Nice article on nVidia's current dominance and future hurdles

[NFS4]

http://www.penstarsys.com/editor/Today/nvidia/nvda2/index.html

 

[DaveB3D]

He says many of the things I've been telling you guys.. maybe now you'll start to believe me.

 

[NFS4]

Believe you??? Never!!!!


J/K

 

[DuneMaster]

DAMN good article, i hope many people read it. excellent! would be a great source for that business paper

 

[ElFenix]

the geforce was slower than the G400 in many instances when it came out. it therefore didn't have the dominance that the voodoo had. has the GTS even yet attained the market saturation that the TNT2 even still has? remember all those p4s that came out last week and had M64s in them? and i'm guessing the v5 isn't much of a oem card due to cost, not features. predictions seem accurate to me though. 3dfx will be fabless just like nvidia and via, and all 3 will fight for space at TSMC. you know who is going to make money next year? TSMC.

 

[BFG10K]

Nice article. I was especially suprised at how positive the reviewer was to 3dfx's potential comeback.

 

[RoboTECH]

dude at penstarsys is a very sharp individual.

he's usually pretty spot-on on his predictions

all 3dfx has to do is RELEASE THE GODDAMN RAMPAGE, and they're set

 

[Adul]

I have a good gut feeling about the rampage.

 

[NFS4]

Same here, bring it on

 

[BenSkywalker]

So yield problems that may happen sometime in the future is going to save 3dfx? I hope they have a lot more then that.

 

[NFS4]

Yeah, there are a lot of "if's" in the article...

 

[Sunner]

I think 3dfx's biggest problem will be nVidia's current momentum.
Lately they've had incredible amounts of it, and its hard to break such a trend, especially by such a small company as 3dfx, like a guy trying to stop a truck thats rolling downhill.

 

[Finality]

Ahhh this guy is still around?

I still remember his "State of 3D article".

Most of the article is based on assumptions.

 

[jpprod]

A very well written article, but being a nitpick, I must point out a one little detail:


<< The NV-20 was originally scheduled to arrive this fall and provide a truly DirectX 8 compliant chip. Unfortunately the NV-20 weighs in at more than 50 million transistors! As a reference, the Intel Pentium 4 has 43 million transistors and takes up 210 mm squared per die on a .18 micron process! This would make the NV-20 absolutely huge on currently available processes! >>


One cannot directly compare die sizes with respect to the amount of transistors. At 210mm^2, fourty-million transistor P4 core is absolutely huge, but this is not only because it has buttloads of transistors, die size also greatly depends on a variety of factors:
- chip layout. A chip can be very tightly laid out to minimize die size, or it can be speculatively laid out to acommodate future additions/fixes/steppings with as easily as possible. My bet is that Intel laid out P4 wastefully just for this latter reason - unlike NV20 for nVidia, P4 architecture's going to stay in Intel's business for years to come.
- logic vs. cache. Various parts of the chip vary in transistor density. At least for AMD's copper process, cache SRAM transistors are much more densely on the die than logic transistors. And P4 has lots of logic.

 

[Digobick]

Great article! Thanks for the link!

Any word on a Rampage release date? Anyone? Dave? My gut told me to skip this latest round of video cards and hold out for the next, but I just passed it off as indigestion. Perhaps it was right afterall.

 

[Sunner]

Just a side note regarding Jukka's post about die size and amount of transistors.
A good example of this is TBird vs Willy.
The TBird is ~37 M transistors, and the die size is ~120 mm.
Willy is, as already pointed out ~42 M transistors and 217 mm.
Shows how big the difference can be even though the amount of transistors is fairly equal.

 

[aznmist]

One must fall..Intel and AMD. What was AMD one year ago? Nothing. What was VIA one year ago? Nothing. Nvidia will eventually lose but to who? ATI? Matrox? 3DFX? I don't know..

 

[ElFenix]

cache is about 4x as dense as logic. if you look at a cumine, the cache is about 1/3 the die space, but its about 2/3 the transistors. if an nv20 is 60 million transistors and it has the same compactness as the t-bird its still 194.6 mm^2

 

[miniMUNCH]

The article didn't even mention the rich cinematic feature set that 3dfx cards have traditionally had; I assume that RAMPAGE will have all the &quot;old&quot; features of the V5 plus some new stuff. Perhaps I shouldn't assume though, because I might make an @ss of U and me (I know, you've all seen/heard that before).

My bro-in-law runs the video/effects rendering engine at Industrial Light and Magic/LucasFilm, he told me that eventually games will have to use cinematic effects to compete against other games; eventually, games without effects will look like pong compared to those that do. nVIDIA chips do not support cinetmatic effects in hardware, which is a really bad idea for the future. Apparently LucasArts and others want to use loads of cinematic effects on their games in the very near future; stuff like depth of vision blur, motion blur, soft focus, haze, glare, etc. Right now, games do use effects (rime constraints I imagine), but imagine a game that looks like the Final Fantasy movie (for those you who have seen the trailor). Now that's what I'm talking bout!!

DaveB3D and others, please comment...

 

[Mr.IncrediblyBored]

<< nVIDIA chips do not support cinetmatic effects in hardware, which is a really bad idea for the future. >>

The nV20 is going to be fully DX8 compliant, and all those features you mentioned are supported by DX8.

 

[miniMUNCH]

Knightbreed:

I hate when they do that...so so much for half my argument.