If PVR had a design that could easily deliver NV40 league performance and features with less transistors and lower bandwidth requirements (i.e. lower manufacturing costs) then they would have no problems finding a manufacturing partner / IP licensee to build the damn thing.
Ailuros said:Jodi,
Did you quit your job over there, or did they fire you?
L233 said:If PVR had a design that could easily deliver NV40 league performance and features with less transistors and lower bandwidth requirements (i.e. lower manufacturing costs) then they would have no problems finding a manufacturing partner / IP licensee to build the damn thing.
Seems kinda obvious to me that they don't.
MfA said:They would have had to license it a year ago, when noone knew what the NV40 could do. You cannot take the risk out of PC graphics development.
That it hasn't been licensed must therefore mean it doesn't exist...
Guden Oden said:Um, if a company saw a NV40-beating chip a YEAR ago, even without knowing anything about the actual NV40, you don't think their eyes would have popped out of their sockets???
That is the whole problem with licensing, the only companies who can assess the risks well enough to be willing to spend the necessary capital will usually choose to go with their own designs.
Are we gonna use the series 5 or a custom PVR chip in our next board?
That's for me to know and for you to found out.
Enbar said:I'm surprised everyone here is so pro TBDR. As time progresses I believe its advantages become less and less.
Megadrive1988 said:Are we gonna use the series 5 or a custom PVR chip in our next board?
That's for me to know and for you to found out.
I'm betting that SEGA will be using multipul custom varients of Series 5 in their upcoming arcade board. probably 2 custom Series 5 GPUs, but possibly as many as 4 GPUs
(hey this is the arcade sector we're talking about, so price is not quite as sensitive as the console space, although price is still important even for arcade boards).
that said, the Xbox 2 will at the very least, rival Sega's new PowerVR-based arcade board, if not surpass it. minimum specs for Xbox 2 would probably be 16 if not 32 pixel pipes, at least 8 Vertex Shaders, VS/PS 3.0+ 500~700 MHz core, GDDR3 memory. 1.5 to 2 billion verts/sec peak
(NV40 is at 600M, R420 will almost certainly beat NV40's vertex performance and Xbox 2 will blow both out of the water)
so in a sense, the new Sega board will likely be a glimpse of the type of power Xbox 2 will have, depending on how many custom Series 5 chips are in that board.
NAOMI 2 did 10 million polys/sec conservatively, with lots of lighting. probably closer to 20-40 million if we go by the standards most other companies use.
if the next Sega arcade board was announced as capable of 100~200 million polygons, that would be a VERY nice improvement. whatever performance figure is given, it too would probably be conservative.
No exception since Matrox really wouldn't be looking to license, they've got a bit too much of an NIH syndrom going on there.MfA said:Guden Oden said:Um, if a company saw a NV40-beating chip a YEAR ago, even without knowing anything about the actual NV40, you don't think their eyes would have popped out of their sockets???
There would have been no chip, but a design.
With the possible exception of Matrox any company looking to license wouldnt have the expertise to accurately assess how well it could stack up in the future, and how big the risks were for manufacturing problems, so no I wouldnt have expected any eyes to pop (and Matrox was burned with their own design a little too recently to make those kind of investments IMO). That is the whole problem with licensing, the only companies who can assess the risks well enough to be willing to spend the necessary capital will usually choose to go with their own designs.
I don't see much need for a multi-chip config for Arcade just yet. Later down the road maybe, just like NAOMI 2 followed NAOMI 1.
Why are you so certain that a dual chip S5 config (assume load balancing between chips would be ideal) would be inferior to XBox2 (ok you could cripple the Arcade system with a vastly inferior CPU but that's a different chapter)?
Naomi2 is extremely CPU bound AFAIK and that's why the Elan polygon throughput is lower than it's true capabilities (10M polys with 6 lights).