3D chips at CGDC
Michael I. Gold
pa...@webnexus.com (Samuel S. Paik) writes:
| I didn't see anything new in the Rendition booth, although Mark Kilgard
| said (in a posting to comp.graphics.api.opengl) he saw an OpenGL
| driver running.
Yikes! Mark Kilgard != Michael Gold. Yes, we both work at SGI but I assure
you we are two very different people.
Yes, I saw an OpenGL driver in the Rendition booth. I also saw the drivers
you mentioned, and the ATI driver as well. 3DFx also showed off an early
version of their "real" OpenGL driver. None of these are available yet,
but most should be out by mid-summer, I believe.
The ATI demo showed GLQuake running at 15-20 fps on a Rage Pro. The guy I
spoke to said the driver has not yet been optimized.
The Cirrus Logic demo of GLQuake was a bit sluggish, but improved when I
turned off multi-pass lighting. The demo jockey was very happy to learn
about that capability. ;-)
--
Michael I. Gold Silicon Graphics Inc. http://reality.sgi.com/gold
And my mama cried, "Nanook a no no! Don't be a naughty eskimo! Save your
money, don't go to the show!" Well I turned around and I said, "Ho! Ho!"
Samuel S. Paik
Lots of hardware companies were showing new stuff at CGDC.
Summary: Everyone is trying to top 3Dfx. I thought some
of them did, but not by much.
nVidia RIVA128
nVidia was showing their new chip running a nice home built demo,
the PC Player Direct3D benchmark and GLQuake. The PCP D3D bench
looked like 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics (e.g. good, unlike say, the
Cirrus Logic 5464 which looks wrong, although I haven't tried out
Cirrus' latest drivers), it was running at about 45 fps on a Pentium
Pro 200. The OpenGL driver was buggy and slow, while running GLQuake,
the engineer there said they had only gotten it running 2 days ago.
Looks like a good future, if manufacturers can actually make boards
in quantity running at 100 Mhz (not a trivial task). This looks like
the new chip to beat (for now).
One guy, probably marketing, claimed consumer boards would be
shipping in May or June. Good luck, my rule of thumb for a new
chip is volume chip shipments + 3 months (cut it down to 2 months
for a pin compatible chip). Given how little time they've had
the real silicon (1 month), they could easily run into some small
but showstopper problem, and even if they started shipping chips
today, the above rule would predict end of July. We'll see by
Comdex.
Videologic PowerVR PCX2
I saw Ultim@te Race running on the new PowerVR chip. Looks really
good, in some ways better than SF Rush on Voodoo Graphics, although
there was some weirdness in the distance, probably application
problems. The shadows and headlights are nice, but rather sharp
(as you would expect). It wasn't quite as snappy as I'd been lead
to believe though. They also had some transparency demos, like
4 transparent planes over a simple textured ground plane. An
engineer said boards were shipping now. As I have yet to have
seen a PowerVR PCX1 board anywhere, I have to wonder what that means.
ATI 3D Rage Pro
ATI was showing their new chip too. They had a nice demo of a knight
running around, meeting a dragon, then getting swallowed up by the
ground, but it didn't seem to demonstrate some of the things they
listed on the sign above it, e.g. mipmapping, edge antialiasing.
I'd guess the performance is reasonable, but not quite up to
Voodoo.
Cirrus Logic CL-GD5465 (Laguna3D/AGP)
The AGP version of the Laguna3D now has the alpha blending
modes needed to run GLQuake (the CL-GD5464 (e.g. Creative
Labs Graphics Blaster 3D MA334) does not). It was running it
at a somewhat sluggish clip, between 1/2 to 2/3 Voodoo performance.
I don't believe there is enough performance available in the memory
system to get much more fill rate. However, unlike the RIVA
chip, it does look correct.
Chromatic MPACT
Apparently MPACT is shipping. Supposedly they had a demo in a room
running D3D tunnel at 45 fps. This was claimed to be 3Dfx performance
<laugh>.
I didn't see anything new in the Rendition booth, although Mark Kilgard
said (in a posting to comp.graphics.api.opengl) he saw an OpenGL
driver running. 3Dfx doesn't have any new hardware to show yet, but
their boards were _everywhere_. Developers have also learned how to
get a much higher fraction of peak performance (esp the GVS guys), there
were some jaw-dropping demos that put currently shipping titles to shame.
Ok, maybe that was a little hyperbolic. I didn't make it to the Matrox
booth before closing, and by the time I got to their room party they
didn't have any more of those maroon Mystique jester caps.
Sam
--
Guy [Gavriel Kay]'s been living here in Toronto | Samuel S. Paik
for the last two years. I believe that means | pa...@webnexus.com
the new book is going to be called THE BLUE | 408-969-3258
JAYS OF AL-SKYDOME ... - Robert J. Sawyer | Speak only for self
Tiitus Tamminen
Samuel S. Paik (pa...@webnexus.com) wrote:
:Lots of hardware companies were showing new stuff at CGDC.
:Summary: Everyone is trying to top 3Dfx. I thought some
:of them did, but not by much.
:nVidia was showing their new chip running a nice home built demo,
:the PC Player Direct3D benchmark and GLQuake. The PCP D3D bench
:looked like 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics (e.g. good, unlike say, the
:Cirrus Logic 5464 which looks wrong, although I haven't tried out
Any knowledge of how much RAM (texture) this chipset supports?
Oh, and I didn't see you mention Pyramid3D anywhere, so it probably wasn't
in that conference? I wonder what is happening with that chipset?