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3DLabs Launching New GPU
h0tblack writes "...or VPU as they've seen fit to call it. The Register is reporting that 3DLabs will be releasing the P10 later this year. It's targeted at workstation and gaming markets with OpenGl2.0 and DX9 drivers having been seeded to developers already. Could be interesting as 3DLabs have been one of the key players in the development of OpenGL2.0. The P10 has over 200 SIMD processors throughout its geometry, texture and pixel processing pipeline stages to deliver over 170Gflops and one TeraOp of programmable graphics performance together with a full 256-bit DDR memory interface for up to 20GBytes/sec of memory bandwidth. More info can be found in the press release." There are also examinations of the new chip on Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, and no doubt many other hardware sites too.
Its look like some one try to re invent AMIGA...
Damn why we spend these bucks that PC architecture...
Capitalism...
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
just base a pc on a series of these cards instead of wasting time waiting for intel to develope the 986 or whatever.. surly it cant be *that* hard to take these chips and modify them for general pc usage.. it feels like the actual cpu in pc's these days are bottle necks for these ultra fast cards..
moo
This is an article about two unreleased graphics cards, one $600, one $900. No, that's not a typo, these graphics cards cost as much as a nice Athlon system. These aren't targetted at gamers, they're targeted at workstation users, and fuckwits.
I purchased a dual-pIII600 system with a 3dlabs Oxygen GLX card in june 2000. Ok, so it's been awhile but I still know some individuals running Geforce II-based cards and playing games like Tribes II. My machine balks at TII and wont even load MOH or even certain Direct-X games. I just want to know if 3dlabs will incorporate some of this technology into a good workstation/gaming card so I can trade up my aging system for something better. Plus, I wouldn't be getting stuck with a crappy card in a few years time. Im not gonna pony up another $1k just to get stuck playing CS only again.
There is no spork.
Press releases can't render anything, to the best of my knowledge. I'll reserve judgement until I get my hands on a review unit. However, this can only be a good thing. Competition drives prices down and features up.
Hopefully, this will not turn out to be a flop like the Permedia. I remember waiting for that and proclaiming that it would be faster than anything else when it came out. *cough* NOT *cough*
The specs were great, but the actual implementation and drivers, well, sucked hard.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
I've been waiting for the next 3DLabs chip for a long time! The last experience with Permedia 2 = Rock *solid* drivers + 100% OpenGL compliance + low power consumption....
If Creative makes a card with them with OSS Linux drivers and *NO FAN* then I'm sold!
Not that I can remeber the product, 'cause I don't.
Or the cliche movie scenes with villians shouting "give me More Power!" [insert evil laugh here]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It seems a bit ridiculous that it is 170 GFlops which is faster then quite a few supercomputers and is about 70 or so times faster then the nearest desktop processor. Do they mean something else? or is this really a supercomputer? Oh and I'll throw in the customary, imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
I have an old 3dx card.. armed with nasm I know somone that has written in the past a calculator that used this card, I have also had ideas about patching mysql to use it for indexing.. has anyone else done this? i.e. with a 3dfx, GeForce.. etc..? is anyone interested in starting some form of group to look into the possibilitys of patching high end software like mysql and apache to take advantage of such hardware?
moo
just wait for the Glaze3D and you'll have to fastest computer on the block!
Extra! Extra! Linux ported to GPU!
Really, these things are getting massively more complicated than your ordinary P4 or Athlon.
And think; There's one less layer between the OS and the framebuffer!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Beyond3d, home to many respected (and notorious ) workers at various 3d companies such as nvidia, ati, and bitboys are discussing this right now.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
One great feature is the virtual memory, which should improve the appearance of depth and richness of models. I wonder how much more textures designers can cram onto a model? Does this mean more games will start to utilize multi-pass rendering and ID will rewrite their engine once again for models with massive amounts of textures? I haven't kept up with the latest trend in 3D game technology, so someone more informed can tell the rest of us?
but isn't 3DLabs dead and burried??? ...either that or I've smoked to much crack last years of my life.
When Geforce3 came out it didn't have much of a clock speed increase, but boasted features that if taken advantage of by the developers would make the games look *MUCH* better. And yet, the only trend in the gaming industry that I've spotted is cranking up the poly counts.
Ñ'
Well - is it? If the boards will be 600 bucks in december, they'll start coming down around the time they need cheap boards for PS3. I'm guessing about 2004-2005?
Stop the brainwash
...To people who CANNOT possibly have DX9 yet. Being on the 1st cut beta list, I was informed just yesterday, by the DX9 group, that the initial Beta for DX9 is nearing completion... LOL.
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but how is it for reliability? my visiontek geforce3 beats the hell out of my friends off brand geforce 4....... besides, i just shelled out $180 for my graphics card, and tuition is coming up for summer semester.......
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Sorry, when did you get the impression that Athlon systems were "nice". There is no such thing as a "nice" 900 dollar computer system, sorry. You get what you pay for, and if you can only afford less than 1G for a new system, well, I pity you personally, and laugh at you in general. What's with all the bargain hunting. Have some pride in what you own man, poney up for what you really want. It's a way of life, get with the program.
It's worth pointing out that Creative has bought 3d labs, and Creative's CEO Sim Wong Hoo has every intention of taking 3d Labs out on an aggressive push into the consumer 3d market. See article.
I cant wait until we get some cards and reviews of those cards - but what does a press release mean?
... ... ...
Absolutely nothing
Anyone can take any product and make a glowing press release over it to get everyone excited about it, but that doesnt say anything for the silicon, or its support chipsets, or its drivers when it finally reaches production
until then
They build for DX9 based on the written specifications. The DX9 software might be nearing first beta just now, but the specifications and requirements for what is supposed to be in DX9 would be completed long before the software.
The specs were great, but the actual implementation and drivers, well, sucked hard.
Sure, the Permedia wasn't the quickest card on the block in its time, and neither was the Permedia 2 nor the Permedia 3...
But both the NT and Win9x drivers were absolutely 100% rock-solid, the OpenGL implementation was flawless and very, very fast, and the card supported a whole bunch of features that no other consumer-level chipset at the time supported, like anisotropic filtering, or multiple video overlay windows at once. The RAMDACs were really good on the Permedia 2 also - razor-sharp, much much better than the TNT2 I ended up replacing it with. It was also rather faster at GUI acceleration than the TNT2, which was a surprise and a disappointment.
Really it was a semi-pro card at consumer-level prices. It would never have been the card you bought if you wanted the ultimate Quake framerate, but it absolutely oozed quality.
It's the only graphics card I've ever used that hasn't annoyed me in some way, be it dodgy image quality (NVIDIA, S3), unstable drivers (ATI, NVIDIA), bus latency greediness (NVIDIA, S3, Matrox, often leads to choppy, stuttering audio), or just being dog-slow (all the usual suspects - hello Trident, earth calling). I've never used a 3dfx card for more than a few minutes so I can't really comment on them, but I suspect their poor OpenGL support would have annoyed me greatly.
If only 3Dlabs had 3d-accelerated Linux drivers (preferably open source) I'd buy another one in a heartbeat. I've been disappointed with every other card I've had since my Permedia 2...
Are the OpenGL 2.0 specifications done, yet?
I hope having a chip out like this doesn't affect the adoption of OpenGL 2.0 by other card/chip manufacturers. I also hope OpenGL 2.0 won't be to 3DLabs what Direct3D/X is to Micro$oft.
Surely the obvious thing that is missing here is a standard in the CPU instruction set. Can anyone see NVidia opting to clone 3DLabs' chips in order to maintain binary compatability of shading algorithms? And can anyone see a games developer wanting to release source code for their shading algorithms just so that it can be runtime compiled onto different (future) hardware architectures?
A Beowulf Cluster of These!
how about we just give you a GF2 with the XF86_SVGA server and we'll just RIP THE FAN OFF FOR YOU!
there you go! you're welcome!
oh, you DIDN'T want it to catch on fire...
-c
...where all you have are CPU cards with whatever specialized adapter is necessary to provide the apporpriate electrical connectivity to peripherals.
Each card is a basically a CPU board with its own memory. The common bus between cards is really a switch to limit card-card contention. One card is the bus master running the kernel. Processes can be shuttled between CPU boards as processing power is available.
The thing is we're getting to the point where just about every PCI device has a CPU on it (NICs with encryption/acceleration engines, RAID cards). Why not just put high-speed general purpose CPUs on the cards and use it as a highly integratable/segmentable cluster?
The actual kernel could do more scheduling and less work, since the "NIC" CPU card could theoretically run large parts of the IP stack in addition to the NIC driver, as an example.
...was the first PC-market, full programmable graphics chip, as far as I know.
Any website proclaiming full programmability as new or revolutionaly is simply demonstrating a lack of historical knowledge. 34010/34020 based boards competed with the first-gen fixed function graphics accelerators for Win 3.x, but couldn't compete on price/performance with the fixed function BitBLT engines from S3 et al, and the flexibility of being fully programmable meant nothing to PC users who were accustomed to dumb EGA/VGA cards.
The article on Tom's mentions the end of VGA as the common denomenator for video, but mentions no replacement. So what's the new standard? When it comes to a standard video format, we really need to have SOMETHING common to all (most) platforms...
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
how many next-gen cards have come out since bit-boys said that they've reached silicon stages are are persuing a fab plant? hahahaha... Oy!
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
a company that is actualy inovating and producing a new product rather than repackaging the old on with more memory and ramped clock speed *Cough* NVIDIA*Cough*
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Hardware manufacturers also get copies of alpha builds to play with long before any beta testing occurs. M$ does whatever it can to ensure that there is a library of titles for their latest version of DX available the day it is released to the public.
Also keep in mind hardware manufacturers have a lot of input into the new features implemented in DX and M$ is more than happy to bring them in to consult as the production progresses.
It would not surprise me if the 3DLabs people have had alpha copies of DX9 to play with for a few months now.
blockquoth the poster (evermore with emphasis added):
Now then, the emphasized bits beg the question: Why has Creative gained and lost its footholds in these areas?
For this Creative customer, the reason is and has always been (across all product lines) one, very important issue: Software.
When and where the Creative development machine manages to mate decent, uncluttered, non-glitzy, tweakable, and trouble-free software (very very seldom IMO/) to the excellent-to-amazing hardware that they are deservably famous for, the results have been very good indeed.
However, in the normal course of events, Creative's hardware ships with installation, driver, ancillary programs, updaters, bundled "features", and enough just outright useless crap to annoy any self-respecting consumer. And while I admit that this occurs largely on the Windows platforms, you should admit to yourself that that's Creative's largest area of concern. Fortunately, they haven't yet figured that they could push for inclusion of enough Creative ad-ware to sicken a telemarketer drone into the driver packages for other platforms.
So, in this reader's experience, the issue is simple. Too much software that users don't want or need, too many features that won't work without all the glitzy junk (anyone like using the LiveDrive product, it's great, but the software to make it worthwhile--remote control--is a cast-iron bitch, crashy, seldom-updated, and too tied to useless trash in the installation). Now these issues seem somewhat prevalent along Creative's product lines, and they're killers.
Fortunately, the answer is simple. Creative needs to give the people who buy their hardware good, stable, and full-featured drivers without the need for a dozen attendant Creative-logo-displaying bits of crapware. If that parts' impossible, then it'd at least be nice to be able to grab reference drivers from the chipset manufacturer (how many people don't use NVidia's Detonator drivers in favor of the card-vendor's?)
.
Failing those... license the hardware designs to vendors who'll give us good, honest, and stable software. Of course, they can always continue to lose business to the competition, afterall, it's . . . "good for the market".
Perhaps now i won't need a farm just for a 3d studio max workstation!!!
Tibbon
tibbon.com
OpenGL 2.0 addresses exactly your concerns - a vendor-neutral shader programming language, and this is precisely why you're seeing 3Dlabs pushing hard for it. It seems they will be first to market with a fully programmable graphics pipeline, and they need the software technology to go with it...
DirectX 9 also addresses the same issues and provides a standard shader language (actually DirectX 8.1 has a standard shader language already, but it lacks a certain amount of the programmability that will be present in DirectX 9), but there are a lot of reasons for the graphics card vendors to favour OpenGL over DirectX. For instance:
Hopefully OpenGL 2.0 will see a resurgence in OpenGL use. I don't like the idea of the 3D market being controlled by Microsoft, and I don't think the 3D vendors do either. Kudos to 3DLabs for leading the way!
hell ya 3DFX for-eva! Still bang'n on Voodoo 3!
-funny how a company can create such loyalty, even after they are gone. Shows what a great Co. is capable of! Makes ya hope NVIDIA will use their acquisition well. This one goes out to 3DFX, long live da king!
is releasing a redigned chip in august? traditionally, nvidia has been releasing new chips in the spring and then introducint a beefed up version of the same chip in the fall. This year they are introducing a "fundamentally new architecture" only 6 months after they anounced the geforce4. my guess is that they had a feeling that ruling OpenGL 1.3 and DX8.1 isn't enough and that this next chip will keep them competative with upcoming chips like this new one from 3d labs.
but that's speculation.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
How am I supposed to boot PC-DOS 1.0 without VGA???
170 billion matrix multiplies pre second? Jesus H Christ! That's even better that i thought.
Now, seriously, how many ops is, say, 4x4 matrix multiply with another? Do they count it as if you really needed 64 muls+48 adds?
First, the 3dLab offerings are indeed targeted at graphic workstations and not home gamers/users. However, Creative Labs is buying them out and plans on offering a P10 based line up for xmas.
The card is built to get rid of some old nagging legacy standards that really have been holding back the PC world, namely VGA and DX6/7. This is a fully software programmed GPU. I assume there will be a software wrapper/layer for interpreting and programming DX6-8 games so they don't get tossed out the window, but you never know.
Another key point is the effect LongHorn is going to have on the PC world. It's a fully 3D OS... no more spirtes and bit maps... even the icons are 3D textured. This is going to seriously raise system requirements for video since each app and the OS is going to be 3D... current video cards are going to be at a serious disadvantage on a LongHorn(ed) system, even the latest GF4 and pending ATI GPUs.
Given that alot of people in the know are terming LongHorn the killer video app of the decade in terms of changing the OS and how we work it, as well as forcing an evolution of PC hardware, I am surprised at the comments on this forum (and the lack of them to boot). The P10 marks a significant step forward in graphics not only for games, but for the whole PC environment, and LongHorn for good or bad will be driving it.
It will be interesting to see how the Linux pundits handle the changes and innovation of LongHorn and what it places on their OS niche in terms of being competitive... to make a *nix kernel based OS do all that LongHorn will do (and again, like it or not people will want LongHorn), the overhead will quadruple for running Linux (remember, this is one area that has been a key selling point for Linux systems, low overhead so it can run on old hardware and still compete in terms of speed) and alot of the OS features (HD journaling and DB file system types, kernel error trapping and stability, etc...) will be matched at least. *nix systems, in order to match this, will need an evolution themselves, and based on my experience with the code, it is not able to handle this evolution easily... new kernels, better coding, more code, more overhead, more drivers, better interface with hardware, etc... alot of changes and work ahead to keep it competitive or to even innovate over LongHorn.
Should be interesting...
if you search google, there are plenty of articles describing the 6 month cycle nvidia has been using.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
If you're willing to spend $900 on a graphics chip, wouldn't it be easier to just get a dual processor motherboard? Why try to co-opt the graphics chip to run sql queries? MySql is multi-threaded and can already use multiple cpu's if they're available.
And what, pray tell, does armed with nasm mean?
Tell me about it! I love my GVX1, but the fans are SO LOUD! They are noisier than the 300watt power supply. I had to take the plastic covers off both of em (Yes, 2 fans on the card) because the blades kept clicking on the covers. Drove me nuts. You'd think a $750 dollar card would have some quiet/quality fans on it.
Will Render For Food!
What exactly is one sample antialiasing? A blur filter?
And the kernel option of the future is...
Processor type and features
...
Floating point emulation? [y/N]
Floating point acceleration via 3dLabs VPU? [Y/n]
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Well ADC of course, we all know everyone follows Apple's lead.
I have no opinion on this card, but im glad that nvidia will finaly have "some" competition. I realy want a gforce 4, but I realy dont want to pay the 400 dollars for one. Kinda like putting an xm radio system that has visualization output to lcds behind the 2 front seats in a geo metro. The phrase "come check out my tricked out metro, man!!!" just drives my alchoholism.
The / in
Looks like it's gonna cost more than my whole PC is worth... $899 or $599? I'd be happy if somebody would give me $500 for my Celeron 300A with 17" monitor...
The toms hardware preview mentions longhorn, wich many knows is the code name for the next generation of windows, and is said to make heavy use of direct3d.
I think it's time for the open source community to start experimenting with using OpenGL for window/widget drawing. (I'm not talking about present experimental 3d window managers, but simply using OpenGL for widget drawing and transparency/alpha blending effects)
Window shadows and transparency effects would be extremely fast, as you could draw them as simple polygonal faces with the contents as textures with alpha blending etc.
I know, this isn't really new, and similar projects have already surfaced, but I would like to see a serious debate on the subject.
Off course if this were to be a standard for window/widget drawing, it would kindof abondon users with less up-to-date hardware, wich, needless to say wouldn't be that good.
From Tom's Hardware Review: Bye bye VGA - We have to say bye bye to VGA, and the sooner the better. VGA is the last of the big legacy items remaining on the PC.
Hmmm I guess Tom isn't that concerned about the floppy drive that has been plagueing systems for years!
"The operating system has to be the next killer app because we can't rely on games - developers are going to be on DX8.1 for a while and playing on their consoles for a lot longer. PC gaming isn't dead, but is it really a driving force? "
Quote from Toms hardware
I think that is the stupidest thing I have heard yet. I am sorry but the OS need not be a killer app it just need to work very very good and leave room for other apps to do there jobs.
The real push of 3D hardware is well the 3d industry from video games to movies. This is where every great 3D thing comes from not your OS. Unless you believe the hype.
Dr. Suess: 'Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring! I am too small to carry this thing!' 'I can not, will not hold the One.
"I think it's time for the open source community to start experimenting with using OpenGL for window/widget drawing. "
1 7shot2 -default-full.jpg
Oh WE are!
http://www.enlightenment.org/pages/shots/dr
uhm...long live...svgalib...yeah, svgalib... or whatever other vga wrapper exists!
Uhm, sounds like BOCHS is the only leading VGA wrapper. Damn.