"According to Nvidia the NV20 is able to handle one trillion operations and 100 gigaflops (floating-point operations) per second.... seven times faster than the previous Geforce 2 Ultra."
-- ZDNet, citing "Secret documents" on Nvidia's next screaming chip design.
nVIDIA: at the top and planning to stay there
While the above "secret documents" should be taken with a large grain of salt, it's safe to say that nVIDIA is already at the top of the food chain in mass-market 3D graphics processing units and apparently intends to stay there. It's also no surprise that these documents cite anti-aliasing as an area where the NV20 greatly improves upon its predecessor -- there was plenty of room for improvement, as 3dfx has already shown. Still, now that GPUs and high-performance CPUs routinely deliver frame rates in excess of 60 frames per second in today's games, the claimed 300 percent increase in anti-aliased graphics performance compared to the Geforce 2 Ultra is a welcome addition to the graphical quality of almost any 3D game. although non anti-aliased performance will always be faster, at a certain point, visual quality becomes the key consideration, and few would argue that full scene anti-aliased displays don't look better. Simply put, they almost always do.
Also, as game creators strive to create ever more realistic worlds, the number of polygons invariably goes up, adding to the complexity of the 3D scene. This complex geometry and ever-larger texture maps will, the company says, deliver up to seven times the performance of the Geforce 2 Ultra. Even in scenes with simple geometry and limited depth, nVIDIA claims the NV20 will deliver twice the speed of the Geforce 2 Ultra.
Other features promised for the new chip include a RAMDAC speed of over 500MHz, a faster (as-yet unstated) clock rate, new pixel shading effects for 3D textures and curved surfaces, advanced fogging effects and a per-pixel bump mapping technique that could, if these confidential documents prove to be true, help keep nVIDIA at the front of the race in the year ahead.
Although not yet confirmed, the NV20 is widely rumoured to be the chip destined to appear in Microsoft's forthcoming X-Box game console, due in late 2001.
3dfx: getting out of the business of building graphics cards
Citing a change in business strategy, 3dfx says it is shifting from being a board manufacturer to a "fabless" model in which it will be outsourcing all its board manufacturing, while retaining the Voodoo brand in the retail channel. This move follows tough times for 3dfx, in which second-quarter-revenue declined more than 36 percent from the previous year. 3dfx also says it will stop predicting when its next-generation chips (code-named Mosaic) will be available and has canceled its plans to release retail products based on the Voodoo5 6000 altogether.
ATI: getting squeezed?
Thornhill, ON-based ATI Technologies Inc., reported its second straight losing quarter in early October, suffering a net loss of $45.2 million, despite annual revenues up 11.4 percent from last year. ATI's stock (ATYT) has dropped more than 50 percent in the last six months.
The company on Nov. 9th announced a low-end card called the RADEON VE, based on a stripped-down variant of the RADEON chip known by the same name. Priced at US$129, the company says the new card's "HydraVision" feature delivers the most advanced and economical multi-monitor support available today in a mainstream graphics card. The RADEON VE lacks some advanced features of its higher priced siblings, such as hardware T&L support.
However, ATI took some heat in Q3 and Q4 of 2000 when it was discovered that cards sent to reviewers were sometimes clocked faster than cards available in the channel. this fact, along with some buggy early releases of its RADEON drivers, put some of the claims ATI had made about the RADEON graphics chipset into question. The RADEONs reviewers wrote about were usually shown to outperform the high-end offerings at the time from market-leading competitors 3dfx and nVIDIA, but buyers of machines with OEM cards couldn't duplicate these results.
What the company didn't say in any of its marketing materials was that the various Radeon cards differ in their clock speeds. Earlier this year, ATI claimed that initially, at least, it could only get hold of 183 MHz DDR SDRAM. The company said it wanted to run chip and memory in sync; that means that the Radeon boards run at 183/183 MHz. Right? Not so fast...
As it turns out, the 32MB DDR and 64MB OEM cards are clocked at 166, not the 183 MHz rating of the more expensive 64MB DDR that most early reviewers were sent. Exacerbating the issue is an ATI Radeon FAQ page that, even at this writing, gives no indication that the 32MB DDR and 64MB DDR cards are clocked differently.
Matrox: Back to Business
Essentially conceding that its cards are no longer competitive in the gaming-oriented 3D market, Matrox has retreated back to the once-safe shores of "business graphics," where its "Dualhead" graphics features are useful in a variety of tasks. Look for the company to focus on its Marvel 450 eTV -- essentially, a competitor to ATI's All-in-Wonder RADEON, and higher-end video editing-oriented products such as the RT2000, where the company has its reputation still largely intact. All things considered, the future doesn't look all that bright for Matrox. We wouldn't be too surprised to see the company sold -- or at least show some big losses -- in the year ahead.
Here are some links to more info: Manufacturer Listings
Post new comment