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ATI Releases Competition for NVIDIA's Cg
death00 writes "ATI has released a beta of RenderMonkey, their suite of open, extensible shader development tools. ATI showed these tools for the first time at Siggraph 2002. Should be interesting to see who wins the shader development race, NVIDIA's Cg, RenderMonkey or whatever 3Dlabs has on the go."
Or maybe ATI did it on purpose, I mean what would you rather program in Cg or RenderMonkey.... it's a no brainer!
"Should be interesting to see who wins the shader development race, NVIDIA's Cg, RenderMonkey or whatever 3Dlabs has on the go."
Or maybe nobody wins. Maybe three uncompatible ways to do things will hurt developers.
What they should be doing is to reach an agreement and put it onto opengl.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Maybe the software is to show the best of its new video card.
Tom's Hardware had a pretty favorable opinion. Article
Why dont they work together and stop thinking about the shareholders! It would be positive for everyone involved.
I think you have that the wrong way around.
These new shaders are designed for people WITH curtains, so they can have the same nifty sun glare effects that you have,
but without exposing their naked selves to the neighbours.
Namely, the fact that OSX actually renders its GUI in 3D (w/ hw accel). Doom3 mentioned just because it will do the same as ID's publications have always done: sell the hottest 3D graphics cards with every new PC. Pie menus because they make thus far the best use of available 2D space. Catch my drift?
If only someone would pay me to implement the first usable prototype. *wish*
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
NVIDIA's Cg is a compiler to create shaders.
ATI's Rendermonkey is Toolkit to debug (low-level?) shaders. I did not find any word about "compiler" on ATI's site.
It is more like they are extending each other -- ATI gives IDE, NVIDIA provides compiler.
Nice to see that ATI recognizes that their stuff is inferior to a nice render farm, nVidia doesn't seem to quite understand that yet, seeing as how they keep claiming "Pixar Quality".
If RenderMonkey is better the Cg, then great! Cg can then try to leapfrog RenderMonkey, and then the API for both just gets faster, more reliable, and easier for developers to use.
[rant]
I'm going to be building myself a new PC shortly, and I'm going to put an ATI Radeon 9700 in it.
Personally, I've been pretty upset with NVIDIA ever since they bought out 3dfx and told Voodoo owners to go screw themselves, that they weren't releasing any new drivers or supporting any Voodoo products. I bought a Voodoo5, instead of a Geforce2 - due to the stability of the Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 I had owned, and due to reading the complaints about NVIDIA's drivers... and a week later 3dfx went under. D'OH!
Experience in C, C++, x86 Assembler, Cg, Render Monkey, Will work for peanuts.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Except its backwards...First they have RenderMan, then RenderMonkey.
Well, if we go on the basis of clever names, ATI wins hands down. Plus, monkeys have always made me think of high quality shaders.
The angel in the oatmeal.
I do game programming, sometime.
I do it in assembly language, almost always.
Since the advent of Cg and now the Render Monkey, I want to know if there has been any comparison between assembly language, Cg and Render Monkey ?
I won't say that I know what are the exact categories for such comparison. Perhaps people who have more knowledge than I am in this field may think of what to compare (features? ease of use? speed? code size? clarity?)
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Where are the cute tricks involving prehensile tails? Where are the happy waltzes to some itinerant organ grinder's music? WHERE'S MY MONKEY?!
Hmm... maybe I make my jokes MORE OBVIOUS next time I post...
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
I vote Nvidia. RenderMonkey sounds cool, but ATI have had banana problems in the past..
My life is one big siesta in which I'm dreaming I wished my life was one big siesta.
Over at NVNews it says.. There are similar APIs in the works from Microsoft and 3DLabs and a new version of OpenGL that all work similarly, and according to Carmack there "isn't much difference" between them.
The Good Life
That's pretty funny, you are going with ATI because you were upset with the lack of 3DFX driver support.
You are in for a big suprise, ATI is the WORST by far of any of the desktop user gfx card companies as far as driver support. They are infamous for releasing buggy drivers or discontinuing support for many of their lines at a moments notice. Compare this to Nvidia who releases a universal driver which covers years worth of part releases and is updated on a regular basis. Even if ATI releases a superior part they just shoot themselves in the foot by releasing shitty drivers on an unpredictable schedule. I used to like ATI back in the day but have been burned one too many times by them.
- Toby
My next card is a GeForce.
I can't play any games at all on my PC without a crash if I use the latest ATI drivers for XP. This has been for the last couple of revisions already.
I am forced to run the XP packaged drivers. Slower but no bluescreens. Of course no openGL games. Oh well.
I have a Radeon if you're curious.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
What good is it with no Linux port? Like anybody uses Windows to do stuff like this!
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
Every video card comes out with its own programming suite. Reminds me of the bad old days when you had to write your own print interface to every printer you wanted to support. The nice thing about 'industry standards' is that there are so many to choose from.
Maybe you should make your jokes MORE FUNNY and LESS GAY next time you post.
I think that you and the parent are missing the real reason that OpenGL is king on the workstations and Direct3D never will be. OpenGL is extendable by everyone and Direct3D is completly controlled by MS.
You can't go and make your own version of Direct3D with a hypercube (or whatever) extension that draws a super widget because Direct3D is closed. OpenGL is completly open and a vendor of 3-D hardware can add whatever they want to the API. The programmers have to then use the extension, but for workstations where the constraints are defined this is usually not a problem.
PC Games on the other hand have to run on the most diverse set of hardware ever. From the lowest 90Mhz Pentium to the newest 2600+ Athlon, with a range of video cards to make a driver writer weak at the knees. (they don't have to run well, just run) D3D solves this by making all functions static and creating software implementations of them. So you program to a 'version' of the API and you know exactly what the machine is capable of and if you can't get an accelerated version of the functionality, then at least you don't have to create your own. Great for game writers, but not as useful for workstation class applications, since they are more concerned with accuracy then games are (in general).
OpenGL is better when the HW that you want to support is smaller, since you can get better performance out of it. Direct3D is better when you just want it to run without having to write a ton of code to emulate the top level functionality.
Minimum Requirements: Deep Thought
:)
- Cg is a high-level shading language (compatible with DirectX 9's HLSL) that will compile to both DirectX and OpenGL APIs, or to various sets of OpenGL extensions, even at runtime if desired.
- Render Monkey is an IDE that supports various shading languages, including Microsoft's (and therefore Cg, at least when they add DX9 support). AFAIK, it's not that dissimilar to nVidia's own Effects Browser.
- OpenGL 2.0 is a lot more than just a shading language, but in any case, it's still at the proposal stage. Cg may yet be adopted for the language, but it will likely end up being quite similar at least.
So I see no reason why you couldn't write your shaders in Cg (sorry, DX9 HLSL) within the RenderMonkey environment, and then compile your results to OpenGL 2.0.
nVidia have said they'll support whatever the ARB decides, but even if OpenGL 2.0 does use the 3DLabs language, there's no particular reason you couldn't use a Cg profile to output an OpenGL 2.0 HL shader, or an ARB_vertex_program shader, or something even lower-level.
Hell, why not just write your shaders in RenderMan & then use RenderMonkey or Effects Browser or whatever to import the RIBs & compile that down. Ever wondered why nVidia bought Exluna? There's a lot of RenderMan expertise right there...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Way to go, ass-go.
Yay competition!
Wait...This is Slashdot, home of the "competition is bad" thread...
Boo! Competiton! Users and developers don't want choice! What does this look like? A democracy?
It's been a long time.
Is Rendermonkey a predecessor to Renderman? Is Renderneanderthal out there?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
It's easy, cg wins over ati, as nvidia has
cg for linux. There is no rendermonkey for
ati. I was at siggraph, and I was very impressed
with ati's demo's. Now I am disapointed that
ati does no linux.
go nvidia!
Bram
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
The coding effort to get high-quality shader effects on real materials looks difficult. I guess this is bound to happend with complex pixel shaders.. although I guess renderMonkey would be an better GFx developlement IDE than Visual C++..
Is there any effort by ATI or other vendors to just create a standard library of materials and effects without relying on coding? (ex. "object covered by material Glass 1021" insted of "dot-product sum-add mutliply")
Perhaps the 3-D modeling vendors would incorporate these libraries for artists development while seamlessly being integrated with a game engine in a standard file format that includes vertices/textures/shader algorithms..
-bobby
NVidia have done really well, but they've got an awful lot of competition lately. As the cards all get alike, they become a commodity and there's nothing to stop prices being driven down.
Oh, except a monopoly, as Microsoft discovered.
All these "open" standards feel awfully ripe to be "de-commoditized" in short order. A great way to lock people into your platform for reasons other than genuine technical superiority.
I wonder how long it will be before NVidia - not to mention their competitors - start revealing that their "open" standards aren't completely open!?
The pr0n sites oughta love this...
"High-quality beefcake 3D brought to you by RenderMonkey"
I know, I need a life.
The two don't compete. One is a language. The other is a tool suite and a shader xml file format. In theory you can use cg as the shader language in rendermonkey. Right now, the language supported is the ati assembly shaders.
there is no renderMonkey. god created renderMan and put announcements for renderMonkey on websites to fool the unfaithful, who'll end up in hell!
Hemos, your thoughts about the liability of corporate employees is not entirely true.
Under most U.S. law (mostly State law relating to fiduciary obligations of Directors, Officers & Executives (DOE)), the standard is called the Business Judgement Rule (BJR).
Under the BJR, a DOE is protected from suits for breach of fiduciary duty if the DOE (1) is disinterested (i.e. financially independant of the outcome), (2) acts in good faith, and (3) exercises due care in reaching the decision.
Every decision that a DOE makes does not have to directly accrue to the financial benefit of the corporation. Corporations can, and are expected to, contribute to the local community, support charities, exercise some respect for the environment, i.e perform "good acts".
These "good acts" will not always (or even ever) benefit the corporation financially. Nonetheless, DOEs are never successfully sued because they should have given a dividend instead of donating a piece of land to the city for a park, decided to give employees a day off to help with Habitat for Humnaity, or install CO2 scubbers when the fines are cheaper.
So, contrary to what I see posted on Slashdot frequently, every decision an employee of a company makes DOES NOT have to be the short-term, profit-maximizing decision. Believe it or not, the law allows some leeway in the decision making of running a company.
For more information, see this link
(and please don't respond with "but Enron...." or "look at WorldCom, Global Crossing, etc." I am speaking about the applicable law of fiduciary duties, not engaging in a public policy debate or Crossfire-esque corporate-bashing)
In other gaming news, I think it's time to take the link to Old Man Murry off of the front page of Slashdot. Old Man Murry has been AOL for quite a while now and it's time to give up on them, at least until they actually get their site back up. Maybe the link could be replaced with Penny Arcade or something.
Now we need to take the source code and port it to FreeBSD, the world's best free operating system. The Matrix was rendered with a farm of FreeBSD machines. Pixar hired Sam Leffler who used to work on 4.3BSD at Berkeley.
You cheese eatin' surRender Monkeys!
Now imagine if Microsoft adopted the name "monkey.net."
Now imagine the logo for it as Ballmer's face....
That is all.
Screwing the shareholders is what got Enron and Worldcom into trouble.
I wasn't aware that you could extend Direct3D, I guess that you'd need a seperate API from the card manufacturer or something right?
OpenGL assumes that each card will have it's own extensions and thus provides a common extension mechanism.
The reason that DirectX has been able to grow so quickly is that MS has kept complete control over the platform, only with versions 8 and higher have they actually let the other companies (read nVidia and ATI) have a real say in the api it seems like. I know that they always consulted the card manufacturers, but they still had the final say.
Contrasted to OpenGL where it has taken forever to get version 2.0 out because there are so many people with so many opinions to consider. Open apis are just slower to develop, but in the end, hopefully better since the requirements are more diverse.
Ha Ha Ha.
I just bought a used Radeon 64 DDR VIVO instead of a GeForce 2 GTS that bench tests as faster because I know that even if ATI goes under or gets bought out like 3DFX did the open source drivers will live on.
Of course I don't suppose that helps much in Windows, and open source drivers aren't on the bleeding edge. (One reason I bought the older Radeon: I checked XFree86 DRI driver status first.)
I've never had a problem with ATI drivers, but I don't play the latest games, either. I just bought and started playing Quake III a month ago.
My previous two video cards: A Rage Xpert 128 PCI (Rage 128 based) and an All-in-Wonder Pro PCI (Rage Pro based).
RenderMonkey is the work of my buddy Chris and an ATI colleague of his named Drew. They're a brilliant pair of dudes who deserve all the glory they get.
Chris also works with me and a few other gifted fools on a fine web project called Megarad, available here. He's not been around much lately; now I know why.
Good work, you guys!
Personal me, collaborative you
Even though they don't really compete, if we go by presence alone, Cg wins. At SIGGRAPH 2002, I didn't even see a bit of RenderMonkey, but Cg was all over the place. NVIDIA even had free hands-on classes for building some simple shaders in Cg.
Did you only play Quake 3? I had so many problems with the Radeon 64MB DDR that I owned. Sacrifice, B&W, to name a couple, and these were problems that made the game unplayable.
::P
ATI has just recently made a commitment to improving their drivers with the CATALYST series of drivers. Kind of like nVidia's Detonator. But there are still problems. Ever since my Geforce I've never looked at any other graphics card, simply because of the great driver support by nVidia. Even their closed source X drivers work great.
I'd like to give the ATI 9700 Pro a go though
Peace to all
-- taking over the world, we are.
...that many slashdotters here don't really know what Rendermonkey (or even Cg) is...
However this is a good tool for creating custom shaders...it's got a compiler built into it, and you can update the rendering window whenever you commit charges..
What sucks is that all but one of the sample shaders provided require pixel shader version 1.4 (which is ATI's standard) in order to run. So if I want to create custom shaders that run on my Geforce 4ti, I need to make my own, from scratch...
As I'm typing this, I'm currently migrating the ocean scene from Meshuggah to Rendermonkey to see what I can do with it...
Sigs are for losers
class Gorilla : public monkey {
//That's how I understand it. Maybe I'm wrong.
bodypart snout;
}
Gorilla::Gorilla() {
size = freakin_huge;
}