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NVIDIA Gives Details On New GeForce 6
An anonymous reader writes "According to Firingsquad, NVIDIA will be announcing a new GeForce 6 card for the mainstream market at Quakecon this week. Like GeForce 6800, this new card will support shader model 3.0 and SLI (on PCI Express cards), so you can connect two $199 cards together for double the performance. NVIDIA will also be producing AGP versions of this card as well."
I might need to dust off my textbook from "Parallel and Distributed Computing", but I'm pretty sure that getting double the performance from two cards is about as likely as getting double the performance from two processors. It's just not likely unless the graphics routines can split up jobs perfectly and not suffer from any overhead for communication. I imagine there will be a noticeable performance increase from 2 cards working in parallel since graphics algorithms do have a tendency to be very parallelizable, but claiming double performance in naive at best and dishonest at worst.
Ignorance warning: I don't know much about the technology, but scanline interweaving seems like it's difficult to pull off with present day technology because of anti-aliasing algorithms, temporal AA, etc. These things have to be calculated, and available on both cards if they are generating the image line by line (alternating turns). It's "obvious" in that it makes sense intuitively, but technologically, it seems like a more impressive feat.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
I'm all for advancing technology, but when it comes to video cards, it's all a matter of who can keep up with Microsoft's DirectX demands the best.
Meanwhile, OpenGL, the industry standard graphics library, is getting left behind because every video chip maker wants to show off how well it supports GlibFlobber() DirectX 27 API.
Won't someone please think of the industry standard instead of the proprietary (and very small market) "standards" of Windows?
All I want is DirectX 9 support in hardware, not the kludges which the current NV's have. The GPU makers churn these things out so quickly, yet they can't keep up with an industry standard a year old...
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
There still are a number of things that are way out in the future for graphics processors, especially polygon based - for instance, ray tracing has the ability to reflect off multiple surfaces (you could create a house of mirrors, for instance, with true curvature reflections), while polygon models have just started to make decent reflections on a single flat(ish) surface. Radiosity and similar effects are usually mapped beforehand because they are so processor intensive to calculate in real time, but could be used to cast "foggy" shadows and create other creepy effects. Another possibility is to offload the entire graphics model to hardware and do everything (e.g. frustum polygon culling and quadtree/oct-tree culling) inside the hardware instead of in software.
It seems to me graphics hardware has a long ways to go still. There are also probably newer, more photorealistic models that have appeared since I studied computer graphics, as well. Virtual reality in a sense depends on audio and AI in a true form, but a virtual visual (and perhaps audio) reality is probably on the horizon. AI is probably 15-20 years down the line (at least for something that stands a chance at passing a Turing test, IMO).
They might concentrate on getting their CURRENT high end card (6800 Ultra) on the retail shelves instead of "pre-announcing" crap in the pipeline.
NVDA has just reported a HORRIBLE quarter. Many are wonder what the F is going on with that company. This is a PR release. They need to say these things. They need to say they have native PCIe despite not a SINGLE OEM design win. They need to say 6800 volume will ramp up and product will be driven down to the low end. Will this actually happen? I have no idea, but this is the least I would expect NVDA to say on this horrible week for NVDA longs. ATI has really put the hurt on. This next 12 months should be pivotal for NVDA's future.
"SLI was such an obvious way to make graphics rendering parallelized! I'm glad they're bringing it back... I've been missing it."
:)
From an economics point of view, it sounds pretty cool. Spend a few extra $$$ to get a top of the line card. Then, in a year or two, pick up a second card when the prices are considerably lower, then you get 2x the performance without tossing hardware. Bitchin.
Unfortunately, I wonder if that puts NVidia in an ugly place. It does set the bar for what the Geforce 7's have a minimum to do. But... that aint bad for us, now is it?
"Derp de derp."
Does it have low power consumption or does it include a nuclear powerplant?