Friday, May 26, 2000

Marketing BS -- 8:29 pm CST, Update by The Master

Recently, the Marketing pukes over at nvidia stated their new GeForce 2 GPU was a "major step" towards the goal of real-time "Pixar-level animation.". According to this post on SiliconInvestor, it ain't quite so:

`Pixar-level animation' runs about 8 hundred thousand times slower than real-time on our renderfarm cpus. (I'm guessing. There's about 1000 cpus in the renderfarm and I guess we could produce all the frames in TS2 in about 50 days of renderfarm time. That comes to 1.2 million cpu hours for a 1.5 hour movie. That lags real time by a factor of 800,000.)

Do you really believe that their toy is a million times faster than one of the cpus on our Ultra Sparc servers? What's the chance that we wouldn't put one of these babies on every desk in the building? They cost a couple of hundred bucks, right? Why hasn't NVIDIA tried to give us a carton of these things? -- think of the publicity milage they could get out of it!

Don't forget that the scene descriptions of TS2 frames average between 500MB and 1GB. The data rate required to read the data in real time is at least 96Gb/sec. Think your AGP port can do that? Think again. 96 Gb/sec means that if they clock data in at 250 MHz, they need a bus 384 bits wide [this is typo. 384 _bytes_ wide!]. NBL!

Now, A.T. and I are huge Nvidia fans, but you have to remember, don't believe everything you read :-) Thanks Shugashack.

News for 05/26/2000

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