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3DLabs Launching New GPU

Posted by michael on from the number-crunching dept.

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.

4 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Why not... by odyrithm · · Score: 0, Insightful

    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..

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    moo
  2. A question... by levik · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I mean I understand that the graphics market right now is hotter than the 1980s arms race, with companies trying to one-up each other constantly... But can somebody tell me if there are products currently on the market that take full advantage of the *current* crop of video cards?

    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.

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    Ñ'
    1. Re:A question... by Steveftoth · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Which means of course that they wasted their time yet again!

      Why do the game companies think that we really care about how cool neato wow the water looks? If it looks vagely like water then yeah, I'll think that's it water and keep on playing the game. You don't have to wow me with water effects, modeling every drop of water as it is absorbed by my characters clothes in the game.

      BethSoft had better make this game work unlike Daggerfall. Daggerfall sucked unless you were some insane fanboy willing to put up with the constant crashes and headaches caused by this buggy piece of crap. You had to be in love with the concept of the game to truely like it. I'm tempted to actually buy a X-box for it because I don't trust them with my PC to play it.

      I think that these new GPUs are too powerful. As nobody can possiably generate the artwork that will use them quickly enough. It takes much longer to generate a 100,000 poly model then a 5000 poly model in a program like 3d studio max. (assuming that they are of equal quality) It's going to be a couple more years until we see any games really taking advantage of these new features.

  3. TI 34010... by BaronM · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...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.