3DLabs P20?

[megadrive0088]

is this even a rumor? I'd think that 3DLabs is working on a DX9 follow up
to the P10. whether it's called P20 or P15 or P11 doesn't matter. but they are working on something correct? perhaps Creative will get into the consumer/gaming market with whatever 3DLabs has in the pipeline.

 

[overclocked]

Well, with a little history-repeat again,

sure they are working on a followup,
sure we vill want to see creative realese it- FOR DESKTOP!
sure their PR will be fuzzy to tease us-
sure we vill be dissapointed again...

Get my point -

 

[Tahir2]

overclocked:
you, sir. are a genius 8)

 

[overclocked]

Amen!

 

[Modulor]

Yes, you can find a "P20" string in the latest drivers - beneath some others.

 

[PC-Engine]

is this even a rumor? I'd think that 3DLabs is working on a DX9 follow up
to the P10. whether it's called P20 or P15 or P11 doesn't matter. but they are working on something correct? perhaps Creative will get into the consumer/gaming market with whatever 3DLabs has in the pipeline.

Maybe P diddy?

 

[Dave Baumann]

sure they are working on a followup,
sure we vill want to see creative realese it- FOR DESKTOP!
sure their PR will be fuzzy to tease us-
sure we vill be dissapointed again...

P10 was designed long before Creative stepped on board, so its target market was always going to be workstation. Anything that is being developed now will likely have Creatives requirements built into it as well.

The question, then, is whether P20's design started before or after Creative coming on board.

 

[overclocked]

Didn´t Creative said self something that they were going to continue supporting Nvidia and so on in the desktoparea?
No Creative 3D Blaster 9700pro here ain´t.

Well Dave i won´t even guess when the work on a new part would have been started/planned, but if it is so that Creative has been involved the designgoals of the P?? it could be a budgetcard or..

Man i´m getting confused by all the info/rumours about this card and all the others!

 

[Saem]

The P10 is doing many things right. I expect others to follow it's lead. The NV30 and R300 have hints of its design philosphies. I suspect the next PXX will show significant improvements in performance on pre-doom3 style/engine games.

 

[Ichneumon]

Didn´t Creative said self something that they were going to continue supporting Nvidia and so on in the desktoparea?
No Creative 3D Blaster 9700pro here ain´t.

It was the European division that was sticking to Nvidia. Creatives US, European, and Asian divisions are fairly autonomous in the products they put on the market.

 

[psurge]

Saem, I expect you're right, but I hope they focus their optimizations and efforts on even more programmability, and on supporting both integer and 32bit fp instructions (at the expense of DX7/8 game performance if necessary).

I am also very curious to see what happens with SlipStream...

 

[Saem]

psurge,

I'm not sure but I think they're basically there when it comes to programability. I'm pretty sure the P10 can do basically anything the NV30 can do except the percision will be lower -- correct me if I'm wrong. If I'm not mistaken, didn't Carmack make a rendering pipeline for it, where it can do each pixel in about 7 passes as opposed to other chips doing it in 10. I think he eluded to being able to do shadow volumes on the chip as well, but the video RAM and AGP were the bottlenecks.

As for optimizations, well I'm hoping they can ramp their clock rate higher in the next round.

The FP texture support wasn't there because of transistor limitations, though I believe they have FP everything else.

Slipstream sounds cool. I'm just wondering how they gracefully handle overflows. I suspect such conditions might become problematic in games such as UT2K3 which likely throws incredibly large amounts of geometry at the GPU.

 

[Dave Baumann]

I'm not sure but I think they're basically there when it comes to programability. I'm pretty sure the P10 can do basically anything the NV30 can do except the percision will be lower -- correct me if I'm wrong.

Actually, they reckon there's enough FP in the pixel shader end to make P10 DX9 compliant - just don't bank on any kind of performance. AFAIK no-one has a feature yet that 3Dlabs think they can't achieve on P10.

 

[Tahir2]

No one has a feature yet.. however new features are bound to be released by ATI, NVIDIA for their next generation parts. Perhaps not DX10 features but PS3.0 VS3.0. I expect the P20 to cover OpenGL 2.0 features comprehensively. It really depends on when the P20 is released. Another thing, if 3dlabs are concentrating more on the Workstation market then there featureset is not as important as the speed and stability in specific workstation type programs the movie/game sfx industry needs, surely?

 

[Dave Baumann]

Another thing, if 3dlabs are concentrating more on the Workstation market then there featureset is not as important as the speed and stability in specific workstation type programs the movie/game sfx industry needs, surely?

Well, remember their goal with P10/OGL2: compilation of Renderman shaders...

 

[megadrive0088]

The question, then, is whether P20's design started before or after Creative coming on board

yes, good question.

 

[Saem]

No one has a feature yet.. however new features are bound to be released by ATI, NVIDIA for their next generation parts.

With the level of programmability, I really doubt such a feature would be possible. Assuming that there basically isn't any such feature. THen one has to ask when features do come out, how fast will the P10 be able to do the same.

I think ultimately the next PXX architecture will really rawk so long as they get all the FP stuff in there, slipstream lives upto most of it's claims and they ramp the clock up ludicriously high +600MHz