Interview with ATI's director of marketing for platform technologies

[josh6079]

Link

Regarding Physics:

...ATI GPUs have a superior architecture for physics when compared to those of nVidia. Consider that a modern GPU as having 48 little CPUs dedicated to computational processing. Not only do we have 48 little CPUs but they work in a massively parallel way, when compared to nVidia, we have the ability to process smaller threads and also we have the a parallel branch execution unit. For e.g. in any physics computation, there are alot of "if than" instructions.... if object A collides with B than execute C.... We can do this branch in parallel. So for a given instruction, we take about 14 cycles compared to nVidia's 20 cycles and then you couple our higher clocks....we rock their block.

Question: Your honored competition at Ageia has been talking some smack on dedicated hardware vs doing physics with the gpu. Would you expect we in the community would ever have the opportunity to see an apples-to-apples application or benchmark scenario to actually have a chance to get to the bottom of this question objectively, rather than just have to wade thru the posturing?

We really look forward to the day where there will be benchmark. It is not our place to comment on Ageia's performance or nVidia's performance but let's just say that we are optimistic against other platforms. We can also look at some facts and figures.... At GDC, nVidia shows 10,000 objects....today we can show 25,000 objects at the same frame rate.

Question: From what I hear, physics support will be driver related (meaning all it needs is a driver release for the ability of the cards to use physics), which means most to all of the new ATI video cards will support the ability to do such things. My question is this, what will someone lose from using say an x1300 pro for physics vs someone who uses an x1900xt?

The X1300 and X1900 are completely different animals. If we normalize physics performance of the nV G70 / G71 to 100%, some of our internal analysis shows that a X1600 is 4X faster and the X1900 a whopping 15X faster. We don't expect that this will be the actual game performance but should showcase the relative performance that we are expecting. We have not fully benchmarked the 1300 yet....it may be the case that we only support the X1.

Question: How will ATi's GPU's compare to one of those dedicated physics processors?

ATI expects to do well against dedicated PPUs. To match ATI's performance today, they would have to show 25,000 objects / per scene....we just haven't seen that in dedicated PPUs or nvidia's GPUs. As our GPUs get more powerful, you can fully expect our physics performance to improve. We have set the mark to beat today...but we are not standing still.

Regarding multi-GPU platforms:

Crossfire is the best performing multi-GPU platform available on the market. You are going to see a further improvement shortly. We are continuing to develop the platform to be more robust, user-friendly and most importantly, more flexible.

Question: When can we expect user controllable profiles for CF in the CCC? Since this is a highly touted feature of SLI over CF.

We are working on this and I am sure Terry will advise when it will be available.....

:laugh: I guess he means it's the best, but not yet. LOL.

Question: When will crossfire go dongleless or will it adapt an internal connector ala SLI?

As you may know the X1600 already supports soft-crossfire. However, we realize that customers want the best performance without the external dongle, so this is something that we are working on.... You will hear from us shortly on this.

Also, this is an interesting view point as to how ATI feels about frame rates compared to visual quality:

Question: From when I started working with computers to now, I have seen and felt I guess you'd say a noticeable speed increase from each generation. Lately though, I haven't felt such a large increase. The games have gotten prettier and more advanced, but in your opinion, have we hit a plateau for performance in other aspects with computers?

As a hardware hack dating back to the late 80's, I totally agree with your first part of the statement. We have seen research that shows humans cannot perceive anything less than a 50% increase in performance. At ATI we have to deliver 2X the performance of the previous generation and this will hold true in the future. But you need to consider as you get closer to reality, the importance of raw frame rate diminishes and much more of the computational power will be focused on the visual quality and nuances...

Overall, it was a good read. I think they are a little full of themselves in certain areas, but it is one of their directors afterall.

 

[Lonyo]

"If than"?
Does he mean "if then"? Or is it some new technical term?

 

[Ackmed]

Originally posted by: josh6079

:laugh: I guess he means it's the best, but not yet. LOL.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2009949,00.asp
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati...950xtx_crossfire_performance/page2.asp

Quad-SLI has too many bugs, to be the best overall for now.

As for the interview, normal PR stuff. Terry has already said they're working on profiles on Rage3D's forums, as well as most everything else in this interview. I dont take PR interviews very seriously, from anyone.

 

[josh6079]

Originally posted by: Ackmed

Originally posted by: josh6079

:laugh: I guess he means it's the best, but not yet. LOL.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2009949,00.asp
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati...950xtx_crossfire_performance/page2.asp

Quad-SLI has too many bugs, to be the best overall for now.

As for the interview, normal PR stuff. Terry has already said they're working on profiles on Rage3D's forums, as well as most everything else in this interview. I dont take PR interviews very seriously, from anyone.

Where did I mention Quad-SLI? Everyone knows it isn't mature yet so the most obvious thing to do is compare regualr SLI to CF. I also think ATI is making good ground, but SLI is still a little better for now at least.