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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.'"
Who cares how many lights the chipsets can emulate when the games themselves still suck?
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
"After that, they tried to do a few things with more lights, using perhaps eight instead of ten. "
I wish I had more money. Like 50 bucks instead of 100 bucks.
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.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
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...
It is going to be interesting to see if this can live up to the hype. As with most technologies, what the developers claim will be possible is usually only possible under restricted circumstances (or not at all). I do expect some great things graphically, since alot of the power from these consoles is from the graphics cards.
Voice your opinion!
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?
Scroogle
Here's the most important word that didn't appear anywhere in that article: OpenGL
"Wow, this game is pretty! What do I do? Shoot those demons over there? OK. Woo! Now what? Shoot the other demons? ... OK. Um, whee. Now what? ... More demons? Um, ok..."
Then along comes something like Ratchett & Clank or Sly Cooper with cartoony graphics, silly characters and more raw *fun* packed into a single level than most FP shooters have in their entire spans.
They also had an interview with Richard Huddy from ATI a little back
All spelling mistakes are due to solar flares...honest
Isn't that overstating the job title a little bit? Engineer sure, but scientist? It's not like increasing the number of bump maps is going to lead to cold fusion or the cure for cancer.
Let's not get in a tiff over pre-rendering, ok? Plenty of THAT to go around!
Quite frankly (and don't take this the wrong way), I don't give a shit WHO comes out on top - although keep in mind that history has shown that the best designs usually lose.
All I'm saying is while I think it's just great that programmers have this wonderful, liberating machine, it IS significantly more complex and even alien to code for - don't try and BS people into believing otherwise.
The article suggests to me that the programmers are still 'playing' and 'discovering' with the hardware and that suggests to me that Sony hasn't done it's job in the software department. Like the PS2, a lot of stuff is probably going to have to be done from scratch.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
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.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
First, as others have noted, games still tend to suck overall so who cares how beautiful the graphics are? Beautiful crap is still crap.
Second, now that GPUs are competitive with CPUs for heat generation and electrical energy waste, are we giving up altogether on efficiency and just consigning ourselves to needing ever better coolers, paying more electrical costs, etc., just to play some beautiful crap?
Not me. Gone are the days of being able to stick all these game machines, DVD players, media PCs, etc. in a small enclosed space of an entertainment center. Now I'll have to place my TV near to a window and buy a standalone air conditioner so I can pipe the hot air flow out and cool all my stuff to keep it from immolating my living room.
I don't think so. If we're going to use up so much horsepower for this, we might as well at least get someone to use it as the power source for a lava lamp. That might be more fun to watch than Doom 3.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
oooh, that's nice. I may have to get a new video card. I can't wait til Holiday 2005 ;)
Here's a link for the lazy.
With the PS3 + disk drive being a Linux machine, are we STILL going to be stuck with closed-source binary-only kernel modules, or will NVIDIA actually start to make good drivers.
(of course, I already know the answer.)
www.eFax.com are spammers
Interestingly enough, Matrox did just announce a fanless pcie 1x dual dvi g550 variant with open source linux/unix drivers :)
In other words, I think you're barking up the wrong tree.
You need to look at cards for what they are, not what video was.
Today's video cards have much higher transistor counts than the processors of the systems they go into.
A standard P4 is around 60million, the Extreme Edition with all its built in cache is 180million
A 6800 series is 220+ million. The X800 is 160+ million.
A 7800 is over 300 million.
What you really have in a video card is a computer within your computer complete with its requsite power and cooling requirements.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
"Worker bees can leave
Even drones can fly away
The Queen is their slave."
And, uh... just curious... is this any different at all from how things work with ATI chips right now? It doesn't really sound like it...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
How will R&D improve games?
Think of all your favourite classic games. How many were made great due to R&D?
R&D is good for making games more 'techincally' advanced (better graphics and sound). To make a game 'good' requires a certain talent similar to the talent of a good film director or music composer.
A good game can be technically advanced or not, although being technically advanced is always pleasing to the senses.
Sometimes, a certain level of technical advancement is required, as a pre-requisite, for the 'good game' to be made at all. Tetris required 2D-bitmaps, Super Mario Brothers required scrolling backgrounds, Mario 64 required 3d rendering, Everquest required internet connectivity. You get the point.
Back to your original point, maybe more realistic clothes will ALLOW for the creation of some kind of revolutionary clothing design game that'll get all sorts of new people into gaming?
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....
Why can't I have dual head graphics with hardware video acceleration/overlay on either monitor?
You can have this on either monitor (I'm sure you can pick which one), the real problem is that they might not do it so well on both monitors at the same time.
"Anandtech??? Give me a fucking break. x86 peecee fanboy site posts garbage article about console hardware."
Er... Anandtech has ALWAYS been even handed - and I've read that article. It was a step by step dissection of the Cell - mostly positive - but REALISTIC.
PS3 scene demos aren't full blown games. Time will tell but just don't be surprised if you're still playing the same three games six months after the PS3 launch.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Except that I don't trust Sony to come through with well documented, well written libraries - especially if the past is any indication. I think the 'reality' is that it will take time for all this to come together. A long time.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
In order to see what will happen in this upcoming generation, we simply have to look at the last generation, when the Dreamcast came out nearly a year before the PS2; and the Dreamcast was released with a programmer-friendly focus, while the PS2 (at and around launch) had an unclearly documented and byzantine architecture which required writing large chunks of assembly code to get many basic things done. And so what happened?
Of course, the Playstation 2 failed horribly and Sega went on to dominate the market for four years.
Considering what happened to the PS2, we can only imagine what will happen to the PS3-- which incorporates such horrors as "having to write in 256k code/memory chunks when you want to use the auxilliary processors", and "a GPU".
What will the market look like by the time that PS3 programmers finally learn to use this newfangled "shader" technology nvidia is pushing (well, newfangled except that it has been present in the Gamecube and XBox for their entire respective lifespans, but you know what I mean)?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
"After that, they tried to do a few things with more lights, using perhaps eight instead of ten." Is that like president Bush spouting coal as a replacement for oil? http://www.publicintegrity.org/report.aspx?aid=80& sid=200
One example of a reasonably priced, fanless GPU is the FX5200, which can be had at electronic stores for $50-$70. The plain FX5200 is passively cooled, and most manufacturers include only one video output on it. The slightly faster FX5200 Ultra requires a fan for the increased heat, and would probably include two video outputs. The ones I've seen with two outputs had one VGA and one DVI. Surely someone is producing one with two DVIs.
I just purchased a FX6600GT for $165. For its performance, I'd call that reasonably priced, and it includes two DVI outputs, but has a fan.
I'd prefer to see video cards with passive heat sinks too, but the silicon process just isn't there yet. It is getting closer, however.
Matrox Intros PCIe x1 Graphics Card
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't know what you consider "reasonably priced", but http://www.apple.com/powermac/graphics.html does what you want.
Don't know if they're available in the states, but XFX make a passively cooled nVidia 6600 (non-GT) with dual DVI ports and TV-out. Retails here for about £80 (~$140), so prolly availble in the US for about $100. Whether this is "reasonably priced" for you I don't know, but it's a good little card for 2D work and the odd bit of OpenGL eye-candy, and will hold it's own in games.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Here's an article on Extremetech discussing Transparent Anti-Aliasing coming from NVIDIA. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1836786 ,00.asp
They did a study with a bunch of games and found that the performance benefit is not that great.
So this begs me to ask are these graphics companies solely concentrating on having a great fast GPU that can take these loads. Or are they simply pushing the market to adopt more expensive cards that have these GPUs.
It isn't nVidia's job to make games more entertaining or 'GOOD'. That is more the developer's job and I don't see why so many posters are ignoring this fact.
I do wonder how much R&D went into Tetris. :-)
how about providing a link to these problems you are talking about? I googled for 'ps3 bus problems' and didn't find much at all apart from a bunch of people in some forums theorizing about with no actual data or numbers to back them up... For now the emphasis should definitely be 'rumored about' because people say all sorts of stuff but if it is not backed up it is not worth much, especially before the product is out.
is the answer. Duh.
With the new high dynamic range lighting systems and 12-bit output to monitors, even more shades of black will be possible.
Which may not be a bad thing if you are developing interactive shopping catalogues rather than games.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Cell is, in fact, more difficult to program than the Xbox, because the worker threads have a different instruction set then the main threads. IBM was, at some point, promoting CELL as a general computing device. Now they kinda' stopped.
The Raven
What is there to mention? When talking about the unified shader model, I got the impression that this guy's focus is more on NVIDIA's hardware design and not so much on how its features are exposed via its APIs. If you want someone from NVIDIA to talk about OpenGL, you probably want an interview from Mark Kilgard.
You think GLSL is more risky to use than HLSL? Bullshit. It's not really that fundamentally different. Neither is Cg. It's like comparing C and Pascal. In fact, NVIDA's shader compiler is the same for all three languages. It's abstracted into a backend and a set of frontends for each language: Cg, GLSL, and HLSL. So, for NVIDIA hardware all three basically perform identically.
But what about the open source drivers? I still haven't found anything about those.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> Are you saying Tetris was a great game?? Yes.
At least 2D would be good for starters. And no, do not reach for the "Reply" link below to point me to the open source driver (nv) -- it does not support secondary heads...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Actually, let me go one step further. It still IS a great game. :-P
You're at slashdot, where posters don't read the articles posted, and the editors just don't care about the articles posted.
I dont' remember netscapre being present when the web was born. I do remember mosaic, though.
a slut did tulsa
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.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
I agree that the progress does not necessarily come from the shaders or the lights, but when modern games get it right (which they sometimes do) they are excellent. The technical sophistication does make a difference in the end, when all these means are used properly.
Take Need for Speed Underground 2 as an example: this is a great game... huge amounts of content, great graphics and sound, easy to drive but difficult to master. Could you have made something like that without the graphics or the sound? Maybe you like to play brain puzzles or text adventures. I respect that. I have played them, too. But that is not the whole world of gaming. Realism and graphics can contribute immensely to an immersive gameplay experience!!
P.
That would be more like:
Whan Noble NVIDIA hath newer cards to showe Thanne Prices risen higher thann the lowe And smale cryes comme from Slashdot kin That Linnux driveres wolde be no sin
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
2005: Walk around shooting monsters with more realistic-looking clothing.
$1999 for a VIDEO CARD?! And that's the default that's only 70% of the fast card's performance?
I knew macs were expensive but...
I never said it was nvidia's job to make games better.
I'm saying that game developers will continue to get deeper into the "eye-candy is better than gameplay" mentality that games seem to be headed towards lately.
Some games have amazingly beautiful environments, but completely lack the key element to make it entertaining. What's the point in that?
Look at how much Doom 3 was hyped with its brand new engine. Sure, it looked good, but... it didn't bring anything new and innovative to the table. The game wasn't horrible or anything; I did enjoy it, but I just feel that had they put as much effort into the gameplay itself as they did with making it look pretty, it could've been something much more amazing.
Take a look at Quake 4. The screenshots look amazing, but unless they offer up something new to the multiplayer FPS genre, it'll be "just another FPS".
My point is... people get too caught up in how beautiful or realistic the rendered graphics look. If the game itself has no life or value, and 80% of the time spent creating it was to make it look good... then what's the point?
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Announced 2 days ago:2 005/millennium_g550_pcie.cfm
http://www.matrox.com/mga/media_center/press_rel/
-PCI-E 1x slot
-You can stick as many in your system as you have 1x slots
-fanless
-fully open source drivers!!
I had a good look at the images on that link (and the ones on GameSpot), it looks pretty dissapointing to me. No multi-hight within levels, no world view, no base management...lame. Not worthy of the XCOM name.
If they made a movie of your life, would anybody buy a ticket?
They in every recent X...
(for the whole G series)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Excluding P series Matrox cards...
One that hath name thou can not otter