Slashdot Mirror
Anand Tours ATI and NVIDIA
logicalstack writes "The folks over at AnandTech have written an
expose on their visits
to both ATI and NVIDIA. Interestingly enough ATI's facility shrouded in secrecy and NVIDIA's is quite open, Including full color pictures of their server farm, and a pic of the NV30 test machine the 'Ikos.' The CEO even showed off the old school NV1 with 1MB of ram!"
NVIDIA programs their GPUs into the IKOS boxes and they run what is effectively a very large NV30 at very slow speeds. Very cool and very expensive.
When I was there a few years ago, they would sometimes hijack all the desktops in the company for more power. If I remember correctly, they would boot them into linux at night and make (slashdot cliche imminent!) a beowulf cluster!
-Greg Daly, formerly of riva extreme, aka
Most of what was actually said in the article however is information that could be picked up elsewhere. There was a complete lack of technical specifications beyond that fact that ATI is using HDL's to do their initial hardware designs. This is hardly sharing information. In fact it is like saying that Windows2000 is written in a high-level programming language. You can learn more about chip development by doing a google search than reading the article.
I fully agree. Last year I was at GDCE doing research at tying to get info from both ATI and nVidia for articles I was writing. all the people from ATI I met were fantastic, I spoke to a few of the heavy engineers (huge kudos to Alex Vlachos and Jason Mitchell) along with the PR and Product Management people. They all went massively went out of their way to help me and inform me, answering any questions I had, burning me cd's of demos, pics, info, etc and following up further technical questions via e-mails and phone calls after the conference was over. This was the overall attitude of ATI at the conference.
Next we come to nVidia, I repeatedly came up against a brick wall, the case was the same for other developers, with David Kirk doing a fine politician-style non-answering of questions after his presentation. You generally got the impression that there were a select few that may be lucky enough to be given certain information, but it was very much on nVidia's terms.
Fair enough, companies have secrets which they need to keep, but from my experiences with the companies, ATI are far far more open. If anything this article backs that up. Would you prefer a bundle of photos or a chance to talk with a variety of the actual engineers?
I can't tell you the number of hours I have WASTED trying to get DRI-GLX working with my various video cards (G400, Voodoo3 and Radeon). And even when it did "work", it did not work very WELL...usually resulting in a complete system hang.
:).
But then along comes NVIDIA...I bought a GeForce4 Ti and was shocked and pleased to find FULLY FUNCTIONAL DRIVERS that actually WORKED, right off the NVIDIA site. Being a Woody user I was even more surprised to find that the NVIDIA Linux drivers worked with the ancient version of XFree shipped with Woody. No mucking with CVS snapshots, no rebuilding the XF86 source...just install and go.
It has been a long, long time since I've had working OpenGL on my system. I've NEVER had STABLE OpenGL on a Linux box until now. NVIDIA's drivers kick ass. Commercial support? HELL YAH! I could care LESS if they are binary-only drivers. In fact, having modprobe whine and tell me I'll be "tainting" my kernel by loading the Nvidia driver is downright INSULTING.
UT2k3 runs like a dream! I can use the GL modes of Xscreensaver! I can play Egoboo, BZFLAG, GLTron and crack-attack again! (Actually, Egoboo clocks in at over 200fps so it is too FAST to play
I don't think SGI's old IP is the reason NVIDIA won't release source code. The real reason is that the drivers deliberately cripple certain advanced features on NVIDIA's low-end cards, to force "professional" users to buy their high-end cards.
Remember how the $600 Quadro2 hardware was exactly the same as a $200 GeForce2, except for a tiny little resistor? I'm sure there are a few places in the NVIDIA driver like:
if(user_paid_for_quadro()) {
make_antialiasing_fast();
enable_overlay_planes();
} else {
make_antialiasing_slow();
disable_overlay_planes();
}
So naturally a few days after they release the driver souce, somebody would provide a "magic" version of the driver that makes all of NVIDIA's low-end cards perform just like their high-end cards. Then they wouldn't be able to charge $600 for "pro" video cards anymore...