Zarolho
Power Member
Since then the company announced an even faster card, the GeForce 8800 Ultra. However, in a situation where the company has no competition at the high-end, it can almost price it where it wants. Thankfully, we learned at Computex that it is going to get a little cheaper.
Roy told us that the launch had been a success for Nvidia – in fact, he went onto say that the whole GeForce 8-series has been a success. He pointed out that Nvidia is in a dominating position with DirectX 10-class hardware, as the company has already shipped millions of DirectX 10 parts shipped in the first eight months. While we were discussing numbers, Roy mentioned that Nvidia had shipped over 500 million GPUs in ten years and, based on Nvidia’s research, he believes that there are currently around 200 million active GeForce users.
Many end users have been disappointed with Nvidia’s Vista drivers and we had our fair share of problems in the first few months. Nvidia was simply too quiet about the problems it was having and it was almost as if representatives from the company were sitting in an air raid shelter waiting for a bomb to drop.
We asked Roy how he felt the transition to Vista had gone for the company, and whether it could have handled the situation any better. “We really did the best we could with the transition. Of course, there were some hiccups along the way but there are many other companies in the same position as us – in that the launch was long expected, but went through many changes before its final launch. Vista changed quite a lot during its development, and of course we had to support those changes.
“As the only manufacturer with DirectX 10 hardware, we had more work to do than any other hardware manufacturer because there were two drivers to develop (one for DX9 and one for DX10). In addition to that, we couldn’t just stop developing XP drivers too, meaning that there were three development cycles in flight at the same time.”
...
Last week, we had the chance to talk with Roy Taylor about how Nvidia works with developers under its The Way It’s Meant To Be Played developer relations programme. In addition, we talked about some of the games that are coming out in the near future and also touched on where PC gaming is heading in the future.
Roy was previously Vice President of worldwide GPU sales at Nvidia and in September 2006 he moved to become Vice President of Content Relations. He is now responsible for the development and support of third-party PC games along with Nvidia developer tools and publications.
He spends most of his day liaising with developers, talking about next-generation PC games and, of course, playing them too. If there’s anyone that knows about what games are worth playing later this year, Roy’s our man.
...
“Developers wishing to use DX10 have a number of choices to make. But the biggest is whether to layer over a DX9 title some additional DX10 effects or to decide to design for DX10 from the ground up. Both take work but one is faster to get to market than the other. It’s less a question of whether DX10 is working optimally on GeForce 8-series GPUs and more a case of how is DX10 being used. To use it well – and efficiently – requires development time.
“Tony and David are right, there are API reductions, massive AA is ‘almost free’ with DX10. This is why we are able to offer CSAA [up to 16xAA] with new DX10 titles – the same thing with DX9 just isn’t practical. AA makes things pretty but what we really want to see from DX10 – and what DX10 offers is the chance to do things we haven’t seen before. For example the full use of DX10 stated instancing to produce huge, I mean really huge crowd scenes. That’s possible and could be used in many ways to affect game play. There are so many others.”
...
Roy then revealed that he’d been playing the alpha for a while now – yeah, I was really starting to get jealous. But, as if that wasn’t enough, he then told me that Crysis isn’t the only game that is looking like it’ll be an absolute cracker. “World in Conflict deserves at least as much credit as Crysis – it’s looking superb.” It turns out that he’s been playing WiC, too – I thought he might have been.
...
This then led onto us discussing how Nvidia’s architects go about designing the next generation of graphics technology. “In the past, we used to talk to the leading developers like Epic and id, along with Microsoft, to ask what they’re looking for in future hardware and then develop the GPUs from that perspective. What we’re finding though is that we’re moving towards a more gamer-experience focused design ethos.
“By this I mean we think about what gamers want to see in games and how we can achieve that with the power we’ve got. Five years from now, we want to be able to walk into a forest, set it on fire and for it to then rain (using a decent depth of field effect) and to then show the steam coming off the ashes when the fire is being put out.”
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/06/26/roy_taylor_interview_twimtbp_dx10/1
Roy told us that the launch had been a success for Nvidia – in fact, he went onto say that the whole GeForce 8-series has been a success. He pointed out that Nvidia is in a dominating position with DirectX 10-class hardware, as the company has already shipped millions of DirectX 10 parts shipped in the first eight months. While we were discussing numbers, Roy mentioned that Nvidia had shipped over 500 million GPUs in ten years and, based on Nvidia’s research, he believes that there are currently around 200 million active GeForce users.
Many end users have been disappointed with Nvidia’s Vista drivers and we had our fair share of problems in the first few months. Nvidia was simply too quiet about the problems it was having and it was almost as if representatives from the company were sitting in an air raid shelter waiting for a bomb to drop.
We asked Roy how he felt the transition to Vista had gone for the company, and whether it could have handled the situation any better. “We really did the best we could with the transition. Of course, there were some hiccups along the way but there are many other companies in the same position as us – in that the launch was long expected, but went through many changes before its final launch. Vista changed quite a lot during its development, and of course we had to support those changes.
“As the only manufacturer with DirectX 10 hardware, we had more work to do than any other hardware manufacturer because there were two drivers to develop (one for DX9 and one for DX10). In addition to that, we couldn’t just stop developing XP drivers too, meaning that there were three development cycles in flight at the same time.”
...
Last week, we had the chance to talk with Roy Taylor about how Nvidia works with developers under its The Way It’s Meant To Be Played developer relations programme. In addition, we talked about some of the games that are coming out in the near future and also touched on where PC gaming is heading in the future.
Roy was previously Vice President of worldwide GPU sales at Nvidia and in September 2006 he moved to become Vice President of Content Relations. He is now responsible for the development and support of third-party PC games along with Nvidia developer tools and publications.
He spends most of his day liaising with developers, talking about next-generation PC games and, of course, playing them too. If there’s anyone that knows about what games are worth playing later this year, Roy’s our man.
...
“Developers wishing to use DX10 have a number of choices to make. But the biggest is whether to layer over a DX9 title some additional DX10 effects or to decide to design for DX10 from the ground up. Both take work but one is faster to get to market than the other. It’s less a question of whether DX10 is working optimally on GeForce 8-series GPUs and more a case of how is DX10 being used. To use it well – and efficiently – requires development time.
“Tony and David are right, there are API reductions, massive AA is ‘almost free’ with DX10. This is why we are able to offer CSAA [up to 16xAA] with new DX10 titles – the same thing with DX9 just isn’t practical. AA makes things pretty but what we really want to see from DX10 – and what DX10 offers is the chance to do things we haven’t seen before. For example the full use of DX10 stated instancing to produce huge, I mean really huge crowd scenes. That’s possible and could be used in many ways to affect game play. There are so many others.”
...
Roy then revealed that he’d been playing the alpha for a while now – yeah, I was really starting to get jealous. But, as if that wasn’t enough, he then told me that Crysis isn’t the only game that is looking like it’ll be an absolute cracker. “World in Conflict deserves at least as much credit as Crysis – it’s looking superb.” It turns out that he’s been playing WiC, too – I thought he might have been.
...
This then led onto us discussing how Nvidia’s architects go about designing the next generation of graphics technology. “In the past, we used to talk to the leading developers like Epic and id, along with Microsoft, to ask what they’re looking for in future hardware and then develop the GPUs from that perspective. What we’re finding though is that we’re moving towards a more gamer-experience focused design ethos.
“By this I mean we think about what gamers want to see in games and how we can achieve that with the power we’ve got. Five years from now, we want to be able to walk into a forest, set it on fire and for it to then rain (using a decent depth of field effect) and to then show the steam coming off the ashes when the fire is being put out.”
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/06/26/roy_taylor_interview_twimtbp_dx10/1