Nvidia Big Bang II

Drawing onclusions based off a slide with limited information and alot of heresay always comes as a surprise to me too. But hey thats why we have Charlie,. To keep us entertained.

 

The lynchmob is just getting drunk so far, wait till the pack hits the streets

 

Thanks for the warning. I'll look for the nearest bomb shelter to hide in

 

Sadly, if that's all it is, not many people will care. It has to be something that actually has a tangible impact on the experience - AMD has very rigid driver controls and no PhysX and those things aren't dampening the popularity of RV770 at all. So far there doesn't seem to be much of a bang, far less a big one......

 

Transcoding on the GPU would be a "big-bang" for me. I get ~5.4x realtime speedup in Procoder 3.0 on my 4GHz E8400. Would be nice to see a 100x speedup from my o/c'd 8800 GT

Think of it as the "killer app" for GPGPU (at least until someone figures out how to turn people's 2d digital camera photos/movies into 3d images).

 

Well you haven't exactly inspired confidence with your off-handed dismissal. Clearly those features are coming up, we've all seen the slide, what's the use denying it? If something even more fantastic is in the pipeline - great! I'm still very much enjoying my 8800 GT.

 

I dont make a habit of raising hopes off hype and baseless information. Yes there is some new stuff coming. And some of these features were things I was talking about over the last couple of months. The information here is far from specific. Charlie however is way offbased and his own speculation/trash rants are completely laughable. Of course. I'lll be the first to admit I enjoy every chance I get to "dismiss" Charlie.

Of course some of the things I've already mentioned in the past.

1) Improved flexibility for transparency AA
2) Improved SLI/PhysX modes. Including Mixing/Matching Dedicated PhysX GPUs. Improved ways of supporting PhysX via SLI
3) SLI multi monitor support is an obvious one. And TBH I'm surprised the driver hasn't been released yet.

Alot of the stuff in this timeline is still under NDA obviously.

Chris

 

I'm not sure video transcoding will the "killer app." That's still a very niche useage of computers.

However, considering I can't really think of a killer app for GPGPU, I suppose that is probably as close as we'll get.

Yeah, having a hard time thinking of a GPGPU must have item that would induce an average consumer to think "I must have this."

However, I'm sure the move would certainly make sure Apple keeps using it in their AppleTV product.

Regards,
SB

 

Though there is something cool coming from Nvidia that I am very excited about. This is of course an item that I dont think everyone will be interested in. Gonna be niche but cool I'm not sure if its related to this though.

 

Tease.

 

One thing i could use is a independent transparency AA sample amount choice which isn't tight to any MSAA mode.

...and of course SLI - mulit-monitor support

 

Boobie PhysX? Applied automatically to a whole bunch of old as well as current games

 

How many years back did ATI demo transcoding on the GPU, yet how many software developers have intergrated that into their transcoders? Go back even further, and remember Nvidia demoing a paint package processing on a GPU? And only in the next version of Photoshop are we going to see some of that on the GPU.

We see all this great stuff being demoed, but like concept cars at a motor show, it may takes years for us to see this stuff at consumer level, if at all. Don't hold your breath when marketing tells you what is possible - look at what you actually can get.

 

Great stuff Chris! Thanks a lot

Can you comment further on the GPU transcoding? As you can tell, I'm really excited about this feature!

 

Of course it's a killer app, for the people that are already likely to buy high-end graphics cards. Now if you're talking about the sort of killer app that would get the average Joe PC user to go out and buy a graphics card, well I think the other scenario I mentioned may just be that app.

Case-in-point: I have ~100 movies on my PC right now, waiting to be transcoded to .vob. I have 2 other friends, each with enthusiast-class graphics cards and about as many movies to transcode. One of these friends has nothing but G80-class hardware in his house (2x Ultras, 1x GTX), each in a different machine. Since his files are already shared over his network, he can use all 3 of these to distribute the workload and reduce his total time involved by 3-fold (irrespective of the gains over CPU transcoding). If we assume even a modest 5x speedup over CPU transcoding, that's a 15x decrease in total time to completion. Something that would've taken 2 weeks before can now be done in a day, in my friend's case.

I'm hoping for > 5x speedup per GPU though. 100x would be good

As for my other friend, he's running an o/c'd 3850 1GB card (he's an AMD fanboy, in the strictest sense - he refuses to use NV or Intel hardware, except in laptops where he really doesn't have much choice). I can pretty much guarantee you that unless ATi counters this move and unlocks their own GPU's transcoding capabilities this die-hard AMD fan is going to buy some G92 derivative.

 

Yeah, ATi's marketing department made big promises there but nothing ever materialized. AFAIK ATi's transcoder application's GPU capabilities were never unlocked.

Its too early to say anything definitive, but I don't get the feeling this will be just a demonstration... Usually you don't list proof-of-concept demos as driver features

 

As I said a niche group. Out of the approximately 150+ people that I LAN game with. Maaaaybe 2-3 of them actually transcode their own video's and actually worry about the transcode speed.

Then there's a few with HTPCs, they just let media center or whatever media program they use do it, and they have no clue how long it takes because it's done in the background.

Even in some forum groups I'm a member of that actively transcode old classic and camp movies from VHS (or in some cases actual film) into computer format. Maybe 2-5% of the forum members actively transcode (much less worry about the speed of transcode) video. Most just try to find copies floating around already made (unfortunately, some with absolutely horrible quality).

Now, granted if you go to someplace like Doom9.net, they'd probably go rabid over something like this.

It's wonderfully neat tech however. But not a killer app that will move marketshare by even 1%. All in my opinion, of course.

Regards,
SB

 

Most of my friends that I LAN with on a semi-regular basis, about 20 guys, are highly-technical and have extensive movie collections. I associate these types of people with those that would buy high-end graphics cards, but perhaps I over-estimated their proportion of this aforementioned market segment.

As for the potential of this application to grow the market of high-end graphics cards: we shall see. Depending on how user-friendly this is, and how much it can accelerate the process compared to a modern multi-core CPU, will have large bearing on the outcome.

 

Kewl, so GRAW2 is gonna be supported. Can't wait to re-install it .. really enjoyed this game. Hope RB6:V2 will get supported sometime in the future too.

US

 

No worries. We've each got different viewpoints and expectations that are colored by our surroundings and the people we hang out with or deal with professionally.

It's why everyone has their opinions and no two people will always have the same opinions on everything.

Regards,
SB