GDC Talk

I gave a short talk at GDC in NVIDIA’s booth on issues with triangle tessellation that we encountered developing a demo here at Emergent. There’s a streaming audio version up here. Be forewarned that I was yelling into the microphone much of the time because the guys from powergig.com were across the aisle having a full on jam session most of the show to promote their new six string peripheral/guitar game. In any case, it’s worth a listen.

I’ll be presenting a longer version of the talk at the Triangle Game Conference next month with Jeremiah Washburn representing the art side of the equation. If you’re in town, you should come check it out.  We’re collaborating with AMD/ATI in the interim to make sure the material grows a bit more, and I’m pretty excited about where things are going.

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Quick Shot: Intel Parodies and NVIDIA

Edit: Updated the post per Tim Farrar’s comment. He was NVIDIA at the time of his post. That doesn’t change my slant on his opinion. I’ve always thought he was a sharp analytic eye on parallel programming architectures and paradigms.

I was traveling out to California over the weekend, so I didn’t put together that post I promised on next gen architectures. One could argue that I had plenty of time on the plane, but I’ve never been able to work well on planes. My mind is not in the right place, and my laptop is too bulky. The post will come, but it’s likely delayed a week. When I’m in CA, my time is fractured by meetings. For now, a couple of quick things.

After posting previously about Larrabee’s woes, a colleague pointed me to this site. It’s a whole bunch of parody cartoons from NVIDIA about Intel. My first reaction was that NVIDIA wouldn’t be so bold, but the whois looks like NVIDIA from the DNS info, and this article concurs. Some of this cartoons are pretty amusing and accurate including the current, Santa-themed one. I’m sure Intel would love a GPU for Christmas.

Now, lest I be accused of bashing Intel too much, I should point out that NVIDIA can’t brag too much yet. Their GT200 cards are pretty awesome. However, they haven’t released their Fermi cards which will have D3D11 support, so they are behind as well. By all accounts, Fermi is an awesome architecture. It’s got great double precision with good performance, the ability to schedule multiple warps at once for better throughput, and a huge number of cores. The tech white paper is here, and here’s  a quick note from Tim Farrar whose opinion I trust. (Note that Tim now works at NVIDIA, but his opinions and this post on Fermi predate that employment. and this post went up shortly after his hire.) So, it’s nice for NVIDIA to make fun of Intel, but they are lagging behind a bit themselves. They have their own set of HW woes in what appear to be long dev times or delays to Fermi cards. Right now, AMD is sitting out there with the only D3D11 cards on the market.

dba