James Wang recently attended the NVIDIA Editor's Day, where he ate a G70. here, he spills his guts on the hottest graphics this side of Ontario.
NVIDIA Editor’s Day 2005
It’s been just over a year since the Geforce 6800 (NV40) series was launched. Now a year later and without missing a beat, NVIDIA unveiled their G70 GPU to the world.
G70 may be a departure from NVIDIA’s old ‘NV’ codename scheme but it’s actually just short hand for the card’s retail name, Geforce 7800 GTX. While this may sound like just another graphics card, it actually closely resembles the GPU for the Playstation 3. In fact, according to NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, the transistor count and performance expectation is rough the same.
The G70 will be the first GPU to ship with over 300 million transistors. It’s on the same 110 nm process as its predecessor. Clocked at 430Mhz, it’s only 5MHz faster than their current high end 6800 Ultra and 90MHz slower than ATI’s X850 XT. Physically the G70 hardly resembles a monster -- it’s a slimly packed single slot card that looks nothing like many of the dual slot monsters out today. So what’s so great about the G70?
The G70 is a killer GPU in disguise. Despite the negligible clock speed increase, it has eight vertex pipelines whereas current high ends cards have six. The pixel pipelines have been vamped up to twenty-four from sixteen – the equivalent of six Geforce 4 Ti4600s on the one chip.
Even such a comparison does not give the G70 enough credit. The chip supports shader version 3.0 while the Ti series works only with shader 2.0. A more meaningful comparison would be against the NV40. In terms of pixel pipelines, the G70 has 50% more. Each pipeline also can execute two multiple-add instructions in one cycle, twice the rate of the NV40. The end result is that one G70 can often outperform two 6800 Ultras in SLI.
Using SLI, the G70 is a different beast all together. At 1600 x 1200 with 4xAA and 8x anisotropic filtering thrown in for good measure, it managed to score an absurd 10611 3DMarks!
A new anti-aliasing mode has also been added that has sent cries of joy across the atomic office. Since multisampling anti-aliasing (MSAA) made anti-aliasing fast enough to use, it has always had one critical flaw -- it couldn’t detect and smooth geometry represented with alpha-textures.
When creating game models, instead of describing each strand of wire on a chain linked fence as a dense mesh of triangles, game designers cheat by modelling such geometry as one large rectangle painted over with a wire pattern. What’s not painted is encoded in the texture as “transparent”. While this technique spares the graphics card of excessive geometry calculations, when it comes to anti-aliasing, the GPU ignores such areas since MSAA only works on polygon edges. The new “transparent AA” mode in the G70 will find transparent textures and tag them to be anti-aliased using supersampling, which smoothes both geometry and textures. Say goodbye to crawling fences and trees!
Editor’s Day also had plenty of game developers showing their latest demos. Epic’s Mark Rein gave a live demo of Unreal Tournament 2007 running on the G70. Much of the demo was shown at E3 in May but watching it live was a different experience. Other than the incredible range of shader options and beautiful soft shadows, the new engine also manages to meld physics effortlessly with the graphics. Call of Duty 2 was also demoed with incredible fidelity. For about five minutes the loudspeakers rumbled the room and over a hundred reporters sat silent as World War II was played out in front of them. The game engine spat out some of the thickest and grittiest particle effects yet the G70 rendered them without a hitch.
A Q&A session with NVIDIA’s CEO wrapped up the day. Mr. Huang as usual managed to turn every question into an opportunity to show NVIDIA’s passion and the marvel of their products. When I asked him what his dream project with Sony is, he pitched, “Playstation 4?” While this drew laughter from the crowd, it occurred to me that groundwork on the PS3 is roughly complete; what you see with the G70 represents the heart and soul of the Playstation 3 GPU.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012