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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.
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.
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.
Speak for yourself, I'm a gamer, and I'm more than willing to fork out $900 for a good video card. Hell if I spent $700 on the Geforce1 DDR when it first came out, why the hell not spend $900 on a fully opengl accelerated card? I've seen the current generation of High end cards from 3DLabs, and if this new generation is anything like the current, it's worth the $900 for gamers.
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
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
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?
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...
That describes the market a few years ago, but no more. These days, with GeForce 2 MXs being dirt cheap and no one having performance issues with them, no one--except neurotic geeks--gives any thought to updating their video cards.
But can somebody tell me if there are products currently on the market that take full advantage of the *current* crop of video cards?
The answer is an emphatic "no." I'm a game developer, and we were focusing on the Voodoo 2 as the low end until very recently. And the Voodoo 2 is still a much more powerful card than people realize, providing you work *with* it and don't just ask it to render 50,000 polygons per frame. I don't think we ever got to the bottom of the performance available in that card, and we certainly, certainly, never got anywhere near what you can really do with later cards, like the original GeForce. All of the fancy stuff you can do with the GeForce 3--mostly based around vertex shaders--is not backward compatible with 90% of the market, so we never touched it.
Fanboys don't want to hear that their cards aren't being pushed anywhere near the limits. The are much happier to have poorly written games that have high polygon counts and bad art, because then they can justify the money they spent on a new computer and/or video card.
...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.
When Geforce3 came out it didn't have much of a clock speed increase
Not over the GF2 Ultra series, but it was a pretty big jump from the MX and GTS cards most people had. In addition to the HUGE FPS jump in games like Quake III, it had all those eye-candy programmable things that are going into things like Aquanox and The New Doom (tm). Also, the memory increase to 64 then 128 megs of DDR graphics RAM allows for insanely better Anti-Aliasing at "normal" gaming resolutions like 1024x768. The NV25 core (GF4 Ti series) increases this further, where you can turn on full-scene anti-aliasing and still get killer performance in your old games.
I only play Quake 3 and RTCWolfenstein on a regular basis, but my GF2 GTS (on an Athlon XP 1600+) pushes a masochistic 0.3 FPS in Quake 3 demos with 4xFSAA. Testing with the new card (128 megs of 600MHz graphics RAM, I never could have imagined in 1999) shows that I'll turn on 8 way Aniso, 4xFSAA and STILL gank 60fps on my 1024x768 LCD. Starting at $199, which is my limit for a graphics card.
And trust me, there is a TON of difference in visual quality with 4xFSAA on using a 15" LCD.
So yes, the programmable pixel shading pales against the power of prettier pictures in your "old stand-by" games, like Q3A. (Alliteration is your friend.)
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
I don't know. But I do recall from reading the VESA 2.0 standard a while ago, that VESA 2.0 compliance does not require VGA compatibility. That would be a possible route to go.
That brings back memories!
The 34010 kicked butt! It was used by Atari's Hard-driving game. It had a lot of neat features, including hardware X/Y addressing (i.e. move x,y,pixel), bit-level addressing (you could twiddle any bit in memory, or write a word/byte on any boundry), and built-in simple graphics operations (copy a block of memory, xor source & destination, use larger of the two, subtract, union, difference, add but don't overflow, etc)
But what was *REALLY* cool was the math coprocessor, the 34020. It was blazingly fast (almost, but not quite as fast as the industry-crushing i860 IIRC), but it featured a programmable microcode so you could create your own instructions and get every ounce of performance out of the machine. I'm still looking for a processor that will allow that... we're getting those with modern NPUs (cradle, intel IXP1200), but these generally lack floating point functionality.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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.