Site Revision

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Ron

I’ve been pretty busy at work and haven’t had a lot of time or inclination to post here over the last two years. Generally I got the job at Intel because one of the things I did here is what I now get paid for, so a lot of effort shows up at work and not here. I’ve had this web site since about 1995 with the last revision in about 2001, where I started writing more on graphics topics. Now they have these newfangled things called “blogs” that fit what I’ve been doing, plus there are now there are engines that do all the updating, formatting, tracking, etc. for you. So I’m in biting the bullet and reformatting everything, and eventually I’ll have it up and running the way I like it. It will just take me a while.

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Kick-ass graphics and Larrabee!

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Ron

Back in 2008 I took a job with Intel. Intel was starting to ramp up its Larrabee effort and was looking to hire some knowledgeable graphics engineers who could also talk to game developers about *other* things like threading, performance, and optimization. This kept me pretty busy with not enough time to talk about graphics, optimization. And there’s no though about talking about Larrabee since that was not my group.  Unfortunately Larrabee wasn’t ready in time so that aspect of my job, while quite a lot of fun, won’t be ready for public consumption for a while. On the other hand, the other aspects of my job were chugging along and I get to do conference talks of these aspects as well, so expect to see some information on multithreading using tasks, using performance tools, programming on Intel’s integrated graphics cores (which really don’t suck anymore), and something new for me, data parallelism though SSE/AVX programming. Since this stuff isn’t as secret as Larrabee, I’m reactivating and reworking my old website into a blog format, since that what is was way back before they had anything called a blog.

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Phantom Entertainment loses stock listing

Posted on August 1, 2009 by Ron

On July 14th the SEC registration of Phantom Entertainment, Inc. was revoked.  The company repeatedly failed to file required annual and quarterly reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and thus violated the federal securities laws that requires public corporations to publicly disclose current, accurate financial information. They are still in Port Chester, New York.

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OpenGL Shading Language Draft nearing completion

Posted on March 3, 2009 by Ron

The OpenGL Shading Language draft is up for comments. You can review it here.

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WARP-Microsoft’s “fast” DirectX software rasterizer

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Ron

It turns out that Microsoft did something very interesting Windows 7, something incredibly cool in fact! Windows 7 will contain something called WARP10, which stands for Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform.  This is, in essence, a software rasterizer for DirectX.  WARP10 is a high speed, fully conformant software rasterizer that supports DX10+. WARP allows 3D rendering in a variety of situations where hardware implementations are unavailable, including:

  • When the user does not have any Direct3D capable hardware or driver, or the card or driver crashes
  • When running as a service or in a server environment

Microsoft lists a bunch of other scenarios, but basically WARP10 will run anytime you do not have a working video card or driver. (Assuming you program for it, that is – that is are targeting feature set DX 10.1 or less)  What this means is application developers are no longer constrained from using 3-D effects when they find compatible hardware.  This is going to open up a whole new realm of casual games that don’t have extreme hardware requirements as well as applications that could be improved by rendering a static 3-D scene. When you combine this with the new Direct3D hardware requirements, applications that are not real-time 3-D will be able to first try hardware driver, and if that’s not available, fall back to a WARP10 interface.

This is an incredibly great thing that Microsoft has done!  This brings us back to the halcyon   days of software rasterizers where GPUs were measured by their bit-blt rate. This is circa 1999. Things were simple in those days, as you didn’t need to check for shader model support or for a particular pixel buffer format or for a CAPS bit.

I see the biggest use of this is in the coming years, as WARP is multithreaded, so that it can effectively use higher-end hardware – in particular multi-core CPUs and SSE instructions to maximize the throughput. Over the past decade we’ve been maxing out GPU’s while the power of CPU and continued to grow steadily and now pretty much all CPUs are multicore systems I continue to see game developers hitting a GPU limit and failing to take advantage of multicore CPU systems. While I rail against this short-sightedness, after all, while physics and AI can be programmed on a GPU, you really can’t do anything fancy very easily in a shader, it’s just not made for it, but it does attack the problem from the other end – offloading some of the GPU tasks onto the CPU. There’s no reason you can’t have two rendering pipelines – one for the GPU and one for the CPU. This allows you to off-load simple things, like occlusion queries, shadow map generation, etc. onto the CPU, giving you more time for the GPU to actually render stuff.

Visit the Microsoft WARP web page here.

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Phantom Lapboards start to make an appearance

Posted on August 8, 2008 by Ron

Phantom Lapboards are starting to show up in the wild and there’s a review of one at MaximumPC. Generally everybody likes the Lapboard but the mouse seems a little iffy. If you want to try one out they can be ordered online for $129.

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The start of the Intel Shopping Spree: Intel accquires physics engine maker Havok

Posted on September 19, 2007 by Ron

The more time goes by, the more I really think that Intel want’s back into the graphics market. Graphics are the most obvious pathway to beefier machines for the consumer and the easier it is to create cool graphics that consumers find compelling (like in games), the better marketplace for Intel to upgrade everyone. So what does this have to do with Intel buying the Irish company Havok (whose physics engine is used in Half Life 2, BioShock, Stranglehold, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Crackdown, Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, MotorStorm, Halo 3, etc.) you might ask? According to Renee James, VP of Intel’s Software and Solutions Group: “Havok is a proven leader in physics technology for gaming and digital content, and will become a key element of Intel’s visual computing and graphics efforts. Havok will operate its business as usual, which will allow them to continue developing products that are offered across all platforms in the industry.” Intel has been pushing developers to make more use of multi-threaded architecture. Just as game developers now target game eye-candy to the ability of the graphics card, Intel is pushing them to do more with beefier processors to enhance the user experience without affecting game play. This means things like adding more detailed models or more particles in a particle system if the user’s machine can handle it. This is a tall order, but one of the things that’ll make it easier is providing a cutting edge physics engine that’s highly tuned to take advantage of multi-core systems. Since the deal is worth about an estimated $US 110 million, I’d guess Intel is really serious about it. That’s cool for all the game developers and the eventual consumer apps that will be physics enabled. But a physics engine is the 2nd thing I would have bought if I were Intel. I expect to see some other acquisitions in the near future.

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Phantom Entertainment (nee Infinium Labs) actually ships something!

Posted on September 19, 2007 by Ron

Well almost it seems. Phantom Entertainment (formally Infinium Labs), after many many many false starts to ship 1) a game console, 2) a streaming game service and 3) a keyboard/mouse combination called the lapboard, apparently shipped the company’s first product, the Phantom Lapboard. The lapboard features a wireless swiveling keyboard with a shelf under it for a mouse. In fact, if you read the history of Infinium’s tech demos (start here) you’ll find that the lapboard was the only thing that’s a constant, the only things that was apparently real an any of their demos. Now they have apparently been shipping out actual Lapboards (@ $129) to consumers (sorry, currently sold out). So I guess a hearty cheer should be given? Maybe not. Let’s see, where to start.n.

Tim Robert’s starts the whole thing in 2002. Scandals occur. Leaves in 2005 with a boatload of stock. Many scandals follow. Rejoins as Chairman of the Board. Resigns in July 2007, the same time that Infinium gets $1.3 million loan agreement with European Investors LINLEY Management S.A. They double the number of outstanding shares to 2.4 BILLION. In September 2008 the SEC settles the charges with Roberts and as part of the settlement, Roberts agreed to be barred from serving as an officer or director of any public company for five years and, to be barred from participating in any offering of penny stock for five years. In Aug. 2008 a company called Phantom Gaming Service is incorporated in Delaware, with many of the same folks who work at Phantom Entertainment, plus Tim Roberts on board. Three days later, Phantom Entertainment gets $65K and some stock from Phantom Game Service AKA Phantom Streaming AKA StreamServ. 49% of the stock in fact. Phantom Game Service gets “technologies” powering the Phantom Game store – which had 1 (one) successful day before it shut down. Phantom Game Service then sells these technologies to a company called Game Streamer for cash and stock. Game Streamer enters into an agreement with (drum roll) Phantom Entertainment to give them access to all the technology & stuff originally in the Phantom Game Store. Who’s Phantom Game Service? Incorporated in October 2008 by Tim Roberts and friends. You can’t make this shit up. Do the math. He only needs 500 folks to prepay for a Lapboard to break even.

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