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NVIDIA's Lead Scientist Interviewed

Posted by Zonk on from the he-makes-shiny-things dept.

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.'"

5 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Hey! Good thing the PS3 isn't due out soon! by Chordonblue · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    "...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
  2. The issue of power consumption by Wills · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

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    Scroogle
  3. ATI interview by AngryScot · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

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    All spelling mistakes are due to solar flares...honest

  4. I would like to see _one_ sane PC graphics card... by Florian · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
  5. Re:Ha ha, lights. by grumbel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ### 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.).