GeForce FX And More From AGDC 2002 191
Mr.Tweak writes "We have posted some coverage from the Australian Game Developers Conference which was held over this past weekend at the Melbourne Convention Center. There you will find information on Sony's PS2 online gaming plans, Sony's PS2 Linux Development Kits, and videos and pictures of nVidia's GeForce FX in action as well as shots of the graphics card and other juicy details."
Re:They make games in Australia? (Score:1, Informative)
www.kromestudios.com
www.auran.com
www.irrati
www.evolutiongames.com
www.infogra
www.ratbag.com.au
www.torus.com.au
Re:They make games in Australia? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They make games in Australia? (Score:2, Informative)
Melbourne House has produced software for the NES, SNES and current consoles since the early days of the industry.
There are heaps of current titles that would surprise you that are written in Australia..I guess with the separation between publishers and the actual software firm that the actual coders don't get a mention.
Re:They make games in Australia? (Score:2, Informative)
This is the one that immediately comes to mind since I live in Adelaide and have met one of the founders, but there are sure to be others.
If the link goes down: (Score:5, Informative)
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Introduction - More Hardware Next Year Please
To be deadly honest with you, the Australian Game Developers Conference which was held over this past weekend at the Melbourne Convention Center was not all that exciting for a strictly hardware junkie like myself.
However... for an Australian conference, it was very good to see large companies such as Intel, AMD, nVidia, Microsoft, Sony and Creative in your backyard all putting some dollars back into the industry for the benefit of future game development in our good country down under.
While we did not see it necessary to post any formal coverage, throughout the weekend we did learn a few things of interest for us hardware folks, obviously though much of it was focused toward the gaming industry with no ground-breaking new juicy hardware news to feed you folk with.
So without further ado, here is some of the interesting bit and pieces I found @ ADGC 2002.
Please note throughout this thread you can click on each image for a larger version.
Sony on PS2 - Still Pushing Hard
- PS2 Online Gaming Service
First off, at their Delegate Cocktail Party, Sony let a noisy, mostly student dominated crowd of 300 or more know that they will launch their very own online gaming service for the PS2 in Australia sometime during our winter season next year - no in-depth details were given by the speaker battling to sound himself above the crowd.
This service will compete with Microsoft's Xbox Live online gaming service which should go live in Australia around the same time, we think.
- PS2 Linux Dev Kit
Sony were also showing off their PS2 Linux Development kit with the aim of getting more up and coming game developers to learn the art behind programming PS2 games under the Linux OS.
These kits sell for around $1000 Australian (roughly $500 US).
nVidia bring beautiful Dawn to our shores!
(Image: http://www.tweaktown.com/popImg.php?img=agdc02_01
One of the company stands I thought I would stop by was nVidia where the friendly Steve Burke, Art Director and co from the Santa Clare office in the US of A were showing off their GeForce FX graphics card (to my delight) and CG Graphics engine and development software.
- The Videos
(Image: http://www.tweaktown.com/popImg.php?img=agdc02_02
Now most of us have seen the stunning NV30 videos floating around the Internet over the past month or so. I remember when I first saw these videos and how amazed I was. Seeing the NV30 in action personally impressed me a whole lot more with what the technology is truly capable of - somewhat refreshing my excitement over the new product.
(Image: http://www.tweaktown.com/popImg.php?img=agdc02_03
We shot 3 or 4 minutes of our own new video footage of both the Dawn and Ogre demos for your viewing pleasure. To view these AVI files, you will need to download the latest DivX codec from the DivX website.
You can download both videos here from our servers:
- Video #1 (Dawn) (10.1mb) (Link: http://www.tweaktown.com/files/nv30dawn.avi)
- Video #2 (Ogre) (6.7mb) (Link: http://www.tweaktown.com/files/nv30ogre.avi)
- The Card
After we shot the videos, I asked if we could get a closer look at the NV30 graphics card. While nVidia refused to power down their systems (fair enough - we cannot take Dawn away from fellow jaw dropped perverts) they did offer to take the sides off one of their three ASUS nForce2 Athlon XP 2700+ powered systems they were demonstrating...
(Image: http://www.tweaktown.com/popImg.php?img=agdc02_04
(Image: http://www.tweaktown.com/popImg.php?img=agdc02_05
(Image: http://www.tweaktown.com/popImg.php?img=agdc02_06
These shots give us a good idea of just how much space these monsters are going to take up inside our cases. As you can see, the heat pipe cooling technology is going to cover two of your first PCI slots - whether you like it or not, start to get used to the fact guys.
- Cooling
While we couldn't see it, the fan cooling the heat pipes was very loud - we are talking almost Delta-like volume levels. Possibly, as we get closer to seeing these cards in retail, nVidia may tweak the cooling systems to a more noise tolerable level - at least I hope so.
When quizzed by a gamer at the sound levels coming from the back of the card, an nVidia rep was quick to suggest that it wouldn't matter much because gamers would be using headphones during their gaming. Unless the cooling technology has thermal throttling (which it very well may, mind you) I would have to disagree with this notion.
Say you are listening to music or fragging away with your desktop speakers, the hum of the cooling fan will still be audible since we do not all use headphones.
- Retail Release Dates
I ended my discussions with Steve Burke asking when we could except to see the GeForce FX on store shelves.
He made it clear he was not 100% certain but said we may possibly see a limited supply in stores in the United States toward the very end of this year with supply coming in quantity late January / early February next year.
Please remember these dates were given to us as ESTIMATES and should be treated as such.
Conclusion
Like I said in the introduction, I didn't have a great detail of information to report here. I hope you enjoy the brief coverage I provided in this forum thread.
Feel free to post your thoughts and comments on anything discussed here.
Cheers!
Re:"85 times brighter"? (Score:2, Informative)
--Informative not off topic!
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Mirror (Score:1, Informative)
http://magnus.infidyne.com/nvidia/
If you do not find everything there now, it will be there ASAP..
Re:Lag Lag Lag Lag LAG! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:PS2 Linux Dev Kits? (Score:3, Informative)
The official devkits (TOOLs) consist of a PC and a PS2 in the same box. The PC runs Linux, and handles code download/debugging between the PS2 and the developer's PC. The PS2 doesn't run Linux.
The Linux kit is cool to start developing on, provided you're not a novice - Sony provides 90% of the official PS2 docs, as well as a bunch of sample code. If you want to learn how to throw DMA chains at the vector units, it's a good start. Unfortunately, gdb is about as sophisticated a debugger as you're going to get. Also, there's no mechanism provided for debugging the vector units. Bear in mind we're talking about relatively low-level code here.
Another big problem is that since Linux is a virtual memory environment, your DMA chains have to be pre-processed by the kernel in order to translate all the virtual memory addresses to physical ones, which basically means your code will never be as fast as it would be on a TOOL, or a PS2 without Linux.
Oh yes - one other thing - the TOOLs have 128MB of RAM, the real PS2's only have 32MB.
Re:Anyone else tired of GeForce's marketing? (Score:4, Informative)
However, as for REAL scenes, they also ran the game Stalker with the geforce FX. It looked VERY nice, ran slightly jerky at some parts - something gamers would shudder at - but on the whole very impressive speed for the detail available. Of course, not as realistic as the fairy model, but still very nice.
So look at the screenshots for that game and imagine it running at perhaps 40-60 fps at a guess, and thats what we saw there. The nVidia guy there said he tried it with a Geforce 4 MX 200 and it ran at around 2-3 fps. Still, that's an MX so not much surprise there.
Re:The Lanfest was just scary (Score:3, Informative)
Just a few facts to kill the humor in your post (please forgive me!).
We weren't locked in. There were only 400 or so of us. The walls weren't very bouncy (we tended to smack into them). And we also wanted to make off with the GeForce FX
I was involved with the AGDC LANfest event (Score:4, Informative)
It was interesting to see the reaction of the developers as they walked through the LANning area, the main response being "What on earth is this?". Maybe that's why some games have rather lame LAN netcode. As for sleeping arrangements, there wasn't any sleeping permitted in the venue. Some of the LAN admins got no sleep at all (I just woke up from a 13 hour sleep).
The cocktail party was cool - all over 18 attendees of the LAN event could attend, too, and enjoy the merits of free beer and mingle with the developers.
I did have a look at the nVidia stand, in fact, I saw the tweaktown guys pass through while I was there, taking their snaps. Yes, the GeforceFX takes up two slots and the fan isn't exactly quiet either.
The LANfest is our last event before the Big Day In.
Re:from the AGDC website (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They make games in Australia? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:nvidia drivers (Score:3, Informative)
I don't do a great deal of graphics-intensive stuff, but do generally play a few rounds of either Unreal Tournament or RtCW each working day (after hours, of course). I've not once had a crash, although occasionally KDE's screen locking button stops working after playing...
Re:Noise and Slots (Score:4, Informative)
I believe most of these cards will go in new (or very recent) systems which already have lan/sound/USB/1394 on the motherboard, reducing or even eliminating the need for extra PCI cards. Heck, even if the GeForce FX car eats up one PCI slot, you still got at least 4 of them left free, more than enough to host a better soundcard, a scsi controller, a video capture card...
Recent cards like the GF4Ti600 already have huge heatsinks with fans that make it a risky decision to plug a card in the PCI slot next to them, unless you want to cut the air from flowing to your GPU. I haven't heard any complaints about it so far, eh. I guess the gamers who invest in such cards don't fill-up their cases by populating all of their PCI slots...
Anyway, I'm pretty sure we'll see a smaller/cooler version of the card within 6 months or so that will make this whole conversation obsolete...
Cheers,
max
Re:From the trenches (Score:2, Informative)
That's pure speculation on your part -- I've never noticed it sounding muffled.
but when the Xbox is supposed to create 5.1 from discrete channels produced by the game, it fails
This is a known limitation of the HRTF algorithm they're using. I'm pretty sure devs can change so that it'll mix the L/R channels into the front speaker too, but you have to be careful with volume balance issues.
Why does this Tweak guy get special treatment? (Score:1, Informative)
I have no doubt that there are quite a few other sites whose articles are just as worthy as Tweak's, but the webmasters of those sites are not allowed to repeatedly pimp their own sites.
If Tweak is so much better than other sites like it, why doesn't Slashdot just add them to the headlines box in the lower right side and be done with it?
Smells like a tuna boat that's been on the beach for a week.