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

Re:Fix the links, please

[Gogo Dodo]

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

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?

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.

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.

FiringSquad nv30 article

[DarkHelmet]

There is another sneak peak at firingsquad...

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

Joy.