 | | | Hardware for NextGen Software | Hardware for NextGen Software 2004-08-30 - By Dave Angelini
Back
MessageRoman,
Wow! A great deal to consider. Yes...I am one of those looking for the
next generation hardware. As such, I am holding out for a PCI-Express
system, but I don't think my 4+ year old PC will be enough to get me through
the next two years until multi-core parallel processors hit the market.
Nevertheless, your arguments make sense and I can only imagine what tS9 will
look like in 2007 on a 24 multi-core GPU processor (Care to paint us your
wildest visions on that one??? We promise not to hold you to any of it ;-).
In the PC market, I was originally planning on the following:
Intel Pentium 4 Processor 560 w/ HT Technology 3.6GHz 1MB CACHE
Asus P5AD2 Premium I925X Chipset Sckt775 DDR2/533 PCI Express w/Audio LAN
IEEE & USB2
2Gb PC4200 DDR2 MEMORY
ATI RADEON X800 XT 256MB 16X PCI EXPRESS VIDEO CARD
Unfortunately, not all vendors have all these components...or at least for
some reasonable prices (CyberPower comes close but they only offer the
Radeon X800 Pro card which has 12 pixel pipelines rather than the 16
pipelines offered in the XT version and they only offer 1Gb of DDR2 RAM with
each system).
But based on your email, it appears that I should wait for AS based systems
in 2005. I was originally thinking of making a purchase in February 2005
(after PCI-Express fever dies down a bit). Do you think Advanced Switching
systems will be on the market by then or should I wait longer? If it is too
much longer (say, past June) then I will just go with what I have (if I
always wait for the next big thing, I'll never buy anything).
Thanks again for the great vision.
Dave Angelini
-- -- Original Message -- --
From: Roman Ormandy
To: truespace@(protected)
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2004 5:29 PM
Subject: [TSML] Hardware for NextGen Software
I noticed that a lot of you guys are buying new hardware or consider
upgrading your current system. As you know we are working hard on next major
TS upgrade and while I am unable to comment on that just yet I decided to
share here my opinions on suggestion for hardware upgrades. These are my
personal opinions and in no way constitute any product announcements from
Caligari.
With that out of the way let me say upfront that one way not to go is to
buy 64 bit CPU's and expect large performance increases for 3D authoring.
While AMD CPU's are nice and while Intel spent billions of dollars on 64 bit
CPU technology the results are already in: Intel is on the losing side and
it is not AMD who may reap the benefits.
The winner is multi-core parallel processors. That may seem like a distant
future, but you already may be using them without even knowing it. When
NVIDIA started to call their 3D accelerators "GPU's" (Graphics Processing
Unit) it sounded just like another marketing gimmick. But today these GPU's,
running DX9 and Shader3.0 are starting to take on more and more 3D computing
tasks, shading pixels, calculating geometry, collisions, physics and more.
If you look at NVIDIA 8600 or ATI X800 architectures you see that they both
have 16 pixel shader processors with full floating point precision and 6
vertex shader processors for geometry which are even more powerfull.
<SNIP>
Intel does have still one dark horse in the race which might have Trojan
powers and reverse the odds back in favor of CPU's. It is called PCI
Express. PCIe in fact is not a bus at all and has nothing to do with PCI;
it is a point-to-point internet in a box architecture completely scalable
(unlike a bus) and very suitable for parallel CPU's. This will become
clearer next year when second generation PCI Express systems called AS
(Advanced Switching) will reach the market. AS adds a complete switching
fabric connecting any kind of computing elements and could give 3D Authoring
aps parallel, Sony Cell like hardware environment (unless Intel will make it
impossible to use non-Intel CPU's).
Let me conclude by making practical purchasing suggestions. My advice is, no
matter how low your budget is get a DX9 card today. They are already below
$100, if you can live with a smaller amount of VRAM. Next, save you money
for a PCI Express PC which will give DX9 GPU a very nice performance boost
(of course DX9 card must have PCIe connector). Finally, if you plan 1-2
years ahead, with arrival of PCI Express AS systems you may get a true PC
based parallel workstation. Chances are on those kinds of PC's next
generation of trueSpace will run rather nicely:)
Roman Ormandy
Caligari
|
|
|