't matter. It was slower with the early drivers, it had crap image quality, and it ran Quake 2 at 10fps or so on my P133.
The Voodoo2 came out and Nvidia had nothing but a slightly improved Riva 128, but at this point, people still didn't really care, but the 3d only thing was starting to have an effect. People would run systems with Riva 128s and Voodoo2s for good 2d and great 3d, and the option of real openGL.
With the TNT, Nvidia had a performance competitive product that had much better image quality too, and 3dfx's Banshee was a rehased, weakened Voodoo2. When the Voodoo3 came out, Nvidia promptly took the performance lead with the TNT2/TNT2 Ultra, albeit by a small margin. From then on 3dfx was way too slow to stand a chance. ATI started to come back into the picture here, and they have been tagging along since.
Nvidia releases new products too quickly for others to remain competitive, and they work quickly towards incorporating features OEMs want, lowering their prices, and look at the extremely dominant set of video chips Nvidia has today. Everything they have out is best of class, or damn near it.
MS won the market using completely ruthless tactics, and now they are their own greatest threat. Nvidia is still pumping out products like there is no tomorrow, and they are aware that if they get lax like 3dfx did, they will fall very quickly. ATI, while lagging behind, could jump right back into the front with one botched product release on Nvidia's behalf.
Also, if ATI gets their act together quickly and writes some decent drivers, and gets a comprable card out at a significantly lower price, then ATI will be able to get some of that lost marketshare back. It will take a better deal to beat Nvidia, however, because the established brand can always charge more for the same thing. And ATI has a huge disadvantage there too because they are competing with a ton of smaller boardmakers that can charge whatever they want.
Only those who dream can grasp reality.
*grin* originally, I didn't say they were a monopoly. They aren't...
:-)
...yet
I'd rather have a closed source nVidia driver for performance reasons than an open sourced ones for political. The Matrox G### cards are pretty open, but the performance of them is only a fraction of the nVidia closed source drivers. Open Source is great, but isn't the solution to all problems. From appearances having fast OpenGL is one of those "isn't a solution" at least at this time.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
What a Chodesmoker.
you mean choadsmoker?
i think someone learned a new word reading the bonsaikitten article.
I'm curious, why aren't you a booster of hardware curves? It seems like a good idea to me, but I think you are *the* expert in this area. Is it because no one has yet created hardware curves that are sufficiently general? Is it because of poor implementations? Major slowdowns? Do they lack versatility? If HW curves are bad, please share your opinion as to which direction(s) the 3D graphics companies should be headed. What would you like to see in a top-of-the-line graphics card built 10-100 years from now? More memory, more texture units, voxels, stereo 3D, direct neural input, embedded DRAM, 64 bit color, 4x4 FSAA, etc.? How could they be improved that would make your life easier? Where do you think they could *best* use those transistors? Sorry, I got carried away and asked too many questions... :-) ...but I'm sure a lot of folks would like to know your thoughts on this subject.
Perhaps because the nVidia hardware is significantly faster than the Matrox G### hardware.
Really, if you want to insult the open sourced DRI effort, at least take the time to think the argument through first.
Whoever said Nvidia doesn't use monopolist tactics, thats complete and utter bullshit. Look at that supposed "cross-license" agreement between S3 and Nvidia. S3 obviously didn't get anything out of it, with Nvidia stealing S3TC royalty free. Nvidia has stolen so much technology its pretty sad. 3dfx sues Nvidia, Nvidia buys out 3dfx, if there was no guilt, why else did they do it? If Nvidia is good at engineering, then its just as good as stealing technology from its competitors, and then settling in court. Its also a master of legal manuever. Have any of you read the SEC filing by 3dfx, about the bankruptcy, and asset completion? If 3dfx shareholders do not approve the sale, regardless, Nvidia WILL STILL GET ALL of 3dfx's technology and trademarks. It reminds me of a lot of the crap Microsoft used to pull. As for Nvidia "Earning" its position, thats the most pathetic excuse for allowing a monopoly to exist I've ever heard of. All the monopolies, Microsoft, and the trusts in the early 20th centuries, "earned" their position in some way. Thats no excuse. And if you keep denying the fact that Nvidia is a monopoly, just go to a store, and ask them what the price of a Geforce2 Ultra is, that'll remind you what a monopoly is. And then think back to how much you paid for that TNT2 Ultra in your system. So all you Nvidiots out there, think about the company you love so much, and I hope none of you hate Microsoft either, otherwise its gross hypocrisy.
Penguin rhetoric. The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
here."over is article the. Polygons than rather (NURBS of derivative a) maps texture quadratic using was it. Dreamcast the for originally developed was which chip NV2 the about bit little a include they that is interesting this makes what. NVIDIA of history the article an posted just"SquadFiring writes Alan
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
What I am supprised to see is the lack of mention in the article to NVidia and SGI. The new SGI Intel boxes are running a variation of the nv15 chipset (and do a good job of it). Also, NVidia, if I remember right, has a ton of ex-SGI employees.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Consoles have gotten cheaper recently. The 3DO was $700 when it came out. The PSX was $300, I think the Saturn was too, and $300 is considered a max price for a console, and a Dreamcast is now $100. In a price competitive world, if something is a ripoff it dosen't last very long, so don't expect to see console prices get out of hand. The Gamecube is probably going to be $200, the Xbox $300, so they aren't exactly getting more expensive.
Only those who dream can grasp reality.
NVidia is not, and really is not likely to become, a monopolist in any meaningful sense. The hardware side of computers is not like the software. Most specs are open, the closed ones tend not to do well [only one I can recall in recent times is the ZIP, and I think that is due to a decent product, reasonable price, and good customer service when they screw up], just look at apple, or LS120 drives. The hardware folks like open, certified specs [PCI, AGP, USB, etc.] that they can conform to. Any company with a few talented chip engineers could make a card that outperforms the GeForce 2's, make it plug into any AGP board, and compete. The reason this doesn't work in software is because the specs aren't open, they are controlled by the monopolist. So, untill NVidia releases their own slot for graphics boards, patented by them and used soley by their cards, don't get your panties in a bunch over their 'monopoly'. As 3dfx showed us, such monopolies in hardware rarely last long.
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
I'm a huge Sega Saturn fan. I have lots of Saturn controllers. Does it seem likely to anyone that I could slap this board in my box as a second VGA controller, and then mostly use the controller port, and nothing else? I could always slap my 13" Mono VGA monitor on there if I absolutely HAD to have something on it.
Also, while I'm on the subject (and slightly offtopic), anyone know if there's some other way to get Saturn controllers to work on a PC without having to do any soldering? (I know I could do it myself if I wanted to break out the iron. That's not what this is about.)
The Saturn 3D Pad controller is perhaps the best non-vibrating game pad of all time. Analog joystick, digital pad, analog triggers, six buttons, and start. It also has a mode in which it emulates the normal saturn game pad. This controller kicks ass. I could put so much smack down in MW4 with that thing...
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ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nvidia a monopolist??? You have got to be kidding me. They out competed the competition by bring out superior products at competitive prices. That's why they are dominating right now. MS on the otherhand stifled competitors with superior products such as DRDOS. That's a real monopolist.
"Only Real Men Have FABs." -W. J. Sanders III
hehe, you can say that again.. I bought a geforce 2 gts card the other day for $200 and my graphics are /damn/ sweet..
:P
It'll take a few years for consoles to surpass this
-since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?
A very engaging, objective view of the current industry leader. Few people seem to remember that even the original nVidia TNT was not a smashing success, let alone the revile heaped upon the Riva 128 by 3Dfx owners when it had no Glide support (!!!). Hopefully nVidia will continue with great execution and great products. If not, I think the graphics market is competitive enough that consumers will happily escort them the way of 3dfx..
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I had one, on a Diamond Edge2000. It shipped in a huge pile of hype about being:
(a) The first Direct3D accelerator and
(b) Compatible with the Sega Saturn.
Both of which turned out to be bullshit. While it did ship some actually quite good DirectX drivers, the direct 3d aspect of it was being "worked on". They did eventually ship some, with a huge disclaimer along the lines of "we know these things blow chunks, it's all due to this quadratic surface thing". This was all in the middle of John Carmack's big Direct3d rant on usenet ("I am looking forward to doing an apples to apples comparison of Direct3D and OpenGL" turned into "I am not going to finish, and there will never be, a Direct3d port of quake").
It also had onboard sound that was also very damn good. The MPU401 in particular was of near sound canvas quality. Unfortunately it was not sound blaster compatible and since the direct 3d port of quake was never going to happen, games basically stayed in DOS and sound effects had to be sent to a separate card.
Saturn compatibility turned into "Sega will be porting games", which of course they never bothered to do because only eight people bought the cards.
And Diamond were just shit about the whole thing. Haven't bought a thing from them since, don't know anyone else who has either.
So in essence: Great silicon, some serious forward steps were taken; Shitty marketing, I guess they learned.
Dave
BTW, while we're on the subject of bullshit graphics accelerators, did anyone ever get texture mapping going on a Millennium2?
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.