Dual GPU graphics solution from ATi?

Graphics Guru writes "Last week TweakTown posted an exclusive picture of the ATi Radeon 8500 MAXX with believable accompanying information also regarding the highly anticipated ATi R300. 3DChipset is today reporting that they have confirmation that the 8500 MAXX is indeed real and is due to be shipped fairly soon. Here's what someone from ATi told them: "The ATI Radeon 8500 Maxx is for real and the card is already in full production and about to be shipped soon. ATi has finally nailed certain issues with the dual chip. Final testings have been done and you should here noise from ATi regarding this offering." You decide if it is real or not, a solid dual GPU solution would surely rock the industry to massive proportions!"

Comments

Which industry?

[FortKnox]

a solid dual GPU solution would surely rock the industry to massive proportions!

Which industry would that be? The gaming industry is slowing down as far as graphics go. Mark my words, there is going to be a shift soon from graphic intensive to gameplay innovation. People don't want games to be any prettier (or don't notice much of a difference). Notice how the mod community is getting bigger and better? Its cause they take the graphics engines and add innovation.

I'm rambling, but I think that these new video cards aren't going to be this big explosion that they were in the past. Sure they are big and powerful, but people aren't going to fork over the cash to get this one when they can get a good GeForce2 that can play their games just as well.

Re:Which industry?

[chrysrobyn]

Which industry would that be? The gaming industry is slowing down as far as graphics go.

Hi, FortKnox, I'd like to disagree with your "marked words". I'd say that anything that dramatically increases the performance of graphical gaming will be welcome. I grew up playing PC-Man, Friendlyware PC Arcade and other ASCII games. I eventually progressed to Doom, to Quake (by way of Heretic, which I liked more than my friends). On opening day, I bought Warcraft III. Turns out my 16 meg Radeon doesn't play it perfectly smoothly, so I may end up buying a new video card by the end of the year for my dual G4. In my case, the vid card is clearly the bottleneck.

People have been talking a deal over the years about how consumers don't want anything prettier (or won't notice), they're happy with what they have. Game play is what's important. Don't try to tell me that Myst was more than an eye candy excuse. Sure, consumers are happy with what they have now, but it turns out that pretty is what sells in the stores -- nobody wants to read a novella describing "game play", they want to see screenshots!

I'm rambling, but I think that these new video cards aren't going to be this big explosion that they were in the past. Sure they are big and powerful, but people aren't going to fork over the cash to get this one when they can get a good GeForce2 that can play their games just as well.

You actually remind me of the neigh-sayers (or nay-sayers, depending on where you're from) a decade, two or three ago saying that games were nothing more than a distraction on computers. Nobody ever designs a computer for the things, and certainly nobody would fork out over $500 just to play games! Can you tell me which industry is driving which? I won't say that iD is single-handedly responsible for Intel's bottom line over the past 10 years, but I will say that consumer's demand for "prettier, better, smoother" has been responsible for a great many computer sales. They don't need 2GHz Pentiums / Athlons to balance their checkbooks or play with Mozilla (yet).

The ultimate in game play, I'm willing to bet, is an eyepiece or two that behaves as a huge, high-res screen, but takes up the entire field of view. That will be a great number of pixels (dare I guess 10k horiz by 5k vert per eye?) Maybe we'll have some game play innovations along the way, but there is certainly a need for more innovation. Perhaps we'll be stopping by 32" LCDs (or OLEDs) on the way, banks of seamlessly tiled conventionally sized screens, or even something different. The fact of the matter is, consumers are happy with what they have -- until they see something better. That's where the bucks are. Where would Gateway/ Dell/ Compaq/ Toshiba/ HP/ Apple be without those consumers wanting the next pretty thing?

Oh, and yes, I do see the mod community getting bigger. They even have some great successes. But, do you see them modding Wolf 3d? Doom I? Or do they move on, exercising the latest engines to the fullest of their abilities? Would they prefer engines that allow them to show on the screen what they have in their heads?

Re:Dual GPUs

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Dual CPU's on the desktop are a waste of money, by the time you need the extra horsepower..."

That's not necessarily true. I've been running dual for a couple of years now, and the benefits I see to it are far deeper than adding 'extra horsepower'.

I'm a 3D artist. I use Lightwave primarily, but also use Photoshop and After Effects quite extensively. I spent a LOT of time waiting for stuff to get done. My boss got me a dual Athlon 1600 with a gig of RAM early this year. She didn't get it for me because she wanted me to halve my rendering times, but rather she wanted me to make better use of my time while the computer was busy.

Lightwave is multithreaded, but not very elegantly. As a matter of fact, I rarely enable the multithreaded option. Instead, while it's rendering, I set up processes on the other processor to continue on with what I'm doing. Sometimes I'm building the next model, sometimes I'm generating a texture in Photoshop, or I'm setting up a composition in After Effects.

So while my computer is busy rendering, I'm still busy being productive. Some of you are saying "Yeah, but you'll never get 2x the processing out of it." And you know what? That's basically true, at least in a benchmark point of view. I get close to double clock speed when I have a rendering running on each processor, but I doubt I hit 2x. I don't need 2x anymore, though. About a year ago I started layering my animations. That means that my computer would render elements of a scene, which render much faster than the entire scene. As each frame is generated, it gets added to the composition in After Effects. So while my computer is rendering, I'm busy in After Effects getting it all put together. This sure beats waiting for the rendering to get completed. Heck, thanks to this technique (and the dual proc), I rarely have 'over-the-weekend-renderings' that have the potential to go horribly wrong.

Would I be better off with a second machine? No. For the amount if money that was spent on my machine (roughly $1,500 sans monitor and hard drives), I probably could have gotten more 'pixels rendered' per minute. But, it'd be a huge blow to my workflow switching between two computers. It wouldn't take very long for the 100mbit connection between them to become a huge bottleneck. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure it would have been all that cheaper. We'd still have to get me high end video cards and monitors for each machine.

Are dual proc desktops for everybody? Not really. The best benefit you'd see is that Windows 2000 behaves a LOT better. Explorer and IE are both very multithreaded, and are much more responsive. As a matter of fact, my Athlon 1.2 gig machine at home felt sluggish compared to my old Dual P3 550. It kicked the 550's butt at rendering, but when it came to browsing the web, doing email, etc, the dual 550 was much more responsive.

In short, dual processor machines have their place. If you primarily play games, you probably won't care much. But if you do CPU intensive work, it'll make your life a lot easier. Unless, of course, you like having nothing to do while your machine is busy.

What the Hell?!?

[djohnsto]

Do you even know what a V5 6000 is? It's a 4 GPU version of the V3!!!

Think about it. This card is 2-3 years old. The architecture is what matters. Not the amount of GPUs.

Again, this card had 4 processors!

...The GeForce4 4600 can't even consider 8xAA. The V5 6K does, and it does it well. On 128M of SDRAM.

It sort of had 128M of RAM. It actually has 32MB of RAM per processor. So, all the latest games that use up more than 32MB of RAM in texture / geometry caching will run really slowly on the V5. Also, for those that don't remember, this was the card that you had to plug into the wall separately from the computer.

Don't get me wrong, I've used the V5 5500 (2 GPU version), and it was really cool at the time. But I'll take a GF4 any day of the week over any voodoo you offer me (unless of course I can sell it at the collector's item price :)