vB Easy Archive - 3D Acceleration on your Cell (NVIDIA GoForce 4000)

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3D Acceleration on your Cell (NVIDIA GoForce 4000)
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Posted by: SSODR

Let the gaming begin! nVIDIA is the leader in 3D accelerator video cards when it comes to the PC, next to ATI, so if anyone knows what they are doing when it comes to this its them. I can't wait!

FYI: nVIDIA also makes the vid chip for the Xbox
FYI2: nVIDIA joins the Symbian program.

The GoForce 4000 offers a host of advanced features for mobile phones, including support for three megapixel image capture, high-quality 30 frames per second video capture and playback, accelerated graphics for gaming, video conferencing, and NVIDIA nPower technology that enables all these multimedia features while optimizing performance and minimizing the impact on battery life."

3 Megapixel Camera Support
High-resolution camera support makes it possible to capture photographic quality images with your mobile phone that can be printed in the standard 8 x 10 inch size.
8x Digital Zoom
High-quality digital zoom allows users to get close-up photos, and brings camera phones up to par with standalone digital cameras. When paired with a high-resolution camera, this feature allows you to “zoom in” on an object while maintaining high image quality.
MPEG-4 and H.263 Codec
Enables full motion video record (encode) and playback (decode) on your mobile phone, including video-on-demand, camcorder capabilities, streaming video playback, and video conference calling. Dedicated hardware filters offer high quality playback of this video content.

More on this topic...

Posted by: SSODR

In addition,

NVIDIA Drives Game Development for Cell Phones

Posted by: Cheech

It would be nice to see in the P1000.

Posted by: sdsviet

yea it would be sweet. also with the new TI wlan chip they're making for mobiles. that phone would be a monster.

Posted by: vwvwvw

NVIDIA processors in Motorola 3G phones... http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/4792.html

Posted by: RageFury32

Ever heard of the ATi Imageon 2300? Or the Shark GS chipset?
Go look at the offical OpenGL ES webpage and catch up, kid.

Posted by: SSODR

Quote:

Originally posted by RageFury32
Ever heard of the ATi Imageon 2300? Or the Shark GS chipset?
Go look at the offical OpenGL ES webpage and catch up, kid.

The nVidia Chip could easily support the Open GL API.

"Anyone may freely download, implement, and ship products using the OpenGL ES API" http://www.khronos.org/opengles/spec.html

ATI, as I mentioned in my orig. post, is also a leader and has a competing product.

As far as your shark gadget goes, I have never heard of that one. Next time you add to your measly number of posts why don't you provide some links to back up your one liners son.

Posted by: RageFury32

Here you go. You might want some salt and pepper to eat those words, son. That's the GShark 2D/3D core.

http://www.gshark.com/en/gshark/index.html

While we're at it, why don't we take a look at the OTHER graphics chipmakers and see what THEY are doing for hardware 3D in cellphones. Well, there's PowerVR with their MBX...

http://www.powervr.com/Products/Graphics/MBX/index.asp

And then there's BitBoy Oy (Yes, laugh, Bitboy back 's in business) with the Acceleon...

http://www.acceleon.com/

The G20 looks pretty interesting as a mobile 3D solution.

And even Neomagic, of the old laptop chipset fame claims 3D hardware acceleration in their NiMagic 6 processor cores.

http://www.neomagic.com/product/mimagic6.asp

It's not exactly a 2 horse race between ATi and nVidia. Plenty of usurpers to the thrones exist. This time it's not the raw speed that counts. It's bandwidth/memory efficiency.

Posted by: RageFury32

Ooh. And that reminds me. As a further pointer, you might want to read the specsheet for that GoForce series. Here is the one for the 400/300 series, the top model.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_11295.html

Under NOWHERE is there ANY mention for 3D acceleration. There is a reference for a 64 Bit 2D acceleration engine, just like the one in the ORIGINAL ATi Imageon that was in the Toshiba e740 PocketPCs a year and a half ago.

Yes. OOPS. No 3D Acceleration for you nVidia users. That chip is an MPEG4/Colorspace conversion accelerator especially designed to work well with videos and cameras. Not your nVidia 3D acceleration monster that would take on the ATi Imageon 2300s.

NEXT TIME, READ THE PRESS RELEASES.

Posted by: SSODR

Ah some links! Thank you.

Someone has forgoten how to share on a forum, or have you forgotten what a fourm is all about?

Whats all this shouting and pointing? Grow up.

Posted by: SSODR

We'll see if any of those chips actually emerge.

BTW what do you call this? http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_12197.html

Posted by: RageFury32

I'll call it "muddled press release for software support in a game engine".
By the way, Mascot Capsule (MC), as current version v3 stands, is a software rendering engine for 1st generation products that does NOT have 3D support in silicon. For example, like this Sharp J-SH53:

http://www.sharp.co.jp/products/jsh53/text/04java.html

See the Ridge Racer game inside? That's Mascot Capsule. The phone itself is a 100Mhz Hitachi SuperH3 running at 100MHz.
It does about 25,000 polygons a second.

Basically, that announcement is useless when it comes to confirming 3D. Basically, it just said that "Yeah, we'll make a code branch to support your hardware...whether your hardware can DO 3D or not is unimportant since whatever you don't have, our code will fake for you". The current GoForce series WILL not have 3D support in hardware...The APIs might like the fact that it's got pretty fast 2D rendering, but in reality, it'll have to rasterize 3D polygons in 3D, via software code. Basically, the OpenGL ES specs said that the rendering engine MUST support certain core features. Whether those features will be handled in hardware or not will be dependent on the implementor. And it seems that the GoForce will probably not have those hardware 3D support, since there are zero mention of anything that might help 3D along, like transform/lighting, clipping, traiangle setup or texture mapping in silicon.

For those who are into following up on OpenGL ES developments, you should take a look at the presentation slides from 3GSM.

http://www.khronos.org/opengles/pre...ation_Feb04.ppt

Right now, PowerVR's MBX platform seems to be embedded in OMAP cores from TI, and it seems that PowerVR also did a Quake 3 demo using an MBX chip running in QVGA. Yes. I said Quake 3.

And if you ARE gonna go around and brag about nVidia 3D in cellphones, you should be a FOOL if you neglect to mention the nVidia AR10.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_11430.html

Posted by: SSODR

You do make some good points and I do appreciate your input.

However I don't know if your bias against nVidia or what, but I was not "bragging" about nVidia's 3D. I only gave the credit for being a great company and only posted a point of interest for other people to see/share. There is no need to jump on me for not posting all of the options available out there. This thread was only meant to take note of nVidia's current press release.

Don't get me wrong either. I'm always for whoever is going to give the best polygon rate and thankfully we won't have to worry about drivers seeing as phones are dedicated devices.

I agree that the other chips do have way more promising specs and you are correct in saying that nVidia is only rendering its 3D though its use of HI's MC software emulation, nothing can beat Hardware rendering. I just hope the other companies come through ok. Competition is always welcome on the customer end.

I'm surprised that the Sharp J-SH53 can even render Ridge Racer @ only 25,000 Poly/Sec. thats only 1/600th the capability of the old school Geforce 256.

You obviously have been following this topic more closely then I have been. I'll again say I appreciate you sharing the topic further, instead of just blabin off and leaving it at that.

Maybe someday we will be gaming together instead, when we have our high end 3D GPU's and WiFi connections for our phones.

Posted by: RageFury32

Actually, I do have a serious bias against nVidia. It's not that ATi is doing better things, it's that they have been promising alot lately and failing to love up to it, and their mobile product line (Laptop chipsets, the Geforce FX Go range) has been nothing but mediocre battery whores. Besides, it's hard to be seriously enthusiastic about a product whose product release is delibrately misleading about its capabilities. Anyone (Including lazy admins on most tech website) who casually glanced at that info will infer that GoForce->GeForce->Kickass 3D, and not GoForce->Orginal ATi Imageon ->No 3D support, especially when nVidia made a casual mention on "accelerated gaming". You won't believe how many people actually lumped GoForce with "Mobile 3D" already on other sites. nVidia's real claim to fame for Mobile 3D is the AR10 core, as mentioned already. Only 5 sites bothered to read the 3GSM slides to get the AR10 release story. (Sad).

Oh, and that reminds me. If you think that Mobile 3D in an ARM processor seems impressive, check out what Pocketeers did with the 25MHz ARM7TDI in the GameBoy Advance on 256k of memory and an 8MB memory cart. Click on the pics for their fully 3D version of NFS Underground.

http://www.pocketeers.co.uk/

Sometimes it's not as much the hardware capability as it is the talent of a good development team.

Posted by: SSODR

When it comes to desktops its more then obvious that ATI has way overtaken and nVidia has been flapping in the breeze as of late. I'm hoping that will change once HL2 and DIII come out in the fall.

As far as mobile 3D goes in laptops nVidia has done a superb job with its GeForce 4 line. I own a GeForce 4 440 Go (http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce4go.html) and I was very impressed with its performance. Obviously things have progressed a lot farther since (1 yro now).

But I definitely think that if nVidia wants to they can come out with something just as worthy as any other company if not better due to its resources and experience.

Mind you I do completely agree about the FX line. Those chips are quite bad for what they should be by now.

At least nVidia has the strongest driver team.

Competition is always welcome and its keeps things moving fast. As always it should be exciting to see what happens.

I wonder how good 3D will look in combination with an updated X-scale proc (~700MHz).

Posted by: RageFury32

Hmmm...Once again, looks like we're on the opposing side of the same coin. I'm an owner of a laptop with Radeon 7500 Mobility (Maps to the GF4 Go, somewhat, abit slower on the bandwidth but just as worthy) but I can probably see where you came from. ATi does have mediocre driver support. The Catalyst 3.x series releases have been better, but overall, it's not exactly days in the sunshine for the Radeon users.

In terms of applicable CPU power for 3D when it comes to the ARM architecture, it's not the fastest clocked CPU that wins, it's really the features of the CPU. The XScale CPUs that Intel puts out (Including the PXA255s used in SO many PDAs) are ARMv5TE, which does not feature hardware divides OR floating point divide. In fact, alot of bits in 3D engines would luse hardware divide for making accurate perspective texture mapping and floating point ops for good collision detection and physics code. In both cases, the XScales and the ARM926s in SonyEricsson phones (The P800 uses an ARM926EJS) will not support either one, and must make do with fixed point math, like the original PS Ones. In terms of bitmapping, the game engine must do interpolation of texel color calculations for the textures in the game, and do it for every bitmapped pixel, 20 frames per second, while handling I/O, sound, physics and AI code (So yeah, V-Rally is probably a ××××× to write), so an ARM926 like in the P800/900 would have a top rendering speed of around 25k polygons per second. It'll be faster in the XScales, but the XScales are often found in PDAs with bigger screens and high resolutions, so they will probably not be significantly better, although they might have an edge in terms of bus/memory bandwidth.

For true 3D acceleration in cellphones and PDAs, I will refer you to a presentation with the geniuses at ARM:

www.arm.com/pdfs/MBX%203D.pdf

Notice that for any ARM v5 processors (XScales are ARMv5s)to get PSOne gaming speeds you'll need vertex acceleration to speed up geometry calculations (Basically a T&L unit like the charisma engine in the Radeons) and an MBX 3D accelerator to get PSOne-like gaming speeds. That's a 20x performance boost over current gaming speeds.

However, with an ARMv6 chip like the ARM1136 (Like the ones in the TI OMAP2s) adding in simply a hardware 3D chip like the PowerVR MBX will get you PS2/Dreamcast level acceleration, 13,000% better than current P900 performance levels. (4 Million Polygons/second compared to 30,000 Polygons/sec...133x performance boost) And that ARM11 does not need to be clocked up to the stratosphere, since the ARM have the hardware divide/SIMD instructions that 3D engine likes so much. So basically, given a choice between a 733MHz XScale and a 333MHz OMAP2, you'll have to be silly not to pick the OMAP2.