Introduction
By necessity I have had to keep this report brief so, you may like to brush up on the white paper technology papers from ATI and Microsoft at your own leisure. I had to get you the message on time, and I am pretty excited about it. I’ll revisit Meltdown and ATI again, to get into the nooks and crannies in future articles.
Meltdown 2001 is a Microsoft event that is not widely publicized these days. It used to be techno love-in for DirectX, but I guess things have changed since those pioneering days. Just in case you aren’t familiar with Meltdown, at it, Independent hardware vendors (IHV) take up suites at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel, open their doors to the attending developers and pretty much leave their hardware up for testing and evalution by the crowd. As such, it provides restricted access to the press these days, but we were fortunate to be there, and will have reports on the event over the course of the next two days.
In the old days of DirectX’s missed shipments, Meltdown was kind of like a last gasp free for all as Microsoft and IHVs rushed to get in synch on whatever version of DirectX was slated to be the flavor for that Christmas’ game season. In the old days, there were a lot more interested and aggressive IHVs trying to position themselves in the DirectX universe. In the old days, game developers had a lot more to be skeptical about when it came to DirectX, and used Meltdown as a chance to catch up on IHV releases, drivers, and mostly to get final SDK code for DirectX. Well, boy has DirectX grown up – in future articles we’ll look at how DirectX is surpassing the Godfather of APIs, OpenGL – development schedules are much easier to keep to when your all grown up and adult.
For this first report I just want to concentrate on one thing – ATI. I did a column a short time ago with my perspective on ATI which left some ATI lovers a bit miffed, to say the least, although I didn’t quite understand why. Well, now I have an update on that perspective and it all has to do with what I believe is the first real showing of the R200 Meltdown, although no one at ATI will ever admit to it. I think there’s a lot for ATI to be optimistic about.
SMARTSHADER – Up The Pixel Shader Ladder
By now, you have seen the announcement about ATI’s SMARTSHADER technology, which George covered in our Hard News section here. He linked through to ATI’s online White Paper on the technology and it’s a little lightweight on the technical detail, but worth a read for an overview.
At Meltdown, I met with ATI in their suite and got the full blown PowerPoint blast on the technology and some live demos. Present were David Nalasco, Technololgy Marketing Manager, Toshi Okumura, Product Marketing Manager, and John B. Challinor II, Director of PR for ATI.
David, Toshi, and John from ATI – desperately trying to hide the box that holds the key to the kingdom of R200
The tack of the presentation wasn’t all that original to begin with. In the past, it was Toy Story graphics in real time. Now, ATI is pushing for Final Fantasy graphics in real time. It’s a nice marketing message, but the real story here seems to be that ATI has jumped ahead of Nvidia on the hardware curve by adding its own enhancements to pixel shading in DirectX, and got them incorporated in DirectX 8.1. Just for the sake of an overview, the diagram below is the DirectX 3D pipeline. There have been an awful lot of articles on the 3D graphics pipeline. For the sake of hardware enthusiasm we can probably simplify things here. Vertex shaders are the T&L segment, and pixel shaders are the rasterizers. Prior to DirectX 8, T&L and rasterizer functions were fixed in hardware, but in the new model, programmers can have access to an almost unlimited number of visual effects by plugging in their own routines into the pipeline.
This diagram of the DirectX Graphics Architecture, courtesy of Microsoft, lays out the basic graphics pipeline in the newly minted, highly programmable world of DirectX 8.1, and beyond. ATI’s SMARTSHADER technology appears to give ATI compatibility with all three new pixel shader models in DirectX 8.1, ps 1.2, 1.3, and the forward looking ps 1.4. On the other hand, GeForce3 seems to stop be more focused on 1.2 and 1.3, lacking the extra texture stages and registers that 1.4 brings to the table. In reality, this does not have a short term impact on the quality of real world graphics, in other words, game developers have a long way to go to get with the program on DirectX 8.1 so, you’re not going to get left out with either Nvidia or ATI products.
SMARTSHADER – Up The Pixel Shader Ladder, Continued
ATI’s SMARTSHADER technology is ps 1.4 in hardware which Microsoft touted as “A stepping stone towards future pixel shader versions” in one Meltdown tutorial. In effect, Microsoft has added, probably at the instigation of ATI, more texture inputs, more instructions, and more registers to the DirectX pixel shader under the guise of ps 1.4. More is good. As a side note, the great thing for Microsoft’s DirectX development team is that they can probably support any number of new DirectX hardware architectures by just accomodating the registers and operations of each GPU as it comes along. No more having graphics chip companies arguing over the merits of the way they do bump mapping in hardware, or quadratice patches, or motion blur. It can all be programmed into the vertex and pixel shader.
ATI didn’t give any clear indication on the number of rendering pipes in R200, but it is clear that each of the pipes will have 6 texture units, compared to the 3 implemented in Radeon (which had 2 rendering pipelines). ATI can certainly match GeForce3’s 4 rendering pipelines, but ATI may deliver 6 to get the commensurate fill rate increase. This will also mean that ATI will have to up the memory bandwidth accordingly.
ATI deserves to be commended for maneuvering itself ahead of Nvidia in this instance. They’ve responded to Nvidia’s jump on DirectX 8 as a result of its involvement on Xbox and its close ties to Microsoft. They’ve responded to Nvidia marketing by peeling away their architecture and highlighting its facets. They’ve responded by trying to leapfrog Nvidia on their next chip.
Assuming that what I saw demonstrated at Meltdown was the R200, and it couldn’t have been anything else considering the functions of the SMARTSHADER being demonstrated, ATI is positioning its product as a precursor to DirectX 9, in the same way that Nvidia positioned GeForce3 as a DirectX 8 product. However, there isn’t anything taking advantage of DirectX 8.1 right now, let alone DirectX 9 (which I’ll address in my next report) so, ATI may only be catching Nvidia up on the marketing battlefield, and that’s plenty good enough for now.
Nevertheless, I think ATI has itself a true next generation product by virtue of the fact that SMARTSHADER gives R200 a possible performance enhancer in the rasterization stage. Six texture blending and 22 operations give ATI bragging rights in hardware even though, I suspect, that we won’t see either ATI or Nvidia having a delta in performance terms.
I wish I could have got more information on the number of games that will actually have support for DirectX 8.1 graphics hardware features for Christmas 2001. The best I could get was 8-12 A list game titles. That would indicate that even without the benefit of a big enough stable of titles to support its featuers, ATI’s R200 is going to be no worse off than Nvidia’s GeForce3 come Christmas as far as consumers are concerned because there is no way for either one to edge ahead on the performance curve. The most importat thing is going to be how the big 3D engines from the likes of Id and Epic take advantage of DirectX 8.1 hardware features in ATI and Nvidia products. These engines will play a crucial role as they are licensed to many other developers and drive the 3D performance market. Until then, it’s a level playing field, but now, ATI can say it has something that exceeds Nvidia in pure specs.
The Demos
Like I said, I think this was as close as we can get for now to a public showing of R200, and therefore, the demos of the SMARTSHADER technology were significant as a result.
Unfortunatley time and conditions didn’t allow me to get good pictures but I’ll try and capture the spirit in the descriptions.
Final Fantasy inspired graphics – this is the ATI demo application running SMARTSHADER on the R200. You can just make out in the top left hand corner of the screen the words PS 1.4 Ghost Shader. The demo used a transparent rotating skull bone set against a bump mapped, specular lit, image using a single light source rotating around the room. Unfortunately, this picture does no justice to the actual quality of the display. The red buttons at the bottom left of the screen are used to turn on and off the various features of the board.
ATI acknowledges that it has to develop more realistic demos, reflective of real gaming situations, but what they showed was impressive enough.
In this image all of the features of the graphics subsystem are at full steam. The text in the top left hand corner of the screen says: PS 1.4 Cubic Environment Diffuse Light and Tinted Refraction
In case you were wondering what the image above was – it’s a stained glass window. The background image comes through the stained glass; there are four light source, one white, three colored, rotating around the object and room simultaneously; the glass panels and leading is bump mapped for extra effect.
R200 Launch Taking Shape
The systematic way ATI has been positioning itself for the R200 launch should have the desired effect for the company – anticipation is high among analysts, and users alike. ATI deserves credit for working hard to set up its next generation hardware and its timing is impeccable, if R200 makes it out the door in September.
Nvidia may have stolen much of the thunder this year with GeForce3, but this year is shaping up to be uncertain economically and the gaming industry has two big console launches in November that will keep the hype outside of the PC arena.
What ATI may have, something which they haven’t had in a while, is a sexy 3D product. It’s out there now, somewhere. It looks good, and it’s saying all the right things. We”ll just have to wait and see what our good Doctor makes of it when he gets his hand on it.
During the product showcase reception, attendees swarm around the ATI demonstration. This was about as busy as anybody got. There was a certain buzz surrounding ATI, undoubtedly.
