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The Future According To nVidia
NerdMaster writes "Last week nVidia held their Spring 2008 Editor's day, where they presented their forthcoming series of graphics processing units. While the folks at Hardware Secrets couldn't tell the details of the new chips, they posted some ideas of what nVidia is seeing as the future of computing. Basically more GPGPU usage, with the system CPU losing its importance, and the co-existence of ray-tracing and rasterization on future video cards and games. In other words, the 'can of whoop-ass' nVidia has promised to open on Intel."
I was wondering about this...now that nVidia wants CPU to loose its importance _and_ they started to cooparate with Via on chipsets for Via CPUs (which perhaps aren't the fastest...but I've hard the latest Isaiah core is quite capable), will we see some kind of merge?
One that hath name thou can not otter
nVidia doesn't do the APIs for their cards. They have no properitary API, their native APIs are DirectX and OpenGL. In fact, the advances in those APIs, more specifically DirectX, often determines the features they work on. The graphics card companies have a dialogue with MS on these matters.
This could be an area that OpenGL takes the lead in, as DirectX is still rasterization based for now. However it seems that while DirectX leads the hardware (the new DX software comes out usually about the time the hardware companies have hardware to run it) OpenGL trails it rather badly. 3.0 was supposed to be out by now, but they are dragging their feet badly and have no date when it'll be final.
I imagine that if MS wants raytracing in DirectX, nVidia will support it. For the most part, if MS makes it part of the DirectX spec, hardware companies work to support that in hardware since DirectX is the major force in games. Until then I doubt they'll go out of their way. No reason to add a bunch of hardware to do something if the major APIs don't support it. Very few developers are going to implement something that requires special coding to do, especially if it works on only one brand of card.
I remember back when Matrox added bump mapping to their cards. There was very few (like two) titles that used it because it wasn't a standard thing. It didn't start getting used until later, when all cards supported it as a consequence of having shaders that could do it and it was part of the APIs.
I am a bit skeptical. If AMD's experimentation with combining the CPU and GPU bears fruit it might actually mean the end for the traditional GPU's. nVidia doesn't have a CPU that can compete with AMD and Intel so I think nVidia is the one in trouble here. But I suppose nVidia has to keep up appearances to keep the stocks from plummeting.
Nvidia's chief scientist, David Kirk, is really down on raytracing and particularly on dedicated raytracing hardware.
http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/raytracing-vs-rasterization.html
However... Dr Philipp Slusallek, who demonstrated how even a really slow FPGA implementation of raytracing hardware could kick general purpose processors (whether CPU or GPGPU) butts in 2005, has been working as a "Visiting Professor" at nVidia since October 2007.
They're still playing their cards close to their chest.
Right. The special hardware being separate graphics-optimized cores, in this case.
Closed drivers suck for pragmatic reasons.
Just because YOU haven't paid the price yet doesn't mean it isn't true.
I bought two top-end nvidia cards (spent $350+ each on them) only to find out that because my monitors don't send EDID information their binary-blob drivers wouldn't work. The problem was that my monitors required dual-link DVI and even though these top-of-the-line cards had dual-link transceivers built into the chip (i.e. every single card of that generation had dual-link transceivers, it wasn't unique to one vendor's model) nvidia's brain-dead binary-blob drivers would assume that their own transceivers where single-link if they failed to get EDID information and nothing you could do in the config files would convince them otherwise. it even printed it out in the driver syslog messages "initializing single-link dvi transmitter..."
I reported the bug to nvidia, I even fucking proved it out by buying an EDID generator (Gefen dvi detective) to force an EDID down the wire to the nvidia cards.
But Nvidia's support for linux is informal. They don't officially support linux. You heard me, its "best level of effort" where the engineers assigned to the work are shit-for-brains who just ignore problems that they can't grasp rather than an official support program with bug-reports and escalation.
So, I ended up spending an extra $150 (plus DAYS of my time figuring out the problem) all of which could have been reduced to about 1 day's worth of effort if the source was available for me to fix myself.
Oddly enough, RMS had a similar problem once upon a time - a closed source printer driver was buggy as hell, and the printer manufacturer refused to either fix the bugs or send him the source so he could fix it himself. Amazing how little things have changed since then, despite all the hype about "Open Source."
At least ATI has committed to fully Free drivers for their next gen cards, due in a month or so. (The current cards aren't fully Free because the DRM hardware is entangled with the video decode/playback acceleration hardware so they won't release a driver that supports accelerated video playback for fear it will reveal the cracks in their DRM. The next gen cards seperate the DRM hardware from everything else so we can just ignore it.)
According to nVidia the dream gaming system will consist of quad nVidia GPU cores running on top of a nVidia chipset-equipped motherboard, with nVidia-certified "Enthusiast" system components. Meanwhile the company just will not work on LOWERING the power consumption of their graphics cards. Why do we need one-kilowatt power supplies? Because nVidia says so!
Fuck nVidia.