The promise of cinematic computing will get a little
closer to reality with the availability of new graphics chips from
industry leaders Nvidia and ATI Technologies over the coming
weeks.
Nvidia's GeForce 6800 chips were formally unveiled this week.
They include Microsoft's DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 feature set,
Nvidia said. ATI is expected to release its own chips that will
rival Nvidia's later this month.
The DirectX 9.0 technology is a collection of APIs (application
programming interfaces) that let games and other multimedia
programs take advantage of the full capability of advanced graphics
chips.
Shader Model 3.0 will allow graphics designers to realistically
portray human characteristics such as flesh tone to create some of
the most compelling video games and movies yet, said Jon Peddie,
president of Jon Peddie Research.
The new chips are a stepping stone on the path to creating
sophisticated images on an everyday PC. Movie developers for
projects such as Finding Nemo currently require expensive
high-performance graphics workstations to create the images for the
movie.
Nvidia added graphics double data rate memory and additional
floating-point engines to the new generation of graphics chips to
reach that level of performance, the company said. It also added an
on-chip video processor as a dedicated video engine for encoding
and decoding MPeg video.
The new generation of graphics processors are powerful enough to
be used as supercomputer processors, Peddie said. Some universities
and laboratories are using older generations of graphics chips in
supercomputing clusters because of their superior number-crunching
ability, he said.
Most users who do not play PC games have no need for that level
of performance, but the PC gaming community is willing to pay top
dollar for advances in graphics technology that will improve the
performance of their gaming experience.
Gamers also tend to influence the purchasing decisions of
friends and family members who are less tech-savvy, so companies
like Nvidia and ATI compete ferociously for the top spot in the
graphics processor market.
Nvidia and ATI also compete to have their technology included in
the console gaming market. Nvidia had been the supplier for
Microsoft's Xbox console, but ATI recently won a contract to supply
the chips for the next-generation of that platform. The two
companies are jousting to see which chip will wind up in Sony's
PlayStation 3.
Most of the graphics chips will be used in graphics cards for
PCs from mainstream companies, such as Hewlett-Packard and
Gateway, as well as from PC companies that cater to gamers, Nvidia
said.
The cards will also be available for purchase separately, and
they are expected to be available in 45 days, Nvidia said.
Tom Krazit writes for IDG News Service