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Inside the beautiful Palace of Fine Arts, in San Francisco, a large crowd waited anxiously for the theater doors to open. NVIDIA was putting together this cool event and there was a lot of excitement coming not only from this company but also from the other companies that were part of the show, the many vendors that have adopted NVIDIA technology in their own products.
One interesting thing that I noticed was that not a single person I met had anything negative to say about NVIDIA. That’s pretty unusual when you consider that NVIDIA has quickly grown to be one of the premiere semiconductor companies in the world. But it’s very easy to understand why people like this company so much. At a time when powerful Open GL graphics cards cost more then the computers that housed them, NVIDIA brought virtually the same amazing graphics power to the masses for the price of a regular graphics card. Suddenly you found not only gamers rushing to the stores to get their GeForces but also graphics professionals, who were happily replacing their $4,000 cards with $250 ones. But NVIDIA didn’t stop there and kept improving their products at an insane pace. And even though their cards designed for the home market were fast enough for professional use, they brought us a professional line that was even better and addressed certain specific needs. They constantly upgrade their drivers and their graphics engines are fast at both 3D and 2D, a feat that very few companies have been able to accomplish. So, what’s not to like about them?
Real time hair and fur rendering,
particle systems texture mapping
and complex shaders
are just a few of the GeForce4 features that can make a huge difference in the way we work. By unloading the computer’s CPU from these tasks, we can expect a considerable increase in overall performance. According to NVIDIA, their goal is to let the GPU take over anything that is related to graphics and let the CPU take care of the other calculations. Once software manufacturers take full advantage of these capabilities we can expect faster render times and better interface performance. And that doesn’t apply just to 3D animation packages. Many compositing programs these days can take advantage of this technology. Programs such as Discreet Combustion, Nothing Real Shake and Adobe After Effects work in three-dimensional space and can produce particles and other effects that the GeForce4 engine can process directly. And since the new GPUs can easily handle extremely complex scenes at much higher rates than the 30 frames per second required by NTSC video, realtime DVEs and other effects can be easily accomplished.
The new chipset also comes with a powerful Video Processing Engine (VPE), which is capable of realtime, high quality MPEG-2 decoding, component video output, HDTV output and more. By taking advantage of these capabilities, digital content creation software may be able to offer realtime video previews and playback at full DTV and HDTV resolutions. In addition, NVIDIA’s nVIEW display technology makes it easy to drive multiple displays.
One particularly impressive member of the GeForce4 family is the GeForce4 Go mobile GPU, currently the world’s fastest. Toshiba was demonstrating this impressive chipset with a new, fully loaded Satellite notebook priced under $2,000. This extremely sweet machine is truly a digital content creation portable studio, with a very bright and sharp 15” 1600x1200 screen, on board Harman/Kardon high quality sound system including subwoofer, S/PDIF optical digital audio interface, I-1394 (firewire) connection, 512 MB of RAM and a DVD/CD-RW combo drive. With this notebook you can easily run any high-end 3D animation program that would previously work well only on a workstation grade tower system. Imagine working on that complex animation or special effect while flying across the country or even while enjoying a nice summer day, outside. You could also take your machine to the set and begin the effects work as a movie is being shot. Because traditionally 3D animators, compositors and editors have been pretty much confined to studio and office environments, the power brought by a laptop like this and NVIDIA’s GeForce4 GO GPU will certainly open new doors to creative expression.
The GeForce4 family of GPUs is a very exciting introduction that will definitely make its way into the computers of professionals and home users alike. The technology made available by NVIDIA is truly groundbreaking and I hope that software developers get to take full advantage of it. Existing software will immediately benefit for the chipset’s performance but even more benefits will come to those who tap into the specific possibilities offered by these chips.
As for the hardcore workstation level users, NVIDIA is working on a professional line of cards featuring the new chipset that should be announced before the end of the month. |
