NV3x "CineFX" info!

[john433i]

http://developer.nvidia.com/docs/IO/3121/ATT/cinefx_whitepaper.pdf

This is a paper by nVidia summarizing their new rendering architecture for the nv3x. If you go towards the end of the whitepaper there is a table outlining the specs of this architecture. There is also another pdf which has some info on the pipeline of the nv3x:

http://developer.nvidia.com/docs/IO/3122/ATT/sigcourse2002-hardware.pdf

nVidia will be releasing more info about the nv3x this week for SIGGRAPH 2002.

 

[john433i]

It looks like Friday is the day that nVidia will reveal more about the nv3x architecture

http://www.siggraph.org/s2002/conference/papers/papers13.html

 

[Judgement]

oooo I'm gettin excited

 

[CrazySaint]

I can't wait for the showdown between NV30 and the .13 9700!

 

[UlricT]

don't you guys think comparing a card that coming out maybe in 5-6 months to a card thats into final silicon already is a bit much? Ok, this time its Nvidia which is coming out later, and they have a history of coming out with groundbreaking products.... Isn't ATI the one who should be cheered for doing it first this time, even before microsoft has come out with DX9. Hey.. maybe they are gonna release DX9 when the cards hit the shelfs???

All i'm saying is its gonna be pretty unfair to ATI if you expect the 9700 to match up to the NV30 without any kind of tweaking.... and a clock speed increase from the .13um process wont be enuff.

 

[UlricT]

Ok... maybe my point is just that Nvidia always tries to rain on ATI's parade (pretty successfully in the past), but this time it seems that all they can put out are promises. I'm sure they always live up to these promises, but this time they have to play catch up, and there is no way around that, my friends.

 

[Venomous]

Ok Mr Computer Expert.

If ATI could keep up with Nvidia's product cycles, then you would see how dominating NV's products are.

Let history repeat itself. ATI's drivers will hold it back. ATI is the one with all the hype each and everytime.

Im sure as hell not going to rush on the 9700 bandwagon. ATI didnt keep their promise with Unified Driver support. I called this last year on another forum.

 

[GTaudiophile]

Originally posted by: Venomous
Ok Mr Computer Expert.

If ATI could keep up with Nvidia's product cycles, then you would see how dominating NV's products are.

Let history repeat itself. ATI's drivers will hold it back. ATI is the one with all the hype each and everytime.

Im sure as hell not going to rush on the 9700 bandwagon. ATI didnt keep their promise with Unified Driver support. I called this last year on another forum.

You nVidiots so cannot handle defeat! It's so funny to watch. Swallow your pride and get over it.

 

[boran]

sorry, but ati have done a REALLY bad job with the 8500, I bought the darn thing and I've cursed them all over it, image quality better than nVidia, my ass, the trillinear filtering is as good as nonexistent, the aniostropic filtering brigs every texture to life (really) and introduces banding all over the place, ATI has been scrapped from my list of good vidcard manufacturers (as is S3, as is SiS as is 3Dfx, so guess who's left, nVidia, I've never been disappointed by any nVidia card, which is something I cannot say from my ATI cards, (had a rage IIc (ancient I kno) a rage 128 (crap) and a rad 8500, all three where having incompatibilities with EVERY new game and now it's on it again with the 8500 (look at GTA3 and neverwinter nights, I cannot run either of them at barely 15 fps, despite having double specced req.) (and no it aint drivers nor bios, cous both R up to date)

ati has always been crap at their drivers and now they start all over from scratch with their 9700, X-cuuuse me, but I'm NOt going to be the one foolish enough to buy another ATI product ...

 

[bluemax]

I'll buy your R8500 real cheap. *I* won't have a problem with it!

 

[rahvin]

Precision: support for 64-bit and 128-bit color to eliminate artifacts and
processing errors and increase the range and robustness of effects.

Interesting quote from the paper.

 

[UlricT]

Originally posted by: Venomous
Ok Mr Computer Expert.

If ATI could keep up with Nvidia's product cycles, then you would see how dominating NV's products are.

Let history repeat itself. ATI's drivers will hold it back. ATI is the one with all the hype each and everytime.

Im sure as hell not going to rush on the 9700 bandwagon. ATI didnt keep their promise with Unified Driver support. I called this last year on another forum.

Well... ATI has been keeping up with Nvidia technology without have as many product cycles. SO, i would say that IF ATI keeps up with Nvidias 6 month releases (which i doubt they will do), shouldnt their technology be getting further ahead of Nvidia?

ATI does have a history of bad driver support, and thus far they havent lived up to their promises. Lets hope the CATALYST thing works out as well as the DETONATORS... or at least half as well

With all your talk about hype, I just have a simple question: Which was being talked about earlier? The NV30 or the 9700? If you had done a simple search on google for both a month or two ago, i'm positive NV30 would have brought up 5x the search results as compared to the 9700.

All I'm saying is that what ATI has done is commendable, not the best thing since sliced bread...

 

[Mr.IncrediblyBored]

Originally posted by: rahvin

Precision: support for 64-bit and 128-bit color to eliminate artifacts and
processing errors and increase the range and robustness of effects.

Interesting quote from the paper.

Interesting why exactly? Isn't 128-bit FP precision pretty much standard with DX9-grade hardware? I know R300 supports this.

 

[kuk]

Originally posted by: KnightBreed

Originally posted by: rahvin

Precision: support for 64-bit and 128-bit color to eliminate artifacts and
processing errors and increase the range and robustness of effects.

Interesting quote from the paper.

Interesting why exactly? Isn't 128-bit FP precision pretty much standard with DX9-grade hardware? I know R300 supports this.

128-bit color != 128-bit FP precision ...
Or am I not getting this?

Kuk

 

[ElFenix]

128 bit, either whole or FP, is 128 bit. with FP being more accurate. if ATi is using 128 bit FP numbers for internal color calculations then carmack got 64 bits more accuracy than he requested.

 

[rahvin]

Originally posted by: ElFenix
128 bit, either whole or FP, is 128 bit. with FP being more accurate. if ATi is using 128 bit FP numbers for internal color calculations then carmack got 64 bits more accuracy than he requested.

That's the thing. I can't find anything that says what color calculations ATI will be doing. Their pixel pipelines are 128bit floating point but I don't think that means the color calcs are being done at 128bit floating point precision.

 

[Mr.IncrediblyBored]

Wouldn't 1280x960 require almost 60MB of memory just for the front/back/z-buffer? What about FSAA, triple buffering, or memory bandwith? :Q

Oh, well. Potentially slow or not, somebody has to do it first.

Edit: I meant at 128-bit.

 

[SexyK]

Insinuated in that paper is the fact that FF:Spirits Within "can be achieved in real time" with nv3x cards. If this is true, ATi will need a new pair of pants, because R300 won't be able to touch it. Of course, none of this really matters, because even the holy grail of Doom 3 won't come anywhere near the graphics complexity of Spirits. I'm tempted by these cards, but there's no way I'm going to shell out $400 to watch 3dmark go by fast looking pretty. Unless there is some real application of all this technology, forget about it. I've got a GeForce3, and it still hasn't got many apps to work on. I'd rather spend the money on other parts of my system that make the whole computing experience better.

Kramer

 

[AmdInside]

I have a Geforce 4 Ti 4400 card and it feels great to not have to worry about updating drivers all the time just so that games run on my card. ATI, even though their driver support is much better than say a year or two ago, still has much more problems that NVIDIA where a new game will not work, then they need to fix it and it soon gets released as a leaked driver and problems are fixed. My Geforce 4 Ti 4400 card will keep me happy until the NV30 comes out. Then I may decide to upgrade. I really don't think the Radeon 9700 will play Doom III smooth enough on high quality mode.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: UlricT

All I'm saying is that what ATI has done is commendable, not the best thing since sliced bread...

I have to disagree . . . sliced bread isN'T that big of a deal.




ATI cards take a bit more tweaking and computer know how to get working exactly right compared with Nvidia's. However, for the price difference and features, I am willing to work a bit harder.

Insinuated in that paper is the fact that FF:Spirits Within "can be achieved in real time" with nv3x cards.

They ALREADY can be so rendered in real-time . . . however the "FPS" is pretty slow.

 

[BDawg]

Originally posted by: SexyK
Insinuated in that paper is the fact that FF:Spirits Within "can be achieved in real time" with nv3x cards. If this is true, ATi will need a new pair of pants, because R300 won't be able to touch it. Of course, none of this really matters, because even the holy grail of Doom 3 won't come anywhere near the graphics complexity of Spirits. I'm tempted by these cards, but there's no way I'm going to shell out $400 to watch 3dmark go by fast looking pretty. Unless there is some real application of all this technology, forget about it. I've got a GeForce3, and it still hasn't got many apps to work on. I'd rather spend the money on other parts of my system that make the whole computing experience better.

Kramer

Remember, they only have to hit 24 fps for the movie...not that this isn't an awesome achievment.

 

[SexyK]

They ALREADY can be so rendered in real-time . . . however the "FPS" is pretty slow.

Remember, they only have to hit 24 fps for the movie...not that this isn't an awesome achievment.

From Gamesdomain:

The demonstration ran on an Nvidia Quadro-based workstation. While a considerable achievement, don't expect games to be looking as complex as the film any time soon. Although the Quadro DCC (Nvidia's product for professional graphics) has similar specs to the gaming alternative - the Geforce3 - the scenes were only able to run at approximately 10 per cent of the framerate that the film was broadcast in. Additionally, the complexity of many shots in the film, which were composited from up to 500 different layers, cannot be replicated in real-time. The final rendering process for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within took an average of 90 minutes per single frame.

So really, nVidia's previous realtime rendering of the film was no where near actaully rendering the film in real time. And in reguards to "only" having to make 24 fps for the film, i think the 90 minutes per frame shows how hard it would be to render that *real time* even at only 24 fps. We're talking about a farm of SGI machines taking 90 mins a frame. If the nv 3x can render Spirits at even 10fps with half the detail, it would be a truly, utterly revolutionary piece of hardware that makes the R300 look like a Riva128.

Kramer

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: SexyK

They ALREADY can be so rendered in real-time . . . however the "FPS" is pretty slow.

Remember, they only have to hit 24 fps for the movie...not that this isn't an awesome achievment.

From Gamesdomain:

The demonstration ran on an Nvidia Quadro-based workstation. While a considerable achievement, don't expect games to be looking as complex as the film any time soon. Although the Quadro DCC (Nvidia's product for professional graphics) has similar specs to the gaming alternative - the Geforce3 - the scenes were only able to run at approximately 10 per cent of the framerate that the film was broadcast in. Additionally, the complexity of many shots in the film, which were composited from up to 500 different layers, cannot be replicated in real-time. The final rendering process for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within took an average of 90 minutes per single frame.

So really, nVidia's previous realtime rendering of the film was no where near actaully rendering the film in real time. And in reguards to "only" having to make 24 fps for the film, i think the 90 minutes per frame shows how hard it would be to render that *real time* even at only 24 fps. We're talking about a farm of SGI machines taking 90 mins a frame. If the nv 3x can render Spirits at even 10fps with half the detail, it would be a truly, utterly revolutionary piece of hardware that makes the R300 look like a Riva128.

Kramer

Talk about 'speculation".

From that same source:

Square and Nvidia have demoed scenes running in real-time from this summer's ultra-realistic looking CG animated film, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, at SIGGRAPH 2001.

So, a CURRENT GeForce3 can already render FF:TheMovie in real Time at about 2.5 frames a second. 10 fps doesn't look like that huge an improvement (I'll bet the 9700 can already do close to that).

EDITED.

 

[UlricT]

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: SexyK

They ALREADY can be so rendered in real-time . . . however the "FPS" is pretty slow.

Remember, they only have to hit 24 fps for the movie...not that this isn't an awesome achievment.

Talk about 'speculation".

From that same source:

Square and Nvidia have demoed scenes running in real-time from this summer's ultra-realistic looking CG animated film, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, at SIGGRAPH 2001.

So, a CURRENT GeForce3 can already render FF:TheMovie in real Time at about 2.5 frames a second. 10 fps doesn't look like that huge an improvement (I'll bet the 9700 can already do close to that).

EDITED.

Come on guys... you really think that report was a 100% authentic? If it was (and the report is on SISGRAPH 2001!!!), we'd already be seeing technology demos out in public and people raving about it. Also, we should have seen all our favorite game companies run out and try to take over from the movie industry. A perfect doomsday scenario for Hollywood, unless they go into making intro-cinematics for games. Oops, with Spirits within quality graphics, we dont even need cinematics anymore... my bad...

Do you think the whole Final Fantasy rendering team was working out from a single Workstation? Get real.... They must have had hundreds (if not thousands) of machines running in parallel on the rendering, and THEN it should get close to 1% of real-time. 130 hours to render a fully animated movie aint too bad, at least for me.


The technology might get there in 2-3 years

 

[SexyK]

Originally posted by: UlricT

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: SexyK

They ALREADY can be so rendered in real-time . . . however the "FPS" is pretty slow.

Remember, they only have to hit 24 fps for the movie...not that this isn't an awesome achievment.

Talk about 'speculation".

From that same source:

Square and Nvidia have demoed scenes running in real-time from this summer's ultra-realistic looking CG animated film, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, at SIGGRAPH 2001.

So, a CURRENT GeForce3 can already render FF:TheMovie in real Time at about 2.5 frames a second. 10 fps doesn't look like that huge an improvement (I'll bet the 9700 can already do close to that).

EDITED.

Come on guys... you really think that report was a 100% authentic? If it was (and the report is on SISGRAPH 2001!!!), we'd already be seeing technology demos out in public and people raving about it. Also, we should have seen all our favorite game companies run out and try to take over from the movie industry. A perfect doomsday scenario for Hollywood, unless they go into making intro-cinematics for games. Oops, with Spirits within quality graphics, we dont even need cinematics anymore... my bad...

Do you think the whole Final Fantasy rendering team was working out from a single Workstation? Get real.... They must have had hundreds (if not thousands) of machines running in parallel on the rendering, and THEN it should get close to 1% of real-time. 130 hours to render a fully animated movie aint too bad, at least for me.


The technology might get there in 2-3 years

That was my whole point. It was 90 minutes a frame for Spirits. nVidia says CineFX will bring that kind of detail to the desktop, so if thats anywhere near true, the card will be revolutionary.