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.

Comments

Nice Screenshots

[Smelly Jeffrey]

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!

Eye Candy

[galaga79]

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?

Re:Eye Candy

[Graymalkin]

Up until the GF3 you couldn't find a consumer card with programmable pixel shaders. Without prescise programmable shading done in hardware a good deal of effects just aren't possible. Current GF cards only support 64-bit integer lighting calculations which works fine if you want simple lighting but for some realism, high prescision floating point shader math is required. DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2 are both going to require floating point lighting calculations and thus hardware will need to support it as the R300 and NV30 do.

If you used every feature of the GF2 or 3 you could get some really nice looking graphics. Whether you would get them running fast enough to play a deathmatch style game is the important question though. Developers can't just make a game for the GF4 and say everyone else can upgrade or else. Even the folks at id develop with hardware in mind that ought to be mainstream when their products are released. Quake 3 ran fine on the TNT2 and the original GeForce 256. Doom 3 is designed around the GF2/3 line of cards and their features.

Re:Fix the links, please

[ericmc42]

HOLY LIVING FUCK!!!! Somebody messed up a fucking hyperlink!!! What the hell is happening to the internet!!!!

pretty cool screenshots

[faeryman]

Did anyone else's brain want to instinctively drink that cup of coffee on the 3rd page?

screenshots?

[ywwg]

third page? screenshots? where are people looking?

Re:screenshots?

[borgillel]

I couldn't find them either, but you can go here to see some.

Screenshots

[ikekrull]

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

More info on the Crucial 8500LE card

[H3XA]

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

Re:Fix the links, please

[Gogo Dodo]

Here's the fixed link to Crucial's video card.

Re:MIRROR NEEDED!

[H3XA]

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 preview.

[Christopher Thomas]

Ace's Hardware also has a short but very informative article about the NV30.

Re:Fix the links, please

[foobar104]

Because you are a COMPLETE fucking dumbass and think that somehow our discussions on slashdot have an impact on life. Get a clue... Anyways... I'm sure this isn't the only thing you read 'for the articles' :-P

Forget to check that "post anonymously" box, huh?

PAGE 3 MIRROR!

[Anonymous Coward]

here.

So, 3. 5 years it'll be necessary

[Quarters]

"My current work on Doom is designed around what was made possible on the original GeForce, and reaches an optimal implementation on the NV30. My next generation of work will be designed around what is made possible on the NV30."

The GF cards came out 1999ish (give or take). No matter how fast and furiously the hardware manufacturers pump out new silicon there is always a long adoption cycle for any new concepts. Game developers would be pretty thick headed to close out an installed base of X just to support a feature on Y (where Y is an extremely small value compared to X) cards.

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.

Re:Fix the links, please

[lukew]

I see a subliminal message here, remove a few choice words and you get;

"huh?? What, you feel like some nut once in a while? If it hurts then maybe your are a very bad person and will get to pound me in the ass."

Sicko.

Thinking it's a forgery

[Viking Coder]

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.

Re:Thinking it's a forgery

[Viking Coder]

Sorry, here's ALL the evidence that I found :

BMRT chess (by John Monos) vs. "nVidia chess"

BMRT Bike (by Don Kim) vs. "nVidia Bike"

BMRT Table (by Goran Kocov) vs. "nVidia Table"

BMRT Markers (by Rudy Poat) vs. "nVidia Markers"

I believe I've pretty definitively shown that either they have an actual RenderMan renderer running on their hardware (and access to the original data by four different authors), or this is a fake.

Sorry, I can't find the coffee cup or the Final Fantasy image. Maybe someone else can.

Re:Thinking it's a forgery

[donglekey]

It is forgery. The BMRT images are so old there is little way they could dig up 5 or 6 year old images from someone who doesn't have any association with Exluna and that created them before there was an Exluna.

More than that, the coffe cup is rendered with Entropy, not BMRT, it was done as all those images were, by someone else, this one recently in an image contest.

The most obvious flaw though, is that those images are raytraced, and this is not something that anyone is claiming to do in realtime yet. It is beyond the scope of Nvidia's processor, as it should be. Those images are scaled duplicates that aren't changed a bit, and there is no way that an Nvidia card rendered them, because there is no way the reflections would be the same, but they are. Reflection maps have a tendancy to look correct, but not the same. There is also depth of field which is not impossible, but is improbable for now.

Nice link

[bogie]

An https connection and a certificate which says:
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 = .slashdot.org
OU = Slashdot
O = Slashdot
L = Nowhere
S = Denial
C = US

Umm, yea sure I'll trust that.

the flip side

[klocwerk]

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.

FiringSquad nv30 article

[DarkHelmet]

There is another sneak peak at firingsquad...

http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/cinefx/defa ult.asp

Joy.

Re:FiringSquad nv30 article

[Seska]

Sharky claims that 64- and 128-bit bit depths will result in more color vibrancy. It won't. Pure red is always the same pure red, regardless of whether it's represented as (0xf,0,0) or (0xffff,0,0).

What it will result in is fewer banding problems, particularly in areas where there's little color variation over a large area, such as fog. Such artifacts are more obvious in moving pictures such as movies or real-time 3D than they are in static images.

Re:The specs on the ATI 9700

[DeathPenguin]

...mean absolutely nothing, as ATi doesn't even have their own driver set out for Linux.

I've heard some good things about DRI, but nobody using ATi hardware that I know has been able to tell me with a straight face that their card performs as well in Linux as it does in Windows like nVidia cards do.