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• #3 Snowcat tag Loha #2

  2002-06-18 23:16:44 #3

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  Snowcat

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  válasz Loha #2 üzenetére

  Nvidia NV1
  
  Nvidia wants your games. The NV1 is a highly integrated multimedia accelerator that includes a 3-D video accelerator (which can do 2-D graphics, too), a 350-MIPS audio engine (with Sound Blaster emulation), and an I/O processor (for joysticks and the like). This chip is designed to improve the game experience significantly. If early demonstrations are any indicator, it will.
  
  The 3-D video accelerator is the most interesting part of the chip. What's intriguing is a graphics primitive called QTM (Quadratic Texture Map), a derivative of an algorithm named nonuniform rational B-splines (NURBS).
  
  Here's why. Computers are good at generating straight lines, but curves present a problem. Most 3-D accelerators represent curves by interlocking polygons- polygons that consist of three or more vertices connected by straight lines. To make a curve smooth, a 3-D accelerator must use lots of small polygons, and that's compute-intensive.
  
  The NV1 is more clever than that. Put simply, it curves the sides of its polygons, so it doesn't need as many to make curves smooth. Fewer polygons mean fewer calculations and faster 3-D acceleration. The NV1 picks up extra speed by decreasing the number of control points required by the host CPU to move through 3-D space. Its resolution is something more like plus or minus 1 pixel. In short, it's great for games with fast 3-D motion.
  
  The audio subsystem is similarly game-oriented. It can generate 32 concurrent audio channels of CD-quality (i.e., 16-b it) audio with phase shifting (for 3-D sound). Perfect for monsters breathing, guns firing, and a great sound track. The secret of the audio subsystem is its DMA engine. The NV1 can push and pull data from main memory incredibly quickly over its preferred PCI or VL-Bus interface. Thus, it doesn't need on-board memory to hold wave sounds - it can store them in main memory. The one potential problem with the NV1's DSP is that its algorithms are hard-wired into its silicon, so upgrades could be difficult. It's a gamble that reduces the cost and size of the NV1 overall.
  
  Everything's connected with a 32-bit unidirectional ring bus. The bus's controller accepts transaction requests and sends instructions to every component.
  
  The main problem we see with the NV1 is its lack of MPEG-1 decoding. MPEG-1 is popular with games. A secondary problem has to do with the new game APIs in Windows 95: They aren't optimized to the NV1's 3-D texture map, so games written to these APIs won't exploit the NV1. With a volu me price of $70, we'll probably see many multimedia boards built on this chip, so maybe the API problem will work itself out. Already, Sega has worked out a deal to port many of its games to the NV1, and Diamond has developed a board that uses the NV1.
  
  [<a href=http://www.byte.com/art/9511/sec7/art2.htm>forrás</a>]

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