NVIDIA nTeresting News: 30 July 2010

In This Issue:

• StarCraft II launched this week. GeForce owners played it with smooth-edges thanks to our anti aliasing support. Radeon owners played it with ‘jaggies'.
• AMD backed peddled with a statement about supporting gamers and games, like we already do with our "The Way It's Meant to be Played' program.
• At Siggraph this week, NVIDIA ushered in a new era of computational visualization with a slew of products for graphics professionals. Welcome to it.
• Mafia 2 is shaping up to be a showcase title for 3D Vision and PhysX, and this video shows why.
• GeForce owners are playing over 500 titles in 3D today. Radeon owners are hoping others come through with 3D technology for them.
• At Siggraph, PEER 1 Hosting launched the world's first, large-scale hosted, GPU Cloud.
• 3D lens, mobile modules and camcorders all launched this week.

NVIDIA Gives StarCraft II Players AA, AMD Gives Excuses

StarCraft is popular. So much so that it is considered the national sport in some countries. So the sequel to StarCraft is kind of a big deal. This is the kind of game people camp out for so they can buy it at midnight on launch day. If you are serious about supporting gamers, you better be ready when it gets here. NVIDIA is serious about supporting gamers, and we back it up with action. If you play StarCraft II on a GeForce GPU you get stunning antialiasing (AA).

"It also has the ability to use NVIDIA's antialiasing override in order to give the game that extra eye candy punch versus the competition. As we said in its original review: the GTX 460 1GB is literally the perfect card for today's market and its performance in StarCraft II just shows this once again."

If you play on AMD GPUs, you don't get any AA (remember ‘graphics plus'). You see, to give your customers better image quality in a game they have been waiting for 12 years, you actually have to do some work. NVIDIA added support for GeForce owners. AMD did not.

So how did AMD spin no AA in the biggest game launching this year? Did they claim that the developer relations team did not know about it? No. Did they claim their developer relations team was locked out of development by evil NVIDIA? No. Did they accuse NVIDIA of bribing Blizzard? No. Did they say AA is proprietary? No.

"After evaluating our options, our engineering team opted not to provide AA support for StarCraft II within the Catalyst Control Center, even though the competition has included AA support in their driver at launch."

Blizzard engaged them and AMD decided not to do the work. They also came up with the stunning revelation that improving image quality requires more GPU horsepower.

"In discussions during the development of StarCraft II, Blizzard indicated that they would not initially include options to set levels of in-game anti-aliasing ("AA"). This meant that support for AA within StarCraft II would only be made possible by including it in the driver, an approach that could significantly impact performance."

And because their cards are too slow, they took the option away from gamers, not giving them the chance to determine if they want to play with jaggies or not.

"We are committed to making AA perform at an acceptable level before we release it to our customers. We will continue to work with Blizzard on this matter and hope to offer our customers an acceptable AA solution at a later date."

So what gives? Here is what PC Perspective had to say on the matter:

"Here is my theory: if AMD's cards had their performance cut in half with the enabling of anti-aliasing then ATI's options would have looked even further behind the NVIDIA cards available today. >From a marketing stand point I can see it being more beneficial to wait and integrate the feature later rather than implement it now and have another "loss" on the record books going into the game's official launch. It's disappointing for all of those gamers with ATI cards that might want to TRY to enable AA and see if they like the experience, but for now all we can do is wait."

I have a theory, too. They simply were not ready for the biggest game of the year. AMD is lacking the developer relations resources to support gamers, so they have statements and blog posts instead of features. (That is foreshadowing....)

AMD's ‘Deep Commitment' Starts Sometime After The Biggest Game of the Year Launches

So StarCraft II launched. NVIDIA GeForce owners got to play it with antialiasing immediately. To mask the fact that they were simply not ready for celebrate the release of StarCraft II, AMD sent out a corny passionate statement.

"AMD's Gaming Evolved program represents our deep commitment to PC gamers, PC game developers, and the PC gaming industry to deliver innovative technologies, nurture open industry standards, and to help the gaming industry create the best possible gaming experience on the world's best gaming platform-the PC."

NVIDIA has had a ‘deep commitment' to supporting gamers for years. We call it "The Way It's Meant To Be Played". AMD has constantly mispositioned our "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" as a pay to play marketing scheme. But knowledgeable people are not buying it.

"But without a doubt, NVIDIA's development efforts in this area are much more extensive. The developer relations team at NVIDIA is significantly larger, has a significantly larger budget and in general works with more developers than AMD's."

It is not about checks and bags of money. We have piles of tools for DirectX, OpenGL, and OpenCL as well as CUDA, 3D Vision, and PhysX. We have piles of sample code. We have engineers who go onsite and add effects, fix bugs, tweak performance and train developers in OPEN standards and standards that allow NVIDIA to innovate for our customers. We have a lab that runs developers games through THOUSANDS of PC configurations (both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs) for QA purposes.

"If ATI offered the same level of service NVIDIA seems to be offering to developers, of the gaming persuasion or otherwise, we reckon everyone would benefit."

After years of condemning and criticizing our efforts with developers, AMD is now trying to copy it.

"...the company's [AMD] support amongst developers has seemingly lagged behind archrival NVIDIA's. Its ‘The Way It's Meant To Be Played' program ensures that games run best on the latest GeForce hardware and take advantage of NVIDIA technologies such as PhysX and 3D Vision. Now AMD's Gaming Evolved looks like it will be trying to woo devs and publishers in much the same way"

Glad to see they are finally on board with supporting developers and pushing innovation. Let's hope that AMD backs-up their statement with action and that they get deeply committed to something besides ‘jaggies' in StarCraft II.

Quadro to the ‘Power of Fermi' Rocks for Graphics Pros

This past week at the annual SIGGRAPH conference, NVIDIA launched its new line of Quadro professional graphics solutions, based on the NVIDIA Fermi architecture. New NVIDIA Quadro pro graphics solutions include the Quadro 6000, Quadro 5000, Quadro 4000; the Quadro 5000M for mobile workstations, and the Quadro Plex 7000 for maximum GPU power.

Equipped with the esteemed NVIDIA Fermi architecture, the Quadro 6000 has already won the 3D Professor Editor's Choice Award, Hot Hardware Approved Award, Icrontic Golden Fedora Award and Desktop Engineering "Editor's Pick of the Week". The Quadro 5000 has been bestowed the 3D Professor Editor's Choice Award, Cadalyst Highly Recommended Award, Hot Hardware Approved Award, and the PC Perspective Gold Award.

We also announced NVIDIA 3D Vision Pro 3D stereoscopic solution, empowering engineers, designers, architects and computational chemists who work with complex 3D designs to see their work in greater detail.

If that weren't enough, we also announced new NVIDIA Fermi-optimized Application Acceleration Engines, aka ‘AXE,' designed for the professional software development community.

With new Quadro pro graphics based on the NVIDIA Fermi architecture, new NVIDIA 3D Vision Pro stereoscopic 3D technology, and new NVIDIA Application Acceleration Engines for software developers-it's no longer just about providing the best possible professional graphics solutions for workstations. NVIDIA has ushered in a new era of computational visualization.

Mafia 2 Demonstrates Our Deep Commitment to Kick Ass Games

When you have a large, responsive, proactive, and talented developer relations organization like NVIDIA does, you can help game developers make games better. When you push new technologies, you can give your customers something the competition doesn't, and make games better at the same time. Case in point: Mafia 2.

AC: 3D definitely is a feature for the PC version, not for consoles it's just for PC I think it's NVIDIA 3D tech that's there. The game works especially well in 3D I have to say. The 3D for Mafia II works especially well, NVIDIA has told us that it's a particularly successful product and...

JK: Basically this 3D thing it works perfectly well for games because they are in real time there are no artificial effects like they do on movies and you can really look around and it's absorbing.

Sometimes to innovate, you have to invent stuff. That is why we support open standards, and we also support standards that allow us to do innovative things with GPUs faster than anyone else. 3D Vision and PhysX are prime examples, and you can see them both in action in Mafia 2 via this Game Trailers interview.

AMD Not Deeply Commented to 3D Games?

An extensive interview with AMD on the subject of 3D gaming hit this week where they discussed their lack of products and panned NVIDIA's award-winning 3D Vision technology. The author walked away with this:

"What's more ATI seem to think the future of 3D lies more in films than gaming."

Other key take a ways:

• They will depend on iZ3D and DDD driver wrappers for gaming. Those products do not provide the same level of game support, image quality and features that NVIDIA is striving for.
• They will focus entirely on HDMI 1.4a and DP 1.2 for their stereo display strategy. We support those too, like we do now with 3D TV Play for HDMI 1.4a.
• They will promote their "Open" source strategy and try to position our ground breaking (and available) solution as ‘proprietary'. We will continue to support open standards, and support standards that allow us to innovate for our customers faster, like 3D Vision does.
• They consider the 120Hz monitors that support our 3D Vision productproprietary. Too bad, because gamers who want to play competitively need fast screen updates. 120Hz gives them a competitive edge. In addition 120Hz provides a smoother view for gamers who don't like the ghosting that is sometimes present on LCD displays.

I think AMD got interested in multi-GPU solutions, GPU computing, in-game physics, 3D sometime after SLI, CUDA, PhysX, 3D Vision launched. GeForce owners can play over 500 games in 3D today. Radeon owners can read interviews about playing in 3D. If you like playing on multiple screens, you can do that in 3D with GeForce, too. GeForce = Graphics Plus.

Cloudy with a Chance of GPUs

This week at Siggraph, PEER 1 Hosting launched the world's first, large-scale hosted, GPU Cloud.

The system is running mental images' RealityServer which combines the processing muscle of Tesla GPUs and 3D web services software to deliver interactive, photorealistic applications over the web using the iray renderer.

The system was demonstrated live in the NVIDIA booth where we showed a technology demonstration of a connection between 3ds Max and mental images' RealityServer, hosted in the cloud, using iray to create photorealistic images. The demo used 32 of the 128 Tesla GPUs that the PEER 1 Cloud Service has at its disposal.

Robert Miggins, VP of Business Development at PEER 1 said that they were already seeing "tremendous demand" even before the announcement and they expect to expand capacity as customer demand ramps up.

And it's not just graphics, customers can use the PEER 1 hosted GPUs for a wide range of other applications, financial computation, oil and gas, bioscience and more.

PEER 1 wasn't the only announcement this week around GPUs in the Cloud. Penguin's On-Demand platform (POD) also launched on Wednesday.

Interest in Tesla GPUs for cloud installations is rapidly increasing as providers look at ways to provide an inexpensive entry point to parallel computing for new users.

3D Cameras are arriving

Besides movies and games, 3D photos and 3D home movies add to the 3D Vision fun. Panasonic announced interchangeable 3D lens for their Lumix digital camera this week. Panasonic also announced the first 3D consumer camcorder. Sharp

has introduced 3D camera modules for mobile and digicam devices.