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SMARTSHADER - Up The Pixel Shader Ladder, Continued

Top of Form
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Bottom of Form responded by trying to leapfrog Nvidia on


their next chip.
ATI's SMARTSHADER technology is ps
1.4 in hardware which Microsoft touted as Assuming that what I saw demonstrated at
"A stepping stone towards future pixel Meltdown was the R200, and it couldn't
shader versions" in one Meltdown tutorial. have been anything else considering the
In effect, Microsoft has added, probably at functions of the SMARTSHADER being
the instigation of ATI, more texture inputs, demonstrated, ATI is positioning its product
more instructions, and more registers to the as a precursor to DirectX 9, in the same way
DirectX pixel shader under the guise of ps that Nvidia positioned GeForce3 as a
1.4. More is good. As a side note, the great DirectX 8 product. However, there isn't
thing for Microsoft's DirectX development anything taking advantage of DirectX 8.1
team is that they can probably support any right now, let alone DirectX 9 (which I'll
number of new DirectX hardware address in my next report) so, ATI may only
architectures by just accomodating the be catching Nvidia up on the marketing
registers and operations of each GPU as it battlefield, and that's plenty good enough for
comes along. No more having graphics chip now.
companies arguing over the merits of the Nevertheless, I think ATI has itself a true
way they do bump mapping in hardware, or next generation product by virtue of the fact
quadratice patches, or motion blur. It can all that SMARTSHADER gives R200 a
be programmed into the vertex and pixel possible performance enhancer in the
shader. rasterization stage. Six texture blending and
ATI didn't give any clear indication on 22 operations give ATI bragging rights in
the number of rendering pipes in R200, hardware even though, I suspect, that we
but it is clear that each of the pipes will won't see either ATI or Nvidia having a
have 6 texture units, compared to the 3 delta in performance terms.
implemented in Radeon (which had 2 I wish I could have got more information on
rendering pipelines). ATI can certainly the number of games that will actually have
match GeForce3's 4 rendering pipelines, support for DirectX 8.1 graphics hardware
but ATI may deliver 6 to get the features for Christmas 2001. The best I
commensurate fill rate increase. This will could get was 8-12 A list game titles. That
also mean that ATI will have to up the would indicate that even without the benefit
memory bandwidth accordingly. of a big enough stable of titles to support its
ATI deserves to be commended for featuers, ATI's R200 is going to be no worse
maneuvering itself ahead of Nvidia in this off than Nvidia's GeForce3 come Christmas
instance. They've responded to Nvidia's as far as consumers are concerned because
jump on DirectX 8 as a result of its there is no way for either one to edge ahead
involvement on Xbox and its close ties to on the performance curve. The most
Microsoft. They've responded to Nvidia importat thing is going to be how the big 3D
marketing by peeling away their architecture engines from the likes of Id and Epic take
and highlighting its facets. They've advantage of DirectX 8.1 hardware features
x These engines will play a crucial role as
they are licensed to many other developers can say it has something that exceeds Nvidia
and drive the 3D performance market. Until in pure specs.
then, it's a level playing field, but now, ATI

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