Actually, they'd be smart to not use PowerVR. Connecting the cost [silicon]of hardware to the price nVidia is charging is pretty crazy."
Well, regardless the silicon will be cheaper for the same performance so they can still charge less and that is a very important factor in consoles.
MS should have outlined a multi-year plan that included price drops that will accompany a manditory decrease in die size - using the president that as costs are lowered and the 'box matures slaes will increase dramtically.
Well, this is besides the point, but yeah.
nVidia is just raping MS, plain and simple... Sony has already started production of their GS [eDRAM] using a 0.13um process, and has been highly agressive in moving to smaller processes and will soon consolidate the EE & GS into a single 0.1um chip... While nVidia has done nothing. Thats the problem.
The whole console is too expensive, the GPU is only part of that. Using PowerVR tech can reduce the overall cost because memory speed (and hence price) need not be as high and also certain graphics processes can be done in hardware on tilers but not on traditionals, such as translucency sorting. This can mean getting away with a slower main processer, or just living with that extra performance.
Besides, the NG console will need to be enormously flexible while maintaing a high sustained preformance - I don't see PowerVR doing this.
Why on earth not? It is not effected by opaque overdraw which goes up and down in-game, it has no trouble with the memory inefficiency associated with small polygons and the fundamental thing to remember is that while current PowerVR incarnations do not offer flexible graphics fucntions such as pixel shaders and the like there is no reason why these cannot be implimented with the technology. Indeed there is no doubt prodcut designs with these technologies included in the RnD pipeline. The design of PowerVR series 4 is complete, even if it doesn't have the features you can bet series 5 will.
Sony's CELL looks to compleatly remove any fixed functionality from the entire 3D pipeline.
Again there is no reason why such a concept could not be applied to PowerVR technology, indeed the fact that the display list is stored could allow for additional effects. A more programmable version of the old generalised modifier volumes (tiler only again) found on the Neon250 and DC could offer inviting oppertunities.
PowerVR's region based, deffered rendering scheme wouldn't be my choice for CELL competition.
That's like saying ATi's heirachal z-buffer technology would not compete well against Nvidias FSAA techniques.
nVidia's by far the company with the more agressive and forward-looking vision;
In the case on Nvidia you are correct, but you overlook that the 'aggressiveness' of the application of PowerVR tech is down to the licencee, not PowerVR technologies or IMGTEC. I think it would be safe to say that Via are reasonably aggressive in the PC space.
It's me belief that the combined nVidia-3dfx team will soon prove to be the preemptive and unrivaled PC graphics company, beginning with the release of their first new architecture since the RIVA TNT.
I dont really know the specifics, but didn't Nvidia just buy all the assets and such, not the employees? I suppose it would have been silly to not at least try and pick up a few boffins on the way.
Besides, if your covering the entire screen with polygons that are a pixel in size, what good is a tiler? Hell, with a sustained TFlop/sec of power, you could design your own tiler...
A tiler would be fine in that situation, in the arcades PowerVR has already been combined with very powerful TnL units.
Inside NAOMI2 NAOMI2 is a highly optimized parallel rendering architecture featuring twin PowerVR rendering engines, using adaptive load balancing across the dual engine and a full hardware Geometry Transformation and Lighting processor. With no-penalty for up to six fully featured lights NAOMI2 can provide 10M triangles/sec sustained throughput in real gaming applications.
