Game Developers Conference 2003, March 4-8 San Jose

Posted on February 25, 2003 by Ron

Why in God’s name they have to hold the thing in San Jose or Santa Clara every year I’ll never know. One year they did hold it in Long Beach and that was at least different. But in any event, it’s that time of year again. If you’ve never been to one, you really should, particularly if games are of professional interest to you. This year’s should be particularly interesting, NVIDIA is going to unveil the GeForceFX (wait – didn’t they do that at Comdex?) (Thursday night at the Fairmont – let’s see if they can party like ATI can!), Microsoft is having an High-Level Shader Language workshop – it’s first come first serve for these two-hour sessions, register here. If you want a more general introduction to shaders you might try Wolfgang Engel’s session on Friday at 10:30 am. Things I’ve heard but haven’t confirmed are the announcement of DirectX 9.1 from Microsoft and the announcement of the next generation of ATI cards based on the R350 chip. Of course you don’t want to miss Suite Night at the Fairmont, Friday, 7:30 pm. (Hint: about 9pm wander the stairwell peeking out on each floor, listening for those loud, private parties, or see if you can score a suite party list.)

While there’s no doubt that the GDC is a money-making interest (the top-shelf VIP pass is a staggering $1975) it’s the only games-dedicated conference around (There’s a GDC Europe as well later in the year).

Posted in Conferences | Leave a comment

Richard Huddy interview on DriverHeaven

Posted on February 25, 2003 by Ron

Those you you that have attended a Game Developer Conference, Meltdown, Siggraph, etc. or frequent the directx-dev list have seen Richard Huddy in action. DriverHeaven has posted an interview with Richard in which he talks about his move to ATI, his job there, and why he and nearly all of the NVIDIA European Dev. Group left the company. It’s got some juicy quotes like this:

Huddy:NVIDIA used to be a technology company pure and simple but has recently allowed itself to become led by marketing. To give two straightforward examples of things it has done wrong, it produced a product called the GeForce 4 MX, which is clearly a GeForce 2 class piece of hardware, and it spent almost a year too long producing the GeForce FX. The first costs the trust of buyers everywhere, and the second cost them the lead in a very competitive race.

Yes, all the Code Mafia guys could see this kind of thing happening at NVIDIA. We fought these errors from inside NVIDIA but the management didn’t agree with our judgement about what was wrong – so we agreed to part company. We actually left on really good terms – but I admit that they weren’t too pleased when we signed up with ATI!

Posted in Game Industry, Graphics Hardware | Leave a comment

NVIDIA and Microsoft make-up – End arbitration over XBox chip pricing

Posted on February 6, 2003 by Ron

An NVIDIA press release announced that they had reached an agreement with Microsoft over the pricing dispute of the GPU (graphics) and MPU (audio/networking) chips that NVIDIA manufacturers for the XBOX. NVIDIA president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, states “This is a win for both companies, and we couldn’t be more delighted with the results, NVIDIA and Microsoft can now take our partnership to the next level and focus our substantial resources to maximize the full potential of Xbox game console.” which is seemingly some happy-happy joy-joy speak if you’ve read an earlier report from The Inquirer that NVIDIA “will not interfere” with Microsoft’s arbitration attempt. We speculate that they reached some happy arrangement about NVIDIA manufacturing chips for XBOX II and that NVIDIA is firmly entrenched in the XBOX II camp, willingly or not. This is an about face from earlier this week even though there were rumors of Microsoft courting ATI from last month. Given that XBOX has only sold about 8 million (compared to PS2’s 50 million), this might not be a good deal for NVIDIA, especially if it turns out that they have to manufacture the chips at a loss for Microsoft. Reuters reported that NVIDIA claims that Microsoft owed them $46.2 million back in July, NVIDIA’s fiscal Q2.Details of the exact agreement are due out at NVIDIA’s quarterly conference call Feb. 13th.

Posted in Consoles, Graphics Hardware | Leave a comment

Posted on December 21, 2002 by Ron

Microsoft has finally released DirectX 9 to the public. New features are

  • High Level Shading Language (HLSL) support
  • A Shader Debugger that integrates with Visual Studio.
  • Pixel/Vertex shaders version 2.0/2.0+ (for the latest hardware)
  • Pixel/Vertex shaders version 3.0 (a specification for the next generation hardware to support)
  • Floating point support for z-buffers, pixel formats, and texture formats.
  • DirectShow’s Video Mixing Renderer9 (VMR9) for faster video playback & features
  • DirectSound has improved effects and lower-latency.
  • DirectMusic has some new features and a updated authoring tool.
  • New AppWizards for DirectX in VS.Net
  • Managed DirectX

Microsoft’s DirectX 9 download page.

Speculation is that this will be the last drop for a while. The next MS Desktop-OS release (Longhorn) will be/is closely tied to DirectX. I’ve heard that DirectX9.1 will be released mid/late next year to sometime in 2004. I’ve also heard that there’ll be various point releases as new hardware vendors release DX9 flavored hardware so MS will be doing point releases as they become necessary to keep DX9 “fresh” until the DX10/Longhorn release. This is all rumor at this point. The interesting thing is that Longhorn is supposed to take advantage of the GPU just like a graphics program should, that 3D will become part of the desktop. The Longhorn screenshots I’ve seen aren’t that impressive. I worked at Xerox PARC for a while and the stuff they had in 1996 was way cooler. Let’s not waste 3D computing power on visual gewgaws.

Posted in OpenGL | Leave a comment

Carmack backs OpenGL in shader wars

Posted on July 1, 2002 by Ron

By Andrew Orlowsk – the Register

Game god John Carmack has given OpenGL his blessing in the ever-thickening shader wars. Carmack says that given the 3Dlabs P10 card, he opted to use the OpenGL 2.0 extensions for the shader path, even though the Nvidia Cg extensions offered “the most expedient choice”. And the port went so well, he writes in the latest addition to his .plan file, he’s committed to using OpenGL as the back end for all implementations of Doom 3.0.

It isn’t so much a shader war (not our term) as a language war, and Carmack sees such higher level languages as NVIDIA’s Cg as inevitable for graphics developers. “It won’t be too long before all real work is done in one of these, and developers that stick with the lower level interfaces will be regarded like people that write all-assembly PC applications today,” he writes.

Nvidia has garnered much industry support for its Cg language, but this could help swing critical opinion behind a vendor neutral approach. Carmack has enthused about the quality of NVIDIA’s OpenGL drivers in the past. Carmack’s comments are received with great interest in the community, particularly because he chooses his words so carefully. He’s no rambling blogger; Carmack had made just three updates to his .plan file this year. You can read his comments here and while we’re on the subject, here’s a gratuitous link to our favorite Carmack interview.

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

Xbox fathers start game development company

Posted on May 10, 2002 by Ron
By Ben Berkowitz – Reuters
Two of the creators of Microsoft’s Xbox have joined a pair of video-game industry veterans to launch a venture with a familiar Hollywood feel: find raw talent, create edgy entertainment, and then sign with a major publisher to sell it to the world. But the product for Capital Entertainment Group is not movies, but video games, and the startup is in the process of raising $50 million in venture backing for just that purpose. The executive team includes former Xbox chief technology officer Seamus Blackley and Kevin Bachus, who handled relations with game developers for Microsoft, the company said. Former Sierra Online senior vice president J. Mark Hood and Dotted Line Entertainment founder Eugene Mauro are also behind the start-up, which plans to find video game developers with ideas that established publishers would normally shun. CEG will back the development with money and production resources and find game publishers to market and distribute the resulting games, very much like an independent movie studio. The game startup plans to make its money by taking a cut of net game sales. The company believes its investors can break-even on a game after sales of 250,000 copies. Developers will get a royalty, assuming a “breakpoint” is achieved within the first 12 months of sales, equal to anywhere between 5 percent and 15 percent of net sales. The new venture comes at a time when the video game industry is in the first year what most expect to be a cycle of unprecedented growth. The top three U.S. game publishers recorded sales of $714.3 million in the first quarter of this year, up 45 percent from a year earlier. Investors, analysts and even major media companies have started to pay closer attention to big-name game publishers, as they produce stock gains and quarterly returns far better than those coming from other technology or media companies.

TRYING TO INCREASE INNOVATION
“I’ve found over the last year that it was becoming increasingly difficult to get innovative, original titles funded,” Mauro told Reuters. “I put together a model that was a little bit VC (venture capital), a lot of bit of production.” Mauro serves as chief executive of the new venture and will work from his home base in Connecticut. Blackley, vice president of development, Bachus, vice president of publishing, and Hood, vice president of production, will work from Seattle. A third office will eventually be opened in Los Angeles. Bachus left Microsoft months ago, but Blackley did not resign from the software giant until April 22, only days after it cut its Xbox sales forecast for fiscal 2002 by as much as 40 percent after poor international sales. Blackley denied a correlation between the two events and said he was leaving simply because he wanted to get back to developing games. While the company does not plan to have any titles available at retail until the 2003 holiday season, it already has a deal in place with Sega Corp. for its first two games, with what Mauro described as “extraordinary latitude” in what the games will be and for which platform they will be developed.

WILL DEVELOP FOR MOST PLATFORMS
Bachus told Reuters that while the CEG team has a natural affinity for Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox, it will also back the development of games for the PC, Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Co. Ltd.’s GameCube. For reasons of logistics and time commitment, he said they will largely stay away from working with developers on games for handheld platforms and mobile phones, as well as massively-multiplayer online games. “For Seamus and me … it was really borne out of our desire to increase the level of innovation in the industry,” he said. “CEG is the industry’s first independent production company.” A background sheet on CEG reads much like those for independent Hollywood producers, discussing fine details like negotiable net sales splits and completion bonding for titles in development — essentially a form of collateral to ensure that game projects are finished. While the group intends to work with a number of different publishers, Bachus said they agreed to the initial production deal with Sega because “Sega entertaining this opportunity is very flattering.”
Posted in Ex-Microsoft, Game Industry, Too Weird | Leave a comment

Biting the hand that feeds you… NVIDIA fights Microsoft, sorta

Posted on May 1, 2002 by Ron

San Jose— So where does an 800 pound gorilla sleep? Where ever he wants. Microsoft has told NVIDIA that they deal that they had for pricing chipsets last year isn’t so cool. Microsoft points out that – hey, you must be producing them for less now, eh? So let’s renegotiate, so what if a goodly chunk of your revenue come from us, I know you’ll do da right thing. Officially NVIDIA disclosed that it’s in arbitration with Microsoft over the pricing of its chips used in the XBOX. Just look at the corpse of SGI lying by the roadside, you’d think all those ex-SGI NVIDIA employees’d know better. Microsoft has a term for working with other companies…”GUBO”.

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

3DLabs to be acquired by Creative Technology

Posted on March 1, 2002 by Ron

3DLabs announced today that it has signed an agreement to be acquired by Creative Technology LTD. (NASDAQ:CREAF) Creative will purchase 3Dlabs stock at $3.60 per share, with two-thirds being converted to Creative stock and one-third to cash, valuing the company at approximately $170 million.

“We see great opportunities to leverage 3Dlabs’ high-end professional market leadership into higher volume PC desktop products that satisfy power gamers’ insatiable demand for faster graphics,” said Sim Wong Hoo, Chairman and CEO of Creative. “We have analyzed 3Dlabs’ forthcoming products and technology roadmap and we believe that their development of a scalable visual processing architecture with new levels of programmability and flexibility will provide a significant competitive advantage in the graphics space. The technological breakthroughs that 3Dlabs has achieved to date, coupled with the strong market we see for high-performance graphics processors, provide a tremendous growth opportunity for our company.”

“We are very excited about the opportunity provided by Creative’s worldwide distribution network, huge customer base, world-famous brands, and financial resources to maximize the technology we produce,” said Osman Kent, Chairman and CEO of 3Dlabs. “Integrating the resources and expertise of these two industry-leading companies can create a truly potent force in the graphics market. The timing of this acquisition is fortuitous, as we are close to releasing the most exciting high-performance graphics lineup in our history. We have experienced a difficult financial period during which we continued to devote significant resources to the development of our breakthrough technologies. Creative can provide us the resources and opportunity to expand our leadership position beyond the high end professional graphics market. We can leverage Creative’s vast experience at building global brands and market share to take full advantage of the market potential for our upcoming release of an exciting new family of graphics processors for the desktop.”

This is a good thing for 3Dlabs, since it lacks the marketing muscle to compete with NVIDIA and ATI, even though 3DLabs has consistently produce excellent (though not always bleeding-edge) products. With 3DLabs posting a loss of nearly $5 million for Q2, the needed some infusion of cash to compete in the cut-throat consumer graphics market. While 3DLabs has typically sold to the workstation market, it’s getting tough to ask premium prices for high-end graphics boards when the sub $400 boards could do nearly as much. With 3DLabs new chipset coming out and with the OpenGL 2.0 proposal, 3DLabs can certainly use the infusion of cash that the Creative acquisition will bring.

UPDATE: The acquisition was completed May 16,2002.

Posted in Graphics Hardware | Leave a comment