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New Multi-GPU Technology With No Strings Attached
Vigile writes "Multi-GPU technology from both NVIDIA and ATI has long been dependent on many factors including specific motherboard chipsets and forcing gamers to buy similar GPUs within a single generation. A new company called Lucid Logix is showing off a product that could potentially allow vastly different GPUs to work in tandem while still promising near-linear scaling on up to four chips. The HYDRA Engine is dedicated silicon that dissects DirectX and OpenGL calls and modifies them directly to be distributed among the available graphics processors. That means the aging GeForce 6800 GT card in your closet might be useful once again and the future of one motherboard supporting both AMD and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations could be very near."
If there's no strings, how are they connected?
No, but I did throw granola at a deaf person once
is that suppose to be ATI and NVIDIA
I gave TFA a quick perusal and it looks like some sort of profiling is done. I was about to ask about how it handled load balancing when using GPU's of disparate power, but perhaps that has something to do with it. It may even run some type of micro-benchmarks to determine which card has more power and then distribute the load accordingly.
I'll reserve judgement until I see reviews of it really working. From TFA it looks like it has some interesting potential capabilities, especially for multi-monitor use.
ATI were bought out by AMD, so future ATI GPUs will be released by AMD.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Can it work with Linux or OS X?
Someone port java to opengl.
Seriously. That would rock.
You can use OpenGL from Java with JOGL. Or were you thinking of running a Java or J2EE stack on your GPU? (That would be a really bad idea, in case there were any doubts)
Jean-Francois Im's blog
Ack! Will this outdate my math coprocessor?
...
All your GPU are belong to Lucid!
(sorry guys)
what is attached though:
ints
booleans
longs
short
bytes
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
So its obvious that these cards could have been working together now for some time. They aren't as incompatible as AMD and NVidia would like us to think. Of course this leaves only one course of action; they must immediately do something "weird" in their next releases to make them no longer compatible.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Next you'll need a 1,000 watt power supply just to run your computer. How long until my home computer is hooked up to a 50 amp 240 volt line?
I mean, if one GPU is good and two GPUs are better, does that mean 5 are fantastic?
I used to have a Radeon 1950 Pro in my current system, which is nowhere near the top of the scale in video cards (in fact, it's probably below even average). It was so loud and literally doubled the number of watts my system took while running (measured by Kill-a-Watt). I took it out and now just use the integrated Intel graphics adapter. Man, that was fast enough for me but I don't play games very often.
I'm a big tall mofo.
What is this 1996? That was true of Doom vs WinDoom before Direct X. I don't think I've had a problem since then.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
How many people feel this is an old card that should be in a closet? If your not a hard core gamer that is a very good video card. My fastest card (out of 4 comps) is a 256meg 7600GS (comparable to a 6800GT) on an Athlon 2500+ w/1 gig mem. Plays all the games I want without a prob and is more than fast enough to run any none game app.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Sounds like Head In The Cloud Computing (TM)
I record my sleeptalking
Power supply units only supply so much energy, and before then cause interesting system instability.
Also, given the increasingly growing cost of energy, it might be worth buying a newer generation card just for the sake of saving the energy that would be used by multiple older generations of graphics cards. Not the newer cards use less energy in general - but multiple older cards being used to approximate a newer card would use more energy.
I guess power supplies are still the underlying limit.
As an additional aside, I'm still kind of surprised that there hasn't been any lego-style system component designs. Need more power supply? Add another lego that has a power input. Need another graphics card? Add another GPU lego. I imagine the same challenges that went into making this hydra GPU thing would be faced in making a generalist system layout like that.
Ryan Fenton
I agree this is a common problem in modern games; see http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1942/programming_responsiveness.php
Don't confuse control latency with reaction time. Reaction time will be at least 150ms for even the best players, but humans can notice time delays much smaller than best reaction time. A good rhythm game player can hit frame exact timing at 60fps -- a 17ms time window. With low enough latency the game character feels like a part of your own body, rather than something you are indirectly influencing.
The same thing applies to GUIs, and only a very short delay will destroy that feeling of transparency of action. I never actually used BeOS myself, but I read that it was designed with low interface latency as a priority, which was why it got such good reviews for user experience.
Latency will be a problem. All that extra message passing and emulation layers.
Already, most Windows 3d games lead me feeling a little disconnected compared to DOS games.
The sound effects and graphics always lag behind the input a little.
Try playing doom in DOS with a soundblaster, then try a modern windows game. With doom you hear and see the gun go off when you hit the fire button. In a modern 3d game, you don't.
I've experienced the same thing over a number of different computers.
Most monitors have about a 30-50 ms input lag, meaning the image is always a frame or two behind in most modern games. You can get a 0-5 ms input lag monitor, though. The DS-263n is a good example. I felt like everything was lagged ever since I switched to LCDs, but once I picked up the 263, that feeling is gone. The feeling of sound lagging input could be a different issue or it could be psychological.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Why does the summary include two links to the same article? If there are two links, shouldn't there be two articles?
And why does the summary link the phrase "allow vastly different GPUs to work in tandem?" Not only isn't it a quote from the article, it actually contradicts the article. The article says "To accompany this ability to intelligently divide up the graphics workload, Lucid is offering up scaling between GPUs of any KIND within a brand (only ATI with ATI, NVIDIA with NVIDIA)." How did anyone get "vastly different GPUs" from this?
But it looks like it will need plenty of threads to work though.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This is most likely due to a feature on newer cards and drivers whereby the video card actually renders ahead of time. They have algorithms to predict what the next 3-5 frames will be and the GPU uses extra cycles to go ahead and render those. That way, if something happens like there turns out to be a high-geometry object that pops out and gets loaded into memory, the video card has a buffer before the user notices a drop in their framerate.
The drawback? You get control lag. Newer drivers let you adjust this or even set it to 0 -- but you will notice that your overall FPS will decrease if you set it to 0 because the card cannot optimize ahead-of-time that way.
For extremely parallel code, why not?
A: Satriani is a messenger from God.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
GPUs very good at running a series of highly parallel maths... but comparisons and conditional jumps required for general computing erm... stuff?
I dunno, think that used to be the case, not sure whether it still is but I'd guess so.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Well, is it?
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
That's why there are bigger power supplies. I can find 1200W ones without any trouble, or even a 2000W one at a major online store, though that one would be tricky to fit into most cases as it's double-high, not to mention the thing will run you $650.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The feeling of sound lagging input could be a different issue or it could be psychological.
Or in 30-50 milliseconds it could be, y'know, the speed of sound.
I saw the product tonight at Intel Developer Forum. Looks like it actually works, and the execs in the booth said production silicon arrived yesterday.
So reaction times are about 150ms, but if you know in advance, you can hit 17ms?
That's some interesting stuff.
As far as rhythm games go, I make my living as a musician. Most instruments.
I wonder if I have got into the habit of intending physical actions in advance, so reaction time is less important than latency.
In that article they mention frame jitter as well, which I think is the thing that bothers me most. My usual instruments don't do that.
The article was interesting, but it doesn't explain why Doom would feel less like there was less latency. Wouldn't the main loop be the same thing?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
....if you are sitting about 10-15m from your speakers......
you must have a pretty big gaming setup... :)
Absolutely, and I'm sure musicians will be most sensitive to these effects. Performance isn't just playing the notes as written, it's about phrasing/groove/swing/etc., and this requires very subtle and precise timing. And just like frame timing jitter in a game, it contributes to "feeling" of quality in a way untrained listeners will likely notice without being able to explain.
Apologies for my ignorance, but is this an issue with LCD monitors only? Is being guttertech and still using a CRT helping me to remain an LPB?
The same thing applies to GUIs,
And that's the only feature the iPhone has that I would readily sacrifice a hundred virgins for to obtain on my Blackberry.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Yes, CRTs have something like 1-2 ms latency + refresh rate.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
Have a look at NVIDIA's CUDA for an example of General Purpose GPU processing.
Unexpect the expected!
No no, you're thinking "port OpenGL to Java". I want to see a Java VM written in OpenGL shader language.
Maybe having 384 lame little stream processors will make Java fast enough to compete with... um... Borland Pascal on a Cyrix 386.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Sort of, CUDA requires that every process complete in the same time. So something like a ray tracing algorithm that will complete in the same amount of time regardless of inputs works great whereas some other systems that use branching and looping wont work.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
A quick glance does look like this is the case. It's like having a load of extra ALUs which can speed up number crunching in apps where the same or similar actions need to be performed against a series of values, such as working with matrices, FFTs, signal encoding/decoding. But GP computing also needs flow control; conditional branching, which still needs the main CPU. (Memory management also, but GPUs do have at least basic memory management as they have increasingly large chunks of memory for caching textures etc). Setting up the GPU to do stuff for ya takes overhead, which pays off if you're using it enough, so yeah being able to write functions that take advantage of it from languages like java could be beneficial, but you couldn't port the actual java vm over to the GPUs.
(but still with the disclamer "from a quick glance" - deeper inspection may prove otherwise)
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
True enough. And the sad part is I felt really bad disagreeing with him. I almost joined in. Doom II is the pinnacle of games. It has never gotten any better and it never will.
Well, that or qubert.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The chips are connected with Intra-Tubules which are micro versions of The Tubes that connect up the The Internets.
Got an NVidia card? Go into the NVidia control panel, "Manage 3D Settings", "Maximum pre-rendered Frames", and set it to 0. I'm sure you can do something very similar with an ATI card.
Of course, I have a feeling that it's purely psychological what you're experiencing. With a modern computer (and I'm talking about one with more than 133 MHz) the "Windows" latency is below the threshold of humans. In modern 3d games, yes, I do hear the gun go off when I click the mouse - if my computer's specs are high enough to actually play the game at 60 FPS. Doom had the exact same problem - if your computer sucked, there was latency on the gun. Have the rose-colored glasses made you forget that?
While TFA does not give any prices, the Hydra chip and a mainboard with multiple PCIe x 16 slots (that is the high bandwidth variety you want for graphics cards) cost extra money too.
As an example, the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe (4 PCIe x 16 slots) costs 144 Euros at my preferred online store, while cheaper ASUS boards with only one PCIe x 16 slot costs 60-70 Euros. Add the Hydra chip, and I guess you'll end up with a price difference over 100 Euros. Which will pay for a midrange modern graphics card that equals several old ones in performance.
C - the footgun of programming languages
If you look at the open source drivers for GPUs, those are full of bugs, that means that this chip will have to deal with the bugs of ALL GPUs... Bare non-sense.
I want to take the opportunity to rant about the newest graphics cards, since that's slightly relevant to your post.
It's been two years since I upgraded my rig and the GF 7600GS could use a replacement. Except I can't find anything that would be reasonably more powerful and not output heat like an oven. GF 9600/9800 and Radeon 3850/4850 all have 70W+ TDPs and either come with noisy fans or really huge heat sinks.
That means the aging GeForce 6800 GT card in your closet might be useful once again
I've still got a 6600 GT in my machine you insensitive clod !
Video cards don't predict what the next frames will be - they simply let the app continue to render frames, which queue up while waiting for the screen's next refresh.
As a recording musician I can attest to the fact that using computer based virtual instruments that have an output latency of more than about 6 or 7 milliseconds causes noticeable "lag" that's very annoying, unless one is playing the keyboard quite slowly. If the latency increases to 12-15 ms, it becomes pretty much intolerable.
It really depends on the architecture of the GPU's processing elements. An Intel Larrabee would have little trouble with Java. A Cell SPU port would be a bitch to do.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I agree with parent 100% on the DS-263N.
I was using exclusively CRTs up until July of this year, when my last good (professional quality) one died. I was reluctant to switch away, because most LCDs I have seen looked like crap. I was proven wrong with the DS-263N.
I am a visual effects and game dev artist, so color accuracy and display uniformity is a must for me. I also do a lot of gaming, so input lag and scaling options (for 4:3 only games) is also a big factor.
Before I purchased, I did a lot of reading and searching for the right monitor. I stumbled upon the LCD thread at the AnandTech forums. It had everything I needed to know about choosing the right monitor. In the "Displays du Jour" section of the post, the DS-263N was listed as being an excellent 8-bit IPS TFT with less than a frame of input lag. I read a numerous consumer reviews on the monitor, and they were also consistently favorable.
I finally made the jump to the DS-263N, and I was not disappointed.
It's BRIGHT, much brighter than my CRT.
The viewing angle is amazing, and the gamma does not change when you shift your view. It only dims just a bit at extreme angles, but the dimming is uniform.
The monitor has 1:1, aspect, and stretch scaling options. So I can happily Quake away at 1600x1200 with no pixel interpolation and only bars to the each side.
The only two issues I have with it are:
1) A single dead green subpixel in the corner (However, I rarely notice it. It's almost impossible to see when gaming or watching a movie)
2) You can adjust the side bar color for viewing non-native resolutions, but it's impossible to get it completely black.
Aside from those issues, it is one of the best monitors I have ever used.
Unfortunately, they were discontinued from production earlier this year and the DS-265W is supposed to take its place.
Hopefully, it will be just as good or better than the DS-263N when it's released.
Like... an optimizing compiler with OpenMP support that'll break down functions suitable for a GPGPU? Then based on some profiling data (both in development and runtime) it would automatically use the most optimized path, in similar vain to Intel's MT optimizations for their chips.
The last thing I want is closed source shit infesting my linux install. [rant rant rant]
INVIZIBL MARKETSHAER! LOL!
You must be new to Florida. They always have more rain in late Summer and less rain in the Fall and Winter.
The weather stays fair and warm in October and November and the air fare and hotel rates are low until after Thanksgiving day.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
I very much doubt that GPU's predict and render ahead.
I think you mean that a number of frames are rendered into a FIFO queue, a delay-line. This is ofcourse rendering behind, not ahead. Often three buffers are used (on-screen, next-screen, rendering) because it reduces the time waiting for swapping the front and back buffer.
Having more than 3 buffers smooths the fps but increases lag and does not further reduce cpu idle time.
I'm still kind of surprised that there hasn't been any lego-style system component designs
are you serious? PCI/PCIe/SATA/eSATA/ISA/VESA I can name hundreds of standards that do just what you say. There are dozens of them out there for the interconnects and power.
The reason there are so many different ones out there is really 2 things. Not invented here, and can not expand the port anymore without burning out older equipment if you plug one in.
For example with PCI there was no reason to change the shape of the connector when they went to PCIe. Yet they did. It was mostly so if you plugged a PCI card into a PCIe slot it wouldnt melt your card and your MB. Could they have designed around that? Probably. But just from a simple it doesnt fit makes a lot of problems 'go away'. You also do not have to drag along legacy issues.
Once you fix yourself into a 'lego' style you buy yourself some short term flexibility at a long term design cost. They even tried this with the ISA slot. They kept making it longer and longer adding in more and more pins. You could take a 8 bit card from the mid 80s and plug it into a mid 90s MB and it would work if you had drivers. The problem was the connector got HUGE. More pins = more money. Sure its an extra 8 bucks but say your making 10k of the things... The flexibility ended up being a kludge ontop of a kludge.
Dont think so? Go look at a MB from the mid 90s. Look for a VESA/ISA mb. 16 bit ISA slot and then a 32bit VESA slot just after it. I sacrificed many knuckles on that bad boy design. They were painful to put in and take out. Snapped a few in my day just because they would get stuck.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_Local_Bus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vlb.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vlb_svga.jpg
Lego designs sound good at first. At first they are! Then you want to add something that doesnt fit anymore. That is when the kludges start rolling in.
I think picture quality would vary substantially over the combined image because of the differences in anti-aliasing and texture filtering algorithms used over the years. Newer cards have the ability to make custom anti-aliasing filters, but I still think that differences in texture filtering could be a problem.
That means the aging GeForce 6800 GT card in your closet might be useful once again and the future of one motherboard supporting both AMD and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations could be very near.
This statement shows a lack of understanding of how video card hardware works. You could never combine the different platforms to render a single image. You'd be able to tell that there were two separate rendering implementations. Think back long ago, to the days when quake 3 was just coming out... ATI had a very lousy fog implementation. NVIDIA had a reasonable one. Now imagine that you're flipping the fog implementation between cards. One frame it might be ATI style the next, NVIDIA. Or even worse, two different implementations in the same frame!
This is also why you can't render 3D movies (like from 3DSMax) using hardware acceleration. Every pixel of every frame must be from the same algorithm. 3DSM does that in its own software.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
While the graphical rendering capabilities of an unmatched pair of older vidcards is limited (compared to newer cards), they might be more useful by games that take advantage of General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU) for its non-graphical systems.
Perhaps these could be makeshift physics accelerators? Or used for better 3D environment-sensitive sound?
Having a spare parallel processor around would be mighty handy...
One man's constant is another man's variable.