Feb 10, 2004, 03:36 PM
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To Have and to Hold
Join Date: May 2003
Location: Ontario
Posts: 527
Rep Power: 0
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R3D.GR does David Nalasco
R3D.GR has yet again come up with another ATi interview. This time its with the Technology Marketing Manager for Desktop Graphics, David Nalasco
Quote:
Q: DirectX 9 seems to be the "big thing" that everyone is talking about in graphics these days. The developers of Half Life 2 have said their game runs much faster on ATI hardware than on the competition. What makes your chips so much better at running DX9 games ?
A: Designing a graphics chip is all about budgeting transistors and deciding how to allocate them most efficiently. For our R300 DirectX 9 architecture (used in the RADEON 9500, 9600, 9700, and 9800 series), our designers resisted the temptation to add a lot of unnecessary features that we felt game developers would not use, or that would not noticeably improve speed or image quality. Instead, they kept very close to the base DX9 specification and added more pipelines, more shader units, and better compression technology. Not only did this allow our products to easily outperform the competition, but it allowed us to do it with lower clock speeds, with fewer transistors, and without requiring a lot of additional software optimization (which is really appreciated by game developers).
Q: What are your thoughts on PCI Express and what this will mean for ATI and the PC industry.
A: I think the transition to PCI Express will be a much bigger deal than many people realize. If you think back how long PCs have been built around the PCI and AGP standards, it's been around 10 years already since the switch from the old ISA bus. The change to PCI Express will require new motherboards, graphics cards, audio, networking, etc. I see this being a great opportunity for us to start doing some really interesting new things with PCs, like more compact form factors and hot-swappable components.
On the graphics side, PCI Express gives us a lot more bandwidth to work with than we had with AGP. This will make it possible to offload a lot more tasks from the CPU to the VPU (such as high definition digital video editing), where they can be done much faster. We have invested a lot of effort to make sure that we will have the best line-up of PCI Express products available as soon as this technology launches.
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Be sure to check out the full interview
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