| Q&A |
Luciano
Alibrandi, Technical Marketing Manager nVidia Europe.
06/05/04
>version française
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| Q1 |
nVidia
leads the 3D professionnal market. What makes nVidia's cards
so popular for 3D profesionnals? |
| A1 |
Well,
it's a combination of performance and compatibility that is
most important to workstation customers. NVIDIA's Quadro FX
family of GPUs lead the market in most professional benchmarks,
and with certifications from all the major ISV's, our hardware
is both optimised and fully compliant with all the most popular
design applications. Combine all that with great price/performance
and it's a pretty good combination - NVIDIA enjoys around 73%
worldwide market share in professional graphics to date. |
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| Q2 |
In
the CAD market, raw performances (triangle/sec) is still the
main preocupation, what bring the new FX4000 in this performance
domain? |
| A2 |
The
Quadro FX 4000 offers roughly three times the level of performance,
twice the vertex processing power, twice the effective setup
rate and twice the textured fill rate of our previous high end
Quadro FX. This, coupled with a radical high-speed memory interface
that provides up to four times the culling, rasterisation and
single-textured fill rates. |
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| Q3 |
Industrial
3D designers require more and more realism, will nVidia helps
CAD editors to bring realistic shaders in CAD applications? |
| A3 |
Of
course, NVIDIA offers support on many levels to Quadro customers
and we will always assist in any way we can. |
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| Q4 |
In
the DCC area, what would be the benefits of using the new QuadroFX4000? |
| A4 |
Shader
model 3.0 support is one feature that the DCC market will be
glad to have as it supports unlimited vertex and pixel shader
instructions. Shader model 3.0 also features 32-bit floating
point shader precision for RGB and alpha. 32 GB/sec memory bandwidth
for fast data transfers will also be key for this market. |
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| Q5 |
Is
the Quadro FX4000 limited to 256MB memory on board? Is the huge
bandwith 32GB/sec. really necessary for the 3D chip? |
| A5 |
Is
32GB/sec needed, well, there is a direct correlation between
GPU and memory interfaces, such that the faster you can access
the memory from your graphics processor, the higher your 3D
application performs, so yes, we firmly believe that it is
a beneficial feature. 256MB is how the Quadro FX will come
to market. |
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| Q6 |
What are
the main reasons for the migration from the AGP to the PCI Express
bus? Will it increase the 3D performance? |
| A6 |
For
the simple reason that it will increase the bandwidth by 2-4
times, professional markets will be amongst the first to benefit
from this new standard. |
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| Q7 |
Will
this new generation of chips come with 64-bit drivers to take
advantage of AMD64 architecture (on Windows 64bits/Linux)? |
| A7 |
It's
very likely! |
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| Q8 |
What
are the enhancements of the Quadro FX in terms of realism and
Pixel/Vertex shaders? |
| A8 |
Shader
model 3.0 also features 32-bit floating point shader precision
for RGB and alpha with 32 GB/sec memory bandwidth for fast data
transfers. |
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| Q9 |
What
is Gelato technology? Is it compatible only with nVidia FX cards? |
| A9 |
Gelato
is a production ready, hardware accelerated film renderer boasting
the highest performance of any renderer on the market. It is
designed to work with Quadro FX card only. |
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| Q10 |
Is
using the computing power of a 3D card for 3D film render the
first step before realtime rendering in DCC software? |
| A10 |
Well,
typically real-time graphics techniques evolve from leading
edge offline procedures developed at film studios years before.
You could ineed say therfore that this a 'step' in the right
direction, but we are some way off before real time rendering
for DCC apps is a reality. |
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| Q11 |
What
kind of gain in rendering time can a studio expect (compare
with a 1 processor rendering). Is it the end of render card
& render farm? |
| A11 |
Well,
Gelato boasts at least twice the speed of any competing renderer
- and this can be as much as ten times depending on the complexity
of the scene and specification of the machine. Blinns law states
that a frame is rendered in a standard time that will never
change, this means that if you give the artist more power to
render faster, they will simply render more in the same time,
so we hope Gelato will lead to richer visuals in movies. As
Gelato is hardware accelerated, the better the hardware, the
faster Gelato will run, so it is far from the end of render
farms, on the contrary, Gelato has been designed to fit into
the existing production pipelines of studios. |
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| Q12 |
Is
rendering a film with the help of a 3D card a risk to have a
uniform render? Or is it possible to customize the render? |
| A12 |
Gelato
does not dictate file formats nor is it intended to be disruptive
to studio's existing pipelines. |
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| Q13 |
Mental
Images has announced they’ll take advantage of nVidia
Quadro FX4000 computing power, is it based on Gelato technology?
Will DCC software (Maya, 3DS Max, Softimage...) take advantage
of 3D hardware capabilities in rendering? |
| A13 |
The
work done with Mental Images is completely different to the
work on Gelato. Gelato is a final frame renderer, relying on
the GPU to accelerate specific computations, that are considered
to be bottlenecks in the film production pipeline. The point
of Gelato is to create the highest quality film images with
no limitations on flexibility or creativity in record time.
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| Q14 |
Is
there any applications where 3D hardware capabilites can be
used (compiling, scientific computing...)? |
| A14 |
Industrial
design applications such as Powerwalls (often used for pre-visualisation
in car companies) is a well known use - there are many others. |
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| Q15 |
3D
chips evoluate faster than CPU ; that inspire me a stupid question
: Will 3D chips take the place of the CPU? |
| A15 |
CPU's
and GPU's are parallel technologies, designed to co-exist -
I doubt one would replace the other. |
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| Q16 |
About
the embedded market: when will NVIDIA's 3D chips power
devices ? |
| A16 |
Mitsuibishi
is already shipping the GoForce 2150 chip in their M342i handset
and there are more designs in the pipeline - stay tuned!! |
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