Game PC Nvidia vs ATI Smackdown

[isochar]

An interesting excerpt from the article:

Hold on here, you think EMBM is a bigger chance in the industry than HyperZ? Sure, they both have stupid names, but HyperZ actually helps any game out there without game-specific coding. ATI is the first major video card manufacturer throwing tile-based rendering into the mix, which is definitely a bit step. In my opinion, tile-based architectures are going to be the future of the video card industry. 3dfx is working on one with Gigapixel, Nvidia supposedly has one in the pipeline, and god only knows what Matrox is working on (something that supposedly eliminates the memory bottleneck of video cards altogether), can't you see a trend here? ATI's taken the first baby steps, and it's turned out to be a success.

Guess the G800 will have embedded memory =)

Link: http://www.gamepc.com/article/show_a...idiaATI&page=3

[This message has been edited by isochar (edited 07 September 2000).]

[Jutai]

embedded memory sounds good to me MAYBE that is what the FUSION means!! I'll buy that for a dollar... well more like $350 and that's bein nice these days huh. Anyways this would probably spark up in some of those "FUSION" and G800 threads.
-chris k.

[DuRaNgO]

been there, done that
jim

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Matrox Fusion Plus F800 AGP with 64mb fcram
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and 384k DSL!

[superfly]

Just adding my two cents here.

I for one don't believe that the G800 will feature embeded memory for at least 3 reasons.

Adding any significant amount of memory directly on die,makes the chip itself very large and therefore expensive to build.

On board memory also takes up quite a bit of room,which can better be used by adding extra features,because it can either have one or the other but not both while still keeping the size reasonable,and i believe that althrough a lot of people like matrox,i don't think there will too many takers for a board costing 450+$$(fitted with 64 megs).

What i believe is that the card will use(to some extent)bandwith saving features,similar to what ATI has started to use,but won't be as advanced as power vr3.

it took them three generations to come up with something that is pretty competitive for it's price,and it wasn't an easy process,so i very much doubt that anyone else can come up with something that outperforms any current gen card using that tecnique.

but i do know as a fact(don't ask)that nvidia has been researching something similar to what power vr is using,for well over two years now,and the first card to use it could very well be their next card(nv20),but i don't that for a fact.

but who knows,maybe matrox has something like that in the works.

[Ali]

Why would you need embedded memory to eliminate the bandwidth bottleneck?

I just had a thought that the reason Matrox went to the trouble of developing a 64bit DDR bus on the G450 is that they might have a dedicated Z-buffer bus.

Ive heard that the Z buffer uses half of the bandwidth.

Is there any reason why you couldnt have a 128 bit DDR bus to 64MB for the textures etc, and have a seperate 64bit DDR bus to 16Mb or whatever for the Z buffer?

Just a thought

Ali

[Humus]

Ali:
Well, you can use different memory buffers and buses for frame/Z/stencil/textures. But that'll be very expensive, both because it'll need more memory and because buses take up valueable chipspace.
This technique was used in the Voodoo2 (4MB for frame- and z-buffer, 4MB for the first texturing unit and 4MB for the other one).

[JK]

Superfly,
4-5 Megs of embedded memory (+64Mb external) would effectivly double the memory-bandwith of todays cards. This small amount would
hardly make the chips any larger. Unfortunally somewhat more expensive yes, but compared to a twin chip solution (ala 3DFX,ATI) this is both cost and space effective..

//JK

[Snake-Eyes]

I sure hope it does have embedded memory, alleviating the bandwidth issues quite a bit. Given the current higher cost of the high-end gamers' card, the big M should be able to still price the card competitively, too (say, somewhere between $300-$450 US).

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Ace

[superfly]

Adding 4/5 megs of memory woudn't make the core that much larger,but i think that having only that amount won't have any significant advantage.

The reason for that is that the bandwith available on chip is much faster because it all done internally,by using very large bus withs(think 512 bits wide or more)and having an extremely low latency.

The problem is that you'd need to integrate way more than 4/5 megs to really take advantage of embeded memory.

Here's an example,a 3d image at 1024*768 32bit color(triple buffered)uses about 12 megs of memory.

And that's not including any textures that may be needed,which will always grow larger in size as games become ever more realistic.

What do you think will happen when the chip itself has less than half as much than needed???.

No external memory on earth can even come close to what possible(on die)when it comes to bandwith,in fact so far it would only be maybe half as fast(250 mhz DDR).

Embeded memory has a future,but it will only happen when the time comes that it will be possible to build chips at half the size of current ones(0.10 micron or lower)so that fairly large amounts of memory can be integrated(think 16+ megs).

[isochar]

It's possible that matrox will settle on using a .13 process for now... (now being when the G800 is produced)