What's Up with NVIDIA?

Just the other day, I was pondering the question, "What's up with NVIDIA lately?", so it was with great amusement when I spotted an article at Loyd Case's site, Improbable Insights, which asked that very question. It's good to know I'm not alone in my thinking, because pretty well every point he makes, I agree with wholeheartedly. So, what is up with NVIDIA?

In the past year, sadly, most of the news to come out of the company has been less-than-stellar, such as quarterly losses, the debacle with their mobile graphics, and of course, the short-lived king-of-the-hill, the GT200 series. Not all has been bad with the San Jose company, but I'm sure CEO Jen-Hsun Huang prefers to go do his work when not at a war with Intel and others.

Over the course of the past year, the absolute number one focus at NVIDIA has to have been CUDA, because throughout the numerous conference calls I've been on, and e-mails I've been sent, it's been pretty obvious. Second to that would have to be ION, and happily, that seems to be working out for the company just fine so far. How long the growth will continue is yet to be seen, however, as Intel has the opportunity to change the landscape drastically once they implement a GPU and CPU on the same chip.

What's the next big thing for the company is really unknown. CUDA support is ramping up, and so is ION (not to mention Tegra), but what's really going to help push the company back to wowing enthusiasts again is up in the air. There's the GT300 cards, but even the launch of those is shrouded in doubt, due to supposed delays. On the other hand, once they do arrive, we may be truly blown away (and ATI) too, so we can't discredit them just yet.

If there's one thing that's true, it's that the next year for graphics is going to be incredibly exciting. With Intel's Larrabee right around the corner, OpenCL adoption up and DirectX 11 on the horizon, who knows how things are going to play out?

Credit: Techgage

Still, it’s an odd place for Nvidia to be. The company’s marketing strategy once revolved around putting out high end products that offered either better performance or a more robust feature set than competitors – or both, in some cases. Then the company would push the new tech down into the mainstream and low end. Now, their key successes seem to revolve around high volume, low margin products.

Uncharted 2 Couldn't Happen on Xbox 360?

From a technical standpoint, Sony's PlayStation 3 is the most capable game console on the market right now, thanks in part to its robust Cell processor that features seven fast cores - four more than Microsoft's Xbox 360. Of course, comparisons like these are too simple, but the fact remains, the processing power of the PS3 is incredible, which is one reason things aside from gaming have even found a home there, such as Linux and Folding@home.

Up to this point though, we've heard various humors of how certain PS3 exclusive titles simply wouldn't have been made possible on the Xbox 360, but no developer has ever been too clear-cut about it. It appears that Uncharted 2, the sequel to Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is indeed going to be one of those titles - at least, if Christophe Balestra, the co-president of Naughty Dog (the game's developer), has something to say about it.

If there's one reason in particular that couldn't be debunked, it's, "we fill the Blu-ray 100 percent, we have no room left on this one. We have 25GB of data; we're using every single bit of it." Compare that to the Xbox 360's discs that hold just about 7GB. This is simply a minor reason, though, as Naughty Dog is planning to take full advantage of the PS3's hardware, unlike any other game to come before it.

The company will be relying heavily on the multi-core nature of the Cell processor to accelerate both the gameplay elements and animations (and we could assume physics), while they'll focus the RSX graphics chip on what it does best... graphics. The realism is meant to be top-rate in the upcoming sequel, so much so, that even the audio will be processed off the SPUs on the CPU. What's the point? No matter where you are in the game, the audio should give you the impression of realism. Picture the ray tracing technique, for example, which calculates reflection and light off of an object based off of available light sources. This audio technique would be somewhat similar.

Either way, the original Uncharted was a fantastic game, so I'm looking forward to seeing if the sequel's going to be able to live up to all this hype. After all, fancy graphics and effects are one thing, but enjoyable gameplay is something else...

For the first game, Balestra estimated that they used around 30 percent of the power of the SPUs, now the team was able to use them to 100 percent capacity. Naughty Dog understands the Cell processor, and knows how to get it to sing. "The ability to use the RSX [the PS3's graphics processor] to draw your pixels on the screen, then you use the Cell to do gameplay and animations—we kind of took the step of using the Cell process to help the RSX.

Tech Roundup - August 28, 2009

Motherboards & Processors
• ASUS M4A78T-E - ocaholic
• EVGA Micro X58 SLI - Hi Tech Legion

Memory & Storage
• Corsair Flash Voyager GT 128GB - EverythingUSB
• Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B 1TB - Red and Blackness

Peripherals & Gadgets
• Cooler Master SNA 95 Universal Power Adapter - Benchmark Reviews
• Head-Direct HiFiMAN EF2 Headphone Amplifier - techPowerUp
• Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX - Digital Trends
• OCZ Behemoth Double-Laser Gaming Mouse - Overclockers Club
• Vantec ezShare Pro Transfer Cable - Pro-Clockers

Cooling
• Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus & TX3 CPU Coolers - Overclock3D
• Enermax Revolution 85+ 1050W Power Supply - PureOverclock
• Rosewill RX82-MP-SUF82-BLK CPU Cooler - Bjorn3D
• Thor's Hammer HDT-S126384 CPU Cooler - Modders-Inc

Chassis & Power Supplies
• Cooler Master Elite 310 Chassis - Neoseeker
• Cooler Master HAF 922 Mid-Tower Chassis - PCShopTalk
• In Win X-Fighter Mid-Tower Chassis - Think Computers
• NZXT Panzerbox Chassis - Hi Tech Legion

Competitions, Complete Systems & Et cetera
• Apple's Worst Products and Biggest Failures - Digital Trends
• Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-T90 - Digital Trends