| To: sandintoes who wrote (482) | 5/26/2000 12:34:00 AM |
| From: Marc | of 1384 |
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What Pixar thinks of NVidia:
The quote from the Nvidia's website:
Achieving Pixar-level animation in real-time has been an industry dream for years. With twice the performance of the GeForce 256 and per-pixel shading technology, the GeForce2 GTS is a major step toward achieving that goal.
Jen-Hsun Huang, President of NVIDIA Corp.
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Here is what Tom Duff from Pixar thinks about that:
These guys just have no idea what goes into `Pixar-level animation.' (That's not
quite fair, their engineers do, they come and visit all the time. But their
managers and marketing monkeys haven't a clue, or possibly just think that you
don't.)
`Pixar-level animation' runs about 8 hundred thousand times slower than
real-time on our renderfarm cpus. (I'm guessing. There's about 1000 cpus in the
renderfarm and I guess we could produce all the frames in TS2 in about 50
days of renderfarm time. That comes to 1.2 million cpu hours for a 1.5 hour
movie. That lags real time by a factor of 800,000.)
Do you really believe that their toy is a million times faster than one of the cpus
on our Ultra Sparc servers? What's the chance that we wouldn't put one of
these babies on every desk in the building? They cost a couple of hundred
bucks, right? Why hasn't NVIDIA tried to give us a carton of these things? --
think of the publicity milage they could get out of it!
Don't forget that the scene descriptions of TS2 frames average between 500MB
and 1GB. The data rate required to read the data in real time is at least
96Gb/sec. Think your AGP port can do that? Think again. 96 Gb/sec means
that if they clock data in at 250 MHz, they need a bus 384 bits wide [this is typo.
384 _bytes_ wide!]. NBL!
At Moore's Law-like rates (a factor of 10 in 5 years), even if the hardware they
have today is 80 times more powerful than what we use now, it will take them 20
years before they can do the frames we do today in real time. And 20 years
from now, Pixar won't be even remotely interested in TS2-level images, and I'll
be retired, sitting on the front porch and picking my banjo, laughing at the same
press release, recycled by NVIDIA's heirs and assigns.
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