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The AMD "PingPong" demo highlights the use of DirectX 10.1's new global illumination engine  (Source: AMD)
ATI Radeon HD 3800 bets big on next-generation DirectX

On the eve of NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT launch, a memo to technology journalists was sent out containing details for AMD's upcoming RV670 graphics processor, officially dubbed the ATI Radeon HD 3800.

Yet rather than attacking the processing power or thermal envelope of NVIDIA's new 65nm GPU, the AMD document focuses on DirectX 10.1 support.  AMD details many of these effects of this new abstraction layer, including even more anti-aliasing patterns and a new global illumination engine -- all of which are supported by the RV670 graphics processor.

RV670, slated to launch next month simultaneously with AMD's upcoming Phenom desktop processor, is still very hush-hush even so close to launch time.  AMD corporate roadmaps previously indicated that RV670 is, for the most part, an optical shrink of the lackluster 80nm R600 graphics processor.

AMD's newest document fleshes out RV670 as "The new ATI Radeon HD 3800 series of GPUs are the first to be designed for DirectX 10.1, as well as other cutting edge technologies, including PCI Express 2.0, Unified Video Decoder (UVD), hardware accelerated tessellation, and power efficient 55nm transistor design."

A copy of the DirectX 10.1 whitepaper is still available at PCPerspective.

NVIDIA declined to launch a next-generation graphics processor in 2007, instead opting for the 65nm optical shrink of the G80 architecture -- dubbed G92.  While G92 features fewer unified shaders than the GeForce 8800 GTX or GeForce 8800 Ultra, the majority of the architecture remains wholly intact. 

However, what is clear is that NVIDIA and AMD will both benefit from the reduced process node.  Smaller nodes mean lower leakage and thermal envelopes -- and in turn quieter and more robust cooling and packaging. 

Banking on DirectX 10.1 selling the Radeon HD 3800 is certainly not without its criticism.  DirectX 10, while clearly the future of game development, has received slow adoption from the developer community even with hardware availability in its second year now.  BioShock, Crysis, Hellgate: London and Unreal Tournament 3 are the only big-ticket titles in 2007 that utilize DirectX 10 support. 

DirectX 10.1 is expected to launch with the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and is backwards compatible with the existing DirectX 10 layer.

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Show me the Goods - I dare Nvidia & AMD
By cheetah2k on 10/29/2007 4:41:02 AM , Rating: 3
I don't really care what these guys are doing, unless they can provide me a video card that does more than avg 40fps in 1024x768 in Crysis.

I mean, WTF guys.. My god damn 8800GTX's in SLI are useless in a real DX10 situation, and now DX10.1?

Sure optimisations are required to make Crysis more playable, but right now - both AMD and Nvidia (especially Nvidia) should be thinking real hard about all the hype they filled the press with touting blazing speeds in DX10...

:-/ Shocking.....




RE: Show me the Goods - I dare Nvidia & AMD
By killerroach on 10/29/2007 9:04:31 AM , Rating: 2
Speed was never really a marketing point of DirectX 10... lower overhead and better memory management, yes; speed... not so much. Most of the lower overhead then, in turn, gets consumed when the far more complex shaders of DirectX 10's Shader Model 4.0 get put into play.

Simply put, a large portion of what DX10 does can be done in DX9... just to do it exactly the way DX10 does it (with the levels of precision and complexity) would completely choke DX9 hardware.


RE: Show me the Goods - I dare Nvidia & AMD
By Mitch101 on 10/29/2007 9:41:37 AM , Rating: 2
Agree speed is being phased out its all going to be about the eye candy.

Its like the Physics cards from Ageia they werent made to create higher frame rates they are there to add elements of realism to the gameplay. Added details created by the physics cards add extra detail for graphics to draw thus slowing them down a bit but ask anyone playing the game with one and they love the eye candy and elements a PPU brings to the game even if the developers havent added that much over the existing game. Necessary Not yet but certainly adds to the gameplay.

I look forward to fragging a buddy by a car tire or engine block when I launch a rocket at a car.


RE: Show me the Goods - I dare Nvidia & AMD
By murphyslabrat on 10/29/2007 10:15:13 AM , Rating: 5
You can already frag a buddy via engine block or tire, only it's done with the gravity gun in HL2:Deathmatch.

Valve needs to add multiplayer to portal. You could have portaling deathmatches, races, CTF matches, etc. All with the awesomeness of the portal gun.


RE: Show me the Goods - I dare Nvidia & AMD
By Bluestealth on 10/29/2007 7:16:49 PM , Rating: 2
You can do similar things in Bioshock with telekinesis or whatever they "want" to call it. When I accidentally threw a corpse into the head of a slicer and watched him dropped to the ground... I had a disturbing moment... in which I thought... that was awesome. I have since learned to use it better, mainly because I realized it wasn't just a gimmick to pickup items.


By Bluestealth on 10/29/2007 8:50:43 PM , Rating: 2
Errr.... dropped = drop... Firefox can only save you from spelling not grammar mistakes :)

I also should really take advantage of this "preview" feature.


RE: Show me the Goods - I dare Nvidia & AMD
By mindless1 on 10/29/2007 1:44:46 PM , Rating: 2
It's been "about the eye candy" ever since the first Geforce and Radeon cards were released. Otherwise, merely producing ~ 50FPS at a typical gamer's monitor resolution isn't a tough target to hit.


By Mitch101 on 10/29/2007 2:43:38 PM , Rating: 3
I agree with that until the Widescreen LCD's started replacing CRT's then FPS was back for a while.

Right now 1680x1050 22" widescreen resolution is the sweet spot for most of the people I know looking for the most eye candy per buck and it looks like the 8800GT is going to make that mainstream now we have to see what ATI is going to drop in the next couple of weeks.

With a SOYO 24" 1920x1080 monitors dropping into the $300.00 range recently it wont be long before that becomes the next standard resolution. Maybe this time next year?

What no one tells anyone about a nice big Widescreen monitor is that you need some GPU power to push all the pixels in its native resolution at a decent framerate in todays games. But it looks like mainstream graphics (8800GT and NV38XX) are going to help the 22" area out for native resolution next gen games.


RE: Show me the Goods - I dare Nvidia & AMD
By wallijonn on 10/29/07, Rating: -1
By killerroach on 10/29/2007 4:02:37 PM , Rating: 3
Have you been using Vista lately? I have... and the video card drivers have improved to the point where Vista and XP are basically on par with each other in DX9 gaming, with a few titles (Oblivion a notable example) that are faster in Vista. Most of the performance penalties from Vista's launch were due to the drivers from both ATI and nVidia being absolute garbage, with the remainder being stuff that Microsoft has fixed through a series of compatibility, performance, and stability patches for Vista.

You may want to actually have some experience with what you're talking about before you make claims like that. I'm no Microsoft fan, but Vista is at a point where, except in some certain situations (mostly if you have obscure hardware or rely on a lot of third-party networking software that hasn't been updated in a while), there's little reason to recommend XP over Vista anymore.


RE: Show me the Goods - I dare Nvidia & AMD
By Tedtalker1 on 10/29/07, Rating: 0
RE: Show me the Goods - I dare Nvidia & AMD
By Dharl on 10/29/07, Rating: 0
By NoSoftwarePatents on 10/29/2007 4:13:12 PM , Rating: 1
God has nothing to do with being exclusively a swear word-assuming that's what you mean. It's a multi-purpose word that can be used for many things.


ATI/AMD brings out the heavy guns
By AOforever1 on 10/29/2007 1:51:35 AM , Rating: 3
I was just about to order the 8800gt tomorrow. Nice move AMD, good to see the market is moving foward.




RE: ATI/AMD brings out the heavy guns
By hrah20 on 10/29/2007 3:59:16 AM , Rating: 1
I would wait a little longer to 2008 to hear something about G90,or better G100, but if you're in a hurry, go for it !!!


RE: ATI/AMD brings out the heavy guns
By wordsworm on 10/29/07, Rating: 0
RE: ATI/AMD brings out the heavy guns
By ZmaxDP on 10/29/2007 3:49:22 PM , Rating: 2
You know, if you really want to analyze "multi-core" graphics cards are way ahead of the CPUs. AMD's TOTL card has 360 "stream processors" and Nvidia's has maybe 120? I can't remember that one for sure. Given, it isn't like 3 complete cores on one die, but both AMD and Intel are transitioning away from that approach anyway. Their chips are sharing cache, FSB - Intel, and hypertransport bandwidth and memory access - AMD and are likely to continue sharing more and more as time goes on. The main difference is the multi-purpose nature of the CPU prevents it from having as much shared hardware as the GPU. Point being, we've got 360 core GPUs out there, so condition 2 is way past being met...


Leaked....
By Regs on 10/29/2007 2:18:15 AM , Rating: 3
I'm getting sick of the word. It should be as familiar now as Stream Processor or shading unit in the GPU world by now.




RE: Leaked....
By JackBeQuick on 10/29/2007 2:24:50 AM , Rating: 1