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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...
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
They also had an interview with Richard Huddy from ATI a little back
All spelling mistakes are due to solar flares...honest
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)
Interestingly enough, Matrox did just announce a fanless pcie 1x dual dvi g550 variant with open source linux/unix drivers :)
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.
Have you ever read any of the proceedings from SIGGRAPH? Yes, people do get their Ph.D's in that stuff.
among other things, designing next generation graphics cards is a serious exercise in computer architecture, vlsi design, and algorithm development; these people arent just system integrators or product engineers...next generation stuff has to come from somewhere other than a reference design...these people are absolutely scientists.
you dont need a beaker and a lab coat to be considered a scientist.
dude.
"Worker bees can leave
Even drones can fly away
The Queen is their slave."
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.
Like http://www.commell.com.tw/Product/SBC/LV-672.HTM which is Mini-ITX form factor, if you're also into space-saving designs.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
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.
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.
With the new high dynamic range lighting systems and 12-bit output to monitors, even more shades of black will be possible.
I know several mathematicians that would disagree with your assessment that coming up with new algorithms is engineering. Algorithm development is typically in the domain of scientists working on better computational tools.
If astrophysicists, computational fluid dynamicists, and/or computational plasma physicists (all of them are scientists, by definition), all got together with game developers and swapped algorithm ideas, I guarantee that there would be improvements seen in games. Those scientists are constantly developing new techniques and algorithms to refine their computations.
An engineer would come along, read the papers those scientists published, gain an understanding of the algorithms and techniques discussed, then go implement them in some code.
Not to diss any engineers out there (I am one), but that's basically what engineers do: take the work of others and implement it, usually in a practical manner. I've worked the other side of the situation as well, working in CFD and controls (amongst other computational things).
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.
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?"
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.