I’ve become used to Nvidia and AMD rocking up with new graphics cards on a consistently quick schedule: since 2008 and beginning with the GeForce 9000-series, Nvidia has released six generations of GPUs, and AMD has replied with three of its own, starting with the Radeon HD 4000-series.

Both firms put the finishing touches on their current ranges in the spring, and the trail’s gone quiet since. Nvidia has confirmed that it won’t release any new cards before 2012, and AMD hasn’t mentioned any potential release dates for its new Radeon HD 7000-series — presumably taking extra time to further tweak and perfect the new chips.

I can understand why Nvidia and AMD aren’t in any hurry to unveil new silicon — after all, evidence suggests that few games, and fewer gamers, will make use of the levels of power available from new cards: 2007’s Crysis is still one of the most demanding games around and, outside of Battlefield 3, few forthcoming games look like they’ll tax even last year’s graphics cards — after all, most are now ported from consoles.

Take a look at the Steam Hardware Survey from July 2011. The most popular ten graphics cards are, with no exceptions, old: top of the pile is the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT, and it’s followed up by venerable old warhorses like the GeForce 8800 GT, Radeon HD 4870 and even the GeForce 8600 GT. The most popular current-generation chip, the GeForce GTX 560, is 25th on the list.

To find something truly high-end, keep on travelling down the list — the GTX 570 is the 31st most popular card and is used by a whopping 0.78% of Steam’s users, and the AMD Radeon HD 6950 is favoured by just 0.68%.

That’s the biggest PC gaming platform in the world and proof that, while AMD and Nvidia have spent the fast few years trying to beat each other with benchmarks, most users haven’t taken any notice. Instead, they’re too busy playing games on cards that are older and perfectly capable.

Perhaps the big guns have realised that this pixelated arms race is virtually pointless. Almost all users either aren’t bothered or can’t afford the latest chips, and the lack of big-name PC exclusives means that even a modest card will run rings around the latest games. Enthusiasts might enjoy the yearly releases, but board partners constantly tweak, overclock and improve chips to eke more performance out of older cores — and, if they’d like to run games across several screens, there’s always CrossFireX and SLI.

It looks like we won’t see any major graphics card releases until 2012 but, after several years of frenzied, benchmark-driven battling, I’m happy to wait — and it looks like most users are, too.

Remember AMD Barcelona? Delayed and disappointing, the architecture behind AMD’s first Phenom chips finally turned up in November 2007, six months behind schedule, with performance that left us “a little underwhelmed” after months of anticipation – and that’s before it was compared against its Intel equivalents.

At the same time, Intel was preparing to release its Wolfdale-based Core 2 Duo processors, which appeared in January 2008 using the more efficient 45nm architecture – a key improvement over AMD’s 65nm chips. The result? Our review concluded that the new Core 2 Duo E8000-series “wipes the floor with the [older] E6000 series” and that Intel’s new processors were an “unqualified success”.

Fast forward three years, and the similarities are startling.

The chips are down

Intel has recently unleashed its stunning Sandy Bridge architecture, which combines improved efficiency with markedly improved performance over its predecessors. The launch might have been marred by the firm’s well-publicised SATA problems, but they’ve now been fixed.

AMD, in the meantime, is floundering: its latest processors are retooled versions of old hardware, and forthcoming Bulldozer chips look like they’ll have an uphill battle, too. AMD is in second place when it comes to implementing 32nm manufacturing, with Bulldozer-based desktop processors not due until later this year and laptop parts only slated to arrive in 2012.

And then there are Bulldozer’s headline features, many of which sound awfully familiar. The chips will be built around individual modules that contain two processing cores with Multi-Threading and Turbo Core technologies, so they’ll be able to address two tasks independently and overclock at will, too – so the firm’s top-end consumer chips will include four modules with eight cores.

Bulldozer might not be as efficient as Intel’s chips, either. AMD’s new chips will have a maximum TDP of 125W, with Intel’s most powerful Sandy Bridge chips coming in with a top TDP of only 95W. That suggests great power efficiency, less heat, and more overclocking headroom.

By the time AMD releases its first Bulldozer-powered processors – rumoured to be in the summer – Intel’s latest Core i7 Extreme chips will also be on the horizon with eight cores and, consequently, 16-thread support as standard, and using a more efficient manufacturing process. They’ll likely be more expensive than AMD’s priciest Bulldozers but, if recent form is to be believed, they’ll also be far quicker, further establishing Intel as the chip of choice for the enthusiast.

The picture isn’t much rosier in AMD’s previous stronghold at the budget end of the market. Fusion is taking aim at Atom but, even though we’ve found it to be a better performer than its rival, we’re not exactly enthused about its prospects. Our review described it as “a year too late” to make a real impact. The desktop chips still aren’t due for several months, and the sheen that surrounded netbooks back in 2007 has faded as CULV laptops, smartphones and tablets – all of which are powered by non-AMD technology – have gained in prominence.

Nvidia fights back

At least AMD has spent the past couple of years delivering market-leading graphics cards, with the firm often finding the perfect balance between price and performance. The tide’s starting to turn here, though, with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 460 and its successor, the GTX 560 Ti, proving to be better prospects than AMD’s own HD 6950, HD 6970 and HD 6870.

The firms are now trading blows in the high-end space, too, although Nvidia’s likely got the edge here, with its GTX 570 offering the “best compromise between cost and power”. And, while AMD currently holds performance records thanks to the new HD 6990, Nvidia is rumoured to be releasing its own dual-GPU card in the next few weeks – so you’d be wise to hold off if you’re thinking about dropping such a vast sum of cash on a graphics card.

There’s turmoil at the top, too. January saw the departure of CEO Dirk Meyer, allegedly because of the firm’s failure to capitalise on the growth of mobile devices, and other key staff left not long after, with COO Bob Rivet and senior vice president of corporate strategy Marty Seyer both announcing their resignations at the start of February.

In the meantime, AMD has appointed a couple of new faces to its board of directors. Henry Chow and Nicholas M. Donofrio, both veterans of IBM, bring plenty of chip-designing experience to the table – but, crucially, Meyer hasn’t been replaced, with Thomas Seifert manning the fort until a permanent CEO is appointed. That can’t come soon enough – while Meyer has an engineering background and personally led the team that developed the Athlon processor, Seifert is a manager with less technical expertise.

It’s a bleak picture. AMD doesn’t lead the way in any area at the moment, and few signs point to this situation improving. Beating rivals such as Intel and Nvidia might be one step too far for the Californian company right now – by the looks of things, it’ll have a hard enough time trying to keep up.

Several other details can be surmised by looking at these pictures closely, though. It’s brimming with display outputs — one DVI-I port alongside four mini-DisplayPort outputs — and the mammoth cooler extends down the length of the huge PCB and is topped off by a fan in the middle of card.

Of course, the HD 6990 might need that amount of cooling, seeing as it’s rumoured to include two of the firm’s latest GPUs.

That’s all the information we’re allowed to reveal for now, though, so you’ll have to check back soon when the embargo lifts for our full review. In the meantime, we’ll see if we can find a case and power supply that will accommodate this gigantic monster.

To read our full review of the HD 6990, and find out if this £550 card is worth the cash, click here.

Certainly, the list of games using PhysX looks healthy enough. Already out are Bionic Commando, Army of Two, City of Villains, Empire: Total War, Gears of War 2, Haze, Mass Effect and Mirror’s Edge. Other promising titles, such as APB and Borderlands, both of which garnered plenty of attention at E3, are in the pipeline.

At a recent briefing, Nvidia unveiled another recent game to make heavy use of PhysX: Terminator Salvation. Unfortunately, though, it’s a typical movie tie-in, averaging scores of just above 50% since its release. And, while the demo (which showed the game running with and without PhysX looked impressive, we didn’t see any effects that couldn’t be achieved with systems other than PhysX. We’ve also struggled to think of many games where the presence of physics is genuinely game-changing rather than just an aesthetic enhancement.

There’s also a formidable list of games that don’t use Nvidia’s technology: BioShock, Company of Heroes, MotorStorm, Spore, Fallout 3, Fable 2, Halo 3, Killzone 2 and Half-Life 2 all use Havok, which was purchased by Intel in 2007 but, at the moment at least, is available for use on any hardware including PC and the big three consoles.

Nevertheless, the fragmented nature of the gaming physics market means that the Irish firm’s technology faces many of the same problems as PhysX even without being tied down to one hardware manufacturer.

Other gaming firms, including Crytek, are often happier to use their own physics engines instead of third-party technology. “Crytek has its own in-house physics system”, says Mark Atkinson, Crytek’s director of technology, which gives them “a single solution which can be optimised for all target platforms” at the same time – and, since Crysis 2 has been confirmed as a PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 release, this is obviously the easiest solution.

When developing Far Cry 2, Ubisoft eschewed PhysX and instead used Havok, a competing physics engine that was bought by Intel in 2007. Vincent Greco, a technical co-ordinator with Ubisoft, explained that “different games have different needs” and that, while Havok was the system of choice for Far Cry 2, PhysX “is a great technology” that Ubisoft has used to good effect in other big titles, such as Rainbow Six Vegas and EndWar.

So, why are some big publishers reluctant to use PhysX in their big games? Perhaps it’s a question of hardware.

The activation of PhysX on all GeForce 8000-series and newer cards in August 2008 brought to an end the days of having to buy a discrete card to handle physics calculations, instead moving these procedures onto the GPU.

In theory, that meant that the majority of gamers using Nvidia cards were able to unlock the hidden power of physics and suddenly populate their games with realistic sparks, gently swelling water and other impressive effects, increasing realism ten-fold. It also meant that using PhysX had never been cheaper or easier.

In practise, though, Nvidia needs a near-monopoly on hardware to make PhysX worthwhile – and its position in the discrete GPU market is looking more precarious now that it has done over the past couple of years. Various reports from the end of 2008 cite the release of ATI’s Radeon HD 4000-series as the major reason why ATI’s market share had grown from 35% to 40% in three months, forcing Nvidia to cut the prices of some of its flagship products in the meantime. In the same period, overall sales of desktop GPUs fell, shrinking the potential market for PhysX (and any other competing physics system) further.

With ATI coming up with superb GPUs and gaining market share, it’s become even less tempting for developers to spend hundreds of hours incorporating PhysX into their games while knowing that a large proportion of players won’t be able to see those effects in action.

The picture is no rosier on consoles, either. Both systems use older hardware and, while Nvidia makes its PhysX middleware engine available to developers on all three consoles, we’ve seen that plenty of developers would rather use their own engines or other third party tools instead of Nvidia’s technology.

In this sort of market – with ATI closing the gap and Intel’s Larrabee apparently on the horizon – it’s going to become more difficult for Nvidia to cram PhysX into enough games to make its purchase of Ageia a worthwhile venture.

At the moment, there’s little chance of most of the big developers and publishers using PhysX but, without widespread support, there’s no chance of Nvidia being able to grow PhysX into the dominant physics system that it surely hopes for. It’s a double-edged sword and, without a drastic shift, it’s difficult to see Nvidia making any sort of genuine progress in the physics market.

]]> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/06/30/will-nvidia-physx-ever-be-worthwhile/feed/ 3 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/10/24/first-look-ati-radeon-hd-4830/ http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/10/24/first-look-ati-radeon-hd-4830/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:04:28 +0000 Mike Jennings http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/?p=3852

It seems that, at the moment, ATI is releasing fantastic graphics cards on a month-by-month basis. Now, it’s the turn of a part that’s been designed to sit between the Radeon HD 4670 and HD 4850 in ATI’s comprehensive line-up: the HD 4830.

The specifications reveal that, while the 4830 isn’t as powerful on paper as the 4850, it’s still a powerful GPU in its own right. A core clock speed of 575MHz is only 50MHz lower than the 4850, and 512MB of 900MHz GDDR3 memory certainly hints at the new card’s potential.

Our gaming benchmarks proved that, while this may be the least powerful 4800 series card available, the 4830 is still no slouch. Our medium-quality Crysis benchmark was despatched at 59fps, with the game only becoming unplayable at high settings, with the 4830 struggling to 22fps. Still, it’s an encouraging result – the 4850 could only manage 10fps more in the same test, and the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT could only manage 23fps.

Further tests revealed that the 4830 is capable with a wide range of titles. A score of 60fps in our high-quality Call of Duty 4 benchmark and 34fps in the demanding, medium-quality DirectX 10 Call of Juarez test prove that, despite its budget-ish positioning, the 4830 is no mere media card.

Aside from excellent performance, the best thing about the new 4830 is the price. It can be had for £76 exc. VAT from microdirect.co.uk – an astonishing price, especially considering that this is a card that can handle, well, any modern titles with little compromise on quality. Prices may change – especially given the current economic climate – but we can’t see them fluctuating too far, and at least not far enough to make this suddenly become a bad purchase.

Our only concern is that, with Radeon HD 4850 prices falling below £100, it may be worth cutting your losses, spending £20 more and investing in that card instead, as there’s a significant performance boost to be had. If you don’t want to splash that much cash, though, this is a fantastic compromise – and another solid GPU from ATI.

I loaded up Steam for the first time in a while last night and was promptly asked to participate in Valve’s ongoing hardware survey. I’ve done this before, and the results are always fascinating, so I jumped right in. A few clicks later, and a quick scan of my cobbled-together PC, and I got to see the breakdown of nearly 1.8million gamers’ systems – with some surprises.

Just 41% of polled users have made the much-needed step to a dual or quad-core processor – the norm in pretty much all new PC systems sold today – and 38% have shelled out on 2GB or more of RAM. Assuming a correllation between the two, that leaves a huge proportion of PC players who are still trundling along on 1GB of RAM or less and a single-core CPU.

Monitors are also an interesting point. Despite the fact that we almost never review them any more, and few manufacturers are even pushing new models today, a startling 75% of polled users are still playing on 4:3 monitors. Of those that have moved to widescreen, nearly 35% have opted for screens sized 24in or larger, while nearly 70% are at 20in or larger – if you’re going to upgrade, you may as well aim big.

The graphics card section is out of date, with no entries for ATI’s HD cards or Nvidia’s 9-series or faster, so can be ignored, but there are still more interesting stats to be gleaned from the survey:

• Intel leads AMD roughly 60-40
• An awful lot of people don’t upgrade their graphics drivers
• 1,396 polled gamers have less than 10GB of total hard disk space in their PC
• Nearly 3% of polled users still don’t have a DVD drive
• 8,105 Steam users speak a language called ‘Simplified Chinese’

And then there’s the old Vista issue. How many gamers do you think have upgraded to Microsoft’s flagship – with DirectX 10 it’s surely a gamer’s paradise, right? Wrong. Of the 1.8million Steam users polled, more than 80% are still running trusty old Windows XP. Ouch.

Admittedly, this Steam survey has been running for nearly a year now, and some of the categories and entries could certainly do with updating and starting afresh, but as a snapshot of a community made up almost entirely of gaming PC users it’s fascinating.

Journalists like us can sometimes get carried away in the constant hunt for bigger, faster, better, forgetting the fact that the vast majority of users don’t want to spend money on their PCs every five minutes, and that for many, running Crysis at Low settings is good enough to get enjoyment out of it (strange people).

But mostly a survey like this just highlights the problem that will always exist for PC and component manufacturers: that consumer inertia is just as powerful as technology in determining their bottom lines.

The first is the re-announcement by Asus of its XG Station, which brings external graphics to laptops. It was first “launched” early last year, as a way to get GeForce 7-series desktop gaming power via the ExpressCard slot on a laptop – but we didn’t recieve a review sample, and it soon became clear it would never see the light of day in the UK.

This, the rebranded Republic of Gamers (ROG) XG Station, comes with an 8600 GT inside, so it won’t exactly set the world of Crysis alight. But it’s a huge step up from integrated graphics, and will outperform an equivalent mobile 8600 chip with ease. Whether that’s enough is a different question, as surely the type of consumer who’ll buy this sort of thing is going to want fairly high-end gaming – a 9600 GT at the very least.

An Asus rep tells us it won’t be upgradable, although he did hint at the possibility of a new model on the horizon – we’d imagine this will include a 9-series card. But as the XG Station uses a PCI Express 1X bus to communicate with the laptop, even fitting the latest 16x top of the range card won’t get you the framerates you’d expect from an equivalent internal card.

It does give other benefits though, such as a pair of DVI outputs and support for Dolby Headphone, Dolby Virtual speaker, Dolby Digital Live, and Dolby Pro LogicIIx. It also has dials for tweaking fan and clock speeds, as well as four USB ports, so it could be considered more of an entertainment upgrade than just a gaming accessory.

Despite the last model never arriving, the Asus RoG XG Station is slated for release in the UK in June, and we’ll get a sample in for testing when it launches.

The other slightly odd announcement involves PCI graphics cards. Yes, you did read that correctly, and no, it’s apparently not a joke. Albatron is hardly a huge player in the graphics market, but it’s obviously trying to tap into a niche that others haven’t spotted – if it exists at all.

The manufacturer will be launching a range of converted GeForce 8-series cards, that can surely only be intended to add HDMI functionality to an old or PCI Express-less PC. We’d imagine you could do a bit of older gaming on an 8600 at PCI bus speeds, and we can just about see the logic for those building a media PC using old or incompatible parts. But, again, it’s tough to see how many consumers will be desperate to upgrade the graphics card on a PC so old that it doesn’t even have an AGP slot.

We’ll wait and see if they arrive in the UK, but in the meantime let us know what you think. Genuinely useful or laughable novelty?

They spent a great deal of time assuring the assembled members of the IT press that it was a waste of time – every game since before the turn of the Millennium (indeed, since the demise of voxels) because every game is made using polygons and that developers wouldn’t want to alter their techniques and systems around a new, somewhat experimental technology.

So, why have Nvidia gone and bought a ray-tracing company?

It’s certainly a bit of a strange move for a company that’s previously denounced the system as pretty worthless for Nvidia’s main market: games. Then again, they did buy Ageia and their Physx technology, which has barely made a ripple in the virtual oceans of games like Crysis and Oblivion, so they do have a history of odd investments.

But, for all this prophesising, their position has recently take a bit of an about-face. The company’s CTO, David Kirk, claimed that ray-tracing was suddenly part of their plans – and that they could integrate it with traditional rendering techniques to make games and graphical applications look even better. Even so, he still doesn’t sound entirely convinced, emphasising that ray-tracing is only ‘part of the future‘, admitting that, at the moment, ‘ray tracing is currently significantly slower than rasterization’.

So, what’s caused such a dramatic turnaround?

We’ve theorised before that Nvidia, for all their bluster, seem to be making various loud, angry noises out of fear. Sure, very little is known about Larrabee, but it’s another competitor in Nvidia’s main marketplace which, aside from ATI, they’ve had little recent competition in.

This just seems like more evidence to support this line of thought – if Intel are going to be incorporating their own ray-tracing and physics technology in their new GPU – developed in-house – then Nvidia need to compete. What better way, then, than by buying up companies already specialised in these things?

Or is there another method to Nvidia’s (apparent) madness?

Evidently, it’s decided to come out on the offensive: Nvidia boss Jen-Hsun Huang recently lambasted Intel’s integrated graphics, which have long been a staple of PCs that don’t need to play games and edit demanding videos, as ‘a joke’. He also boasted of his plans to ‘open a can of whoop-ass’ onto Intel, which must be quaking in its boots – after all, its CPUs haven’t done that well, and they certainly not market leaders with no real competitors. Ahem.

In a move that could be likened to David squaring up to Goliath and promising to break his legs with his arms tied behind his back and a blindfold on, Nvidia has also now announced its new chipset. The MCP79 is designed to stomp all over Intel’s well-defended backyard after recent claims that Intel “can’t write a graphics driver to save their life”.

It’s certainly a brave position to take – at a recent press event, Nvidia was keen to stress that, as well as excellent processors, Intel’s mighty marketing department was responsible for recent success. Given its dominance in the CPU market, I certainly wouldn’t put it past Intel to seriously frighten Nvidia with its new graphics card – in fact, judging by the aggressive and almost petulant reaction emerging from leading Nvidia figures these days, it could be reasoned that the company’s already pretty worried.

Even so, it makes for a tantalising future for graphics, as there hasn’t been a serious third player in the market for a fair few years – and a bit of playground scrapping could work wonders for the price of new GPU technology.