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ATI Radeon 9700 Dissected
Bender writes "The guys who laid out the future of real-time graphics a while back have now dissected ATI's Radeon 9700 chip. Their analysis breaks down performance into multiple components--fill rate, occlusion detection, pixel shaders, vertex shaders, antialiasing--and tests each one synthetically before moving on to the usual application tests like SPECviewperf and UT 2003. You can see exactly how this chip advances the state of the art in graphics, piece by piece. Interesting stuff."
The big question for an ATI part is how are those drivers. In addition, it looks like going to .13 micron is helping slow Nvidia down for the NV30 but that is a bump in the road ATI will hit too.
The real question for those of us who don't run Windows is how well it works in X. What it ATI's attitude towards open source ? Are their specs public ? Do they provide drivers ? In short is there a reason to switch from nVidia when I upgrade ?
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It's partly a working style issue. Texture-map people go out with cameras and photograph nice-looking surfaces, which they then apply to models. Or they paint the textures. Procedural shader people try to code up the "meaning" of a texture. Texture maps are created by artists; procedural shaders are created by programmers.
The basic problem with texture maps, of course, is that you can't get too close before the texture gets blurry and the illusion breaks down. In film work, you know where the camera is, so you can figure out how much texture detail you need. Games don't have that luxury; you can get close to a surface and blow the illusion.
Most film work other than Pixar's has used texture maps. There are exceptions, but they're typically for hair, fur, and water, where the problem is motion.
The price you pay for using procedural shaders is that they usually model surface, not detail. So you have to model the detail. Lots of it. Again, Pixar is notorious for this. ("We modelled the threads on the screws, even though you couldn't see them!")
Texture maps, bump maps, and displacement maps can be used to modulate procedural shaders, and that's probably how surface detail will be done, rather than getting carried away with building complex textures in some programming language.
(I only skimmed through part of it, but it looks like if you have an ATI card, you may not have much luck with UT2K3.)
-B
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Now, if you can provide that, let me throw a twist that makes me think nobody has done it - I've run 100% Linux for several years. Is there a site that reviews video cards plus all the extras (like TV-in and out) with an eye toward their Linux compatable features? I have a G400 and ATI All in Wonder Pro and can do TV-in (but not record video) and TV-out (although I lose a monitor and have to swap cables makes that a PITA).
For that matter, I'd like to do video editing at some point in the future (when I get a digital camcorder). I'd like to convert all my VHS tapes to a digital format. Anybody know of a good import card at a reasonable price (under that $5k prosumer/low end professional bracket)? If it doesn't pull the absolute *best* quality possible from the VHS format, I'm content to wait rather than reencode a couple years from now.
I kick this question out to Slashdot every year or so. To those with experience: what's the latest?
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Evan (no reference)
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Every NVIDIA card since the GeForce2 Ultra has had Linux drivers before they even hit the shelves. This is because Nvidia pay people to write and maintain the drivers. They might not have specs, but at least NVidia support your choice of operating system.
ATI release some specs, and that's all. They don't either bother writing drivers for their cards and they just hope someone else will - *maybe the weather channel, maybe soon, maybe later, maybe not for your specific card) or release binary-only drivers (great, at least they exist) that don't have anything like the performance of their Windows drivers. The UT2003 benchmark, if ran under Linux, won't even start on a Radeon 8500 (which ATI do have fast, binary only drivers for because its missing correct support for S3 texture compression. Which isn't exactly a new technology by any means.
So I can get Open Source 2D support for a Radeon 9700? Great. I'm sure 2D support is why people buy a Radeon 9700.
Vote with your dollars.
Why are you slamming ATI for releasing binary-only drivers, while hailing Nvidia? Nvidia does exactly the same thing.
What do you think the 1MB 'Module-nvkernel' file in their NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-nnnn.tar.gz is?
NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-2960> file Module-nvkernel
Module-nvkernel: ELF 32-bit LSB relocatable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped
You didn't seriously think the few snippets of C code in that package was the complete driver, did you? That's just a kernel wrapper for their binary blob.
For that matter, I'd like to do video editing at some point in the future (when I get a digital camcorder).
Video capture on Linux... from a "freebie" capture port on your video card??
Forget it man.
Video capture requires drivers AND applications. You buy a video card for Linux, and IF the manufacturer supports Linux, video drivers are all you get. ATI has drivers for Linux... but not even the 3D part. See what I mean?
The only way to get Linux capture drivers is to buy a dedicated capture card for Linux. That way you get what you paid for, with no "missing features" on the Linux side.
Besides, the way things improve and drop in price, you never want to buy this hardware BEFORE you are ready to begin using it.
Me? I have a MSI GeForce4 4400 (oc'd of course). Capture only works on Windows, but in a few years I expect Linux capture support to become a competitive feature... just like primitive driver support has become now.
I've used broadcast capture equipment, and while this capture port can be called a "toy", the MSI Video-In/Out port which handles uncompressed 720x480 fine (if your drive can not handle uncompressed YUV I sugest HuffYUV which is lossless compression).
Whatever you use, "realtime" MPEG compression sucks. It looks OK if you consider how hard your PC is working to do the job in software, but there's just no substitute for variable-bitrate multipass compression. CBR video creates fixed size files that are compromised everywhere... multipass VBR allows you to lower the "average" bitrate by 25%, AND give better quality (presuming you lower the bitrate floor and ceiling and have a good encoder).
I've transferred 8 hours of VHS to DVD so far. Did someone say Star Wars? I didn't. ;-)
With VHS, you shouldn't have to capture at 720x480 because of the limitations of VHS resolution on the VHS tape... you can get away with 360x480 (not a typo!) and then double the horizontal lines... a good capture card does this in hardware.
IF there's a way to use 360x480 on DVD and specify the aspect ratio as 8:3 (did I do that right?), you'd save a LOT of DVD space but I have not tested this. Until I figure that problem out, there's no advantage to capturing at this res... but it's worth mentioning if your hardware cannot keep up (you would have to stretch the video afterwards).
In short, dual boot... or fork out real cash for professional capture under Linux. You have a limited selection under Linux and will pay more until the market becomes more viable.
You'd also need to MASTER your DVD's under Windows. No authoring sw for Linux anywhere (AFAIK). Once you HAVE mastered your DVD, you CAN burn it under Linux using dvdrtools.
If you're putting pieces together and considering them as a whole, that's synthesis.
If you're taking pieces apart and considering them separately, that's analysis.
If you're explaining this on Slashdot, that's anal-retentiveness.
NVIDIA uses the same codebase for ther Windows, Mac OS ?, and Linux drivers. This same codebase will also be used for their FreeBSD drivers to come. Their unified driver architecture ensures that every platform the card runs on gets the latest version of the code and can take advantage of each card's features. So this is definitely a few notches above ATI who won't even produce drivers for my platform, let alone release full specifications to the public to write them.
As for the complaint that NVIDIA is no better than ATI because of a binary driver release: that is not NVIDIA's fault. NVIDIA tries to make as much of their driver open source as possible (which is kind of a necessity because of the plethora of kernel configurations out there). However, the closed-source portions are kept closed because of SGI's patents on OpenGL. Assign blame where blame is due, please.
Why bother.
Actually, it does matter with more FPS. Don't compare it to film, because even though they both use the term 'frame' they mean different things.
A 24 fps film means that each frame is recording 1/24th of a second. That means that if an object being filmed is moving fast enough, the frame will have motion blur. When strung together with the other frames, this will give the illusion of smooth movement. A 24 fps 3d engine, however, means that you have 24 static shots. There's no transition from point to point, unless you wind up rendering said inbetween shots. Or, put another way, a 5 fps film of a hand waving in front of the camera will produce five frames full of motion-blurred hand, which, when played, will look relatively smooth. A 5 FPS render, however, will have five static shots of a hand sitting motionless in space, and when played, the hand will appear to 'teleport' from spot to spot to spot.Or, put another way, record that hand with a standard camera shooting at five 'frames per second' not 'several frames, each 1/5th of a second exposure' and then string the negatives into a film reel, splicing in copies to make the whole thing last one second.
This is one of the reasons, I always thought, that 3dFX was trying to get their T-buffer out into the world, becuase then, yes, if you could LOCK the rendering at 30 FPS, and throw in motion and acceleration blur, it would still look better than a card rendering the exact same thing at 300 FPS.
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I think the poster's point was that you have two choices for drivers with an ATi card:
a) Open-source drivers - No S3TC support, UT2K3 won't even run
b) Binary-only drivers sorely lacking in performance. (I don't even recall seeing any Linux binary drivers from ATi - Does he mean the XiG drivers you have to *pay extra for*?)
With Nvidia, your only choice for 3D is unfortunately the binary drivers. While I'd rather not have it be that way, NV's drivers are maintained from the *same* source base that ATi's are, and hence are kept as up-to-date as the Windows drivers. In fact, the Linux drivers often *outperform* NV's Windows drivers by 1-2 FPS. (Not a big difference, but the fact is that they are not only "as good", but they are FASTER.)
So overall, given that binary drivers are the ONLY real option for both cards, NVidia is the way to go because their binary drivers are *far* superior to ATi's.
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