Recent content by Dave H

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    another Dave Orton interview

    Would be fun to see Mr. Spink answer this one, but in the meantime... DEC--the Digital Equipment Corporation--was one of the leading computer systems companies in the 70s and 80s, comparable to an IBM today, or even an Intel. DEC first gained prominence in the late 60s with their PDP series...
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    Short interview with Eric Demers (sireric, ATI) on 3DCenter

    Ugh, bad idea. It might make some sense if IHV costs in making a GPU were entirely just the marginal cost of manufacturing the chips and boards. But a huge part of their cost structure is development costs--designing, implementing and verifying a hundred million transistor ASIC in...
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    I just got a microwave. I read up on dangers of microwaved

    That article is one of the most egregious examples of know-nothing pseudosceince I've ever read. (Well, ok, I couldn't force myself to read more than the first few paragraphs.) For those who can stomach even less, the operating conceit is to first lead with shocking evidence that microwaving...
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    David Kirk finally admits weak DX9 vs DX8 performance - GeFX

    I understand that cost per working die increases superlinearly with die size. The point is that this dynamic exists over the entire die-size curve (although it is overshadowed by countervailing per-die costs, like packaging and testing, at the small die size end). There is no die size at which...
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    David Kirk finally admits weak DX9 vs DX8 performance - GeFX

    No reason why it should have impacted clockspeeds, assuming extra clock stages were added to keep the slightly longer FP32 execution unit path out of the critical path. As I said, it would impact yields modestly (particularly in terms of good dies per wafer), but it's not as if there's some die...
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    David Kirk finally admits weak DX9 vs DX8 performance - GeFX

    Ok, I misremembered a bit: sireric actually said the decision was made final 1.5 years before NV30 launched, or roughly 1 year before R300 launched. Still not anything like the two years Chalnoth (and I, before sireric set me straight) posited. (Of course I was off by a factor of two as well...
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    David Kirk finally admits weak DX9 vs DX8 performance - GeFX

    Right, everything but the fragment shader registers and functional units. Placement and routing is unlikely to be a particularly lengthy process for modern GPU development; in fact, I'd be surprised if it wasn't almost entirely automated. It's an interesting problem in bleeding-edge CPU...
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    David Kirk finally admits weak DX9 vs DX8 performance - GeFX

    Nope. Sireric revealed in another thread (1 or 2 months ago) that: a) MS did not make the final decision on DX9 precisions until "about a year before the launch of NV30", i.e. Q1 02, only two quarters ahead of the launch of R300. b) ATI would have been able to accomodate a decision in...
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    NV38 in 10Oct2003 and performance Lowered?

    Nvidia doesn't own their fab; they only pay for what they use. Higher yields mean lower costs to them. (Which could then mean lower prices and thus higher demand, potentially.)
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    Interview w/ Nvidia guy David Kirk at FS

    FWIW, sireric has posted that the PS 2.0 precision choice was made by fall '01, and that the R3x0 did not become an FP24 design until after the decision was made. (Although one might guess ATI was lobbying for FP24, as a minimum precision of FP32 would have resulted in a die size cost on a chip...
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    What is the chance that the nv36 has improvments?

    If it's anything like how CPU instruction sets are done, the information whether a register stores a single 32 bit value or two packed 16 bit values is "stored" in the instructions that are used. So, for example, there will be an ADD32 instruction that treats the two source registers as 32-bit...
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    Multisample of non-uniform resolution Patent

    2x SSAA will cut your fillrate in half; 4x will cut it to one quarter, and so on. For a naive implementation, the bandwidth hit for MSAA and SSAA is the same. But because with MSAA all sub-samples of a given non-edge pixel will have the same color, there are huge opportunities for lossless...
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    Would it be wrong to say AF is the AA for textures?

    Just to add a bit to Hyp-X's excellent posts (I'd tried a couple times to cover the same ground he did, but couldn't quite manage to come up with something concise, correct, and understandable to someone with no prior knowledge of aliasing/signal theory): SSAA is a brute-force technique for...
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    Competiton over ?

    I agree. SOI will only reach its potential after a few more years of process tweaks and, perhaps more importantly, experience on the circuit design side. (On the other hand IIRC SOI's theoretical benefits decrease at smaller chip geometries...) That is certainly relevent to a discussion of...
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    Would it be wrong to say AF is the AA for textures?

    I would say exactly the opposite. Anisotropic filtering is certainly a form of antialiasing--it removes texture aliasing that would occur if you weren't using AF. (Or rather, AF allows you to use a more detailed LOD for textures mapped onto objects at an oblique angle to the screen than you...
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