nVidia NV3x Sneak Peek
zoobaby writes "Here is a sneak peak at nVidia's upcoming line of cards. No hard specs, but some nice notes on changes from current NV2x to NV3x, also some very nice screenshots to show off what it will be capable of." In related news, Tim_F noticed that memory manufacturer Crucial is entering the video card business with their first card based on the ATI Radeon 8500le.
Wow, that's a nice picture of a motorcycle there. It's so well rendered that you can actually see that the designer forgot to render valve caps on the tire valves. Damn!
are awesome. I've not upgraded to a GF4 because of a promise ata 100 bios conflict with the chipset. Maybe its time to hope for some real competition in the graphics market :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The word 'noticed' sends me to an admin page, and the phrase ATI sends me back to the home page. Please fix.
I know, I know. You all can't wait to get your hands on the only component that really pushes computer hardware. However, I feel I have to remind you that these are only technical demos, and don't show, among other things, the true performance of the card. What's the point of being able to render objects with that level of realism if you're only pulling 1/2 frame a second to pull it off?
The eye candy is pretty damn amazing, especially that rendering taken from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within movie. Just a couple of questions though, are those sort of graphics available in existing cards but game developers aren't fully taking advantage of the shaders? If this card intended for consumers/gamers?
aus.music.scrapbook
Did anyone else's brain want to instinctively drink that cup of coffee on the 3rd page?
,
faeryman
"This is intended to allow real-time cinematic effects in real-time"
Today is a great day in computing history: nVidia is the first to bring us "real-time cinematic effects" that actually occur in real time! I can't wait!
If you look at the features that are implimented in the NV 30 chipset, it is just about what the features for dx9 are. As for its capabilities are concerned, I really am excited to see that such technology will be used in games, but I am definately not buying that card, its price is well out of my range, I really do not like how nvidia's implementation of their linux drivers work. It seemed that after their 2802 drivers, their opengl didn't work too well at all with redhat linux, and then when I switched to gentoo recently, it doesn't work at all. So, as a result of that, I threw a Matrox G400 into my box, and will await the first company that creates linux drivers that fricking work. I don't care who it is, Ati or Matrox, or some other bastards, just get it done. Because it is obvious the way Xfree4.2 works, it is a real bitch for me to get my NV card to work, and since it is a GeForce2 mx, I really don't care if it does or not. I have a card that works with my games that I play on the PC, and for doom, or any other high end 3d game, I have an Xbox. So I can wait at least until someone gets decent drivers again.
It will be interesting to see how much of a foothold ATI's Radeon 9700 can get before nVidia's new card actually hits shelves. As this article points out, nVidia has trumped ATI's latest graphics card almost immediately after it becomes available with an even more powerful one of their own. Do people think nVidia will see their pre-orders fewer in number when compared to those made before the releases of their past cards?
Yah. I think this is marketing PR to get people's attention off the new ATI cards. A bird in the hand...
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
third page? screenshots? where are people looking?
I would be rather surprised if those screenshots represented actual, realtime-rendered scenes.
They look like they have been lifted directly off the ExLuna BMRT (kudos to Larry Gritz for a great renderer) gallery page.
It may be that these are NV30 realtime scenes, with the BMRT Renderman shaders used in the BMRT renders ported to Cg, but it is also possible they are simply the BMRT-rendered examples, given to show what is possible using a shader-based rendering architecture.
Anybody have any more info on whether these examples are actual realtime DirectX/OpenGL scenes?
-Pete
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
HardOCP - Crucial Response
Since the R9000 has already been launched and is supposed to take the place of the 8500/LE, how long will Crucial produce this card?
The length of time we'll sell this and any product is dependant on the market. Right now, the Crucial Radeon 8500LE is an excellent and economical option for anyone looking to improve their graphics capability.
Is the Crucial VidCard made in the USA?
The Micron DDR memory used in our Crucial Radeon 8500LE video card is manufactured in the USA. But the video card itself is assembled in Hong Kong.
Astute [H]'er, Robin Schwartz, pointed out that the Crucial driver downloads page points to Sapphire Tech in Hong Kong, apparently the folks building the card.
How much will it retail for?
Currently, the Crucial Radeon 8500LE is available for $134.99 through Crucial.com and it comes with free shipping in the contiguous US.
Will the 9000 chipset follow closely?
We'll consider offering other video card options in the future. Whether we do depends on what our customers want and need.
Where will is sell through?
As with all our products, any new Crucial video cards would be available direct through our Web site at Crucial.com. We would also expect to offer new products through our European Web site at Crucial.com/UK. In fact, the Crucial Radeon 8500LE should be available through the UK site shortly.
- HeXa
I don't see any, just some lame Doom III logo.
- sigs are for wimps.
If you consider a comparison table and a Doom 3 logo to be screenshots, then well...
SharkyExtreme is loading fine for me (Midday Shanghai, China time) but here is a link to a earlier story by nvmax.com (including a couple of screenshots).
NVIDIA NV30 Sneak Preview
Some Beyond3d forum discussion as well as screenshots and more info on the NV30.
NV30 Screenshots
One more link.... to nV News with further NV30 details
nV News
- HeXa
Ace's Hardware also has a short but very informative article about the NV30.
here.
It doesn't matter how earth-shattering the NV30 will be. It's complete feature set won't be utilized anytime soon. The GF3/4 cards still has long lives ahead of them.
NvNews
Given this "nVidia rendered image" and this BMRT rendered image, I see three possibilities.
One - the guys at nVidia painstakingly translated each aspect of the original image to Cg.
Two - the guys at nVidia have some technology that translates RenderMan to something they know how to render. It could be RenderMonkey-like technology. It could literally be RenderMonkey, with some nVidia back-end. It could be they contacted the original artist, John Monos, and took his original data and reformatted it (skipping RenderMan, entirely).
Three - the images are a forgery.
I'm betting on Three.
Education is the silver bullet.
If you like BMRT, you may also like Aqsis. It is a GPL, Renderman compatible renderer.
Every halfway decent raytracing package can produce images of the same consummate quality (using only the cpu) at, say, one frame per minute. nVidia has yet to produce some proof that their new chip can even do that.
Remember, all the renderings are with almost 100% certainty taken from a static model, i.e. no animation, no being busy with matrix translation. Now, what's the likelyhood that NV3x can actually render 25 of those in one second? Comparing 99's sneak peak screenshots with today's (or yesteryear's) games: Very Low.
Hopefully, nVidia will provide a video clip of their creation in action sometime soon.
Imagine the Creator as a stand up commedian - and at once the world becomes explicable. -Mencken
An https connection and a certificate which says:
.slashdot.org
Issued by Snake Oil CA
Issuer:
E = ca@snakeoil.dom
CN = Snake Oil CA
OU = Certificate Authority
O = Snake Oil, Ltd
L = Snake Town
S = Snake Desert
C = XY
Subject:
E = brian@tangent.org
CN =
OU = Slashdot
O = Slashdot
L = Nowhere
S = Denial
C = US
Umm, yea sure I'll trust that.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Yes, the screen shots are gorgeous, but it's all just eye candy.
Once we have hardware that can render realistic scenes and humans in real time, there's going to be a sudden realization that for all this prettiness, there's nothing behind it.
imho, it's time we started really looking at interactive and reactive programming. Yes, AI research is a step in the right direction, also realtime english parsing stuff, but we need systems that can at least pretend to comprehend and react to realtime and infinitely variable human input.
Imagine kings quest, with those graphics, and when you type something in it will understand it no matter what it says (short of l33t sp34k) and the game will react accordingly.
Graphics are pretty, but with nothing behind it the graphics are just empty shells.
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
"This is intended to allow real-time cinematic effects in real-time"...and after the show, the nVidia staff went out for pints of beer filled with beer.
<P>Is this the kind of writing we get when buzz-words collide?
http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/cinefx/defa ult.asp
Joy.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
If the nv30's memory interface is only 64 bit, the main reason to wait for the card is its die shrink. DDR-II is a nonissue.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
"Snakeoil" is one of the default settings in Openssl when you make certificates for yourself. They tell you to change it to whatever town you're in...if you read the directions...
So... we don't read the articles, and Slashdot admins don't read the directions.
HARD TO BELIEVE!
"Snakeoil" is the example name when setting up Apache after compiling in SSL. You are supposed to substitute in your own company name but obviously someone took the example a little too literally.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
I like nVidia's products, great cards with great drivers. But I think that ATI has done the market a big favor reminding nVidia that there are competitors not just in the value market but also in the performance market.
One year ago it looked like the video processor industry would go the same way as the CPU industry 4-5 years ago, one giant corp. delivering the only viable alternative.
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
Back in my day, the internet had only one hyperlink, and it worked... and we liked it that way.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
-Styopa
It says capable of rendering , see. That means the chip has the same rendering capability in its vertex shader as the high powered rendering engine that rendered these original pictures. It does not say they actually rendered this picture on this chip.
Get it now....?
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I wonder if that might be because nVidia recently bought ExLuna...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
1. It shows that you have never created a SSL certificate with OpenSSL. The snakeoil stuff is defaults. No big deal.
2. Trust the certificate. Just don't send any information you want kept secret. It's just encrypting the request/reply, not installing anything on your computer.
I'm also thinkin of getting a dell notebook. Which res screen would this be?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Thanks for responding, I figured it might be some sort of default, but Snake Oil is not a very endearing thing to call a cert, that's what had me wondering. :-)
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
those images are raytraced, and this is not something that anyone is claiming to do in realtime yet.
I beg to differ.
I would have claimed the same before last week's Siggraph conference. But at that conference, I went to a panel discussion entitled something like "When will ray tracing replace rasterization?" The answer was "we'll do a hybrid approach instead". The first presenter showed an app (which was also running at RackSavers on the show floor) that was actually doing real time raytracing. It was rendering a conference room scene. You could dynamically change the viewpoint anywhere you like, move the furniture around, and it would even recompute a diffuse reflection solution progressively. Very impressive! He also showed another app that rendered the reflections of a car headlight at something like 5 fps.
I would also suggest that you check out the paper that someone pointed out from Stanford. They have written a raytracer that uses the pixel shader of the nVidia hardware to render triangle-based scenes at interactive rates. Very impressive.
I wouldn't discount those images as forgeries quite yet. With the new pixel shaders and vertex programs, the GPUs are rapidly becoming very versatile stream processors.
I am thinking of getting a dual AMD box. I want to get a decent video card that I can play games and give me nice 2D images. Something under $200. I am leaning towards NVidia, as they are 'linux friendly'. What card ./ers using?
thanks
...because there are no NV30s yet. It was confirmed in an NVDA conference call yesterday that NV30 has not taped out yet.
.13um card it *should* achieve higher clock rates. Performance in bandwidth-bound situations depends on whether it uses 128-bit or 256-bit DDR-II; if the former, then it will have ~20% less bandwidth than the 256-bit DDR Radeon 9700, if the latter, it will have a hell of a lot more. AA/aniso performance depends both on that bandwidth question and on the particulars of the AA/aniso hardware. The Radeon's is really really good (which is why its lead over Ti4600 becomes so dramatic in AA/aniso situations), but NV30s could be that good too.
.13um and DDR-II) very close at hand. This is the first time in a long time that Nvidia has screwed up big time like this (in fairness, it seems more the fault of their fab partner TSMC), and it comes just as ATi is releasing a truly excellent product. Again, NV30 will still be an awesome card when its released, despite the delay, but leaking info about it now is just a way to string people along on a wait which will be longer than most realize.
All of these previews are just PR leaks to distract from the Radeon 9700 launch. Assuming NV30 tapes out today, Nvidia will be very very hard pressed to get a card in stores by Christmas Day. They have already missed the Xmas season.
Having said that, the NV30 will be quite amazing, and (from what we know of it) should best the also-amazing Radeon 9700 by quite a bit. To be more specific: it should be better for non-realtime hardware rendering of scenes that are currently rendered in software--like those Exluna pics that were shipped out in their PR--because it has more flexible shaders (we dunno if they're faster too, but this is also likely). Yes, it will be able to render those images, in "near-realtime", though certainly not actual realtime. It should offer better texel fillrate, especially in multitexturing situations, because it has an 8x2 pipeline organization instead of 8x1 like the Radeon, and because as a
But Nvidia is desperately late with the card, and by the time they get it out ATi may have a successor to the Radeon 9700 (perhaps
And these "previews" are nothing more than rehashes of Nvidia PR pdf's; they are vague not because sharkyextreme performed any difficult investigation, but because they are simply regurgitating teaser PR for a card which doesn't even exist yet.
Back in my day, the internet had only one hyperlink, and it worked... and we liked it that way.
And here it is, still alive since 1994!
No sig for the moment.