ATI Mojo Day report

[DemoCoder]

I attended ATI's developer event in San Francisco last week, here are some of my comments

#1 ATI is aggressively going after developers. Everyone at the event got a free Radeon 9700 PRO. It's sitting inside my machine now. (yes, being a registered developer has its perks) They must have given out 100+ free Radeon9700 PROs.


#2 ATI has made a terrific comeback over the last year. Their developer support used to pale in comparison to NVidia's, and their demo team wasn't putting out stuff that good. There has been a complete turn around now. The amount of information ATI is distributing to developers is close to on-par with NVidia, but ATI'a demo team has surpassed NVidia. I'll get to that later.

#3 Microsoft has developed an AWESOME shader debugger for Visual Studio. You can set break points in your shaders or set breakpoints on screen pixels!. You can single step your shaders and watch each line be executed or each pixel be rendered. It uses the reference rasterizer to do this of course.

It has almost every single feature that the C++ debugger has. It also has the ability to breakpoint HLSL lines.

#4 I saw real, compiled, honest to god DX9 HLSL and it looked identical to Cg. In fact, the Microsoft presentation mentioned that MS is adding "profiles" to the language.

#5 DX9 beta 3 is immiment.

#6 Richard Huddy is still an awesome presenter. I don't know if it's the British accent or the "Weakest Link" type demeanor, but he pulls no punches. E.g. if the PowerPoint slide says "Batch Processing", Huddy won't say "You should try to batch triangles", but like a Marine Seargent, he says "I don't want one or two triangles from you, I demand a hundreds of triangles!"

#7 ATI had a RenderMonkey workshop where dozens of P4+Radeon9700PRO+LCD monitor XP+DX9 machines were setup to teach a class on how to use it. It's a pretty cool prototyping tool for artists. The procedural wood shader is nice!

#8 ATI doesn't have a magic "RenderMan -> DX9" compiler, but instead, their demo team took various SIGGRAPH materials and hacked them until they ran in real time, but you can't tell the difference! I finally saw Animusic running in real time, and every trick they used to get it running was explained in detail. Very good techniques.

#9 ATI has released a utility to take a hi-res mesh and low-res mesh and compute a normal map for the low-res mesh ala Doom3 and Polybump. Expect to see dozens of developers using this technique now that ATI has made it easy.

#10 ATI devrel employees were all dressed like Austin Powers

More later when I look at my notes.

 

[Doomtrooper]

How do you like your card is the what I want to hear....I'm still wiping beer off my monitor after I read your post

 

[DemoCoder]

I love the card (at the moment ). I was disappointed when I loaded up Counter-Strike with 6X FSAA and nothing happened until I learned that ATI isn't support FSAA in 16-bit, so I had to add -32bpp to the command line.

I also played BattleField 1942 @ 1280x1024 6xFSAA 16xANISO with no perceptable slowdown. I tried the UT2003 demo, but it's too CPU bound to make a judgement. I only have a 1.4Ghz Athlon in my system.

However, I am really waiting for DX9b3 so I can do development as doing development on this card is the most interesting thing for me. Once you've seen ATI's DX9 demos running for real, instead of as mpegs, all current stuff looks like crap. I'm way more interested in this card as a DX9 platform then in running Counter-Strike on it or BF1942 on it.

I was planning on buying this card before ATI gave it to me for free anyway. I am working on some projects that require DX9 hardware, and I can't wait for NVidia's slow ass to get get their card out.

 

[stevem]

Which driver ver are you using? Dx9b?

 

[MrB]

They gave out 250 to be exact

Wonder what will be nex in DX9 beta3. The change from beta1 to beta2 was very significant.

 

[DemoCoder]

I told a friend later that day that I am switching my allegiance from NVidia to ATI unless NVidia's next developer event gives away not only a top of the line NV30, but also a 23" flat-panel display.

(Hint hint for NVDA's event planners on how to "one up" ATI)


I love competition!


P.S. NVidia's presenters must dress up as Lord of the Rings characters. Derek Perez should Gandalf. Brian Burke as Frodo.

 

[Crazyace]

quite funny

Talking about BW with '20GB/s - noone has ever had that much' while ignoring PS2....
It's a cool card though - interesting thing is that the multitexturing from 3dfx and TNT seems to have gone - one texture fetch per cycle max...

 

[Dave Baumann]

I saw the DX9 demos running at ECTS, and I have to say that I was shocked at how low detial the car is in the car demo - virtually all the detail is coming from the bump map.

Did you see how they did the shadows on the balls in the animusic demo?

 

[Grall]

Shouldn't M$ be at like at DX9 RC1 stage by now? If they're planning on releasing beta3 then they're seriously behind schedule it seems to me. What's holding them up, how much debugging do you need to do on a god-damned API anyway before you know it's working as intended?!

Is it featurecreep or what?


*G*

 

[Dave Baumann]

AFAIK they are adding more features to give the API longevity such that they don't need another major revision (DX10) until Longhorn. Even the interim DX9.1 update that you'll get after a while isn't all that it seems from what I hear and will be little more than an exerise in marketing.

 

[DemoCoder]

Yep, the Doom3 normal map technique is great. They had the Car demo run splitscreen against a version without the normal map and it looked very blocky.

They covered most of the techniques of how they did animusic, such as the static "baking in" of shadows, the vibrating strings, the motion blur, the dynamic lighting, the shadows fading out when they move into shadows, etc.

 

[RussSchultz]

#10 ATI devrel employees were all dressed like Austin Powers

If only they were all little people and dressed like mini-me. Then the surreality would be complete.

 

[Brimstone]

Yep, the Doom3 normal map technique is great. They had the Car demo run splitscreen against a version without the normal map and it looked very blocky.

Compared to Displacement Mapping what are the pro's and cons of each or are they really to different things? With the Doom 3 method more hardware can take advantage of that because its based off of bump mapping.

 

[Sabastian]

#2 ATI has made a terrific comeback over the last year. Their developer support used to pale in comparison to NVidia's, and their demo team wasn't putting out stuff that good. There has been a complete turn around now. The amount of information ATI is distributing to developers is close to on-par with NVidia, but ATI'a demo team has surpassed NVidia. I'll get to that later.

DemoCoder could you elaborate now on just how it is that ATIs demo team has surpassed Nvidias..... I never would have thought that in this realm would ATI ever surpass nvidia. This is real interesting info, too bad there are not more who attended this event here. The fact that MS is releasing a HLSL that looks identical to nvidias Cg is also interesting. Please if you would elaborate on the matter of ATIs demo team.

 

[Ilfirin]

Yep, the Doom3 normal map technique is great. They had the Car demo run splitscreen against a version without the normal map and it looked very blocky.

Compared to Displacement Mapping what are the pro's and cons of each or are they really to different things? With the Doom 3 method more hardware can take advantage of that because its based off of bump mapping.

1. It isn't 'the Doom 3 method', the process was proposed in a siggraph paper almost a decade ago. Doom simply uses the process, not invented it

2. DM and normal mapping are two different things. Normal maps (also erroneously known as bump maps) are for [per-texel] lighting, DM is for creating/extruding geometry. Matrox's paper on DM says it requires both the normal map and the height map for DM to work properly (lighting done on the normal map, geometry recreated from the height map).

 

[alexsok]

The fact that MS is releasing a HLSL that looks identical to nvidias Cg is also interesting. Please if you would elaborate on the matter of ATIs demo team.

nVidia themselves said that Cg was designed in collaboration with Microsoft and is fully compatible with DX9 HLSL, so no big suprise there at all. You could also say that DX9 HLSL is identical to nVidia's Cg - same thing.

 

[MrB]

I told a friend later that day that I am switching my allegiance from NVidia to ATI unless NVidia's next developer event gives away not only a top of the line NV30, but also a 23" flat-panel display.

(Hint hint for NVDA's event planners on how to "one up" ATI)


I love competition!


P.S. NVidia's presenters must dress up as Lord of the Rings characters. Derek Perez should Gandalf. Brian Burke as Frodo.

lol. One lucky dog if that happened!
Did you happen to take any pictures of the event demo? I've meet most of the dev rel and the demo people. It would be nice to see them in the mojo atmosphere!

 

[alexsok]

DemoCoder could you elaborate now on just how it is that ATIs demo team has surpassed Nvidias..... I never would have thought that in this realm would ATI ever surpass nvidia. This is real interesting info, too bad there are not more who attended this event here. The fact that MS is releasing a HLSL that looks identical to nvidias Cg is also interesting. Please if you would elaborate on the matter of ATIs demo team.

Yeah, I would like to hear more about this as well...

 

[3dcgi]

Did you see how they did the shadows on the balls in the animusic demo?

I'm pretty sure the ball's shadows are volumes while the instruments are baked. If you turn on wireframe mode in the demo you should be able to verify this.

 

[LeStoffer]

#8 ATI doesn't have a magic "RenderMan -> DX9" compiler, but instead, their demo team took various SIGGRAPH materials and hacked them until they ran in real time, but you can't tell the difference!

Way cool... but could you elaborate a bit here? Does the R 9700 really have the ops-power to use DX9 for this in real time - or is it kind of a developers playground-thingy for this generation of HLSL-hardware? It just sounds awesome... 8)

Thanks for the report, but we want more info!