At last week’s WinHEC show, Nvidia Chief Scientist David Kirk pontificated on where 3D graphics rendering is going over the next decade. What can you expect? Photorealistic rendering and cinematic realism, of course. Bottom line — it’s not about pushing clock speeds and pixel rates, but rather making pixels much better looking!
The Future of 3D Graphics
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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This coming from a scientist from Nvidia, the company that fractured there render cycle in order to falsely bolster their latest benchmarks…
we can get new pixles based on those colors or even more than that!!
More virtual people to kill and virtual things to destroy.
Over 90% of what is done with desktop 3D graphics is just sick. Sick shit for sick people.
Why should anybody buy Nvidia if he doesn’t have the intense desire to slaughter someone (at least virtual)?
Oh, wait I forgot the monster-sized polygon tits of Lara Croft. Just pathetic.
“More virtual people to kill and virtual things to destroy.
Over 90% of what is done with desktop 3D graphics is just sick. Sick shit for sick people.”
Though I agree with you somewhat, people have the choice (from the very beginning) to use any product as they please. NVIDIA is not to stop making graphic cards because a lot of them kill “virtual people”.
Oh yeah, you’re a nice troll to bite on a Friday night.
Personally, I don’t play games. I use my NVIDIA card to run my 3D CAD software. However, I used to be a gamer, so I’m compelled to defend them. Acting something out on screen is very different from doing it in real life. And most of the time, what attracts people to games like Quake or Unreal is not the carnage (which is a thrill for some young teenagers, but irrelevent to most gamers) but the speed, suspence, atmosphere, and requirement of skill. Your view of reality is seriously warped, anyway. Our culture has moved to a position where violence in some form or another is present in almost all media. Our culture accepts it because most people are mature enough to realize the distinction between watching Arnold take it to some computer generated robots, and a kid gunning down his class mates. Apparently, some people (you) aren’t, but that’s their problem. They should just bask in their obsolete world view and not bother the rest of us.
America has extremely high levels of violent crime, the highest of any first world nation. There are 2 million Americans in prison, many for violent crimes.
Your assertion that Americans aren’t programmed by omnipresent violence is totally wrong.
Bowling for Columbine didn’t win an Oscar for nothing. It really goes to show that omnipresent fear and violence make Americans highly unstable and unable to cope with the real world without resorting to violence.
The plethora of violent American computer games only makes the problem worse. What interesting creative non-violent games come out of the American computer gaming industry? Not many.
However, just as I don’t blame Smith and Wesson for crime, I don’t blame Nvidia for violent computer games. The problem is a cultural problem, not a technology problem.
First off, let’s not get started on Bowling for Columbine. It was a terrible spinumentary, and I’ve liked his stuff before.
This has nothing to do with 3D cards. give it a rest. It seems to me that most cultures seem to be violent these days, the only difference is that Americans are aware that their culture is so, and by so doing, there’s a reputation there.
ON THE SUBJECT … 3D cards have to go this direction. It’s not about speed anymore, at least not until much higher resolutions and stereo displays become common. How else can graphics chip makers sell us a new card if it doesn’t do something new. The only real thing to do new now is pretty it up. IMO good.
In a year or two we’ll be seing the Vid cards go the way of sounc cards, adding pretty useless stuff in order to temp us into the new cards because there really isn’t anything new to do.
>They should just bask in their obsolete world view and not bother the rest of us.
I won’t excuse myself for having an opinion different from yours. I won’t keep quite just because you don’t like what I’ve to say.
“If freedom means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they dont want to hear” – George Orwell
>Oh yeah, you’re a nice troll
No, I’m not. I really think this shit is sick. I don’t say it to provoke some kind of flame war. Its just what I think about this stuff.
Correlation does not prove causation. There is no evidence that violent media causes violent behavior. America’s problems with violence reach far beyond media. We have a society where children are left unsupervised for long periods of time, where families often cannot sit down to dinner even once a week, where there is a huge and still growing disparity between the rich and the poor, and where the very culture rejects education and family in favor of “da thug life.”
>This has nothing to do with 3D cards.
It has everything todo with desktop 3D boards. These things are made just to play these games.
There are a few non-FirstPersonKiller games but the market is pushed strictly by the shooters.
The future of 3D home graphics is making the people in
Soldiers of Fortune XXI so realistic that you really can’t tell the difference anymore.
“Personally, I don’t play games. I use my NVIDIA card to run my 3D CAD software. ”
Actually isn’t one of the problems with gaming cards is the tricks that are used as they relate to accuracy. I believe that’s one of the differences between a gaming card, and a professional card.
Anyway as pointed out in the article great things are on the horizon. Yes we’ve been able to do some of the things illustrated, but it would takes weeks to compute.
I personally as someone greatly into graphics. I can’t wait, and I’m certain the artistic quarter out there can’t either.
Most FPS are not that much violent. All varieties of Quake, Unreal, Half-life, Serious Sam and Max Payne are more or less kiddy arcades. Yes, there is a bit of red stuff, but it is not that real and scary. If you are looking for a really violent game, look no further then Fallout 1 and 2. Yes, it is two-dimensional, but that doesn’t make humans turned into lead cocktail any less fun and degenerated societies surviving in radioactive wasteland any less scary. War… war never changes.
Is there any 3D-shooter that can be comparable with it? I doubt that.
Gaming cards aren’t really less accurate anymore. Besides, accuracy isn’t all that important for 3D CAD. It’s impossible to get hundredth-inch accuracies by sight anyway, so there are lots of features in 3D CAD packages to allow the image to be several pixels off. The difference between consumer cards and pro cards has to do with support for certain features, and of course, performance. Pro level cards have support for multiple overlays, 96-bit color depths, and line anti-aliasing. They are optimized for higher geometry rates at the expense of texturing performance.
Max, you are dead on. Ever since I played the first Doom I’ve just wanted to walk into my school with my plasma rifle and shoot down all the floating heads I see. Because you see, I’m just a stupid little kid and think that sees something on a computer screen and thinks it’s ok to do in real life.
….not.
Video games don’t make kids want to shoot up their schools. They just don’t. The biggest problems with video games is that it makes kids fat and lazy, but exercise is overrated anyway. Has anyone thought of blaming parents for not being parents? I mean, how are you supposed to grow up if you aren’t raised? Video games are a scapegoat, parents who aren’t parents are to blame for the rise in violence.
They say the economy is down. Something that would make me buy would be a better monitor. A good monitor can do 100 dpi. A printer can do orders of magnitude better than that. IBM has broken ground with a new monitor that does 170 dpi – http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8578. Still way out of reach though.
> Video games don’t make kids want to shoot up their schools.
> …
> Video games are a scapegoat, parents who aren’t parents are to blame for the rise in violence.
Exactly, videogames only decrease the likelyhood of someone going out and shooting up everyone in a shopping center. Its a vent for your anger/killing fantasies. Gunlaws are the problem.
Whoops, this is getting off topic. But anyway:
> it’s not about pushing clock speeds and pixel rates, but
> rather making pixels much better looking!
You need faster CPUs to a certain extent. As for pixel rates, games don’t look very good at 640x480x256. I think that this comment contradicts itself. Without higher clockspeeds and pixel rates, the pixels won’t be “better looking”.
While most monitors come a bit short of 100 dpi, these dots are in fact composed of three primary colors, with each component able to assume a value from 0 to 255. Printers have really high values of dpi, but printer dots are individual droplets of ink (or toner) that either have either full or zero intensivity. You need to combine a lot of them into large “subpixels” to have access to gradually changing intensivity, and you will need four of these (using four different primary colours) to match a single monitor pixel. One would probably need a 16×16 matrix of same colour dots to match monitor’s amount of bits per component, and then use four such matrices for four different ink colours. The result is that a 32×32 matrix of printer dots coresponds to a single monitor pixel, so you should probably divide the printer resolution by about 30 for fair comparison.
Of course, the less colour tones you need, the better printers look if compared to monitors.
“ON THE SUBJECT … 3D cards have to go this direction. It’s not about speed anymore, at least not until much higher resolutions and stereo displays become common. How else can graphics chip makers sell us a new card if it doesn’t do something new. The only real thing to do new now is pretty it up. IMO good. ”
I agree to a point. But they could always work on increasing clarity and aspects needed for desktop use (IE Matrox). Also they can work on making them not need fans for fast graphics, smaller cards, cheaper cards. Better isn’t always in in what’s fastest.
I personaly find all these latest video cards insane. I could find something much better to buy with 300 bucks or whatever they are then a video card.
“Personally, I don’t play games. I use my NVIDIA card to run my 3D CAD software”
Well thats a waste of a card since CAD programs do very little with your graphics card. It’s all CPU. Sure if your trying to spin or animate a model around real fast having a fast card might help, but most CAD workstations run rather bland cards. It’s just not important for them. I do CAD work on my computer with the built in video, no issues what so ever. Money is far more well spent on CPU and Memory for CAD, oh and nice big clear monitors.
so they can work on making them not need fans for fast graphics, smaller cards, cheaper cards. Better isn’t always in in what’s fastest.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I bought a Geforce 2 when they came out to replace my Voodoo3 3000, because I felt like wasting my money a new video card.
I installed it and booted up to a disturbingly loud fan on the Geforce 2. Maybe mine was defective, or maybe I’m just paranoid and want the quietest computer in the world, but I got rid of the Geforce 2 and installed my old Voodoo3 (cooled passively) and haven’t looked back.
Oh yeah, and the Voodoo3 box was pimp, with that face… damn.
Are there any new cards that don’t have big fans and have reasonable performance? I’m looking to upgrade again and would like any input.
At the risk of actually being On Topic (snicker), there were a few very interesting pieces of information in the article.
GPUs have a much faster development cycle than general-purpose CPUs, doubling in performance in less than 12-month cycles. Which is important, not just so we can see ‘better eye-candy’, but because at the same time, they’re becoming more programmable.
The article specifically mentions the use of GPUs for performing tasks like FFT, which are absolutely crucial in signal-processing, as well as database sorting and a number of other operations that benefit from massive parallelism; I think we’ll see a trend of GPUs being regarded as incredibly high-performance maths coprocessors.
The beauty is that people who need this performance for “serious” tasks (eg I’m personally dying to use my GPU power for audio synthesis), get cheap rapidly-upgraded hardware, because the general public enjoy “eye candy” so much.
What about making cheap ($50-100), fast 2D cards for home users to do real time video editing etc. A lot of people don’t play games but would like fast hardware multimedia encoding without buying an expensive PCI video capture card and high end CPU.
matrox g450
Printers have really high values of dpi, but printer dots are individual droplets of ink (or toner) that either have either full or zero intensivity. You need to combine a lot of them into large “subpixels” to have access to gradually changing intensivity, and you will need four of these (using four different primary colours) to match a single monitor pixel
5 years ago this might have been true but not any more. IIRC the HP printers actully mix the colours into a dot so they don’t have “sub pixels” at all. The Epson photo printers can change the size of their dots, have a very high resolution (now over 3000DPI) and use more than 4 colours.
I can print pictures that are photographic quality from my printer (Epson Stylus Photo 1290). However, you only get good quality from the printer if you have good source material and most consumer digital cameras simply aren’t up to that level yet.
I printed a couple of test prints from the Canon 10D which came out amazing, the monitor even at it’s best can’t even come close to this quality or resolution.
—
BTW great article, intersting stuff…
“”Well thats a waste of a card since CAD programs do very little with your graphics card. It’s all CPU. Sure if your trying to spin or animate a model around real fast having a fast card might help, but most CAD workstations run rather bland cards. It’s just not important for them. I do CAD work on my computer with the built in video, no issues what so ever. Money is far more well spent on CPU and Memory for CAD, oh and nice big clear monitors. ”
Think architectual rendering. Maybe for engineering you may not, but when you’re showing a client what their money is buying you do. Also as someone mentioned, the cards may also help in the non-graphics department. BTW wouldn’t the AGP bus be a limitation? I seem to remember most drivers are optimized one-way.
Our 3D CAD software pushes the graphics card a lot harder than 2D programs like AutoCAD. On my last project, even our Quadro-equiped workstations could barely keep up when trying to manipulate the model. My poor laptop had a big disadvantage here, since it doesn’t accelerate anti-aliased lines, while the Quadros do.
Anytime someone (especially the religious zealots) want to preach to you about how ‘bad’ violent video games are and how they program people to do evil and nasty things, just point something like this out to them …
http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/05/12/slain.children/index.html
And suggest that as long as we’re going to ban violent video games, we should probably ban God as well. That, I imagine, would shut them up pretty quickly.
The plethora of violent American computer games only makes the problem worse. What interesting creative non-violent games come out of the American computer gaming industry? Not many.
This may shock you, but those violent American computer games get exported. To europe, canada, australia,.. Guess what, the grand majority of teens living there grow up to mature adults, who do go on killing frenzies.
I think that the problem is based in culture, economics, educational systems.
Some kids are so poor, that they don’t have any hope to be someone. Landing in prison, getting fed every day, a secure and controlled environment.. It’s paradise on earth for those kids.
An educational system that is in the hands of religious zealots, not giving any sort of trust in their children. Teaching children to cope with conflicts isn’t important, as long as they don’t see a naked female breast in school. Offcourse the evolution theory is something the devil himself created, and any teacher that dares to mention it, should be fired on the spot.
Culture and politics where slogans and tough language is more important than a good decent debate and compromises. It doesn’t matter when a senator H. Itler wants to put muslims in camp, and gass them, because H. Itler gave me a shiny pen!
A kid that is well educated. A kid that has hope for the future. A kid that looks up to people who solve conflicts through debate, arguments and compromises. Will that kid be impressed by a couple of red pixels, and start killing his peers?
This may shock you, but those violent American computer games get exported.
The Doom style game design pattern is easily replicated, advertised, and consumed, hence its great commerical success. Given the prevailing American culture, large unified market, and globalisation, it’s no surprise that it’s also achieved considerable commercial export success as well. This doesn’t mean it’s creatively or culturally, welcome or a good thing.
because graphics is an “embarrassingly parallel” problem
That’s the key phrase. With much of the problem being solved, the next wave of cards will essentially be a cut and paste job, doing no more than throwing more shader blocks at the problem. Some issues remain, such as lack of a unified memory architecture, which makes it difficult to handle certain tasks or classes of problem. The more things change, the more they stay the same…
The Doom style game design pattern is easily replicated, advertised, and consumed, hence its great commerical success. Given the prevailing American culture, large unified market, and globalisation, it’s no surprise that it’s also achieved considerable commercial export success as well. This doesn’t mean it’s creatively or culturally, welcome or a good thing.
The whole point was: If there is alot of teen-violence in America, but significantly less in Europe, Canada, .. then the cause of that violence isn’t those video-games. If it were, there would be alot more violence in Europe/Canada/Australia/Asia/.. too.
The whole point was: If there is alot of teen-violence in America, but significantly less in Europe, Canada, .. then the cause of that violence isn’t those video-games. If it were, there would be alot more violence in Europe/Canada/Australia/Asia/.. too.
Neither people or works exist in glorious isolation within a culture. Personally, I’d look more toward character, social structure, history, etcetera, as a root cause of violence, though a violent game can be a contributor to the overall level of violence, and like anything, a cause in itself – on a case by case basis. That is something we can all agree on. What I think’s the problem with Doom etcetera, is the degree and nature of the contribution.
“And suggest that as long as we’re going to ban violent video games, we should probably ban God as well.”
Mebbe you should put retarded people (as she clearly was) in mental institutions first. It might be easier.
If you want to take Boling for Colombine as a reference then I suggest you whatch the film again. It is not the prevailence of violence in games and entertainment that seporates America from other countries but more the fear factor perpertrated by the media. Unfortunately our media is following suit here in Australia and it makes me sick.
For the most, people in society can differentiate games from the real thing and killing of real people is not tollerated. Let us also not forget that some of the worst Human rights violations and killing of civilians has taken place in countries where the media is terrably under developed and computers are a dream not a reality. Think of Africa if you’re having trouble placing the latest spates of mass murder. Before that Asia with good old Pol Pot (no computer games there).
Also look to European history over the last century and tell me where the most violence has transpired? Sure as hell wasn’t in America or from kiddies with PS2’s or Quake on their computer. For the challenged think of Lenin, Stalin, and histories favourite, Hitler. So get of your bloody soap boxes and embrace the benefits 3D technology can bring like in the fields of Art, Science and Medicine.
Should have checked over the first paragraph )-:
“Our 3D CAD software pushes the graphics card a lot harder than 2D programs like AutoCAD. On my last project, even our Quadro-equiped workstations could barely keep up when trying to manipulate the model. My poor laptop had a big disadvantage here, since it doesn’t accelerate anti-aliased lines, while the Quadros do.”
I don’t use autocad, it’s pretty worthless unless your into archetecture. I mainly use Pro/E and Solidworks. I would have to say most of your problems are CPU related. Sure if your spinning a massive assembly around real fast the graphics card might struggle, but you don’t do that a whole lot. I have never managed to have such a problem. Not to say it doesn’t happen, just haven’t seen it. Also it could be a function of the cards your using or something else.
I’m gonna pitch in my thoughts on the topic because I have a duality to my nature and like to take things to extremes. My opinions can be harsh.
I play violent video games. But not just the typcial violence, cops and robbers or first person shooters. I get into the real violence. The heart of what it is to be truely sick and evil. I enjoy the thought of torture and pain and sufferring. Not because I ever want to see this happen to another human, but because we humans do this to eachother ALL THE TIME. The difference is I am merely experiencing this for myself, experiencing what it is to be as evil as humans are. In the comfort of my home without injuring anyone.
Now how evil can a human be? We kill with guns and rockets and bombs and knives. But we can also take pleasure in inflicting pain in others or punishing others for some stupid meaningless action they commit. Take GTA3 for example. If a sim or ped, as I like to call them, runs into your car you could just back up and move on or you could get out of your car, walk up to theirs, pull them out. Then proceed to beat them in the street. But I prefer to pin them under my car, so they can’t move. Then stand a few feet away, pull out my pistol, and kneel down to get a good look at them before slowly putting one bullet after another into their helplessly pinned body. After some cries and a few shots they finally die. But that isn’t bloody enough for me. I want to be able to cut into the flesh of another human and hear them scream. I want computers games to get so violent they portray in realistic life-like detail exactly how brutal we are. I want to see the effects of radiation first hand on my computer screen as I apply it to the peds on at a time, etc.
Why? There are two reasons. First it hurts no one and some sick and twisted people like me enjoy it. Second because there are so many people in this world who want to remain ignorant of the fact that we commit these attrocities all the time in real life, not on computer screens. We hurt real people all the time, but none of that ever makes it to the news. We never see people getting blown up by our rockets or tortured down in Cuba because that sort of violence doesn’t sell war, it makes people sick and want to stop hurting eachother.
If you are so offended by violent video games that it makes you sick then they are doing their job. I would never play these games if we didn’t live in a capitalist society as corrupt as ours with wars ever few years and highschool shootings and violence in real life everywhere I look but a population oblivious to the facts. Because of the hypocracy I turn to video games.
Hey, at least I ain’t destroying your precious property, ahh-ite!
talking about bowling for columbine. There were two school schootings recently. One involving AK-47s and another involving the suicide of a student and murder of his pricipal in the school’s caffeteria.
The reason school shootings mean so much to me? I went to Thurston highschool in Eugene Oregon. Kip Kinkel shot almost 30 people in my highschool’s caffeteria.
Something is deeply wrong here and it ain’t the computer games.