Trident sell Graphics Chip division to SiS

Posted on June 13, 2003 by Ron

Yesterday Trident Microsystems, Inc. announced that it has pulled out of the graphics chips market after less than a year and will focus on its digital TV & set-top-box business. The graphics division was sold to SIS and will be merged with SIS’s graphics subsidiary XGI (Xabre Graphics, Inc.). The details haven’t been released, but SiS said the move was to help it in notebook graphics.

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Further NVIDIA optimizations…

Posted on June 12, 2003 by Ron

This story get keeps getting more interesting. On June 2nd FutureMark retreated a bit from earlier claims, stating that they’d run across some optimizations and not cheats when testing the latest drivers from NVIDIA..

The latest twist involves further evidence of something fishy. Both Tech-Report and ExtremeTech report that by renaming the 3DMark03 executable, NVIDIA’s scores dropped when using the latest DetonatorFX drivers. Running the test with the original name produced one set of scores and pixel-perfect images from run to run, Renaming the executable produced lower scores and generated slightly different images. Hmmmm.

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Endgame for 3DO

Posted on June 1, 2003 by Ron

In a sad conclusion to one of the more interesting companies in the game business, 3DO files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California, and will try to sell off the company and/or its assets. CEO Trip Hawkins said the company is expected to continue to operate as it works through the bankruptcy process. “This filing gives us more time to complete transactions in the interest of our stockholders,” Hawkins said. “While we hope that this news will generate additional new opportunities, at this point we are focused on pursuing either the sale of the entire company or the sale of its assets.”

This must have been a particularly difficult statement for Hawkins, who left EA to found 3DO in 1993 and has repeatedly bolstered the company’s coffers with personal loans when funds ran low – to a total of about $US 12 million. You can read about 3DO’s early hardware history here. But it’s never really been smooth sailing for 3DO, a company originally founded to create its own game console and eventually forced by a harsh market (and a $US 700 price tag) to write software for other’s consoles. The company was recently in danger of getting delisted from NASDAQ but issued a 1 for 8 reverse stock split earlier this year and secured a $US 10 million credit line, but poor sales left it unable to fully use the credit and apparently even Hawkins own steadfast fidelity to 3DO reached its Rubicon. On May 8 the company warned employees that there would be a mass layoff in July. (Large companies are required by law to give at least 60 days notice when mass layoffs are impending.) May 13 3DO announced that it was exploring its options, including a merger or selling publishing rights to its games in progress, but to no avail and 3DO filed for Chapter 11 on May 29th.

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NVIDIA’s Dawn – corporate avatar collects tainted reputation

Posted on June 1, 2003 by Ron

No doubt you’ve all seen the fantastic NVIDIA Dawn demo – each year at GDC, E3, Siggraph, etc. we see better and better graphics card demos. If you noticed in the last few years we’ve gone from cool looking 3D things to human demos – either full bodies or facial animation. As anyone who’s attempted it will tell you, recreating a digital human is the toughest task you can attempt. Actually there’s two tough tasks – one is getting it to sound right (which we still can’t do believably) – the other is getting it to look right, which is barely possible. NVIDIA’s latest entry is Dawn (and her darker sister, Dusk). NVIDIA has a really outstanding demo in Dawn and it shows that we’re close to getting photorealistic human representations on PC’s – first probably in games, but eventually they’ll be pretty ubiquitous.

How’re you gonna keep ’em down on the farm (after they’ve seen Paree)? When I worked on photorealistic human faces we had some research on human bodies and, yes, there was some focus on the bouncy bits (unfortunately by the art department, not development) – not only was it good clean fun, but it was our company’s goal of leading the way in eventually creating a photorealistic avatar or non-player character – and don’t think if the bit’s didn’t bounce correctly folks wouldn’t notice. ATI used our Rachel head for a demo (not rendered to our liking, see a screen capture from our demo here – much better!). As we’ve seen that pretty much any female character released into the world can go – well – less than wholesome. From a naked Lara Croft (patch here) to Final Fantasy’s Aki posing for a men’s magazine (pix).

So it was no surprise that eventually there was a Dawn patch (Dawn nekkid patch). Well, that’s no surprise except that the patch seems to be just that, apparently hacking the code to put in the nekkid bits. But more seriously Dawn’s apparently be cheating on NVIDIA with, *gasp* ATI! Yes, since most video card demos are written in OpenGL, it’s pretty easy to hack OpenGL and intercept the calls that get made. Well, a little bit twiddling had allowed Dawn’s NVIDIA extensions to get mapped to work on an ATI RADEON 9800 (find out about it here). According to the results (unconfirmed by me), Dawn may be a fast girl (er, faery), but she’s faster on a RADEON 9800 (by about 15%).

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And the driver cheat mudslinging continues…

Posted on May 27, 2003 by Ron

Yeah, it’s starting to look a little funkier. Without getting into too much detail (which you can read here, here, and here), it’s looking less like a bug and more like an “optimization”. Futuremark put out a report titled “Alleged NVIDIA Driver Cheating on 3DMark03”. Apparently when they redid some of their shader code, NVIDIA performance decreased by as much as about 25% for some tests. Beyond3D also found similar “optimizations” from ATI, but to a lesser extent. ATI apparently jiggered the ordering of the shader instructions (not a bad thing itself) to get better performance for a visually identical shader. Which is what you’d want the driver compiler to do. However they did admit to doing this just for two shaders in the 3DMark03 tests, which is a bad thing – optimizing for a test. They realized this is bad and said they’d take these optimizations out of the next driver revision. You’d think that after ATI had gotten caught cheating (again) with Quake 3, they wouldn’t pull this stuff again. I’m really surprised than any video card companies not only thinks they can get away with this (seemingly repeatedly), but that they feel it’s necessary. Sure ATI and NVIDIA are fighting for supremacy, but do they really feel their cards suck so much they need to inflate benchmark results?

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UT2003 to come with a software renderer

Posted on May 27, 2003 by Ron

When fetching a graphics device from DirectX, it’s possible to request a software renderer, though until recently no such thing existed. If you didn’t know, graphics god Mike Abrash left Microsoft and had been quietly working on a software renderer – called Pixomatic – at RAD GameTools, which has been included in UT2003 for those folks who are running on older or unstable hardware. Apparently a 1GHz CPU will run the game, though with some things like shadows and some dynamic lighting turned off. Still, it’s nice for those of us who have to support older hardware (typically done via an OpenGL layer) but would like to use all the latest DirectX API. Find out more info here at the Unreal web site.

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Fun and Games at E3

Posted on May 27, 2003 by Ron

It’s come to my attention that not only did NVIDIA have the band Smashmouth at their E3 party, they had porn star “Catalina” there as well. (view the party pix here…) which has apparently upset some shareholders on the Yahoo NVDA board. Jeez, whom do they think the target audience is anyway? Alcohol fueled nerds being wooed at a party by a video card company is no big news, it’s expected!. Besides ATI supposedly had Smashmouth at their E3 party in 2001, so NVIDIA is just playing catch-up. Hell, ATI was expensing lapdances for some select game developers at E3 in Atlanta a few years ago, so having a porn star bounce around is certainly going to be cheaper in the long run. Whatever it takes to get game developers favoring your cards is the name of the game, and selling sex to nerds is certainly fun and easy. Though – looking at the pictures is a bit pathetic – like Siggraph at New Orleans, when the girls flip their tops up for beads and all the nerds bring their digital cameras came out, I was genuinely ashamed to be associated with those pathetic guys. But I’m not complaining, the nudity certainly livened things up.

Posted in Conferences, Game Industry, Graphics Hardware, Too Weird | Leave a comment

DirectX 9.0a SDK is available

Posted on May 17, 2003 by Ron

There are some performance tweaks, support for anti-aliased render targets, some DirectPlay fixes, and a Managed DirectX security fix. For developers there’s some new D3DX functionality, otherwise it looks pretty much the same. If you’re not a developer and you already have DirectX 9 installed, you probably don’t need to worry about this update unless you’re told you need it by a hardware vendor. You can get it here.

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