How far is far?

Mystik

Mystik

Active member
Back when there where no 3D cards.. and when Doom looked good, we thought that that rocked.. (or at least, i did)..

How far will video card manufacturers go? Until they can achieve true-to-life rendering? What do you guys think? How about what you guys think is enough? Or is it never enough?

I'm bored, enlighten me. =)
 
I believe "ray-tracing" will be the future of computer graphics.
Hardware is just now starting to get powerfull enough to do this in realtime.
Unfortunately while we are doing some really neat things in hardware, software has been going backwards for a few years now. Only a handfull of developers these days have even heard of assembly language, the most fundamental and efficient way to communicate with hardware. Another problem is the un-justified over use of floating point data in applications. FP is only required when absolute precision is needed. And can be avoided completely even in 3D applications such as games. I blame this on new developers being taught to apply college level math to their projects and while this may make things easier, processors can do integer operations hundreds of times faster than floating point calculations.
My point being is that until we reach a speed bump in the hardware dept forcing proper software development we won't see but a glimpse of the power of current technology.
For now I'm looking forward to seeing some games make use the latest features native to the Radeon and GeForce2 cards, particularly EMBM (not a GeForce2 feature) and per-pixel effects.
Looking forward to Doom 3 :)
 
woah, a reply. =)

Hehe, although I only have an idea of what you are saying, i think it is true that we won't see much of an improvement unless software gets up to the level of the hardware being used..

Doom3 seems to be the only game that i know that is technologically advanced over any other game now, or being developed.. but then again, i haven't been paying attention to games in a while. =)

I'm proud of ATi..
They've really pulled something good.
 
How can game developers output to the hardware max when the manufacturers can make drivers that work properly? The future is in the drivers Ati, get a good team together like nvidia.
 
Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom
 
Doom3

Doom3

Oh yeah Doom III is going to rock, I still play Doom to this day.
From what I gather ID is really going into Doom 3 full bore. Possibly a make it or bust project?
 
I'm not too sure about Doom3.
I just hope that it can live up to Doom1 and Doom2 standards. I still play that game sometimes as well, it's a classic. The levels are well done, and the music rocks!
 
Well speaking of news have you seen the video of John Carmack introducing the GF3 & Doom 3?
Love the lighting system, per-pixel effects rock!
 
Hey.. i thought i had another line in my post.. oh well.

and yeh, it looks amazing..
i hope my Radeon can take it.. lol

it's still chuggin' along..
 
Mystik said:
woah, a reply. =)

Hehe, although I only have an idea of what you are saying, i think it is true that we won't see much of an improvement unless software gets up to the level of the hardware being used..

Doom3 seems to be the only game that i know that is technologically advanced over any other game now, or being developed.. but then again, i haven't been paying attention to games in a while. =)

I'm proud of ATi..
They've really pulled something good.
Click to expand...

Developers make games that will run on the majority of systems. Right now most games still have minimum requirements of P133s. Only recently have we seen a few titles requiring PIIs.

However, the majority of graphics cards are still basic 8MB crap cards. The Radeon and Geforce products however have now become so mainstream and the issue of GPUs so prominent that I believe the standards will soon rise VERY quickly. Relatively.
 
Vigilant said:


Developers make games that will run on the majority of systems. Right now most games still have minimum requirements of P133s. Only recently have we seen a few titles requiring PIIs.

However, the majority of graphics cards are still basic 8MB crap cards. The Radeon and Geforce products however have now become so mainstream and the issue of GPUs so prominent that I believe the standards will soon rise VERY quickly. Relatively.
Click to expand...

So, in a few years from now, what do you think are going to be the minimum system requirements for games such as Doom3?
 
I know that CPU clock speeds don't account for the overall performance of systems, but I guess that by around 2005 no one will use any processor of any brand running at anything lower than about 750 Mhz, and most people will have systems clocked well over 1 Ghz, and a good number above 2Ghz... and beyond. Basic systems will have no less than about 256 MB of what is considered very fast memory today.

I wonder what speed will 'value' systems be by then.

As for graphics and other sub-systems, 'fast enough' for some type or 'level' of application will be barely enough for some others emerging. When everyone is able to render complex scenes at hight resolution with very high color depth and insane frame rates (several hundreds or even thousands of frames/sec), the quality and detail of the rendering will be increased to get the final output even more realistic, thus eating up all that power. A new plateau of performance will eventually be reached enabling other applications or other ways of doing things which in turn call for even more power to mature.

It will never end. It will never be 'fast enough' for 'very long'...

Memory sub-systems, bus architectures, storage, networks, everything will have to be improved substantially in the relatively near future or it won't matter how fast the GPUs and CPUs might be.

Regards, ../Klingon
 
I know for a fact that Carmack is designing Doom3 for Programble TCL cards, which is what all of the hardcore gamers will be using in 2 years anyway.

AGP 8X will be coming around the end of the year, and next year we may see QDR, QBM, or even DDR-II come in on some highend cards to alleviate the bandwidth problem.

I'm using 512MBs of RAM, and for me it's still not enough. I've seen samples of VERY high density chips that lead me to believe that in two years the basic systems will have 256MBs of RAM, while most gamers will have 1 GB and up. Right now the standard is 128MBs.

Around 2004 <ahem> I have heard from someone else that the 5GHz Pentium V will be manufactured on a 100 nanometer process. The performance increase will be comparable to the Pentium-Pentium Pro-Pentium II evolutionary scale. You can all figure out what to compare to.

But that's just tweaking of the architechture and optimization of programs to run SSE2. Basic stuff.

Perhaps the most important advance will be hard drive access times. This will be aided by desktop 10kRPM drives appearing next year, probably on Serial ATA.

I agree with Klingon; it's the subsystems that are really important.
 
Need to intergrate!

Need to intergrate!

If you look at the current console market they are able to do graphic intense video games with less ram and CPU speed. In fact the graphics cards are basically on par with what was available almost 2 years ago. I believe they need to better intergrate the Video Card with the available ram, and CPU.

I know the archetecture of the machines are different in so many ways. However you have to wonder if thats what Computers need!! Over the years motherboards really have not changed much...heres a hint..GET RID OF PCI SLOTS!! They are too slow, set a new Faster standard for such devices and things will improve. They need to remodel mainboards for better throughoutput. AGP is good for now, but you have to wonder if the best solution isnt integrated CPU-GPUs. It would kinda suck for upgrading but would improve performance. It would also set a standard and make games more compatible accross multiple users.

Also get rid of slow hard-drives! Ram is getting so cheap now I dont know why Maxtor, WD, Seagate..ect, isnt using ram as the storage medium. I heard a company is making ram now that runs at 1/5th the power cunsumption normal PC133 ram runs at. I dont know about you but Nanoseconds compared to Milliseconds is a big difference. The access and write speed of ram is by far faster. I hate waiting for windows to load up, and games to load up, and blah blah blah. For the most part the hard-drive is as big of a bottleneck as a CD-rom is. So why are they still pumping in money to a format that has its limits compared to a format that keeps increasing as technology gets faster.

Dont even get me started on sound-cards...they are limited by PCI buses and will never reach full potential until a new bus is used.

Thats just some of the things I think they need change...I dont want to write a "Document" about my ideals of future development.
 
The reason console developers can do that is because it's a static paltform and they don't have to run everything through an API.

Basically the only thing more advanced in consoles than PCs is the graphics chip.

If you've kept up with things, PCI-X is just around the corner, as well as AMD's Hypertransport which would be compatible with PCI as well, thus offering an upgrade path.
Intel is planning to replace AGP around 2003/2004 with a new format. AGP 8X, which will be out this winter at the latest, will probably be the last version of AGP.

Integrated chipsets have been around for a long time, however because it is usually the cheapies who buy it those chipset makers use only the minimum videochips possible (as cheap as can be). So what ends up happening is that it actually slows down progress, because people are stuck with crappy 2 year old video chips and they're not going to buy a new motherboard for at least 2 years and probably 5 if they're that cheap.

Unless there's an AGP slot for upgrading, and once again if people are cheap they're not going to buy it because it adds $30 to the cost.

Integrated graphics on a CPU is just a bad idea. IF you think about it for 30 seconds you can come up with at least half a dozen reasons why.

I agree about slow hard drives. The cheapies buy 5400s, but 7200s are fast becoming the standard. And next year we should see some 10ks coming around. Most people don't realize that the HDD is the slowest part of their computer, the weakest link. If they upgraded it to a 10k most systems systems would probably get a 20% improvement. THat like going from PIII 733 to a 1GHZ CPU.

RAM is cheap, and if manufacturers are smart they will up the standard to 256MBs. That would kill off Rambus, but PC133 and DDR RAM is dirt cheap, especially at Crucial.
Why the hell do people still buy 64MB PCs when it only costs $30 for those manufacturers to upgrade them to 128MBs?

I'm going to assume that you aren't suggesting something as stupid as replacing hard drives with RAM.

Most hard drives already use 2MBs of RAM, which is 4x more than even the most advanced drives a couple of years ago. And Seagate offers up to 16MBs of RAM. However the cost is too high to put in more.

Sound cards have been held back by lack of competition, not by PCI.
 
Why not??

Why not??

Why not use ram for the storage of information?
You can buy a gigabyte of ram right now for about $280. Which is pretty high for the low amount of data that can be stored. However ram is getting cheaper, new types of ram let it be DDR, or maybee PC200 (who knows) are emerging all the time. A 10,000 rpm hard-drive or even a scuzy hard drive will crumble to the speed of ram!! Also when you look at the size difference of ram compared to hard-drives, you can stack 12 PC133 Dimms easily into the space required for hard-drives.

Although the sound of 8XAGP sounds impressive, really its not. As of right now hardly any games gain any speed by using 4x agp! Try benchmarking it yourself. Quake, Unreal..all of them only gain a few points by having your AGP running a 4X!

I know what I said about intergrated graphics chips wasnt stated correctly. I wasnt merely talking about Cyrix chips, or other cheap all in one, wonders. I was talking about making GPU's CPU dependant of eachother. As of right now most of us will agree that a 900mhz Athlon compared to a 700 Duron will perform the same at certain resolutions because the graphics cards are the bottleneck. So if the GPU and CPU worked more effeicently together performance would improve.

Design a port in which the Graphics card is allowed to share more resources with the Processor and you will gain performance. Simply sharing Ram is not going to help much as most cards today do not even need that Ram in the first place. Yet design a system which makes the Proccessor and Graphics card as one and performance can be upgraded 2x over.

Computer feeling a little sluggish during B&W, upgrade 600 duron to a 1.2ghz athlon. Now the GPU has extra resources to pull more power from. Most of you overclockers know how much just a little more speed can make on your system. How much more could allowing the graphics card full use of the Co-processor help?
Consoles are doing it, in fact the PS2 has a pretty week graphics card, yet its believed that it will keep up with the xbox, and Game Cube because its processor is so powerfull. Each of the consoles are using PC graphics cards, Xbox by Nvidia, GC by ATI. And the Ps2...LOL..all it does is perform the fill rate, hardly any Ram, and very slow GPU speed.

And if any of you have been keeping up on the console wars youve obviously seen madden 2001, GT3, Bouncer, MGS2. All those titles are doing graphics better then the Computer.

So in all, I think a new standard is the way to go, simply trying to make hard-drives with higher RPMs, and AGP slots faster is not going to help that much. True innovation is the key..PCI to AGP for graphics..innovation..AGP1x-8x not innovation. Design a better port for the graphics card and then we will truly see the next state of computer evolution.
 
Vigilant said:
... I agree about slow hard drives. The cheapies buy 5400s, but 7200s are fast becoming the standard. And next year we should see some 10ks coming around. Most people don't realize that the HDD is the slowest part of their computer, the weakest link. ...
Click to expand...
I agree.

Well, I don't know if these exist already, but I thought of more ways to make speedier drives (in addition to making them spin faster).

One would be to build them with two independant head assemblies (placed at 180 degrees of each other) instead of the one head set as in current drives. Any piece of information would at any time be 90 degrees from the nearest head on average instead of the current 180 degrees.

I see this as performing somewhat the same as raid 0. So, one would need only two of these drives to achieve what raid 0+1 provides with 4 drives. Firmware improvements would of course be required so that information is put on the drive(s) in such a way as to maximize the use of the "redundant" R/W heads in some way.

While we're at it, then why not also have heads that are capable of reading/writing more than a single track before it becomes necessary to move the head assembly, a bit like multi-channel tape recording equipment. I understand that this may not be easy to achieve without making the heads heavier and slower... But combined with two head assemblies, smart firmware could possibly more than make up for it.

My point is that there are other avenues to improving the speed of hard drives that seem unexplored at present, at least in currently selling products. The past several years we've seen hard drives improve in the areas or areal densities, rotational speeds, head miniaturization, head seek times, cache and host interface improvements. The time may be right to innovate with new features instead of improving by refining existing technologies.

I mentioned required improvements in firmware. Actually, depending on the intended use of the drive, external software (in the form of drivers or state altering utilities) could make these improved drives behave differently in order to optimize either the transfer rate or the access time (or balance between the two).

Has anyone heard of new drive designs such as what I'm proposing? Any comments?

As for optical storage, I've recently read an article about a new medium whose size is the same as a regular CD but instead of using reflection it would use fluorescence. One such disk could have tens or a few hundreds of recording surfaces accessible by changing the focus point of the lens, giving a storage capacity of about 1 terabyte. It seems like the research is completed on this and the first shipping drives, which would also be able to use regular CDs and DVDs, could be in the 100$ to 200$ range now if this technology were adopted. I don't remember about the other specs for this new storage medium. Anyone heard about this? I don't know about the expected price for the new medium itself.

Regards, ../Klingon

PS: I forgot to mention that as far as I know all heads in HDs currently move toghether. If they could move independently then each head (or each pair) could move faster and there could be more platters in drives without any reduction in seek times. Fragmentation would also be somewhat less of a problem.

I guess I should at least put a copyright on these ideas, if not get a patent. It might have to come to that one day.
 
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