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The Future According To nVidia

Posted by kdawson on from the when-all-you've-got-is-a-hammer dept.

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."

3 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Will they become platform supplier? by sznupi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  2. Well API isn't their department by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. nVidia's split personality by argent · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.