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ItsMeOnly
Joined: 06 Jun 2006
Posts: 173
Location: Warszawa, Poland
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 Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 4:16 pm Post subject: |
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| swaaye wrote: | Just think....that whole board is now days compressed into just a portion of a graphics chip.  |
Well, there's a little more to it- the RealityEngine 2 beats the crap of even contemporary graphics by one factor: reliability. AFAIR in 1995, the internal data transfer was about 1 Gbit(!) per second, something today's consumer grade memory achieved just recently. Besides, RE can render broadcast-quality scenes in real time with guaranteed frame rate (so no slowdowns when more details appear in foreground or there's just some environmental mapping), you have 8 graphic pipelines- something that consumer cards started to have a year or so ago.
And besides- the today's cores run at 450 MHz, 860's here run at 50 MHz each... |
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swaaye
Joined: 02 Sep 2005
Posts: 47
Location: WI, USA
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 3:46 pm Post subject: |
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I wonder how one of G80's or R600's stream processors, at 1.35 GHz and 740 Mhz respectively, compares to a 50 MHz i860? And they have over a hundred of each in those GPUs.
1 Gigabit per second is only about 125 MB/s bandwidth.. That's nothing. Even if it was 1 gigabyte per second, that was exceeded by Voodoo3/TNT back in the '90s with external commodity SDRAM chips.
8 pipelines is great for the time, but I'm sure they are very basic relative to what was in the first 8 pipeline fully-integrated GPUs like ATI R300. Playstation 2 technically has a 16-pipeline GPU, by the way, but you wouldn't know it from the graphics because the GPU is very simplistic.
I also would imagine that considering both NVIDIA and ATI make professional-grade products out of these processors (Quadro and FireGL) that they are fully capable of delivering reliably smooth rendering.
Ex-SGI engineers are the basis for a lot of the engineering talent at NV and ATI. |
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Windmiller
Joined: 24 Jun 2005
Posts: 1716
Location: Chapel Hill, NC
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 3:56 pm Post subject: |
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| swaaye wrote: |
Ex-SGI engineers are the basis for a lot of the engineering talent at NV and ATI. |
I think you're right. Are you familar with the Pixel-Plane project from UNC? Many of those that were involved with it went to either SGI, Nvidia and places like Nintendo, etc. |
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ItsMeOnly
Joined: 06 Jun 2006
Posts: 173
Location: Warszawa, Poland
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 4:07 pm Post subject: |
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| swaaye wrote: | | I wonder how one of G80's or R600's stream processors, at 1.35 GHz and 740 Mhz respectively, compares to a 50 MHz i860? And they have over a hundred of each in those GPUs. |
In that it's superscalar, superpipelined processor with really good FPU performance? And you have 12 of'em?
| Quote: | 1 Gigabit per second is only about 125 MB/s bandwidth.. That's nothing. Even if it was 1 gigabyte per second, that was exceeded by Voodoo3/TNT back in the '90s with external commodity SDRAM chips.
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Actually I was wrong: the referenced Reality Engine memory bandwidth was 8,3 GB/s.
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8 pipelines is great for the time, but I'm sure they are very basic relative to what was in the first 8 pipeline fully-integrated GPUs like ATI R300.
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Using 8 monitors simultaneously? 30fps HDTV? on one graphic pipe, for that matter
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that they are fully capable of delivering reliably smooth rendering.
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Well, again, we're talking about 10 years of difference! And still, my point is valid- the reliability stays, there are still fully blown RE's working in graphic studios, how long does your graphics last?
Btw, some benchmarks:
| Code: | RealityEngine2:
2M t-mesh triangles/second
930K textured t-mesh triangles/second
80/160/320M textured, anti-aliased pixels/second
Hardware texture mapping
Real-time anti-aliasing
VGA up to 1600x1200 and HDTV display
Advanced stereo modes
Hardware image processing acceleration
48-bit RGBA color, quad-buffered (192 bits total)
256 to 1024 bits per pixel
40 to 160MB frame buffer
NTSC/PAL/S-Video output
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swaaye
Joined: 02 Sep 2005
Posts: 47
Location: WI, USA
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| Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2007 4:06 pm Post subject: |
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Those are, of course, embarrassingly slow results. It's ancient technology. It was neat at the time, but it's a ridiculous waste of electricity today and isn't going to provide anything remotely like reasonable performance compared to something recent. The only reason to have one around is to keep reaching for some more return on investment on that beast.
As for this nebulous "reliability" claim, what makes you think a vastly smaller and more powerful and less proprietary machine from the past 5 years wouldn't be more reliable?
The slowest current Quadro seems to offer multiples more performance than an entire Reality Engine 2. While using 21 watts.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_11761.html |
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