Some NV30 Info

Athlon4all

Diamond Member
Jun 18, 2001
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Thanks to mad_arab at Ace's Hardware for finding this. Its an editorial on nVidia's Past, Present, and Future, and in the Future, he discusses nVidia's purchase of 3dfx, and the background surrounding the 3dfx chip "Fear". As always, one cannot be sure if there's any creditability, but I ffound it intriuging none the less. Here's the main part:

<< When 3dfx announced that it was selling itself off to cover all of its debts and essentially going out of business, they had already received working Rampage silicon from the Fab. The very day they announced that they would be divesting itself of all interests, the first Sage (programmable T&L unit) was delivered. The single Rampage/Sage combination looked to have competed very well with the GeForce 3, but the cost of each card would have been significantly smaller than the GeForce 3. Much of these savings came from the actual chip costs. The Rampage rendering core was about 26 million transistors, while the Sage core was around 18 million. Producing each chip separately is much easier than producing a single 57 million transistor GeForce 3. The dual Rampage, single Sage board would have significantly outperformed the GeForce 3, and would have cost only slightly more to produce. 3dfx was in a very good position technologically, but financially the company could no longer exist and go on with its plans.

Nine months before this tragic event, 3dfx bought Gigapixel and its technology. 3dfx instantly integrated the engineering teams and the technology of the two. Things were going very, very well in terms of engineering development, and an exciting new chip was being designed. Fear was the codename, and it was going to be something special. Basically a Rampage rendering core redefined by Gigapixel technology, it would be around 58 million transistors and produce some of the most amazing graphics ever seen. That was the original plan, and tapeout was scheduled for March of 2001. The company didn?t make it that far. NVIDIA instead got the technology and all design work done to date. NVIDIA engineers were very excited to be able to see what 3dfx was working on, because it was in many ways superior to what NVIDIA had. Now, nearly 2 years after NVIDIA acquired 3dfx, we are about to see a totally new architecture that is a fusion of the 3dfx and NVIDIA technology.

The idea of a texturing computer is that texturing resources can be dynamically allocated to the pixel pipelines that most need them at that particular time. This helps the overall performance of the core by making it more flexible to the needs of the rendered scene. Add in more advanced texturing techniques, more texture passes per clock, more internal bandwidth, and you can get the basic idea what is in store. This will be NVIDIA?s first product that will feature greater than 32 bit color accuracy. Rampage had 52 bit color (13 bit RGBA vs 8 bit), and Fear was to have 64 bit color. Internal bandwidth was improved by using the Gigapixel technology, so the performance hit of higher color accuracy was not as significant as it would initially seem. Anti-aliasing would also be improved yet again in terms of quality and performance.

NVIDIA is staying with a single core design, so all functions will reside on one chip. Sage II was to be integrated with Fear, but NVIDIA will probably go with a beefed up, Dual Vertex Shader on this chip. The idea of 3dfx, Gigapixel, and NVIDIA technology wrapped in one core should give the competition night sweats. This combination will also receive a new name, as NVIDIA wants to differentiate it from the GeForce brand.
>>



There you go!
 

j@cko

Diamond Member
Feb 13, 2000
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<< Good lord! If thats true...the NV30 is going to be amazing! >>



Haha, funny.
I wonder why would some people amazed by an article with no crediablity.
No one knows what the actual chip is gonna be nor what the tech is actually behind it, but people still get amazed by it. LOL... funny
 

Derango

Diamond Member
Jan 1, 2002
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<<

<< Good lord! If thats true...the NV30 is going to be amazing! >>



Haha, funny.
I wonder why would some people amazed by an article with no crediablity.
No one knows what the actual chip is gonna be nor what the tech is actually behind it, but people still get amazed by it. LOL... funny
>>



I said IF THATS TRUE. Read my post next time. I am not yet amazed. I was just saying IF IT IS TRUE (emphisis added since you obviously have trouble seeing those words), the NV30 will definitly be worth watching. IF IT IS TRUE Of course.
 

Pacinamac23

Senior member
Feb 23, 2001
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A lot of heresay. A lot of people thought that 3dfx was going to have some really amazing cards but looking at their track record for the past frew years before their demise I wasn't too excited about it.
 

Gog

Senior member
Feb 1, 2002
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The NV30 will probably be coming out in NVidia's next cycle which is Fall 2002.
 

BD231

Lifer
Feb 26, 2001
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Dosn't nVidia's 6-month cycle seem a litte to aggressive? With the way they keep dishing out faster and faster Video Cards, it?s almost impossible to keep up, let alone get a long life span out of a $400 dollar video card. Maybe it?s just me, but I feel nVidia is being a little careless, overly ambitious and wastefull with the video card market.
 

noxipoo

Golden Member
Aug 12, 2000
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sounds like it was written by Hardware, hehe anyway, faster cards are good, let them put out GeForce 29 tomorrow, i can buy the stuff out there now cheap.
 

Gog

Senior member
Feb 1, 2002
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I love the 6 month product cycle... all the rumours and subsequent reviews give me something intersting to read about:);). Its really amazing where 3D graphics are headed... even if I can't afford the latest and greatest hardware.

I personally would never spend $400 on a video card, about $120 is my max and that explains why I have the Geforce 3 Ti 200.

What nVidia is doing is definitely not 'careless, overly ambitious and wastefull' simply because new hardware is what spurs on Software developers to make revolutionary games. The next nVidia card, whatever its called, will be just whats needed for the likes of Doom 3.
 

SexyK

Golden Member
Jul 30, 2001
1,343
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<< What nVidia is doing is definitely not 'careless, overly ambitious and wastefull' simply because new hardware is what spurs on Software developers to make revolutionary games. The next nVidia card, whatever its called, will be just whats needed for the likes of Doom 3. >>




Great, only question I have is where are the revolutionary games?? I doesn't take a Geforce3 to make a revolutionary game, but people arent even really making graphically stunning games either. i could understand the "give them time, it's new technology" arguement 15 months ago, but come on, my Geforce3 rarely uses it's vertex and pixel shaders on anything but 3dmark. Where are the games, for the love of god, where are the games!

Kramer
 

BD231

Lifer
Feb 26, 2001
10,568
138
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I suppose your right gog. At this point reading up on stuff that no one knows much about is practically tedious :confused: The speculation and sometimes idiotic arguments that spur from such talk becomes repetitive at times. I admit I do love to see new technology come out, but being in high school and unable to make enough money to throw down on new high-end stuff whenever I please, I can?t help but feel left out :p:)
 

Gstanfor

Banned
Oct 19, 1999
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I think that anybody expecting nVidia to simply bring rampage or fear to market and call it NV30 is dreaming, quite frankly.

The technology that went into rampage and fear is now 2 years old, or if you like 4 nVidia product cycles, and the 3d acceleration world has changed greatly since then. vertex and pixel shaders are the important technology at the moment, not fixed function T&L like sage would have provided. Do you honestly think nVidia will tell the public geforce 2, 3 & 4 were all a mistake, none of the standards they set apply now and we are headed down a different path?

I'm sure small bits and pieces of 3dfx tech have been utilized by nVidia since the acquisition, but, nVidia never bought 3dfx for their technology - they bought them for their intellectual property (it is easy to create the actual technology once you have rights to the IP), to be rid of a competitor and to finally rid the world of glide.

So, NV30 may contain technology inspired by ideas and knowledge possessed by 3dfx engineers and IP, but it will not contain 3dfx technology (as it stood when the company was bought) in any easily recognisable form.

Here is some of what David Kirk, chief scientist at nVidia said concerning 3dfx in a recent interview



<< Did Nvidia's philosophy change with the purchase of 3DFX?
Not too much--we still want to be profitable and we still want to stay in business--so they haven't influenced us in that. What we did though was to mix the development teams up completely. I didn't want 3DFX people vs. Nvidia people--I wanted to have us all learn from each other and make different products.

Both companies had products in development at the time, and we could have just picked up 3DFX's products and developed those--but instead I took the two teams and shuffled them around. I got the Nvidia people to argue for 3DFX products and the 3DFX people to argue for Nvidia, so they all had to learn the advantages of the competing products. We ended up changing the projects so much that they really weren't recognizable from before, and that was the goal--we wanted the best from both sides. Plus, they are all Nvidia people now.
>>



Greg
 

BFG10K

Lifer
Aug 14, 2000
22,709
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NVIDIA is staying with a single core design, so all functions will reside on one chip

That's good to see. Really, I think we've all had enough of that multi-GPU stuff.