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AIB Companies To Adopt XGI Volari GPUs?



 
 
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  #1  
Old September 27th 03, 08:36 AM
graphics processing unit
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Default AIB Companies To Adopt XGI Volari GPUs?

While not directly related to Nvidia or ATI, the fact that XGI is entering
the consumer graphics industry with its range of Volari GPUs may effect both
of the current leaders. hopefully in a positive way, for the end user. God
knows we could use some more competition here.

Personally, I am most excited about the Volari V8 Duo - first *consumer*
graphics card configuration to sport twin Grahpics Processing Units.

now here's the article of the topic:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/d...923124528.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------
ASUS, ABIT, Gigabyte, Club3D to Adopt XGI Volari GPUs?

by Anton Shilov
09/23/2003 | 12:46 PM

There are rumours going around Computex Taipei 2003 exhibition in Taiwan
that a number of graphics card makers are seriously considering
manufacturing of graphics cards powered by XGI Volari graphics processors.
The list of the companies includes the names of tier-one manufacturers, even
though there are no official comments from any firms mentioned.

As we managed to find out, ASUSTeK Computer, ABIT, Gigabyte Technology, CP
Technology and Club3D plan to support XGI in an attempt to successfully
enter the graphics cards market this year by adoption of XGI Volari V5 and
V8 GPUs.

Everybody in the graphics cards market is very interested in the third
provider of GPUs since the fierce competition between today's leaders NVIDIA
and ATI is not only exhausting for chip companies, but also has a negative
impact on their add-in-board partners. Furthermore, only two GPU companies
that have practically equal resources may result in a rise of the GPU cartel
that totally controls the graphics processors market. Even though it is
practically impossible for a new player to enter the market, AIB companies
want to give XGI a try. In case XGI manages to be competitive, everyone will
benefit from this.

Note that the information is totally unofficial and no formal decisions
concerning actual graphics cards have been announced yet



  #2  
Old September 27th 03, 08:48 AM
Thomas
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graphics processing unit wrote:
Personally, I am most excited about the Volari V8 Duo - first
*consumer* graphics card configuration to sport twin Grahpics
Processing Units.


Hahahahahahaha...
Quite funny.

Don't remember the Ati Rage Fury MAXX, or the Voodoo 5 5500? Both had twin
GPU's...

If you dont know what you're talking about, stop posting ;-)

Thomas


  #3  
Old September 27th 03, 10:20 AM
graphics processing unit
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"Thomas" wrote in message
news:chbdb.55519$tK5.6217727@zonnet-reader-1...
graphics processing unit wrote:
Personally, I am most excited about the Volari V8 Duo - first
*consumer* graphics card configuration to sport twin Grahpics
Processing Units.


Hahahahahahaha...
Quite funny.

Don't remember the Ati Rage Fury MAXX, or the Voodoo 5 5500? Both had twin
GPU's...

If you dont know what you're talking about, stop posting ;-)

Thomas


Bwuhahahahahaha....

I guess you didn't notice that I said
*graphics processing unit* and not graphic accelerator or graphics chip.
neither the Ati Rage Fury MAXX nor the Voodoo 5 5500 used GPUs with on-chip
geometry processing (T&L)



  #4  
Old September 27th 03, 11:08 AM
Thomas
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graphics processing unit wrote:
I guess you didn't notice that I said
*graphics processing unit* and not graphic accelerator or graphics
chip. neither the Ati Rage Fury MAXX nor the Voodoo 5 5500 used GPUs
with on-chip geometry processing (T&L)


The name 'GPU' was simply an invention of NVidia. For me, it's just another
name, not another 'thing', hehe. There were many more hardware-related
things added to the 'GPU', that didnt change the name, so for me, it's all
the same thing, from the Hercules chip to the Ati 9800 ;-) Just added more
features, and speed... But at least i see what you mean now ;-)

Thomas


  #5  
Old September 27th 03, 01:06 PM
Bratboy
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"Thomas" wrote in message
news:chbdb.55519$tK5.6217727@zonnet-reader-1...
graphics processing unit wrote:
Personally, I am most excited about the Volari V8 Duo - first
*consumer* graphics card configuration to sport twin Grahpics
Processing Units.


Hahahahahahaha...
Quite funny.

Don't remember the Ati Rage Fury MAXX, or the Voodoo 5 5500? Both had twin
GPU's...

If you dont know what you're talking about, stop posting ;-)

Thomas



well and not to mention the new 9800 dual chip cards I read about recently
that someones makeing


  #6  
Old September 27th 03, 11:27 AM
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U comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.video graphics processing unit prica:
Personally, I am most excited about the Volari V8 Duo - first *consumer*
graphics card configuration to sport twin Grahpics Processing Units.



Voodoo5 5500 in my machine has got 2 VSA100 units... If that isn't GPU, than
what is it? Drivers are working properly under any Windows OS (right now
using Windows 2000 Pro)...

There is one thing that nobody will beat soon... ) Voodoo5 6000... Or,
saying another words - 4 CPU's on one board...

But, shhhhhh... ) I screwed one CPU, so it isn't working properly... ))


And, ATI Rage Fury MAXX had 2 Rage128Pro CPU's (IIRC)... But, problematic
drivers...



--
"Ruzans li mlijekoo podmazuje ?" upita Fataa drka Zidovu povracu.
"Nisam ja nikog bombardiro !" rece coravaco mirise "Ja samo pudingu pozdravlju naklonjenm !"
By runf

Damir Lukic,
a member of hr.comp.hardver FAQ-team
  #8  
Old September 29th 03, 05:22 AM
Radeon350
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Default

wrote in message ...
U comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.video graphics processing unit prica:
Personally, I am most excited about the Volari V8 Duo - first *consumer*
graphics card configuration to sport twin Grahpics Processing Units.



Voodoo5 5500 in my machine has got 2 VSA100 units... If that isn't GPU, than
what is it? Drivers are working properly under any Windows OS (right now
using Windows 2000 Pro)...

There is one thing that nobody will beat soon... ) Voodoo5 6000... Or,
saying another words - 4 CPU's on one board...

But, shhhhhh... ) I screwed one CPU, so it isn't working properly... ))


And, ATI Rage Fury MAXX had 2 Rage128Pro CPU's (IIRC)... But, problematic
drivers...



Ok this post is sort of for you, and for Tony, or anyone who doesn't
really draw the line between a rasterizer / 3D accellerator like 3Dfx
Voodoo 1,2,3, Banshee, VSA-100, PowerVR Series 1,2,3, Riva 128,
TNT1/2, Rage128, Rage Fury etc., and a full on 'graphics processor' or
GPU or polygon processor or polygon processor chipset (GeForce 1-4,
GFFX, all the Radeons, Lockheed Reald3D series, 3DLabs GLINT+Delta,
Evans & Sutherland RealIMAGE, 3DLabs Wildcat, etc)

What I am posting below is a very good (IMHO) post from 1996 from a
guy who explained the differences (and made a distinction) between
Voodoo Graphics or similar consumer 3D accelerators/rasterizers of the
time, and full 3D polygon processors (equivalent of todays GPUs) with
geometry engines/processors-like Lockheed's non-consumer Real3D/100,
which was a true 'graphics processor'/ chipset (not the horrible
consumer Intel/R3D i740 used in Starfighter cards that had not been
revealed in 1996). At that time, there were NO consumer PC 3D chips
with geometry processing / T&L. in otherwords, there were no consumer
GPUs in 1996. not until 1999's GeForce256.

This post really points out the differences quite well. Alright
without further rambling on my part, here is the post:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...&output=gplain

[quote]

"First, let me start off by saying I am going to be buying a Voodoo
card. For low end comsumer grade flight sims and such, the Voodoo
looks like about the best thing available. Second, I am not
necessarily responding to just you, because there seems to be a hell
of a lot of confusion about Lockheed Martin's graphics accelerators. I
have been seeing posts all over the place confusing the R3D/100 with
the AGP/INTEL project that L.M. is working on. The R3D/100 is *NOT*
the chipset that is being developed for the AGP/INTEL partnership.

However, since your inference is that the Voodoo is faster than the
R3D/100, I have to say that you are totally dead wrong. While the
specs say that the Voodoo is *capable* of rendering a higher number of
pixels per second, or the same number of polygons per second as the
R3D/100, the specs fail to mention that these are not real world
performance figures any you probably will not ever see the kind of
performance that 3Dfx claims to be able to acheive. This does *not*
mean that the Voodoo is not a good (its great actually) card, just
that the game based 3D accelerator companies (all of them) don't tell
you the whole story.

The Voodoo uses a polygon raster processor. This accelerates line and
polygon drawing, rendering, and texture mapping, but does not
accelerate geometry processing (ie vertex transormation like rotate
and scale). Geometry processing on the Voodoo as well as every other
consumer (read game) grade 3D accelerator. Because the cpu must
handle the geometry transforms and such, you will never see anything
near what 3Dfx, Rendition, or any of the other manufacturers claim
until cpu's get significantly faster (by at least an order of
magnitude). The 3D accelerator actually has to wait for the cpu to
finish processing before it can do its thing.

I have yet to see any of the manufacturers post what cpu was plugged
into their accelerator, and what percentage of cpu bandwidth was being
used to produce the numbers that they claim. You can bet that if it
was done on a Pentium 200, that the only task the cpu was handling was
rendering the 3D model that they were benchmarking. For a game,
rendering is only part of the cpu load. The cpu has to handle flight
modelling, enemy AI, environmental variables, weapons modelling,
damage modelling, sound, etc, etc.

The R3D includes both the raster accelerator (see above) and a 100
MFLOP geometry processing engine. Read that last line again. All
geometry processing data is offloaded from the system cpu and onto the
R3D floating point processor, allowing the cpu to handle more
important tasks. The Voodoo does not have this, and if it were to add
a geometry processor, you would have to more than double the price of
the card.

The R3D also allows for up to 8M of texture memory (handled by a
seperate texture processor) which allows not only 24 bit texturemaps
(RGB), but also 32bit maps (RGBA) the additional 8 bits being used for
256 level transparency (Alpha). An addtional 10M can be used for
frame buffer memory, and 5M more for depth buffering.

There are pages and pages of specs on the R3D/100 that show that in
the end, it is a better card than the Voodoo and other consumer and
accelerator cards, but I guess the correct question is, for what? If
the models that are in your scene are fairly low detailed (as almost
all games are - even the real cpu pigs like Back to Bagdhad), then the
R3D would be of little added benefit over something like the Voodoo.
However, when you are doing scenes where the polys are 2x+ times more
than your typical 3D game, the R3D really shines. The R3D is and
always was designed for mid to high end professional type application,
where the R3D/1000 (much much faster than the 100) would be too
expensive, or just plain overkill. I've seen the 1000 and I have to
say that it rocks! I had to wipe the drool from my chin after seeing
it at Siggraph (We're talking military grade simulation equipment
there boys, both in performance and price!)

Now then, as I mentioned before, I'm going be buying the Voodoo for my
home system, where I would be mostly playing games. But, I am looking
at the R3D for use in professional 3D application. More comparible 3D
accelerators would not be Voodoo, Rendition based genre, but more
along the lines of high end GLINT based boards containing Delta
geometry accelerator chips (and I don't mean the low end game base
Glint chips, or even the Permedia for that matter), or possibly the
next line from Symmetric (Glyder series), or Intergraph's new
professional accelerator series."

[unqoute]


Ahem, I appologize for making a really huge deal out of this. I am not
trying to be anal or trying to flame anyone, just pointing something
out that is quite significant IMHO, and significant to most people
that work with 3D graphics. (I dont myself). I feel that person's post
is right in line with my thinking as far as making a distinction
between rasterizers / 3D accelerators, which only tackle part of the
rendering pipeline (leaving the rest for the CPU) and full polygon
processers with geometry & lighting onboard, aka 'GPUs'.
  #9  
Old October 1st 03, 10:57 PM
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Look... GPU states for Graphics Processing Unit, right?

The acronyms says it's a unit that processes graphics... So, looking that
way, all 2D GPU's back in the time of Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA, blahblah, to
the newest GPU's are the same thing... Units that have only one thing to do
- process graphics...

You can now talk about high-perf SGI GPU's, all the stuff you mentioned, and
yes, all of these are GPU's, just like all the stuff I mentioned...

But, if you say 3D GPU only, then it's other thing to discuss... Looking
that way, Voodoo 1 and 2 weren't true GPU's, but 3D only (which they were in
fact)...


EOD...

--
Klintona boja drazesan keksu sviru na Infou prekjucer ?
By runf

Damir Lukic,
a member of hr.comp.hardver FAQ-team
  #10  
Old October 5th 03, 12:46 AM
Thomas
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Radeon350 wrote:
Ok this post is sort of for you, and for Tony, or anyone who doesn't
really draw the line between a rasterizer / 3D accellerator like 3Dfx
Voodoo 1,2,3, Banshee, VSA-100, PowerVR Series 1,2,3, Riva 128,
TNT1/2, Rage128, Rage Fury etc., and a full on 'graphics processor' or
GPU or polygon processor or polygon processor chipset (GeForce 1-4,
GFFX, all the Radeons, Lockheed Reald3D series, 3DLabs GLINT+Delta,
Evans & Sutherland RealIMAGE, 3DLabs Wildcat, etc)

What I am posting below is a very good (IMHO) post from 1996 from a
guy who explained the differences (and made a distinction) between
Voodoo Graphics or similar consumer 3D accelerators/rasterizers of the
time, and full 3D polygon processors (equivalent of todays GPUs) with
geometry engines/processors-like Lockheed's non-consumer Real3D/100,
which was a true 'graphics processor'/ chipset (not the horrible
consumer Intel/R3D i740 used in Starfighter cards that had not been
revealed in 1996). At that time, there were NO consumer PC 3D chips
with geometry processing / T&L. in otherwords, there were no consumer
GPUs in 1996. not until 1999's GeForce256.


Yes, sure, the name GPU was invented back then. It was a 'revolution' in 3D
cards. The 'GPU' has more capabilities and hardware support than the
previous generations of vid cards.

*BUT*, there have been many many more revolutions, like for instance the
pixel shader. The Directx 8 compliant cards are the first ones capable of
doing this. Great. But they didnt come up with a new name, like PSGPU, or
whatever. It's just that NVidia chose to change the name of the graphics
chip to GPU. For me, it's nonsense to claim that it's a special thing that
the Volari chips is the first dual GPU video card, since you're referring to
a dual video-chip card. It's the card with the latest version of videochips
that has been launched. But, well, since it's te most recent card, there's
no special thing in that.

Well, this doesnt really lead anywhere ;-) I think we all know what we all
mean, so no point in arguing about names ;-)

Thomas


 




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