NVIDIA and Cg – raising some hackles

Posted on May 8, 2003 by Ron

I have to admit that that I wasn’t particularly enthralled when NVIDIA announced Cg. It’s bad enough that we’ve got DirectX 9’s HLSL and OpenGL 2.0’s GSLang. As someone who got to program DirectX, OpenGL, Glide and CIF (ATI’s proprietary 3D language, RIP), I really hate competing graphics languages. I feel it’s a waste of time to reinvent the wheel in a different flavor, and I really would rather be creating something new than porting code. On the other hand, I ran across this article by Colin Stoner that hits on some of the more recent uneasiness. While Colin does raise some interesting points, like even though Cg is open source and theoretically could output for ATI chips, ATI doesn’t give a shit as they are on the HLSL/GSLang wagon, and how NVIDIA is getting games to brand themselves with the NVIDIA logo, he really is complaining about something that I don’t think is a bad direction for the PC graphics world in general, at least I think so…

I got a fair amount of (good-natured but strident) flak from NVIDIA for my “short sighted” viewpoint. Yeah, well sorry. Cg is so close to HLSL that I understood the need to get something out there while HLSL shaped up. But hey – HLSLs here now, so why hasn’t Cg been merged into HLSL?. The recent Cg book by Fernando Kilgard (a really nice book by the way, see the Gamasutra article) is being followed by another one. Which seems strange to me. The Cg book is selling well, but it just came out – it’s a bit soon to be following up with another one. This seems to point to Cg being around for a while, and NVIDIA pushing some not insignificant resources at it. Let’s face it, NVIDIA ain’t stupid, they’ve got some of the smartest engineers in the business even though I don’t care much for some of their marketing practices. What other reason could Cg exist when HLSL/GSLang could easily fill the role? It’s got to be because NVIDIA owns Cg. It owns a high level rendering language. What can you do with that? It’s only an advantage if you can do something with it. NVIDIA quietly picked up some IP last year that really could make CineFX engine a real cinematic experience. This is all sheer speculation on my part, but it’s what I’d do if I had those resources. NVIDIA’s market share is still twice as big as ATI’s, a nice end run could cut ATI off at the knees if executed correctly and put to rest any doubt about who’ll supply the chips for Xbox2.

So how can this be a good thing? DX9 is going to be here for a while. ATI is settling down to a slower R&D cycle. Ho hum. Nothing new on the horizon for a while, it looks like smooth, straight sailing for a while. Unless someone decides to rock the boat. 

Posted in DirectX, Graphics API, Hardware, OpenGL | Leave a comment

ArtX acquisition bearing fruit for ATI

Posted on April 29, 2003 by Ron

Been wondering where ATI got the chutzpah to beat NVIDIA? This article on the EETimes talks about the acquisition of ArtX by ATI and how it’s worked in ATI’s favor. Not just in technology, but in getting key people in to ATI’s management in time to make changes in things like the R300 (RADEON 9700) graphics core. The article discusses how the R300 core was designed to beat NVIDIA’s offering instead of just providing “good enough” graphics, and how this effort will bring out ATI’s first DX8.1 integrated chipset

Posted in Graphics Hardware | Leave a comment

ATI Slows Product Cycle, increases output

Posted on April 28, 2003 by Ron

ATI is lengthening their product cycle from 18 months to 24 months, citing stagnant PC sales over the last few years. In spite of gaining market share (along with NVIDIA) at the expense of other video chip manufacturers, ATI wants to rein in R&D costs of video chips that are now more complex that the CPU’s on most PC systems. Given the lead ATI has over NVIDIA and that DirectX 9.1/OpenGL 2.0 are likely to be the standard for a while (perhaps till 2005), taking a breather might be a good idea. ATI lost $8.3 million in its last quarter, even though sales were up over the same quarter in 2002. ATI really needs to ramp up chip production since it’s been unable to keep up with demand for it’s high-end cards (as has NVIDIA).

ATI expects to increase its order to TSMC and its secondary foundry partner, UMC, later this year. TSMC currently churns out all of ATI’s 0.13 micron parts like the RADEON 9600. TSMC has said it will begin volume production of 90nm (0.09 micron) parts in July but ATI’s CEO Ho said the company was not considering a move to 90nm until 2004 at the earliest. .

Posted in Graphics Hardware | Leave a comment

Online gaming market is large and growing

Posted on April 5, 2003 by Ron

In a recent PC magazine article quoting stats from a research firm, about 9% of the 2002 Internet traffic was due to online gaming, and online subscriptions will bring in an estimated $US 650 million annually in five years. The report states that while free online services will grow, it’ll be the pay-for-play services that will really take off. The report states that by 2005 most consoles will be playing subscription based games. Microsoft’s Xbox Live currently has 350,000 subscribers, up 100,000 from Jan. 1st. each paying an estimated $10/month (though everyone is still running on the $US 50, 1 year introductory fee). And this on a paltry 10 titles with only cable or DSL subscribers. It’ll be interesting to see when PS2 and GameCube start to get bigger numbers. Still, it looks like there’s real money on the table.

Posted in Game Industry | Leave a comment

First The OpenGL ARB, now the W3C – Microsoft quits World Wide Web Consortium

Posted on March 29, 2003 by Ron

It was brought to our attention that on March 21 Microsoft announced their withdrawal from the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C examines how to best standardize how the web works, and how best to make sure that Internet contact points cooperate in the future. While Microsoft was only participating since March 13th, it’s interesting to note that Microsoft decided to discontinue participation after discovering that its research into contract language (the language of establishing communication between endpoint on the web) didn’t mesh with the W3C’s efforts. You can read more about in the InfoWorld article.

In a follow-up the Enquirer puts a rather negative spin on the whole issue in Microsoft DirectX killing innovation in which they.. umm…well… “whine” is a good term I guess, about the Microsoft domination of the direction of 3D graphics features (true) and about the homogenization of the 3D graphics card market (also true, but it’s generally a good thing), and about how homogenization will take away all innovation (Just look at NVIDIA’s NVRotate and NVKeystone). I don’t think standardizing on a programmable API is at all bad – programmers will take this to the next level. The trend has been towards higher and higher levels of API’s. Nobody really wants to program at the register level anymore.

Posted in Game Industry, Graphics, Miscellaneous, PC Graphics | Leave a comment

Is Microsoft poised to open a brawl on the graphics front?

Posted on March 23, 2003 by Ron

Way back at the July 2002 OpenGL ARB meeting Microsoft made an amazing statement – that it has “possible claims” on IP related to vertex and pixel shader programming. Essentially Microsoft claimed they have patent rights relating to the ARB_vertex_program and possible pixel (“fragment” in OpenGL) shader programming. There was some mention of Microsoft offering “reasonable and nondiscriminatory” terms for the license. The exact nature of these claims is unclear, and Microsoft hasn’t cleared them up. They’ve acquired intellectual property from SGI, NVIDIA, ATI Technologies, Intel and others, according to industry observers. “They’ve just been picking it up everywhere,” said Jon Peddie, head of consulting firm Jon Peddie Research. “They have a huge library of intellectual property.”

At that ARB meeting Microsoft’s Dave Aronson hinted that it would prefer an alternative licensing arrangement, and suggested that “other bodies have licensing terms that are more effective in a corporate sense, and we should look at adopting some of those terms.” Hmmm. Now Microsoft has gone and resigned from the ARB. Could this be a precursor to some sort of legal action? If so against whom? Certainly not against the 3D video card manufacturers. (Not if they’re smart). Microsoft has made nice with the chip companies and the result has been stupendous (at least from a programmer’s standpoint). If this stuff makes it out to the consumer level we’ll really see some spectacular effects in the next few years. DirectX 9 and 10 show that Microsoft is learning to talk, listen, and work with the chip and gaming companies. It could possibly be a way for Microsoft to get some cash from those pesky “other” game consoles. A little slice of $US10.3 billion (US interactive entertainment sales in 2002) goes a long way. Time will tell.

We do note that Microsoft does have an open req. for an OpenGL kernel engineer, so it seems that they are interested in some development with OpenGL.

Posted in Graphics, Graphics API, OpenGL | Leave a comment

Game Developer’s Conference Announcements

Posted on March 9, 2003 by Ron

Well, in an about face from previous years, there was lots going on at this year’s GDC. Here are some highlights.

NVIDIA Announces new cards – The GeForceFX 5200 and 5600. Both are DirectX 9 cards. The 5200 is expected to sell starting at $79 MSRP. NVIDIA becomes the first card company with DirectX 9 capable cards in its entire front line.

ATI Announces new cards – They announced the 9200 (DirectX 8.1) , 9600, and 9800 (DirectX 9) cards. Also under-the-radar was incorporation of F-Buffer (fragement-stream-buffer) in SmartShader 2.1, which is supposed to allow shaders of any length without resorting to multipass rendering. These cards compliment the 9700.

3DLabs – not to be left behind – announced the WildCat VP990 Pro.

ATI and 3DLabs announced they are working jointly on our fav shader tool – RenderMonkey! In a not so subtle swipe at Cg, ATI and 3DLabs have teamed up to work on RenderMonkey. ATI will continue to work on the framework and both will work on plug-ins for HLSL and OpenGL’s shader language GLSL. In addition they say they’ll work closely with 3D party vendors to incorporate RenderMonkey functionality into tools – so expect to see RM plug-ins for Maya, 3DSMax, etc. in the near future. Press announcement.

Microsoft withdraws from OpenGL ARB – citing failure for OpenGL to keep pace with graphics features, Microsoft says that it’ll focus on DirectX.

DirectX 9.1 is it – for now. According to Microsoft’s Dean Lester, the next major release of DirectX isn’t scheduled until the release of the next OS (codenamed Longhorn), which is now due out sometime in (survey says) 2005.

Posted in Conferences, Game Industry, Hardware, OpenGL | Leave a comment

Microsoft Withdraws From OpenGL ARB

Posted on March 7, 2003 by Ron

In a move that surprised no one, Microsoft withdrew from the OpenGL ARB, citing that it felt OpenGL was not advancing fast enough, and that it wanted to focus it’s energy on DirectX.  Microsoft has been less than useful at ARB meetings of late, so it’s departure was felt with both a sigh of relief and not a touch of anxiety.

 

Posted in DirectX, Graphics API, OpenGL | Leave a comment