NVIDIA GF100 & Friends speculation

Xbox360 has a tesselator. I've seen it in some games, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed appears to use it(poorly, but yeah). Of games I can think of right now, I think the new AVP game coming out soon uses it to nice effect.

 

The hair in that demo is impressive, but being a dummy head on a blank screen is less so. Tell them to make a demo of it in a scene with some people doing something.

 

It's 7pm CST on January 17th, 2010 in case anyone was wondering....

 

So how much time is left?

 

If its pacific time, then 4 hours.

 

Hehe, well at least not early! It's not 4 hours away either

 

Right so why am I still up?

 

There was a very interesting paper on using a fast radix sort to help efficiently render many layers of hair. It's possible that they've integrated that technique into PhysX as that's one algorithm that Nvidia claims to have gotten a boost by Fermi's caches.

Rys, you're joking right? I was hoping to read B3D's piece before I so much as glimpsed at another website

Actually Batman is a good example of a significant deviation. So although many people don't like their tactics we're probably much better off if Nvidia has an advantage with tessellation as they are more aggressive in pushing developers to adopt things that favor their hardware. It should be a bit easier too since tessellation isn't a proprietary thing that will enrage the populace.

 

You do realize that, other than the fixed function tesselator itself, the spec requires everything to be shader based, right?

So it's a bit of a mystery to me why you're expressing such disdain for what seems to be the correct way to implementing it?

I'm sure you can elaborate...

 

Since when it is a bad thing for someone with an industry insider source to speculate. Thats what Rys has been doing. I thought the article was great given the information available on the web at the time. Not calling you out here just reaffirming what you've said here. Rys wasn't trying to spread FUD. He was trying to have a technical "but" speculative piece on Fermi.

 

So in effect Charlie was right Ok just making sure. /wink

not meant as a "Love Charlie" post btw... for those unaware of sarcasm

 

Please point out the specific parts of the below statements that are accurate?

Zero cost tessellation on RV870?
Inefficient tessellation on Fermi?
Cypress owning Fermi in DX11?

 

The first sentence isn't even true since a domain shader is used after tessellation to calculate vertex positions (yes, in theory you can use null hull/domain shaders, but that's not the expected use case). That's why the idea of Charlie producing an analysis of NVidia's tessellation architecture (which he said he is working on earlier) smells suspiciously like "re-post talking points sent private from IHV".

 

Mr Demerjians article is up.

 

Funniest, weakest, hit article I've read.

 

Me too.
My 5 285s F@H need some big brothers. Of course if it's a monster gaming card, I might sneak quite a bit more gaming in than I currently do.
I'll just wave at those waving the picket signs as I pay for the new hardware.

 

Hmm So when do those NDAs come to the end of their miserable and hateful lives?

Anyway im looking forward to see how the end result vs Charlie's article pan out. Its a long read and I guess I'll read it again to be sure I get everything he said down.

 

If you google GF100 or GF100 architecture, Chuck's hateful "article" is the first thing that comes up, hah! Looks like he achieved at least one goal for himself and whichever IHV he is directly (or indirectly) working for Thankfully it won't be too much longer before we can start talking about the real, true, good stuff

 

Charlies article can't be disproved really, since most of it relies on attacking a supposed feature in which Fermi performance can't be scaled, but Cypress can. Plus a lot of other silliness, like still trying to hang onto the idea that NVidia doesn't have a "real tessellator" just something that smells like it + SM. I believe we call that waffling and wiggling when your wrong.

 

Well there are some specific claims...

(Its gonna get measured)

(I assume this is the 512 Cuda core version)

I figured I would drag out some of the stuff which could be refuted by the truth or not refuted. Im interested to see how close to the mark he is. As hes one of the only guys sticking his neck out so publicly I have to give the guy the respect of waiting for the final product before calling it.