NVDA article in IBD for Monday
by: soxrulzit
11/16/02 08:18 am
Msg: 48602 of 48607
This article is to appear in "Investor's Business Daily" for Monday, November 18, 2002
You can view it, if you have an account to IBD, today.
http://www.investors.com/editorial/tech.asp?v=11/16
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Internet & Technology
Monday, November 18, 2002
Nvidia Chips Away At Real Animation
BY JAMES DETAR
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Is it real, or is it digital?
The quality of recent animated movies like "Shrek" and "Monsters Inc." makes it hard at times to tell whether a character's real or from a computer.
Graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) plans to unveil its latest line of chips on Monday. Nvidia says its new GeForce FX chips will bring to home video games the same level of animation in today's Hollywood movies. The company's earlier chips were part of the technology used to make "Shrek" and "Monsters Inc."
"We've been trying to bring 3-D graphics to the mass market," said Mike Hara, Nvidia vice president of investor relations. "We're moving at a rapid rate toward enabling people to do on a PC what people are able to do in cinema today."
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSM) will make the chips for Nvidia. TSMC will make the devices using the latest process.
The metal lines on the chips will be only 0.13 micron wide. That's less than 1/500th the width of a human hair. That will let Nvidia pack more transistors, and more features, onto the chips.
And TSMC will use copper. Copper lines let electricity flow faster than the aluminum lines that are today's standard. The result is a faster-running chip.
Some people say the Holy Grail in animation is to make people and scenery look perfectly real. With the release last year of the animated movie, "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," the film industry took a huge step in that direction. The Columbia TriStar movie, also made with Nvidia chips, won acclaim for its realistic detail. Dr. Aki Ross, the movie's lead character, looks realistic down to individual strands of hair waving in the wind.
Hara, however, doubts digital animation will ever be as real-looking as movies with real people. "That may be a challenge we never meet," he said. "To emulate a human would take an incredible amount of computing bandwidth.
"The bandwidth needed just to show someone twiddling his or her fingers is beyond a supercomputer's bandwidth today. So how can you simulate a crowd of people clapping? The human is the ultimate challenge."
Frame of reference is important in the animation field, he says. Nobody's seen a living, breathing toy. So there's no frame of reference, and that makes it easier to suspend disbelief.
"The reason 'Toy Story' came off so well is we've never interacted with a toy. There's no way for a human brain to have a point of reference," Hara said.
For just that reason, it's harder for people to believe they're seeing real people on screen when they watch digital animation. "I'm not sure we'll be able to flawlessly make a human in the next 10 years," Hara said.
But Nvidia says
GeForce FX chips will take digital animation a step in that direction. The chips will let game developers do "shading." That technique creates effects such as more realistic mouth movements in animated characters.
The GeForce FX chips are set to go
on sale in February. Gaming enthusiasts will be able to buy a graphics card with a GeForce FX chip for about
$360, Nvidia officials say. They also say some workstation and PC makers plan to include the chips in new machines, including Fujitsu Siemens Computers.