Meltdown 2001 - ATI's R200 Countdown Begins

SMARTSHADER - Up The Pixel Shader Ladder, Continued

ATI's SMARTSHADER technology is ps 1.4 in hardware which Microsoft touted as "A stepping stone towards future pixel shader versions" in one Meltdown tutorial. In effect, Microsoft has added, probably at the instigation of ATI, more texture inputs, more instructions, and more registers to the DirectX pixel shader under the guise of ps 1.4. More is good. As a side note, the great thing for Microsoft's DirectX development team is that they can probably support any number of new DirectX hardware architectures by just accomodating the registers and operations of each GPU as it comes along. No more having graphics chip companies arguing over the merits of the way they do bump mapping in hardware, or quadratice patches, or motion blur. It can all be programmed into the vertex and pixel shader.

ATI didn't give any clear indication on the number of rendering pipes in R200, but it is clear that each of the pipes will have 6 texture units, compared to the 3 implemented in Radeon (which had 2 rendering pipelines). ATI can certainly match GeForce3's 4 rendering pipelines, but ATI may deliver 6 to get the commensurate fill rate increase. This will also mean that ATI will have to up the memory bandwidth accordingly.

ATI deserves to be commended for maneuvering itself ahead of Nvidia in this instance. They've responded to Nvidia's jump on DirectX 8 as a result of its involvement on Xbox and its close ties to Microsoft. They've responded to Nvidia marketing by peeling away their architecture and highlighting its facets. They've responded by trying to leapfrog Nvidia on their next chip.

Assuming that what I saw demonstrated at Meltdown was the R200, and it couldn't have been anything else considering the functions of the SMARTSHADER being demonstrated, ATI is positioning its product as a precursor to DirectX 9, in the same way that Nvidia positioned GeForce3 as a DirectX 8 product. However, there isn't anything taking advantage of DirectX 8.1 right now, let alone DirectX 9 (which I'll address in my next report) so, ATI may only be catching Nvidia up on the marketing battlefield, and that's plenty good enough for now.

Nevertheless, I think ATI has itself a true next generation product by virtue of the fact that SMARTSHADER gives R200 a possible performance enhancer in the rasterization stage. Six texture blending and 22 operations give ATI bragging rights in hardware even though, I suspect, that we won't see either ATI or Nvidia having a delta in performance terms.

I wish I could have got more information on the number of games that will actually have support for DirectX 8.1 graphics hardware features for Christmas 2001. The best I could get was 8-12 A list game titles. That would indicate that even without the benefit of a big enough stable of titles to support its featuers, ATI's R200 is going to be no worse off than Nvidia's GeForce3 come Christmas as far as consumers are concerned because there is no way for either one to edge ahead on the performance curve. The most importat thing is going to be how the big 3D engines from the likes of Id and Epic take advantage of DirectX 8.1 hardware features in ATI and Nvidia products. These engines will play a crucial role as they are licensed to many other developers and drive the 3D performance market. Until then, it's a level playing field, but now, ATI can say it has something that exceeds Nvidia in pure specs.