London's 3D-Day?

Electronics Times, Sept 18, 2000

While Nvidia is providing the 3D graphics for the X-box, ATI is the power behind Nintendo's GameCube (formerly the Dolphin) console. The console was launched at Nintendo's Spaceworld Show in Tokyo two weeks ago, and uses the graphics chip designed by ATI engineers formerly of ArtX of Palo Alto, California, which ATI acquired in April.

The chip has a clock speed of 200MHz, and is built on NEC's 0.18 micro m embedded DRAM technology to integrate the one transistor DRAM cell technology from Mosys. Dave Orton, president and chief operating officer of ATI, said: "This announcement confirms ATI's entry into the mass consumer electronics and game consoles market."

Nvidia is starting to supply the graphics engine for X-box so that developers can start working with it. The X-box itself will not be ready until later next year, based around a Pentium III CPU, the Nvidia spin of its Geforce GPU, 64Mbyte of ram and an 8Gbyte hard disk and DVD- rom drive.

The architecture uses a unified memory model with the graphics and CPU sharing the same 64Mbytes of memory for lower costs. However, this may limit the graphics performance and the size of the textures, even with texture compression.

The GeForce Ultra shipping this month uses 64Mbyte of DDR DRAM on its own. So, given that the box will use even a skeleton version of Windows 2000 code, there is not much hope of equivalent performance of PlayStation 2 unless there is a substantial memory cache in the Nvidia chip.

The Ultra is Nvidia's high-end chip, building on the success of the GeForce2 GTS and GeForce MX. The Ultra uses Nvidia's second-generation transform and lighting engine with four pixel pipelines to give fill rates of up to one billion pixels per second and two billion texels/s, as well as drawing over 31 million sustained triangles/s at 2048 x 1536 in 32bit colour. Part of the performance comes from the fact that GeForce Ultra is the first graphics chip to ship with 230MHz (460MHz effective) DDR memories, producing a 7.36Gbyte/s pixel bandwidth.

Nvidia's drive into consumer started with the GeForce MX, the first GPU designed specifically for the volume PC. "This is the first GPU with multimarket, high-volume appeal," said Huang. "In addition to the mainstream PC market, the GeForce2 MX will also set the stage for our entry into the commercial workstation, Mac, and mobile markets."

But ATI has also been trying to fight back with the Radeon 256 chip. ATI claims this has the world's fastest hardware transformation, clipping and lighting (T&L) geometry engine and will drive the creation of an entirely new generation of 3D applications and content.

KY Ho, chairman and CEO of ATI, said: "Radeon 256 firmly establishes ATI in the high end, cutting-edge performance category of the PC and workstation markets." Built in 0.18 micro m and with 30 million transistors, the Charisma Engine at the heart of Radeon is a 30 million triangle/s geometry engine and includes an on-chip hardware HDTV decoder.

Chas Boyd, graphics architect for DirectX at Microsoft said: "ATI's latest generation, the Radeon 256, provides the most complete implementation we've seen to date of the DirectX 7 Direct3D feature set and provides a good step toward the features of DirectX 8."