NVIDIA's Lead Scientist Interviewed

rtt writes "bit-tech.net has up an interview with NVIDIA's chief scientist, David Kirk, about the PlayStation 3, next-generation architectures and what to expect in PC gaming. From the article: 'We're going to see the next generation of shader-based games. At the first generation, we saw people using a shader to emulate the hardware pipeline, and finding "Hey - this really is programmable". After that, they tried to do a few things with more lights, using perhaps eight instead of ten. Then they started to write material shaders, and they made great cloth and metal effects that we saw. People are now starting to change the lighting model, and are exploring the things that they can do with that.'"

Comments

Hey! Good thing the PS3 isn't due out soon!

[Chordonblue]

If the XBOX 360 gets a 6 month jump on Sony, the results by the time the PS3 launches will be obvious. Sony's hardware may be more powerful in some respects, but the amount of work that needs to be done by the programmers is daunting.

While actual code is being written on the 360 side, my guess is the coders on the PS3 side are doing what this article suggests - feeling out the hardware. It means that a lot of the development environment is unfinished or at least unkempt. You've got a lot of power there, but learning to wield it is going to take quite some time - ESPECIALLY with the Cell processor.

opinion?

[kc0re]

I am still of the opinion that Doom 3 was the finest lit and rendered game to date. I believe that Doom 3 will change the face of games.

The other game that did alot with lighting was Spliter Cell.. I'd like to hear other's opinions...

Re:opinion?

[RealityMogul]

My opinion, you're trolling... but I can't resist...

Doom 3 had some decent static lights in it. But they screwed up soooo much with the light that mattered - the flashlight. I don't mean not being able to hold the flashlight and gun at the same time. I mean that the flashlight was technically poorly implemented. For starters, the realism was killed for me immediately by the fact that I could look through the SIDE of the light beam, and the wall I was looking at was illuminated even though the flashlight wasn't even pointed at it.

However, the wall that the light was pointed at was totally black. And don't try to use the flashlight in a large room or long corridor, or on anything up close. You need to be within a certain distance range for it to work acceptably, and even then you also have to be at the right angle.

The issue of power consumption

[Wills]

What I would like is for nVidia (and ATI) to start making lower power consumption a big goal for their new products. Can't we leave the era of 100-110Watts being the norm for new graphics card such as the GeForce 7800 GTX?

ATI interview

[AngryScot]

They also had an interview with Richard Huddy from ATI a little back

I would like to see _one_ sane PC graphics card...

[Florian]

It seems all development efforts goes into 3D gaming and no brains into vanilla PC requirements. Why is it impossible to find a reasonably priced, fanless graphics card with two DVI connectors? Why can't I have dual head graphics with hardware video acceleration/overlay on either monitor? Why don't Nvidia and ATI at least take care that the non-3D features of their cards are fully supported under Linux and X11? Yes, Matrox's cards come close, but even their vintage G550 require buggy binary X11 drivers.

One Sane video "cards": GMA 900 and GMA 950

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvidia does make sure that 2-d support is their for Linux.

They have the nv driver, which they helped develop and maintain, and it is under the BSD license, or the old XFree86 license...

IF you realy want a fully supported Open Source card.. Buy a Intel motherboard.

Yes. A Intel motherboard.

With the new GMA series you get reasonable performance (333mhz core in some versions) with fanless support, and if you look around you can find one that has DVI support and vga support.

Advantages to GMA 900 and GMA 950:
1. Worlds better then Intel Blaster Extreme. It's up to around ATI 9200-9600 territory.
2. Comes free with some 915 and 945 motherboards. Look for the ones with 'g' in the chipset names.
3. Is documented by Intel to the DRI project and DRM support is in Linux kernel 2.6.12 and DRI supports the GMA 900 with GMA 950 in CVS. They use the 915 driver.
4. Is completely fanless.
5. Has low electricity usage.

Disavantages:
1. Shared memory archatecture.
2. takes over the PCIe 16x channel. (leaves others alone)
3. Not as fast as other nvidia cards.

For a Linux workstation for a experianced Linux user it's a steal. Pentium Ds support AMD's 64bit extensions, they are cheaper then dual core AMD64s at the moment. The downside is that it's only supported in 945 and 955 chipsets, the 945 can come with the GMA 950.

Think about it:
It's reasonably fast. It's silent. It's energy efficient, and it has support from Free Software Drivers.

I know it's not as sexy as AMD, but it's a damn nice setup.

Also Celeron D's (single core) are a STEAL right now and can be used withj the 915g and 945 series chipsets. A 3.0ghz cpu is pretty cheap and very fast.

If you don't want something that energy-hoggish. Check out the Pentium-Ms....

Re:Preach on

[drsquare]

In that case, why did they market and sell it as a game? Surely that's fraud? I know I'd be pissed off if I paid a huge amount for a game just find out it's merely a demo for an engine.

They should have said on the box: "Warning: this game is less fun than tetris, and only has nice graphics that get old in 5 minutes."

Personally, I think if a game's good enough, it's immersive no matter how crap the graphics are. Eventually you get used to them, and when you're really involved in the game you don't notice the framerates or shoddy lighting. With a shallow game like Doom 3 all there is to think about is the graphics, and then you're going to notice all the imperfections because that's what you're playing for. And once the novelty of the graphics wears off, you've nothing left.

Re:Ha ha, lights.

[grumbel]

### I once thought VGA graphics and 386 speeds rocked too. But if I ever go back there, it sucks.

A few month ago I played XCom:UFO for the first time ever, so no nostalgica involved and suprise, suprise it didn't suck, it was simple one of the best games I have played in the last few years, even by todays standards. An interesting side node it that XCom has completly destroyable terrain, sure its all just 2d tile graphics, but destroyable terrain is something that almost no 3d game these days has gotten right.

I don't mind if graphics are good, but quite often the better graphics actually limit the gameplay in harmfull ways (no destroyable terrain, no huge outdoor szenarios, etc.).

Re:I would like to see _one_ sane PC graphics card

[Molochi]

The primary market for dual DVI is willing to pay for the privilage, rather than do without. The same used to be said for just plain old dual vga. Feature creep should hit us on cheapo cards once cheap lcds have DVI inputs. I don't know why VGA inputs are used on LCDs to begin with, unless it is somehow cheaper or just preserves a price point.

Appian sells a dual dvi radeon 7000/VE (4 year old tech) for ~$190. The Matrox 2xDVI G550 cards (again, about 3-4 years old) go for ~$130. A DualDVI XFX GF6600 PCI-E goes for less than $140 but the AGP version is $160+. Both are full sized cards, but they do use a passive heatsink. Perhaps more importantly they should continue to get less expensive if they sit on the shelf a bit, should provide access to better drivers, and give you superior hardware to boot.

The cheapest way to go is (ironicaly) to use two cards. Specificly a pair GF4MX4000 (vga+dvi out). AGP and PCI for around $35 and 45 each respectivly.