"Digital Media Professionals"

A

arjan de lumens

Veteran
http://www.dmprof.com/index_en.html

Seems we got a new 3D HW company on our hands, with a new "revolutionary" approach to 3d rendering. Apparently, they've even secured $13M of funding already, so I expect something to appear from them sometime soon-ish.

Looking at the feature set of their technology, it looks jaw-droppingly impressive at first. Phong shading, back-face refraction mapping, and a lot of other really big "wow" features. They even claim to have solved the soft shadow problem.

But, at least IMO, there is something ... amiss. It's as if they have taken fixed-function rendering to the extreme, added lots and lots of new features, but still kept the basic pipeline fixed-function - they do not talk at all about programmability - this looks like it might clash hard with the programmability approaches of DX9+ and OpenGL2+, leaving a potentially great architecture in a total no-man's land as far as API support is concerned. Also, they give no hard performance numbers - making me ultimately wonder what will happen when you try to run e.g. Doom3 on it - will it cream the GF6800Ultra or make a GF2MX shine in comparison?
 
So far as DX9 compatibility, what on those web pages makes you think they are targeting PC games for their technology?
 
Well I hope they make a pc viddy card, I like their color scheme.

It's about time for a blue schemed viddy card manufacturer....
yep.gif
 
From the "Recruit" page:
SOFTWARE ENGINEERS

Job Description:
・ Device Driver / Graphics Library / API design engineer
Click to expand...
Oh well, yet another company going out of the market within a few years, unless they get a console deal, which just ain't gonna happen. And their mobile plans don't seem like a priority to me either...

Uttar
 
$13M is nowhere near enough to compete with the likes of nVidia and ATI. Their only possible chance of success would be to go for a market other than the PC market, but with the big guys moving into those markets with a vengeance, well, there isn't much chance there either now.
 
Chalnoth said:
$13M is nowhere near enough to compete with the likes of nVidia and ATI. Their only possible chance of success would be to go for a market other than the PC market, but with the big guys moving into those markets with a vengeance, well, there isn't much chance there either now.
Click to expand...

Exactly. On the "Partners" page under OS & Platforms they list a mobile consortium. If they can have some success outside of PCs maybe they can leverage that down the road --but $13m is peanuts to take on ATI/NV in the PC space.
 
Uttar said:
From the "Recruit" page:
SOFTWARE ENGINEERS

Job Description:
・ Device Driver / Graphics Library / API design engineer
Click to expand...
Oh well, yet another company going out of the market within a few years, unless they get a console deal, which just ain't gonna happen. And their mobile plans don't seem like a priority to me either...

Uttar
Click to expand...
Does this imply no D3D/OGL?

If the technology is good, I suppose they could always sell it if they fail on their own...
 
Another of their partnerships: http://www.khronos.org/

The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard, royalty-free APIs to enable the authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.
Click to expand...
 
It allows real-time photo realistic rendering with physically correct lighting and shadowing such as soft shadow casting and position dependent environmental mapping.
Click to expand...

Does this mean some sort of GI?
 
Yeah, that presentations DOES hightlight two VERY positive things IMO:
- Support for OpenGL (a slide is pretty obvious about it, can't seem to find it anymore though)
- One MASSIVELY KICKASS anti-aliasing algorithm. It's years ahead of NVIDIA's and ATI's algorithms. I do have my doubts about the "performance does not decrease" bit though... It seems possible the performance hit would be minimal with such a technique, but it'd have to be highly parallel, and in that particuliar implementation you'd always have a very slight performance it because of the video memory used, and the corresponding bandwidth. The only apparent problem with it is the lack of gamma correction.
Interesting links about it: http://www.parims.org/overview/k-1x.files/slide0084.htm http://www.parims.org/overview/k-1x.files/slide0127.htm http://www.parims.org/overview/k-1x.files/slide0143.htm

If they played their cards right, they could be a very interesting player in the Workstation market ala 3DLabs, but somehow I doubt they will.

Uttar
 
Shinichi Okamoto is listed among the 23 employees of this firm.

About some of these claims, just remember that VM Labs (maker of the world-shatteringly successful NUON system) claimed to have real time ray tracing, and in the propaganda released by them showed an obviously ray traced scene of translucent bubbles among other obviously offline rendered scenes.

Needless to say that came to nothing.
 
Can you explain what you think is so great about that FSAA algorithm, Uttar? I can't currently view the slides.
 
I didn't find any information as to what PLD actually is, though. Do you have a more informative link?
 
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