I hope Apple doesn't miss the boat on this one
<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/25147.html" target="_blank">http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/25147.html</a>
3DLabs still makes the fastest workstation accelerators. Creative recently bought them and now they're going into the consumer market with DirectX 9 support.
3DLabs still makes the fastest workstation accelerators. Creative recently bought them and now they're going into the consumer market with DirectX 9 support.
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<strong><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/25147.html" target="_blank">http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/25147.html</a>
3DLabs still makes the fastest workstation accelerators. Creative recently bought them and now they're going into the consumer market with DirectX 9 support.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It'll be interesting to see if they can compete. Being bought by Creative should help solidify their business. Their lead in the workstation space isn't going to last long unless they get this P10 out, and then that might only let them keep up with the DX9 parts from nVidia and ATI. I don't think Apple needs to make friends with 3DLabs, nVidia and ATI will deliver what Apple needs to compete in the workstation space... and odds are we'd just have another set of substandard drivers. Better to focus on making nVidia/ATI drivers better.
Remember the Bitboys?
Remember the Promedia 4 Dual chip from Formac?
Way too much overhyped products in this field to take seriously until the silicon is working.
<strong>I will never get too excited about Graphics cards until they are shipping.
Remember the Bitboys?
Remember the Promedia 4 Dual chip from Formac?
Way too much overhyped products in this field to take seriously until the silicon is working.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Only, silicon is already working. It is already being sampled to manufacturers and the release date was actually brought forward because things are working right.
<strong>
. I don't think Apple needs to make friends with 3DLabs, nVidia and ATI will deliver what Apple needs to compete in the workstation space... and odds are we'd just have another set of substandard drivers. Better to focus on making nVidia/ATI drivers better.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Choice is never bad.
[quote]The P10 is the most programmable, single-chip graphics architecture to date. There are over 200 32-bit floating point and integer processors built into the chip. These are all general purpose processors, with addressing, looping, and subroutine capability. For example, nothing prevents a processor in the shader section from writing out data to memory that can then be accessed by one of the scalar vertex processors, though it's hard to think of any reason to do it. The point is that the programmability is general purpose and highly flexible. Neil Trevett dubs this a "VPU", short for Visual Processor Unit.
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Can you say "Quartz acceleration"?
<strong>and odds are we'd just have another set of substandard drivers. Better to focus on making nVidia/ATI drivers better.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I tought 3DLabs was kinda famous for solid drivers. It comes with trying to compete in the workstation market I think, the professionals don't tolerate bad drivers.