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NVidia + OpenGL + Linux
BJH writes "Saw this on Ars Technica - NVidia have announced their new workstation-class graphics board, and say that it's going to have OpenGL drivers for Linux. Check it out their press release for more information.
" The hardware looks really, really nice too.
Well, I can tell you some of the things that I have used or seen high-end graphics used for.
1. Visualization of the 3d structure of molecules. Many chemical reactions require an understanding of the fit between say a molecule and a zeolite in 3d. In order to visualize this in 3d I used an evans-and-sutherland graphics workstation with a mechanical shutter and jittering display image to project a 3d image into the space in front of my eyes. This type of application is big big big in the pharmacueticals industry. SGI has a very strong market share here.
2. Visualization of CFD simulations. Real-world work often requires a multi-dimensional projection of data onto a 2-d surface of large data sets - say flow fields obtained from computational fluid dynamics. Ideally you would like the ability to view the 3d time dependent result and rotate or pan the 3d field in real time. Most of the CFD work I have seen is done on HP or Sun workstations these days. Important in all sorts of places - example - modelling flows in an oil field, or in a tornado.
3. CAD/CAM. Computer aided design on a large scale. My brother is a wing designer for Boeing on the Joint Strike Fighter project. Boeing is doing all their airframe design in the digital domain now. This means preparing 3d models showing the actaul placement of every component in the airframe and determining it's mechanical performance.
Obviously this is important stuff - it's where the action is in the transferrence of science to every day life. I suppose the NVidia card may fit in the low end of some of these applications.
There have been a lot of posts so far on whether nVidia's code is open-source. nVidia created a hardware-enabled GLX driver that integrates with XFree86 3.3.x, and source is available (you can compile it yourself). However, the source is obfuscated to protect what they consider proprietary details about their cards.
XFree86 4 will be the thing to watch for GLX with integrated 3D hardware support; it looks to me like this is where nVidia is putting a lot of effort. Should be sweet!
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Brent J. Nordquist N0BJN
Are they releasing the specs/source as well so that drivers may be written for other platforms? I would *really* like to see BeOS drivers for this. It seems like the kind of hardware BeOS was made to run.
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grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
> overlay planes are needed by many high end apps,
> and if these cards dont support overlay they may
> not get far
Overlay planes are not really essential if you can grab the image and display it fast enough. I know that its a waste of memory and processor cycles and bandwidth, but for interactive applications you have those cycles and bandwidth to burn.
The nice thing about throwing out the overlay-plane hack (perhaps you can detect some bias here) is that you can do much better rendering of the foreground elements that you are interacting with. Overlay planes were typically used to draw things over static backgrounds, and were limited to just a few bits. If you just load the whole background image in every frame, then you can draw nice antialised, colored, even shadowed lines and objects over the background, and get a much richer interactive experience.
I've ported a few of my SGI-based visual effects tools to Linux, and had to give up on overlay planes, and while it was difficult at first -- I don't miss them any more. And this is using extremely slow refreshes; once there is good hardware accelerating for OpenGL glDrawPixels commands then I will not miss overlay planes at all.
One thing that these programs do is they only redraw the dirty parts of the screen. As you're dragging a rubber-band line across the screen, only a sub-rectangle of the image needs to be refreshed, and this can be substantially faster than refreshing the whole screen.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
The Nvidia drivers are actually under the XFree licence, not the GPL.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
it looks like a great chip, and, as it seems to be using much of the same technology as the GeForce, I am sure it IS a great chip....
/., that is a card I would love to have...
but did you all read the press release? it is going to be placed on some very high-end boards... it is competing in the price-class of $1000 videocards....
even if the chip is not so expensive, the board will be, the older ELSA high-end cards were VERY pricey...
too bad really, because, just like all the other members of
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
Grrr. my nick is "Forward the Light Brigade"...
They didn't say whether the Linux drivers will be GPLed, or even some Open Source(tm) variant. With all the noise about OS lately, you'd think they could at least TRY to jump in the bandwagon... unless they've already decided not to, which would be a Bad Thing. Maybe they don't know about the /. effect yet...
A little bit of info at Thresh's FiringSquad
:)
It has some information about Quadro vs. NV10, and even some CAD-related benchmarks against cards like the GVX1.
Guess who won..
-Warren
From what I've seen on the lists, the TNT cards are generally regared as faster than the Matrox cards when it comes to 3D.
But - and this is a big ol' but - Nvidia hasn't played quite as nicely as Matrox when it comes to releasing specs. So, the GLX guys have been able to optimize the heck out of the Matrox driver, and the Nvidia driver hasn't gone as far.
In fact, John Carmack has more or less stated that he's personally focusing on development for the G400 because the specs are there and he likes to program the *hardware.* This is kind of a bummer, because at this point, the TNT cards are 2 generations old - how many super-secret secrets can be left in it?
It's unfortunate that while 3D hardware is nice and cheap, the nice-and-cheap kind is designed to throw many frames/second of low-polygon models at the screen. The benchmark is Quake III, and that means the most important features on a cheap 3D card are fill rate and texture-map speed.
Higher-end cards, those designed with more advanced features like geometry setup and anti-aliasing, are much more suitable targets for whatever 3D-like user interfaces eventually arrive. You can count on such interfaces to make use of high-precision models, high polygon counts, and almost no dependence on texture-mapping (or even fill-rate, for that matter).
The key is _detail_, and that will require very high resolution rendering of anti-aliased models in very large memory spaces. Hopefully, NVidia's entry signals a new era for high-end 3D graphics pipelines, one of increasing affordability.
MJP
Don't try that "protecting the children" shit you people use to keep the tits and bad words off my TV. --Seanbaby
Still, I wonder if the nVidia coding for OpenGL will be applied to any of their earlier boards. I have an NV1 (Diamond Viper RIVA TNT V770D) board that required a driver download before I could get anything other than 320*240 on.
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My office has been taken over by iPod people.