The ATI R600 Rumours & Speculation Centrum

Hmmm that's a bit of a whopper. My first reaction is that ATI wants to make sure that none of this Nvidia help inadvertently handicaps R600. Still, what would any of that have to do with ATI's opinion of G80?

 

you can't get everything through compiled code, thats why code is compiled in the first place, reverse engineering code leaves out alot of important things.

 

What Joe said. The only thing I'd find curious was if ATI was doing that while also pressuring ISVs to not share any code/practices that ATI has been advocating. And I haven't heard anyone suggest that is the case.

Really what we're talking about here is compatibility, and that's in everyone's best interests; the ISVs, IHVs, MS, and, oh yeah, us the gaming consumers.

 

r600's 96 shaders

Is there a credible source for R600's supposed 96 complex shaders, or is this merely conjecture based on the assumption that R600 will need 96 in order to surpass G80's performance?

 

Well up to a certain point it is, but only when the developers want to work exculsively with a certain ISV a situation like this will happen and this is a rare situation (this will handycap a developer that goes this route). So usually contracts in these gamedev programs rarely go along with proprietry code unless there is no alternative to it. This is why I'm thinking its more to do with the physics coding more then anything else, possibly some OGL code but thats not that significant. Shader code isn't that important since shaders can be read easily, so if something goes funny ATi can pick it up without too much work.

nV and ATi are both involved alot with gamedevelopers at crunch time, they help up with final shader code, final bug crunching the works if its necessary and the title is big enough to warrent the work load.

 

That sounds harmless enough. What was your motivation for the "ATi doesn't like G80" comment? Or was that just for melodramatic effect ?

 

Perhaps G80's way of doing things is that much different from R600's way of doing things, therefore optimizing code for G80 would make R600 run slower than normally. This could be reason for ATi's dislike?

 

Well, TechReport quoted Orton on 96 shaders, but he didn't specifically mention R600, and there is the possibility that he was looking forward to the 65nm refresh or even R700 (at least I think that can't be foreclosed as a possibility). Some of these guys put stuff in their mental pocket much sooner than the rest of us and have moved on to "next" while we're still waiting for what we think is "next". Most sources have been hanging on to the 64 shaders that Xbit predicted from "ATI sources" some months ago. I personally am still fence-sitting on most things R600. I've got some leanings, but not pronounced enuf to boldly predict them.

As to "complex", err. . .what? You mean as opposed to "128 stream processors"? I think that's based on comments re the acknowledged (by ATI) Xenos heritage of R600. Tho even that can be overread in my opinion, as it is likely to the near point of certainty there are significant tweaks in there --we just have yet to hear what they are.

 

I don't know why, but, this story reminds me NV30, when Nvidia was trying to push Cg next to developers.

 

There is a reason lol, talking to some other guys at Dell who are in a new program which I can't talk to much about it, but they were also hinting at something else, but don't want to rush into something I really don't know much about.

 

Complex? I'm guessing they'll use the word extreme.

 

I don't think ATi cares how someones engine is layed out internally or what have you, they only care about the portion that interfaces with their hardware and everything dealing with that goes through ATi's driver (Textures, Render States, Render Targets, Shaders, etc).

It is a lot simpler for ATi to just capture the information at the driver level instead of going through everyones engine code (there are a lot out there and they all function differently).

 

Its not as simple as it sounds , not to mention if they are caught doing something like that...... its just a black eye, and ATi doesn't do things, well tries not to do things that would tarnish thier name unless they don't have much of a choice unlike another ISV which doesn't mind going through some mud.

Actually if you look at the how many AAA games that come out and what engines they use, most of them use one of the big engines out there. Its not that much of a stretch if a company with resources to go the distance. Perfect example nV.

 

How is it a black eye? They have all the information available for how the rendering part of the engine works, they can optimize for it in their driver (not talking about shader replacement here) or they can suggest optimizations to the ISV (shader code, geometry layout, render states, etc). None of this requires access to the engine and game source code.

btw the physics layer would be a middle ware (Havok, PhysX, ODE, etc), I highly doubt that anybody is using a custom written physics layer from NVIDIA. Even so, see above, I don't see why ATi would need access to the code when they have everything that they need at the driver level.

How much do you know about NVIDIA dev rel?

 

Start another thread for that kind of tangent, please.

 

Is there any possibility that AMD/ATi R600 will come out earlier than expected? [/dreaming]Something like they come to join the holiday season too... [/dreaming]

 

Its not that simple trust me, infact the fx series if code was specifically written for them in a certain manner we would have never seen the faults of it.

Physics layer in the g80 can be accessed in a generic fashion, but just like graphics in the past and its still there with OGL there are ISV's specific instructions that could hurt or might not even work on other ISV's cards. Do you remember Glide? there were a few games that came out that only worked with Glide, its a possibility that shouldn't be overlooked.

 

Forum engine need some refresh to ban words like "nv30", very bored story and every year coming up.... nv aeg agents shittalk is bored too.

 

When i good remember Dave Orton said "the future maybe 96" , i don't think so we see 96 shaders in the first round.

 

Shader code, not engine code. NVIDIA had no problems with capturing the shader code in the drivers and replacing it with their own "optimized" version. The card (like any other) did not care about engine or game code however.