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Nvidia CEO "Not Afraid" of CPU-GPU Hybrids
J. Dzhugashvili writes "Is Nvidia worried about the advent of both CPUs with graphics processor cores and Larrabee, Intel's future discrete graphics processor? Judging by the tone adopted by Nvidia's CEO during a financial analyst conference yesterday, not quite. Huang believes CPU-GPU hybrids will be no different (and just as slow) as today's integrated graphics chipsets, and he thinks people will still pay for faster Nvidia GPUs. Regarding Larrabee, Huang says Nvidia is going to 'open a can of whoop-ass' on Intel, and that Intel's strategy of reinventing the wheel by ignoring years of graphics architecture R&D is fundamentally flawed. Nvidia also has some new hotness in the pipeline, such as its APX 2500 system-on-a-chip for handhelds and a new platform for VIA processors."
It's easy to not be afraid when you have NO COMPETITION! I realize that wasn't the point of the article, but there were some stories no here about Creative and how they have sucked since they bought up the competition, and it would suck if that happened (more than it already has) to NVidia.
Did I hear that correctly? NVidia is going to beat Intel in the GPU department? What a breaking development!
In other news, Aston Martin makes better cars than Hyundai!
More details here in HotHardware's coverage: http://www.hothardware.com/News/NVIDIA_Gets_Aggressive_Dismisses_CPUGPU_Fusion/ Jen-Sun squarin' off!
CPU and GPU integration is quite logical progression of technology. There are things the GPU is not optimal and same goes to the CPU. It seems that when combined, they prove successful.
A side note maybe we'll see a Nvidia GPU based Folding@home release some day, but at least ATI latest GPUs have a new client to play with:
http://folding.typepad.com/news/2008/04/gpu2-open-beta.html
What AMD should really try to do is start combining their cpu technology and their graphics technology and make some multi core GPUs. They might be better positioned to do this than Intel or Nvidia.
Until Intel can show us Crysis in all it's GPU raping glory running on it's chipset in 1600x1200 with all settings to Ultra High Nvidia and ATI will still be kings of high end graphics. Then again, if all Intel wants to do is create a sub standard alternative to those high end cards just to run Vista Aero and *nix Beryl then they have already succeeded.
Some of the comments made were very interesting. He really slammed someone that I take was either an Intel rep, or otherwise associate. The best was when that rep/associate/whoever criticized Nvidia about their driver issues in Vista, and the slam-dunk response that I paraphase, "If we [Nvidia] only had to support the same product/application that Intel has [Office 2003] for the last 5 years then we probably wouldn't have as many driver issues as well. But since we have new products/applications that our drivers need to support which come out every day, it makes things a little more complicated".
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
IMHO, Nvidia is stuck as the odd-man out. When integrated chipsets and GPU-CPU hybrids can easily handle full-HD playback, the market for discrete GPUs falls and falls some more. Sure, discrete will always be faster, just like a Porsche is faster than a Toyota, but who makes more money (by a mile)?
Is Creative still around? Last I heard, they were making MP3 players...
I, for one, don't want a GPU which requires 25W+ in standby mode.
My Mac mini has a maximum load of 110W. That's the Core 2 Duo CPU, the integrated GMA950, 3GB of RAM, a 2.5" drive and a DVD burner, not to mention FireWire 400 and four USB 2.0 ports under maximum load (the FW400 port being 8W alone).
Granted the GMA950 sucks compared to nVidia's current offerings, however do they have any plans for low-power GPUs? I'm pretty sure the whole company can't survive on the FPS-crazed game players revenues alone.
They should start thinking about asking intel to integrate their (current) laptop GPUs into intel CPUs.
If I understand them right, they're claiming that integrated graphics and CPU/GPU hybrids are just a toy, and that you want discrete graphics if you're serious. Ken Olsen famously said that "the PC is just a toy". When did you last use a "real" computer?
Ray vs raster. The reason we have so much tech in Raster is because processing was not sufficient to do ray. If it had been we'd have never started down the raster branch of development because it just doesn't work as well. The results are not as realistic with raster. Shadows don't look right. You can't do csg. You get edge effects. There are a thousand work-arounds for things like reflections of reflections, lens effects and audio reflections. Raster is a hack and when we have the CPU to do the real time ray tracing rendering raster composition will go away.
Raster was a way to make some fairly believable (if cartoonish) video games. They still require some deliberate suspension-of-disbelief. Only with raytracing do you get the surreal Live-or-memorex feeling of not being able to tell a rendered scene from a photo, except for the fact that the realistic scene depicts something that might be physically impossible.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If Intel is right, there won't be much of an effect on existing games.
Intel is focusing on raytracers, something Crytek has specifically said that they will not do. Therefore, both Crysis and any sequels won't really see any improvement from Intel's approach.
If Intel is right, what we are talking about is the Crysis-killer -- a game that looks and plays much better than Crysis (and maybe with a plot that doesn't completely suck), and only on Intel hardware, not on nVidia.
Oh, and Beryl has been killed and merged. It's just Compiz now, and Compiz Fusion if you need more.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
So, if you have a hybrid chip, why not put it on a motherboard with a slot for a nice nvidia card. Then you'll get all the raytracing goodness from intel, plus the joyful rasterbation of nvidia's finest offerings. The word "coprocessor" exists for a reason. Or am I missing something here?
"Huang says Nvidia is going to 'open a can of whoop-ass' on Intel..."
This is a VERY SERIOUS problem for the entire world. There are apparently no people available who have both technical understanding and social sophistication.
Huang is obviously ethnic Chinese. It is likely he is imitating something he heard in a movie or TV show. He certainly did not realize that only ignorant angry people use that phrase.
Translating, that phrase, and the boasting in general, says to me: "Huang must be fired. nVidia needs a better top manager."
While I agree that Mr. Huang's statement was a little overboard, and definitely unprofessional, I, my good sir, think you are uptight. Furthermore, if you had actually RTFA (I know, you are probably unfamiliar w/ the term), you would have realized that he never directly mentions Intel in his statement. Feast your eyes on the glory of an article snippet: Huang summed up Nvidia's position on Larrabee in one sentence: "We're gonna open a can of whoop-ass [on Intel]." Now, notice the [on Intel]. Thank you.
When AMD Finally dies, what will my ATI Stock Certificates be worth?
President/CEO Pacy World http://www.pacyworld.com
What it says to me is "Huang speaks the language of their demographic". Sorry, but "can of whoop-ass" may be coarse, but it's not redneck-speak. It's at worst a little bit dated.
I see you didn't say anything about his actual leadership or management style. The crappy year of 2008 aside, where everyone's been suffering, I'd say NVDA's stock price alone vindicates him.
NVDA was down 7% in the stock market today. As an Nvidia shareholder, that hurts!
If you don't believe Intel will ever compete with Nvidia, now is probably a good time to buy. NVDA has a forward P/E of 14. That's a "value stock" price for a leading tech company... you don't get opportunities like that often. NVDA also has no debt on the books, so the credit crunch does not directly affect them.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Intel is and always has been CPU-centric. That's all they ever seem to focus on because it's what they do best. Nvidia is focusing 100% on GPUs because it's what they best. AMD seems to have it right with their combination of the two (by necessity) because they're focusing on a mix between the two. I'm seriously stoked about the 780G chipset they rolled out this month because it's an integrated chipset that doesn't suck and actually speeds up an ATI video card if you add the right one. Given, AMD isn't the fastest when it comes to either graphics or processors but at least they have a platform with a chipset, CPU, and graphics that work together. Chipsets have needed to be a bit more powerful for a long-ass time.
The statement itself is pretty stupid. Is NVDIA going to design a better CPU with onboard GPU unit than Intel?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Nvidia may not be scared, but I am, I don't want some goatse interfering with my porn data processing . :-(
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Granted NVidia is way out ahead in graphics performance - but generally you can tell when that someone is getting nervous when they start in the belligerant bragging.
The risk for NVidia isn't that Intel will surpass them, or even necessarily approach their best performance. The risk is that Intel might start catching up, cutting (further) into NVidia's market share.
AMD's acquisition of ATI seems to imply that they see tight integration of graphics to be at least cheaper for a given level of performance, or higher performance for a given price. Apply that same reasoning to Intel, since they certainly aren't likely to let AMD have that advantage all to themselves.
Now try to apply that logic to NVidia - what are they going to do, merge with a distant-last-place x86 maker?
Intel "graphics cards" are on most regular PCs, and they can't run shit. They're integrated, so if you try to run a game, the computer takes some RAM and makes it graphics RAM, which slows everything down...
NVidia may just put a CPU or two in their graphics chips. They already have more transistors in the GPU than Intel has in many of their CPUs. They could license a CPU design from AMD. A CPU design today is a file of Verilog, so integrating that onto a part with a GPU isn't that big a deal.
I find that graphics cards burn out 2-3x as fast as cpu/motherboards, and discrete graphics also allow the graphics capability of the system to be upgraded for $100-200. Integrated graphics would mean the CPU/GPU (which would be much more expensive) would need to be swapped out to upgrade a system, and also that these more expensive chips would either burn out more often, or underperform in order to extend chip life. I'm sure vista would also consider a cpu/gpu upgrade as 'reliscenceworthy' event, though a single graphics card upgrade probably is not.
The folks that are concerned about high speed graphics are the most likely to want to upgrade the graphics more often, and integrating them onto the GPU just doesn't make sense for that market. Some type of higher level bus than AGP would be a better way to go.
Of COURSE they do, in fact they already HAVE low power offerings. I'm not sure why people seem to think the 8800 is the only card nVidia makes. nVidia is quite adept at taking their technology and scaling it down. Just reduce the clock speed, cut off shader units and such, there you go. In the 8 series they have an 8400. I don't know what the power draw is, but it doesn't have any extra power connectors so it is under 75 watts peak by definition (that's all PCIe can handle). They have even lower power cards in other lines, and integrated on the motherboard.
So they already HAVE low power GPUs. However you can't have both low power and super high performance. If you want something that performs like an 8800, well, you need an 8800.
Once upon a time the floating point was done on a seperate chip. You could buy a cheaper "non-professional" machine that emulated the fpu in software and ran slower. You could also upgrade your machine by adding the fpu chip.
Such FPU's do not exist today.
I think Nvidia should be worried about this.
...is that Nvidia is saying that Intel is ignoring years of GPU development. Umm, wait. Isn't a GPU basically a mini-computer/CPU by itself that exclusively handles graphics calculations? By making this statement, I think they've forgotten who Intel is. Intel has more than enough experience in the field to go off on their own and make GPUs. Is it something to be scared of? Probably not, because as he correctly points out, a dedicated GPU will be more powerful. However, it's not something that can be ignored. We'll just have to wait and see.
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
DAMN IT! We want opened drivers!
This is a VERY SERIOUS problem for the entire world. There are apparently no people available who have both technical understanding and social sophistication.
Maybe he was out of chairs?
Huang is obviously ethnic Chinese. It is likely he is imitating something he heard in a movie or TV show.
Yeah, them slanty-eyed furriners just can't speak English right, can they?
Huang is over 40 years old and has lived in the US since he was a child. Idiot.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Or just design a dedicated GPU that blows Intel's offering out of the water. That's what a video card manufacturer does, after all.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Having the GPU built into the CPU is primarily a cost-cutting measure. Take one low-end CPU, add one low-end GPU, and you have a single-chip solution that consumes a bit less power than separate components.
Nobody expects the CPU+GPU to yield gaming performance worth a damn, because the two big companies that are looking into this amalgam both have underperforming graphics technology. Do they both make excellent budget solutions ? Yes they certainly do, but for those who crave extreme speed, the only option is NVidia.
That said, not everyone plays shooters. Back in my retail days, I'd say I moved 50 times more bottom-end GPUs than top-end ones. Those Radeon 9250s were $29.99 piles of alien poop, but cheap poop is enough for the average norm. The only people who spent more than $100 on a video card were teenagers and comic book guys (and of course, my awesome self).
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The problem is not that Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made one stupid statement. The problem is that he said many foolish things, indicating that he is not a good CEO. Here are some:
Quote from the article: "Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was quite vocal on those fronts, arguing hybrid chips that mix microprocessor and graphics processor cores will be no different from systems that include Intel or AMD integrated graphics today."
My opinion: There would be no need for all the talk if there were no chance of competition. Everyone knows there will be new competition from Intel Larabee and AMD/ATI. Everyone knows that "no different" is a lie. Lying exposes the Nvidia CEO as a weak man.
"... he explained that Nvidia is continuously reinventing itself and that it will be two architectural refreshes beyond the current generation of chips before Larrabee launches."
The entire issue is that Intel+Larabee and AMD+ATI will make Nvidia irrelevant for most users. The GPU will be on the motherboard. Nvidia will sell only to gamers who are willing to pay extra, a lot extra.
"Huang also raised the prospect of application and API-level compatibility problems with Larrabee. Intel has said Larrabee will support the DirectX 10 and OpenGL application programming interfaces just like current AMD and Nvidia GPUs, but Huang seemed dubious Intel could deliver on that front."
Intel, in this case, is Intel and Microsoft working together. Both are poorly managed companies in many ways, but they are both managed well enough to insure that the Microsoft product works with the Intel hardware. Sure, it is an easy guess that Microsoft will release several buggy versions, because Microsoft has a history of treating its customers as though they were beta testers, but eventually everything will work correctly.
'[NVidia VP] Tamasi went on to shoot down Intel's emphasis on ray tracing, which the chipmaker has called "the future for games." '
Ray tracing is certainly the future for games, there is no question about that. The question is when, because the processor power required is huge. It's my guess, but an easy guess, that Mr. Tamasi is lying; he is apparently trying to take advantage of the ignorance of financial analists.
"Additionally, Tamasi believes rasterization is inherently more scalable than ray tracing. He said running a ray tracer on a cell phone is "hard to conceive."
This is apparently another attempt to confuse the financial analyists, who often have only a pretend interest in technical things. Anyone understanding the statement knows it is nonsense. No one is suggesting that there will be ray-tracing on cell phones. My opinion is that this is another lie.
"We're gonna be highly focused on bringing a great experience to people who care about it," he explained, adding that Nvidia hardware simply isn't for everyone."
That was a foolish thing to say. That's the whole issue! In the future, Nvidia's sales will drop because "Nvidia hardware simply isn't for everyone." Most computers will not have separate video adapters, whereas they did before. Only powerful game machines will need to by from Nvidia.
'Huang added, "I would build CPUs if I could change the world [in doing so]." ' Later in the article, it says, "Nvidia is readying a platform to accompany VIA's next-generation Isaiah processor, which should fight it out with Intel's Atom in the low-cost notebook and desktop arena"
Translation: Before, every desktop computer needed a video adapter, which came from a company different than the CPU maker, a company like Nvidia. Now, the video adapters will be mostly supplied by CPU makers. In response, Nvidia will start making low-end CPUs. It is questionable whether Nvidia can compete with Intel and AMD making any kind of CPU.
Analysts, the word is analysts.
Typing too fast.
I think this comment on the story is pretty insightful:
When you start talking pre-emptively about your competitor's vapor, you're officially worried.
i think Nvidia is a pretty cool guy. eh fights them intels and doesn't afraid of anything.
Be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds. -- Homer
I never saw this on the Simpsons... which episode did Homer say this?
Lrrr: "This is Earth's most foolish GPU vendor. Why doesn't Nvidia, the largest of the GPU vendors, simply eat the other competitors?"
Ndnd: "Maybe they're saving it for sweeps."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jen-Hsun_Huang
"Huang is obviously ethnic Chinese. It is likely he is imitating something he heard in a movie or TV show. He certainly did not realize that only ignorant angry people use that phrase."
I can't for the life of me imagine someone with a thick Taiwanese accent saying "we're going to open up a can of whoop-ass on Intel".
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Why would anyone make a new laptop using AGP instead of PCI-express with any of those two cards? It's not like people upgrade the graphics cards in laptops often ..
I see your 1 million triangles and raise you 349 million more. (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with OpenRT, I just think this is a neat demonstration.)
Textures, verticies, and the like take up memory with ray tracing just like rasterization. There's a bit more flexibility with a ray tracer, though, to store non-triangular primitives. Most fast real-time ray tracers just use triangles, though.
As for acceleration structures, octrees have largely been superseded by kd-trees (preferably constructed using a surface-area heuristic), and more recently bounding interval hierarchies, which can be constructed much more quickly than kd-trees.
Don't generalize. "Everyone" doesn't think that. I don't think that. Hence your a liar.
Wow. GPUs have been on mother boards for ages. Intel/NVIDIA/AMD all ship products with GPUs on the motherboard . It's my guess, but an easy guess, that your lying; you are apparently trying to take advantage of the ignorance of slashdot readers.
Sure they might get it stable. But the directx/ogl implementations would be dog slow. I'd guess around 1/10 high raster GPU. Doesn't seem much of a lie here. Sure. NVIDIA supports ray tracing now. People aren't arguing whether ray tracing will be used. But *how.* This, no one can say for certain. Anyone that tries to tell you otherwise is an idiot. He is just stating a fact. No lie there. It's also quite possible when we hit this "good enough" threshold, people won't need to update their CPU. GPUs are more efficient then CPUs for graphics (raster AND ray tracing) -- dedicated HW will always be more efficient then generic HW, with power and performance. So it's quite possible people will be able to get away with a cheap VIA/AMD CPU and a decent GPU and leave intel out of the loop.
Obviously, this scenario doesn't apply to everyone. Some people will always need faster CPUs. It could easily apply to laptop users for example, that just browse the web, play games and watch video. They'll want the perf and power advantages of dedicated HW. Whereas, desktop users might be able to get away with a less efficient solution.
Hacks like radiosity? Indeed, a ray tracer needs to be supplemented with a global illumination algorithm in order to produce plausibly realistic images, but there are many global illumination algorithms to choose from, and radiosity is the only one I know of that can be implemented without tracing rays.
Photon mapping, for instance, is quite nice, and performs comparatively well. (Normal computers aren't fast enough to do it in real time yet, but they'll get there eventually if the Lord tarries and the creek don't rise.) It also correctly handles non-lambertian textures, unlike radiosity.
What global illumination algorithm would you suggest that isn't a hack and can run on a GPU? (Pre-baked textures don't count.)
JenHsun's been in the US since he was 9 years old (and has no detectable accent).
The large corporations and engineering companies that have *THOUSANDS* of high-end workstations need graphics hardware compatible with complex, specialized software. I'm talking Unigraphics, CATIA, Patran, Femap, etc. You need to use the hardware certified by the software publisher otherwise you don't get support and you can't trust the work you are doing to be correct. And the vast majority of the cards that are up to the challenge are nvidia cards.
I have done CAD/CAM for ages, and my P3-750 with a Quadro4 700XGL isn't noticeably slower than a P4-3.4 with a Radeon X300SE running Unigraphics NX 5. I have a P3-500 with a QuadroFX-1000 card that freaking flies running CATIA V5. Again, in contrast, my 1.8GHz P4 laptop with integrated Intel graphics sucks balls running either UG or CATIA.
Speaking for the workstation users out there, please keep making high performance GPUs, Nvidia.
AFAIK the integrated video, sound, ethernet and all are integrated in the chipset not the CPU. And nvidia does already chipset (nforce) with integrated GPU. So I thinks even without "CPU-GPU Hybrids", you can give low cost solution.
Intel is looking at reducing the price of fully-functional PCs compared to its main rival (which isn't NVIDIA).
No sig today...
Officially he is not afraid of anything that might affect Nvidia's stock.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
... he's more scared of his own driver developers.
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
Ever hear of the Innovators Dillema LOL? Of course he is going to say this because: 1) Its at an earnings report to investors, wth else is he going to say. 2) He doesnt have any way to develop a high performance CPU. Transistor scaling is here to stay. Integration of CPU and GPU onto the same silicon was inevitable. Also while Nvidia is still messing around with ASICs and 600Mhz nominal frequencies, Larrabee is done in a semi-custom / custom design methodology so will be at 2+ ghz. Keeping the CPU and GPU on the same piece of silicon also keeps BW on chip which is of paramount importance nowadays and opens up avenues for new workloads. Keep in mind Intel is going to do more with Larrabee then just run a "traditional" renderer on it........ EasyE
According to the biography on Wired, Huang spent a good deal of his childhood in a Baptist boarding school, so even if he's ethnically chinese (taiwanese), he is both legally and culturally USian
No sig for the moment.
The problem is not that Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made one stupid statement. The problem is that he said many foolish things, indicating that he is not a good CEO. Here are some:
I don't think Mr. Huang's statements are stupid; your statements are stupid!
Don't you see the courage Mr. Huang has in dealing with business giants such as Intel? His courage is exactly the quality of good CEOs for small companies such as Nvidia.
My opinion: There would be no need for all the talk if there were no chance of competition. Everyone knows there will be new competition from Intel Larabee and AMD/ATI. Everyone knows that "no different" is a lie. Lying exposes the Nvidia CEO as a weak man.
You misunderstood Mr. Huang's statements, stupid fool! What Mr. Huang's statements mean is that hybrid chips that mix microprocessor and graphics processor cores will really be no difference (from users' viewpoints) from systems that include Intel or AMD integrated graphics today---either ways are transparent from the users.
"... he explained that Nvidia is continuously reinventing itself and that it will be two architectural refreshes beyond the current generation of chips before Larrabee launches." The entire issue is that Intel+Larabee and AMD+ATI will make Nvidia irrelevant for most users. The GPU will be on the motherboard. Nvidia will sell only to gamers who are willing to pay extra, a lot extra.
The users of GPU are, of courses, gamers. For business users, they don't need GPU at all. So you should not take non-gamers into account. Furthermore, your statement underestimated the complexity of GPUs that can meet the demands of gamers. Nowadays, GPU goes multi-cores in order to cope with the raising expectations of gamers. Cheap on-board integrated solutions are no way compete with dedicated graphic chips such Nvidia.
'[NVidia VP] Tamasi went on to shoot down Intel's emphasis on ray tracing, which the chipmaker has called "the future for games." '
Ray tracing is certainly the future for games, there is no question about that. The question is when, because the processor power required is huge. It's my guess, but an easy guess, that Mr. Tamasi is lying; he is apparently trying to take advantage of the ignorance of financial analists.
Ray tracing is NOT a solution for games today or the future. Believe it or not: in the future the advance in rasterization will cause ray tracing obsolete!
"Additionally, Tamasi believes rasterization is inherently more scalable than ray tracing. He said running a ray tracer on a cell phone is "hard to conceive."
This is apparently another attempt to confuse the financial analyists, who often have only a pretend interest in technical things. Anyone understanding the statement knows it is nonsense. No one is suggesting that there will be ray-tracing on cell phones. My opinion is that this is another lie.
It is a clear and succinct true statement that ray tracing is not the future for graphic computing, especially for mobile platforms such as cell phones. I understand this statement, which makes a whole lot of senses.
Your disrespectful option about the financial analysts shows that how arrogant you are.
"We're gonna be highly focused on bringing a great experience to people who care about it," he explained, adding that Nvidia hardware simply isn't for everyone."
That was a foolish thing to say. That's the whole issue! In the future, Nvidia's sales will drop because "Nvidia hardware simply isn't for everyone." Most computers will not have separate video adapters, whereas they did before. Only powerful game machines will need to by from Nvidia.
This is a wise thing to say because it states explicitly that the target market of Nvidia excludes non-gamers. Mr. Huang knows upfront that there are fools like you who attempts to confuse people by arguing
but they'll never win my vote because they can't get Monster Truck Madness to run.
A system capable of ray tracing, however, is also capable of raster. When the tech is here we'll see what wins out. Perhaps as you point out some hybrid will take the day.
You know that's not what I meant by edge effects. In raster based systems collision points create areas where the proper pixel to display is indeterminate. That's the basic cost of rasterization and one reason why it will always look fake. An animated picture of a wave lapping a hull is never going to look like a model of a wave lapping a hull no matter what you do to refine your raster model.
Others have pointed out that photorealism isn't always the goal. That's true, but ray is also capable of doing the cartoony things without the issues you see with raster. It's all up to the game designer. One person mentioned that John Carmack prefers raster. That may be. It also may be that John Carmack is a really smart guy and isn't going to tell you what he's up to until he releases the Carmack Ray Game Engine (R)(tm)(really cool).
One major benefit of ray is that it's embarassingly parallel. Performance scales linearly across multiple cores. Each core does not have to be very fast -- its load just has to be no more rays than it can handle in each refresh cycle. Multiplying cores does not increase latency. Current raster models require maximum clocks for each GPU for good results. This is a problem because for a given GPU architecture power dissipation as a function of clock speed is definitely non-linear. This means that at some point your triple core per card, 3 card GPU system is going to require 1200 Watts at least and all of the requisite cooling, noise and physical volume required to serve that issue. OTOH, 1024 250mW cores only take 250 Watts.
And let's not forget about the fact that there might be other uses for a system with 1024 microcores that would help drive up demand and help hit the economy of scale metrics that make such a thing profitable.
Oh, and when you're not using all of those cores you can turn them off. That's a handy feature right there.
My preference is straight to the point: raytracing technology is so mature that enough of the patents to make it useful have long expired. That makes these beautiful effects open to everyone and it's unnecessary to hide the technology behind proprietary interfaces in order to avoid endless patent troll lawsuits. It's a general purpose CPU and what people run on it is not the business or responsibility of the hardware vendor. Raytracing video architecture will be open. From there progress is inevitable.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I've had Chinese friends in 5 countries. I've spent weeks in Taiwan, and imported computer parts from Taiwan directly.
Even if I spoke fluent Chinese, and lived in Taiwan, I would never use a colloquial Chinese expression. Why? Because colloquial expressions tend to have many, many hidden meanings.
Jen-Hsun Huang is obviously very intelligent. However, he has had Taiwanese parents. He didn't understand the full meaning of the colloquial phrase he used. Someone who is ethnic American and educated would not say what he said.
There are other more serious reasons why he should have not said what he said.
You said, "I beg to differ. Many questions surround this. Would you know more than John Carmack?"
Certainly John Carmack knows far more about the subject than I, far more.
Carmack is not saying he is against ray-tracing. He is only saying he is against the raw ray-tracing he says Intel is proposing.
Quoting Carmack, from the article to which you linked: "But, I do think that there is a very strong possibility as we move towards next generation technologies for a ray tracing architecture that uses a specific data structure; rather than just taking triangles like everybody uses and tracing rays against them and being really, really expensive."
Carmack is correct, and so is Intel. Intel is talking about the long-term issue of the continued success of Intel, and Carmack is talking about what can sensibly be achieved in the near future.
You said, "Since many years ago, Intel has been the major supplier of graphics hardware."
Then you said, "It's been all crappy integrated graphics so far..."
Exactly right. The point of the conference with financial analysts is that Nvidia is facing real competition that didn't exist before. Before, anyone who wanted minimally good graphics needed to buy a separate graphics adapter, which Intel did not sell.
Everyone agrees that development of games to new levels of realism will require far more computing power than is available now. Nvidia is ready to supply the new gaming GPUs. But, for the first time, Nvidia will have much greater competition for the mid- and low-range GPUs from Intel, if Intel begins supplying something other than extremely poor graphics.
People don't become fully culturally integrated until the third generation, usually, and sometimes not even then.
Anyhow, it's obvious that Huang is an intelligent person. It's obvious also that he doesn't understand the implications of what he said, or he wouldn't have said it.
It wasn't funny. No one is laughing.
The entire story to which the Slashdot linked is a disaster for Nvidia. The conference apparently communicated that no one at Nvidia has thought carefully about Nvidia's need to communicate the company's plans. Or, maybe there are no good plans.
My impression is that Huang is doing an Andy Grove. He has gotten tired, and is just not interested any more in dealing with the torrent of details necessary to running his company.
You seem to have a sound understanding of the issues involved here. That's good.
You scored a clean miss here though. If you read back, you'll see I agree with this thoroughly. It's the specialized hardware and software and the methods employed in raster approaches that are more recent tech and so more vulnerable to patent trolls. This has been the main impediment to getting the interfaces published to the point where open developers can work with them. It is the ancient and elegant ray tracing solutions where so much prior art exists from the dawn of the computer era, and the fact that it's a computational simulation of a physical process that make their use as an open platform possible now that the hardware is finally emerging that can deliver real time ray tracing.
In the end we'll see. Until then watching the events unfold will be interesting.
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I think if I had put so much thought and forethought into a post I'd log in to post it.
Slashdot is attracting a higher quality of Anonymous Coward these days.
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I'm agreeing with you. You will find that fractal geometries when carefully applied as deformation structures on regular forms create a computable pseudorandom difference sufficient to transform them to "realistic" looking irregular forms. The deformation can be baked into the construction of the model with a tool.
If you apply this idea, remember to quote me.
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The commonality of brilliance is one of the things that makes posting to /. So much fun.
Let's see what folks make of this then.
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