Things brightened considerably when Ujesh Desai, general manager desktop products at NVIDIA, mounted the stage to show, in real-time, a new technology demo, and to roll out the slew of new technology announcements regarding their powerful new 7800 series of chips. While tons of techno jargon was displayed across the giant screen for all the technophiles to absorb and enjoy, the highlights went a little something like this:
* The GeForce 7800 GTX chipset is the most complex GPU ever built (according to Nvidia).
* It features the brand-new Shader Model 3.0 engine, which basically makes lighting effects and textures even more realistic than ever, reducing the drowned-out, oversaturated lighting representative of recently current technology, in favor of softer, more natural, more realistic lighting. This was helped by Nvidia's new High-Dynamic Range lighting, which is 32-bit per component, versus the 8-bit per component of current standards. This was demonstrated showcasing a cathedral scene where sunlight coming in through one chapel window blew the graphics out, obscuring the majority of the details. In the new 7800 GTX-powered example, much more of the scenery was visible (imagine going out in the bright sun, then putting some sunglasses on), illuminated by light reflecting off other surfaces.
* Breakthrough transparency supersampling, a new catchphrase used to highlight an effect similar to putting your hand near a lightbulb, revealing the veins and luminescence of light shining through surfaces like skin.
* SLI multi-GPU technology. The multi-part gist of this announcement was that a single 7800-powered 3D card would be more powerful than two 6800 cards running in parallel, would be 10 decibels quieter (a.k.a. 50% quieter), and, most importantly, drain less power than that required to run current 3D cards (using a 350W power supply for a single card, 500W for SLI). Nvidia also announced that they would work with their partners to ensure whether a 3D card, power supply, chassis, motherboard, and more is "SLI-approved," effectively making the SLI brand the PC-certification equivalent to LucasFilm's THX brand of sound certification. The last announcement was that Nvidia's low-end line would also be SLI compatible, to give gamers an economical taste of the future.
* The 7800 series is the most complex graphics processor ever built, with 302 million transistors. To put that in perspective, Nvidia compared how many millions of transistors are used to fuel machines like the Xbox GPU (60M), PS2 graphics synthesizer (43M), GameCube Flipper (51M), GameCube Gekko (21M), Xbox Pentium 3 CPU (9M), PS2 Emotion Engine (10.5M) and the Athlon FX55 (105.9M). In rough, general terms, Nvidia would have you believe that the 7800 is more powerful than all those combined (the quick math states that those numbers equal 300.4M transistors).
* The Shader Model 3.0 engine powers not only the GeForce 7800 GTX, but also the PlayStation 3, and the Xbox 360.
* GeForce 6 series Shader performance is single pipe tech, running at 108 clocks per cycle. The GeForce 7 series also runs via a single pipe, but the calculating time is only 79 clocks, making for a significantly more efficient chip.
* The GeForce 7800 GTX has been designed from the ground up (as they say, pipe for pipe), which is the result of analyzing over 1300 of the most commonly used shaders. The 7800 series, as displayed in a myriad of bar graphs, is nearly anywhere two to three times as powerful at processing graphics as the current GeForce 6 series, even with high quality filtering, pixel edge detection (using multi-passes) and hatching shaders.
* Superscalar performance, tested on over 20 popular PC games, like SWAT 4, Serious Sam 2, Need for Speed Underground 2, World of Warcraft, Age of Empires 3, Far Cry, Doom 3, EverQuest 2 and more, revealed gains of anywhere from 250 to 650% improvement (tested on an AMD FX 55 with 1 Gig of memory).
* Again, based on tests run using the Unreal Engine 3's Engine CityStreet2 demo, a single GeForce 7800 GTX is faster than two 6800 Ultras running in SLI, by almost 30%.
* A wealth of existing games were designed to auto-detect when an Nvidia card utilizing the Shader Model 3 engine is installed, offering a new Shader Model option in user settings.
* Transparency supersampling is the new era of anti-aliasing. The example displayed showcased a room filled with fencing which, in the normal anti-aliasing example showed dithered lines which were rendered ultra-smooth when switched to supersampling.
* A 7800 GTX SLI configuration utilizing a 3.2GHz EE Dual Core architecture would be a $900-$1100 upgrade to user's current systems, whereas the low-end of available technology (using 6600 GT, 3.2 GHz Single Core architecture) can be had for as little as $25-$50, based on system performance running Doom 3.
* The GeForce 7800 GTX runs at 430MHz, has 8 vertex units and 24 pixel shader pipes. It comes in a 256MB/256-bit DDR3 configuration, supporting DVI, DVU, HDTV/VIVO technology. Boards will fit in a single, PCI-Express slot and are, naturally, SLI approved.
* Unlike late-shipping cards of Nvidia past, the 7800 series is available now, on websites like Newegg.com and Tigerdirect.com. Searches for these cards proved tricky, although Nvidia had a number of PC kiosks set up at the event for eager purchasers to order.
While the tech details were occasionally mind-numbing, they were backed up by highly credible demos of Battlefield 2 (awesome), Age of Empires III (maybe not the most amazing game to demo showcasing technology, but certainly excellent from an RTS-standpoint), Unreal Tournament 2007 (kick-ass), and perhaps most impressively, the upcoming Webzen-developed/published MMO-FPS, Huxley. The demo, which was essentially one long cutscene, was still claimed to be running in real-time, which, if true, was absolutely exceptional. A combination of MMO (complete with instanced areas) and an FPS (you shoot stuff), Huxley's use of the Unreal 3 engine is expertly crafted and beautiful. If there's any game that looks like it can stand up to Epic's own Gears of War, this is it. Veteran players will be able to invite noobier players to their clan, and hook them up with more powerful weapons they've earned in battle. The variety of races may be few, but everything looks great, as do the hordes of wall-crawling monsters you'll fight in the game.
Ujesh Desai also mentioned that while this very technology is being developed for the PS3 as well, since there's plenty of time to improve the performance gains on what they've already accomplished, that the PS3's performance will surely outpace what was demonstrated at this event. In fact, the key to Nvidia's SLI strategy is to show, in future generations, what will be capable with single chipsets, using dual graphics cards running in parallel now. Meaning, the next gen of graphics technology can likely be gauged using two of the current cutting edge tech. Based on what we saw today, it's a promising glimpse into the future of each console's visual potential, perhaps finally fulfilling the promise of Hollywood-quality CG in the context of real-time, interactive gameplay.
