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Nvidia 6600 Series Examined
DrunkenTerror writes "Yesterday at QuakeCon, Nvidia debuted their new affordable GPU mentioned a few days ago on Slashdot. Dubbed the GeForce 6600 and 6600 GT, they differ from their higher-end brethren by having only 8 pixel pipes (unlike the 12 & 16 of the 6800 line), and appear to be limited to 128MB of RAM. Both GPUs support Shader Model 3.0. The 6600 GT sports fast GDDR3 RAM, while the 6600 appears to use plain-jane DDR. The GT also supports the oft-recently-discussed SLI, which could 'enable millions of users to experience the power of two GPUs in their system.' The best part, however, may be the price/performance. With a suggested street price of US$199, the 6600 GT runs at a steady 42 FPS in Doom 3, at high-quality 1600*1200." Reader aceh0 adds a few links: "Nvidia is announcing their NV4x Sub $200 Level graphics hardware today with the GeForce 6600 Series. The 6600 Series is feature complete with the 6800s and the differences come in the number of pipelines and memory configuration. SLI has trickled down to the 6600GT as well. Coverage is available at Neoseeker, Tech Report and PC Perspective as well as other sites."
No matter how inexpensive or how well an NVIDIA product performs it'd be a cold day in hell before I willingly purchased it.
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Their driver development team is absolutely AWFUL. I've sent numerous OpenGL driver bugs to them and I never got a single reply. At the very least they should say "We got your bug report, we'll look into it in a couple of years..."
I think ATI's really got the right idea. They're not focusing so much on revolutionary new hardware architectures. Instead, they're focusing on really exposing game developers to all sorts of techniques for EXISTING hardware.
This month's Game Developer Magazine comes with a CD filled with all of ATI's OpenGL, DirectX, Advanced Shader, etc... GDC 2004 presentations. They didn't have to do that, as the presentations are all available online, but it shows they really care about the developers.
Every time I've had to deal with ATI's developer relations communication has been top notch. For my bug reports I've always had a reply within 2-3 days and a followup when it's fixed. Having to write an app that demos the bug can be a little bit convenient, but it really speeds up their fixing the bug. And they certainly are speedy fixing those bugs, it's rather impressive
And 40% hardware discounts for registered developers is AWESOME! It makes testing new backend/codepaths for new generation hardware much more affordable.
Overall, I think NVIDIA's got the wrong idea. Shader Model 3.0 is cool in theory with dynamic branching, etc... However, all of that stuff can already be done to some extent using Shader Model 2.x (ATI continues to introduce revisions with every DirectX release that're supported across the board on their Radeon 9500+ hardware).
3.0 doesn't completely address the bottlenecks in modern per-fragment (pixel if you wish) lighting. One of the biggest issues is fillrate (memory bandwidth limited). Normally (no pun intended) compressing normal maps is a bad idea; You can use hacks like palettized compression or ATI's suggestion for swapping the red and alpha channels. But ATI has a much more elegant new solution, called 3Dc. I personally find 3Dc more valuable than Shader Model 3.0 for my work. Not to mention writing and maintaining yet *another* backend for Shader Model 3.0 is a major pain in the butt
I'd say buy ATI hardware, and help support us engine developers!