AMD demos DX11 hardware at QuakeCon 2009

[josiahsuarez]

http://www.pcper.com/comments.php?nid=7640
AMD demos DX11 hardware at QuakeCon 2009 Fri, Aug 14, 2009 - 03:50 PM
Ryan Shrout | Source: PC Perspective | Subject: Graphics Card
While we are still prepping for tomorrows Hardware Workshop hosted by PC Perspective, we decided to get some news in for you as well by stopping by the AMD suite in the hotel. Here they were showing off the upcoming Evergreen graphics chip, first shown at Computex this year. This DX11 hardware is the first GPU to support the technology and should be able in late fall or early winter.



Inside this system is the Evergreen GPU reference card - though we weren't allowed to open up the case to actually SEE the card. I did take a peek at the back though and it was a dual-slot cooled card with a pair of DisplayPort outputs and a single DVI output. The rest of the system was basic AMD-system components on Windows 7 OS.



One of the two available systems, AMD was showing the new Wolfenstein game - though it was only running DX9 code this is an IMPORTANT thing to see as we can tell the GPU is in good working order with a fully functional game, not just SDK demos.



But we did see SDK demonstrations with cool new DX11 features. This shot above shows the tessellation functionality at work.



A close up shot shows the sheer amount of triangles being created by the DX11 tessellation engine.



You can see in the text here we are on a "FUTURE CARD" (very nice AMD...) running D3D11 at over 78 FPS at 2560x1600.



This SDK demo was showing off shadowing effects that are made easier in DX11 - notice the softness of the shadows as they run along the ground away from the pillars.



This SDK demo shows some advanced texture-based shadowing effects like ambient occlusion.



Though the monitor does distort our image a bit for the photos, you can see that this image shows standard shadows...



... while this image's shadows are much darker where the tank's parts are further obscured from the light and illumination.

That's all we have for now - no other details on the chip, the speeds and feeds, or any product information were revealed and no amount of persuasion would change that. We WILL have a more detailed look at these technologies for our hardware workshop tomorrow and we'll likely post that video on our site here after the event.

article is ****e without pictures. hit the link! but first here's a tease:


A close up shot shows the sheer amount of triangles being created by the DX11 tessellation engine.

http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e16/josiahsuarez/04.jpg

[Muppet]

It's a shame they didn't give any Wolfenstein numbers. That would have been nice.

[Fotis]

AMD has been toying with as for months now!:D Come on, bring teh cards!!!(lee)

[Buio]

I don't know, 78fps displaying a wireframe? Of course there is a lot of polygons, but I hope tesselation doesn't require too much power from the GPU. If it does, what is the use? As today scenes are rendered with fairly high polygon amount and the visual difference from tesselation is smaller.

[josiahsuarez]

it also require some extra effort from the developer. tessellation is a non-starter for the consoles, so making geometry with the control points necessary would be for a PC only feature. why bother when you can just increase the LOD levels for free?

[josiahsuarez]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20090814061759_ATI_Demonstrates_The_Future_DirectX _11_Graphics_Cards_at_Quakecon.html
ATI Demonstrates “The Future” DirectX 11 Graphics Cards at Quakecon.

ATI’s New Evergreen Graphics Chips Hit Quakecon, Set to Hit the Market by Windows 7 Launch
[08/14/2009 06:17 AM]
by Anton Shilov

ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, may be demonstrating its next-generation DirectX 11 graphics processing units at Quakecon, a video game convention held yearly in Dallas, Texas. The company claims that it has exclusive Area64 room at the show and that it shows next-gen technologies there.

“Area64 will be exclusive access only, meaning, you can try to find it, but its hidden and being kept secret. AMD will be showcasing what we lovingly refer to as ‘The Future’,” said Ian McNaughton, a senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD.

Even though AMD now has a rather broad portfolio of products, it is doubtful that the company demos its 32nm central processing units or next-generation core-logic at a computer game convention. A logical assumption would be demonstration of the next-generation ATI Radeon graphics processing units (GPUs) that support DirectX 11 application programming interface (API) and belong to Evergreen family of GPUs. Mr. McNaughton marked his statement with "DirectX 11" tag, which indirectly confirms that the claim refers to the forthcoming graphics cards.

Back in the days, ATI used Quakecon to show the power of the now legendary ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (R300), the world’s first DirectX 9 graphics processor. In 2002, the company equipped several PCs with the novelty and allowed gamers to try the latest technology and enjoy the unrivalled (back then) performance themselves at Quakecon.

The alleged demonstration of the next-generation graphics cards means that the new boards are in production and that the company is gearing up for the launch of the graphics cards. Another claim in AMD’s official blogs earlier this month says that ATI’s DirectX 11-supporting graphics boards will be available when Microsoft ships its Windows 7, which may mean that the launch is scheduled to take place before the 22nd of October.

“AMD has been working hard to support DirectX 11, so there are plans to make native DirectX 11 hardware from AMD in its ATI Radeon GPUs available when Windows 7 is released,” the statement reads.

ATI demonstrated its first DirectX 11 graphics processors at Computex Taipei 2009 in early June, however, it did not outline any actual timeframes for introduction. The general expectation is that ATI plans to release its chip known under “RV870” and “Evergreen” code-names that is produced using 40nm process technology this Fall.

[pakotlar]

it also require some extra effort from the developer. tessellation is a non-starter for the consoles, so making geometry with the control points necessary would be for a PC only feature. why bother when you can just increase the LOD levels for free?

The point is you can't increase LOD levels "for free". First of all, making numerous LOD assets for a game is far too time consuming to make seamless LOD transitions in every situations. Second of all, you still end up with un-optimized polygon usage. Adaptive tessellation afforded by DX11, will give you better than power of 2 scaling, due to mesh optimization on the fly. You'll be to get the best LOD this side of sparse voxel octree's, and the best LOD's for dynamic objects. It will basically mean that you can write a load balancer, specify max # of triangles for each scene/map/world/whatever then let you program run. If you make good use of the tessellator, you should be able to make fewer LOD models, and easier transitions "dynamic-interpolative LOD". That'd be great.

And it so happens that Xbox360 games are a near shoe in for this cross-platform tech, and the PS3 is too, depending on how you want to spend your resources.

I don't know the programming models themselves, and whether or not control points would have to change between the platforms. The Siggraph09 paper on tessellation offers some insight on variations. You really want to use tessellation to optimize meshes, aka where you see benefit from more polys, and removing triangles from those areas you do not.

[josiahsuarez]

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1040/1/

http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e16/josiahsuarez/directx11_videocard.jpg

Taking a look at the back of the case though we can see that the DX11 'Evergreen' graphics card is a dual slot solution. For hooking up monitors the card has a has a pair of dual DVI outputs and then both DisplayPort and HDMI connectors. There is also an exhaust port on the back for what could be an outside thermal exhaust system. This is one of the only pictures of this elusive video card on the web!

[CaptNKILL]

And they're running it on an Athlon II 250? :bleh:

[josiahsuarez]

The point is you can't increase LOD levels "for free". First of all, making numerous LOD assets for a game is far too time consuming to make seamless LOD transitions in every situations. Second of all, you still end up with un-optimized polygon usage. Adaptive tessellation afforded by DX11, will give you better than power of 2 scaling, due to mesh optimization on the fly. You'll be to get the best LOD this side of sparse voxel octree's, and the best LOD's for dynamic objects. It will basically mean that you can write a load balancer, specify max # of triangles for each scene/map/world/whatever then let you program run. If you make good use of the tessellator, you should be able to make fewer LOD models, and easier transitions "dynamic-interpolative LOD". That'd be great.

And it so happens that Xbox360 games are a near shoe in for this cross-platform tech, and the PS3 is too, depending on how you want to spend your resources.

I don't know the programming models themselves, and whether or not control points would have to change between the platforms. The Siggraph09 paper on tessellation offers some insight on variations. You really want to use tessellation to optimize meshes, aka where you see benefit from more polys, and removing triangles from those areas you do not.

by "for free" I mean that the PC version isn't going to require much more time/effort/money to develop than the console versions. you can just take the LOD models you need to create for the consoles anyway and use them on the PC.

now I'm assuming that the LOD levels will already be done for the consoles, because the consoles are so weak that LOD models are the most efficient use of resources IMO, instead of spending the resources doing dynamic tessellation and using a smaller fraction to actually run/render the game. it can easily get to the point that the additional load of performing the tessellation is more of a drag than the efficiency gained by drawing properly tessellated models. so the developer just uses traditional LOD levels, and that gets ported to the PC version, because implementing tessellation just for a PC version can't be financially justified (does the visual improvement justify the additional cost? how many more units will be sold by adding this feature?). this is all IMO, I don't know what all the developers will actually do, but I have heard time and again the pie-in-the-sky promises of how great tessellation will be for RT 3D graphics only to find the reality is quite lackluster (smooth surfaces in Unreal 1, Shinys much hyped game Messiah, ATI truform, etc....none of them ever amounted to much). maybe this time will be different :/

[Heinz68]

The PCPerspective article (http://www.pcper.com/comments.php?nid=7640) posted by josiahsuarez is now updated with AMD Neil Robinson video.
Talking about and showing DX11 Tesselation demos and on the end answering few good questions.

[Heinz68]

Gaming that will blow your mind :)

DiRT 2 teaser shown at QuakeCon 2009
http://vimeo.com/6182068

[Apheleon]

http://bbs.chiphell.com/attachments/month_0908/090820100880f648d0be5aa201.jpg
rolf :headexplode:

[Heinz68]

Apheleon can you explain what are you trying to say before your head explode from laughing so hard. :)
I don't like to speculate about it.

[hokeyplyr48]

And they're running it on an Athlon II 250? :bleh:

how does that work? Theres got to be a crazy bottleneck there...

[lduguay]

Apheleon can you explain what are you trying to say before your head explode from laughing so hard. :)
I don't like to speculate about it.

Proly because there is absolutely nothing to see but a huge black surface, a standard issue fan and a few caps, hence the :headexplode:

[Fotis]

how does that work? Theres got to be a crazy bottleneck there...

They apparently were using a low end system(Athlon II & RV840) for the demos.Probably didn't want to give away the top end full performance.

[XDanger]

WILL IT BE ABLE TO DO CIRCLES?

[Fotis]

WILL IT BE ABLE TO DO CIRCLES?
I think you're asking for too much!:D

[Muppet]

WILL IT BE ABLE TO DO CIRCLES?

No, only squares :D

[pakotlar]

I think you're asking for too much!:D

Yeah funny enough, no modern hardware can actually render a sphere.

A decent discussion on the subject: http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=613729

Point is that if we got true curved surfaces support it'd be a paradigmatical leap. Maybe a close approximation is possible with SVO.

[Heinz68]

Proly because there is absolutely nothing to see but a huge black surface, a standard issue fan and a few caps, hence the :headexplode:

Iduguay thanks for speculating for me. The one picture Apheleon posted was part of 3 pictures series posted at CHIPHELL. Every other forum I remember reading posted all 3 pictures. My guess is that you might be wrong about what Apheleon found so extremely funny about the picture.
I think the only question is how much we can trust the original source of the pictures.

Here few examples from other forums when posting the CHIPHELL (http://translate.google.com.au/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chiphell.com%2F2009%2 F0820%2F99.html&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8) pictures:
Beyond3D Forum (http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1323867&postcount=1844), XtremeSystems Forum (http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=3969628&postcount=224), OCAustralia Forum (http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showpost.php?p=10781229&postcount=228)

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/6956/pic1exh.jpg (http://img6.imageshack.us/i/pic1exh.jpg/)
http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/356/pic2kuj.jpg (http://img268.imageshack.us/i/pic2kuj.jpg/)
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/7854/pic3olt.jpg (http://img25.imageshack.us/i/pic3olt.jpg/)

[Muppet]

The card itself looks very short. This can't be there top of the range model surely. Plus it looks as if it only has one PCI-e connector.

[XDanger]

Yeah funny enough, no modern hardware can actually render a sphere.

A decent discussion on the subject: http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=613729

Point is that if we got true curved surfaces support it'd be a paradigmatical leap. Maybe a close approximation is possible with SVO.

I dont need spheres or donuts just ellipses/circles/cylinders/cones
:(

[Atomizer]

I dont need spheres or donuts just ellipses/circles/cylinders/cones
:(

What he means is, all "curves" in the GPU are approximations, either using triangles or straight lines(in the case of 2d shapes), there is no true curves, though honestly, I dont see the requirement for them, since upto a certain point, you cant tell the difference between a true curve and an approximation