NVIDIA Marketing Kicks Into High Gear - Anti Intel and AMD

[Apoptosis]

The marketing team over at NVIDIA is putting out e-mails daily like this... Wonder why the PR department is pushing so hard right now.

More news bits that should not be overlooked:

Intel on board with rasterization…finally…maybe…

Intel has been talking up ray tracing for quite some time. First there was this article on the web which proclaimed, “ray tracing has the potential to become the widely used rendering technology on desktop computers.”

And then in this article, they said a combined approach of traditional rasterization and ray tracing is a “bad idea,” noting, “so it is understandable that people have it in their minds that ray tracing should be introduced in small steps. The only problem is: Technically it makes no sense.”

Intel went to so far as to showcase the image quality of Far Cry 2 in its Larrabee discussion at IDF, however Far Cry 2 doesn’t even support ray tracing and should be a great test case to show the benefits of rasterization. Hey, whose hardware did they used to do that IDF demo anyway? I bet it rhymes with “glee source mine.” : )

Game developers quickly responded:

John Carmack of Doom and Quake fame:

“I’m not really bullish on [ray tracing] taking over for primary rendering tasks which is essentially what Intel is pushing.” Adding, “I saw the quote from Intel about making no sense for a hybrid approach, and I disagree with that.”

Followed by Cevat Yeril of Crysis and Far Cry:

“There are a variety of graphics problems which would suit a hybrid solution of rasterization and ray casting, and most likely is the way to go. Whilst I think there is at least one more generation with almost pure rasterization, very clearly any proposed graphics hardware architecture will perform great in pure rasterization.”

As the technology leader in visual computing, NVIDIA’s opinion is in line with that of the game developers.

NVIDIA Chief Scientist David Kirk says:

“I don't exactly see a convergence, but I do believe that hybrid rendering is the future. Ray tracing is excellent at producing some effects, but slow at others. So, if you try to use ray tracing for everything, there is a very good change that it won't be very fast. Rasterization is blisteringly fast, but not well-suited to all visual effects. A hybrid renderer can parsimoniously choose the best of multiple techniques, to produce the best quality images quickly.”

Well, now it seems Intel may be back-peddling on the subject of ray tracing:

Intel’s Tom Forsyth blogged recently:

“Ray tracing on Larrabee is a fascinating research project, it's an exciting new way of thinking about rendering scenes, just like splatting or voxels or any number of neat ideas, but it is absolutely not the focus of Larrabee's primary rendering capabilities, and never has been—not even for a moment.” He goes on to say, “We are totally focused on making the existing (and future) DX and OGL pipelines go fast using far more conventional methods.”

Intel to enthusiasts: No soup-up for you!

PC gamers and enthusiasts won’t be happy, but Intel may be making plans to prevent the popular activity known as overclocking. Overclocking is a common method tech-savvy PC owners use to maximize PC performance and bang for the buck forcing a component to run at a higher clock rate than it was designed to. NVIDIA takes a different approach because we value the opinion of the computer enthusiasts. NVIDIA has many board partners that offer “extreme editions” of our graphics cards that are overclocked right out of the box and tools for overclocking our GPUs are commonplace. Our nForce chipsets even come with tools designed to make overclocking easier and to maximize results. If this story is true, Intel may learn the hard way that computer enthusiasts are a rowdy bunch and do not take kindly to attempts to stifle them.

Note to Intel: they are going to figure it out anyway.

AMD <3 balanced PCs

AMD seems to like the idea of a balanced PC.

"Fundamentally, we agree," Moorehead stated. "We agree that optimizing for the visual experience is one of those areas that's important." According to Moorehead, AMD's recognition of the importance of graphics was one of the driving factors behind the ATI acquisition..."

The optimized PC concept is old hat for the new school

The optimized PC concept is something that gamers and enthusiasts already know. “New school” journalists who practice their craft on the internet have known for years that a balanced PC provides the best experience. Jump in the way-back machine and go back to March of 2006 for a story from HardOCP that shows that, even two years ago, top flight CPUs where not mandatory for a great gaming experience:

“We are sorry to say if you are purchasing a dual core CPU in hopes of better gameplay you aren’t going to see any difference right now. The major discerning performance factors in games are going to be the frequency of your CPU and your level of GPU.”

Intel back-pedals some more:

Intel is backing off statements about the demise of the GPU:

"Intel is not predicting the end of the discrete graphics business. Moore's Law has allowed Intel to innovate and integrate. As a result, we expect that we and others will integrate graphics and visual computing capabilities directly into our CPUs in the future much like floating point coprocessors and other multimedia functions have in the past. However, we don't expect that this integration will eliminate the market for higher-end discrete graphics cards and the value they provide."

Note to Intel: They have it on film.

A $500 PC does not have to be dragged down by slow graphics

The prevailing thought in the industry is that any $500 PC is going to be saddled with low-end integrated graphics that are just not adequate for today’s visual computing applications. But that doesn’t have to be the case. The wise folks at THG saw past the myth and have configured a hot, little PC that has a nice balance of CPU and GPU horsepower for $500. They built a $500 gaming PC using a Pentium dual core CPU ($70) and a GeForce 8800 GS graphics card ($130, or $100 with rebate).

[DMB2000uk]

Congrats Nvidia, you've done your job

What the hell is this non-overclocking speculation about?!?

Dan

[Kougar]

Sounded like general FUD to me... no more FSB must obviously mean no more overclocking, as we all know AMD processors can't be overclocked ever since they replaced their own FSB with hypertransport links.

Some of the earliest articles quite clearly stated Larrabee is going to offer hardware rasterization, so considering how truthful that one turned out to be, I guess I shouldn't believe a lick that comes out of NVIDIA's PR department.

[martini161]

i dont know about you guys, but im going to be sticking to FSB for quite a while now. hardware is all ready worlds ahead of software, and something like this is just going to be a complete waste of time and money. when amd got rid of FSB, they started sucking. now that intels going to get rid of FSB, it will probably suck for the first couple generations because kinks have to be worked out. i look at this like i look at XP vs Vista. Vista may be a fairly good operating system, but when you have been devoloping for XP for 5 or more years youve got everything worked out, and theres no reason to move to vista

[Kougar]

i dont know about you guys, but im going to be sticking to FSB for quite a while now. hardware is all ready worlds ahead of software, and something like this is just going to be a complete waste of time and money. when amd got rid of FSB, they started sucking. now that intels going to get rid of FSB, it will probably suck for the first couple generations because kinks have to be worked out. i look at this like i look at XP vs Vista. Vista may be a fairly good operating system, but when you have been devoloping for XP for 5 or more years youve got everything worked out, and theres no reason to move to vista

How on earth do you figure AMD started sucking because they got rid of their equivalent of the FSB? Doing that is what created K8... without K8 AMD would still be viewed as a small, niche player in the market. K8 gave AMD three years of domination in performance terms, and dumping the FSB for hypertransport along with integrating the memory controller were two of the biggest changes between K7 and K8.

[martini161]

basically what im saying is if it aint broke dont fix it
and when i said sucking i ment in overclocking

[Zertz]

basically what im saying is if it aint broke dont fix it
and when i said sucking i ment in overclocking

FSB may not be broke, but HyperTransport is clearly superior!

[martini161]

thats why amd processors are doing so much better than intels right?

[Kougar]

thats why amd processors are doing so much better than intels right?

Actually, they are. AMD is still offering better performance in the HPC market solely because of hypertransport. Their 4P servers are also still very competitive with Yorkfields for the same reason, even if Intel can still barely edge them out using the FSB.

In my opinion, the FSB is broken. It needed fixing, and CSI (now renamed to QPI) is going to do exactly that at long last.

and when i said sucking i ment in overclocking

AMD's chips never did overclock as far as Intel's Pentium 4 chips, if you look at purely MHz/GHz. So what, pure Mhz it means nothing about performance without looking at the actual chip. K8 still beat the pants off better overclocking Pentium 4s...

[martini161]

well were not really talking about servers here are we? and thats besides the point as intels are still beating them so i dont thing fsb is broken, even if it is outdated its still beating newer technology. and by hpc do you mean HTPC? cause if you do, they are not. they are just better for HTPC because you dont need the performance (and in turn price) of the intels. once mainstream software starts catching up with todays tech, let alone tommorows, thats when i think intel needs to consider phasing out FSB. what im saying is, the FSB formula with the memory controller etc on the motherboard, and the PROCESSOR doing the PROCESSING is much simpler, cheaper and from what ive seen so far performs better. not to metion it has stood the test of time.

[ibleet]

I'm not sure what you're smoking, but Intel is still beating the pants off of AMD.