NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition Launched

Spinnerbait writes "NVIDIA took the wraps off their nForce 4 SLI chipset platform for Intel Processors today and there's a full review and showcase with benchmarks up at HotHardware. As with NVIDIA's AMD version of this chipset, motherboards based on the technology will support dual PCI Express graphics cards for load sharing in 3D Gaming applications. What's perhaps even more interesting is how the new NVIDIA memory controller actually allows the platform to out-pace Intel's own i925XE in virtually all of the benchmarks."

Comments

Re:Humans in my game

[Ford Prefect]

At this rate soon we will have processors that are capable of rendering real video instead of animation. Or say animation as real as videio footage.

Hardly. Most game-style rendering today is mostly smoke and mirrors; while 3D graphics hardware has improved at a ridiculous rate over the last couple of years, there's still a long way to go before certain, everyday scenes can be rendered.

Something I'd like would be a 'city-renderer', capable of rendering a decent-sized European city (i.e. not a grid) from aerial views down to individual rooms. While a clever level-of-detail system could go a long way towards this, there would still be an utterly horrendous amount of geometry for a typical skyline shot.

Now add traffic, crowds of humans (typical FPS-style games give up after about ten or so, strategy games use crude mannequins for more), properly reflective surfaces and whatnot, motion blur and decent HDR and your quadruple-SLI Geforce 9000-Hyper-Pro-Matic setup will still grind to a halt.

Things are slowly getting there, but I'm still waiting - but like a gas, FPS-style generic corridors will expand in processing requirements until they saturate even the greatest hardware. Look at Doom 3, for example... ;-)

Re:Another troll who didn't RTFA?

[hirschma]

OK, I'm responding to a troll that called me a troll :)

Normally, in a processor comparison, the processors are comparable for a reason - same positioning by the companies involved, same price point, whatever.

In this case, it appears that the only reason why the AMD proc was chosen was to give Intel "wins" in close contests, like LAME MP3 encoding, and to not make Intel's best look too awful in the cases where AMD won.

Point is, Intel was represented with its best game. Why should AMD be presented in a less favorable light?

There is little journalistic integrity with these enthusiast sites.

Obstacles to Mainstream VR

[podperson]

My wife operates a VR research lab (they still exist) and all the new hardware is just great for them. Unfortunately, it only addresses one of the concerns which must be addressed before we can all live in the world of "Snow Crash". The basic problems for mainstream VR are as follows:

1) The headsets really haven't "tipped" price-wise. Kind of like LCD screens for a long time, they stay expensive (around $10k) while slowly improving in features (e.g. resolution, motion tracking). Until they get "good enough" the prices won't trend downwards. (There are cheap headsets, but they make you sick pretty fast. Even the pricey ones make you sick after 30 mins or so ... so you won't be playing WoW in them.)

2) The big issues w.r.t. UI remain unsolved. E.g. a lot of VR setups involve complex motion tracking and setting aside a room for subjects to walk around in. Usually a second person watches the subject to prevent them from, say, running into a wall... There are rigs that allow you to suspend the subject to allow them to walk through theoretically infinite landscapes... we're talking six figures though.

3) Behavior capture. The solutions to tracking movement remain pretty experimental and invasive. All the stuff we've talked about so far will, at best, get you walking around in a virtual landscape, capture your head movements (kind of), and maybe capture some of your arm and finger movements. Even assuming your $500,000 suspension rig captures all your body movements perfectly, we still to capture facial expression and lip synch. (So far, spacial 3d audio is pretty primitive too ... Teamspeak is a long way from a person's voice emanating from their position in a shared world with lots of people.)

4) Force Feedback. All this VR is going to seem pretty lame when you can walk through solid objects or your hand passes through an item you're trying to manipulate. Arguably, this is a subset of item (3) above, but in fact just allowing people to walk around in an unlimited expanse is a big enough problem...

There are plenty of finer grained issues to deal with, but the rendering of VR scenes (at least, so far) has turned out to be the easy part. At the moment, if you wanted to play WoW in VR you'd need to set aside a large room, buy an expensive HMD, and a really expensive suspension rig. (Luckily, WoW lets you run straight through people so the UI will match this perfectly.)