Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: achtung on January 27, 2012, 09:13:45 pm
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http://www.tweaktown.com/news/22431/omgtt_powervr_are_making_a_pc_comeback_releasing_pci_express_gpgpu_card_that_provides_real_time_ray_tracing/index.html
Who's next? Matrox?
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Heh, I think our family's original Gateway 2000 had a Matrox card in it. The thing must have died at some point, because I wasn't able to get any video output from it, so we wound up getting rid of it. :(
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Wow, really cool; potentially real-time ray tracing? That I would have to see.
Don't know much about PowerVR.
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they are kind of a fallback to voodoo days.
Heh, I think our family's original Gateway 2000 had a Matrox card in it. The thing must have died at some point, because I wasn't able to get any video output from it, so we wound up getting rid of it. :(
matrox mostly specialized in 2d tech. the fact that they couldnt compete with 3dfx in the area of 3d acceleration pretty much ejected them from the graphics card market. voodoo2 owners usually had a matrox card for 2d graphics. they tried to follow suit with their own 3d card and failed. then they tried doing several all in one card but it also failed to match voodoo3 or anything that ati/nvidia did later on. after that they just kinda focused on niche markets.
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Matrox kept in the game far longer than Voodoo 2/3 era. See Parhelia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_Parhelia
After that though, they gave up.
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PowerVR has been pretty active in the mobile GPU market. Them trying to tackle the GPGPU market is a pretty smart move; I don't think they'll be competing in the mid- to high range GPU market, but GPGPU cards, especially if they're small and have low power requirements.
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I'm excited to see a potentially serious third competitor in the market. I'm hoping they move to compete directly with nvidia and AMD in the traditional consumer market soon. I'm sure their initial offerings will target things like render farms.
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I think what's going to happen first is them going more for the low-end Laptop market, seeing as how the GPUs they're making for things like the PS Vita are pretty capable things. I am not sure they have the engineering capacity to enter into the desktop market yet.
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I think what's going to happen first is them going more for the low-end Laptop market, seeing as how the GPUs they're making for things like the PS Vita are pretty capable things. I am not sure they have the engineering capacity to enter into the desktop market yet.
Real time ray tracing on a discrete card for laptops? I'm not so sure. If you're saying for future plans, I agree.
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I think this may be a reaction to ARM's Mali product which may cut them out of the graphics market. PowerVR doesn't have a good open source linux driver, unlike Mali, and it doesn't seem like a direction they'll head in.
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Real time ray tracing...cool.
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sounds like their demonstrator models were fpga based. an fpga is essentially a processor with a user definable architecture. its an array of 1-bit logic cells that you can wire together in any configuration you want. string 8 in paralell you got an 8 bit adder, 16 for a 16 bit adder. change some inputs around and they can do bit ops, do a number of them in sequence you can do multipliers, fpus, etc. you "program" (though technically you arent really programming it so much as wiring the logic units together to make your own instruction set) it with a hardware descriptor language of sorts. its something i want to play around with but its out of my price range. ive seen a lot of them used in diy and oshw video projects. for a company developing a cpu/gpu/whatever, it provides a nice way to proto your architecture and optimize it before you start doping your own wafers. though in many cases you can just use the fpga in the final product.