JeGX’s Infamous Lab

A small post to say I have set up a new website dedicated to the Latest of the world of 3D: graphics cards, OpenGL and Direct3D programming, 3d softwares, demoscene and all other cool things I forget.

This website is here: Geeks3D.com.

Why this new website? Simply because it’s perfect way for me to keep pace with the latest in 3d.
I’m in the news for a while: first in the oZone3D.Net website, then in the Infamous Lab (actually oZone3D.Net+Infamous Lab) but now it was getting a little confused to know where posting the news. The solution was very simple: starting a new website only for the news!

In a word: Geeks3D.com for 3D news and JeGX’s Infamous Lab for my demos and tests/reviews.

By the way, if you have some cool news that match Geeks3D you want to spread, feel free to send them (jegx at ozone3d.net), I would be glad to publish them.

Post moved to Geeks3D - Jump HERE to read it.

Post moved to Geeks3D - Jump HERE to read it.

Post moved to Geeks3D - Jump HERE to read it.

David Kirk, Nvidia’s Chief Scientist, interviewed by the guys at bit-tech.net.

Read the full interview HERE.

Here are some snippets of this 8-page interview:

- page1
“Kirk’s role within Nvidia sounds many times simpler than it actually is: he oversees technology progression and he is responsible for creating the next generation of graphics. He’s not just working on tomorrow’s technology, but he’s also working on what’s coming out the day after that, too.”
“I think that if you look at any kind of computational problem that has a lot of parallelism and a lot of data, the GPU is an architecture that is better suited than that. It’s possible that you could make the CPUs more GPU-like, but then you run the risk of them being less good at what they’re good at now”
“The reason for that is because GPUs and CPUs are very different. If you built a hybrid of the two, it would do both kinds of tasks poorly instead of doing both well,”

- page 2:
“Nvidia has talked about hardware support for double precision in the past—especially when Tesla launched—but there are no shipping GPUs supporting it in hardware yet”
“our next products will support double precision.”
“David talked about expanding CUDA other hardware vendors, and the fact that this is going to require them to implement support for C.”
“current ATI hardware cannot run C code, so the question is: has Nvidia talked with competitors (like ATI) about running C on their hardware?”

- page 3:
“It amazes me that people adopted Cell [the pseudo eight-core processor used in the PS3] because they needed to run things several times faster. GPUs are hundreds of times faster so really if the argument was right then, it’s really right now.”

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Pierre and Marie Curie University - Paris 6 - Jussieu

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The new Alienware’s gaming notebook is available with the following features:
- 17 inch Wide Screen WUXGA 1920×1200
- Intel Core 2 Duo
- NVIDIA 8800M/8700M/8600M GT/GTX and SLI
- up to 4Gb of RAM
- HDD: up to 500Mb or 1Tb in Raid 0 (2×500Mb)

Full features and more on that monster here:

Alienware Area-51 m17x – Learn More

An interesting page that tries to collect the most full information about all games, packages and software products, which use Ageia PhysX SDK. Demoniak3D is listed in Game engines and wrappers section.

Link:
- Projects using PhysX SDK

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware. 3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

This new benchmar is available in 4 versions:
- Trial: free
- Basic: $6.95
- Advanced: $19.95
- Professional: $495

The free version is downloadable BUT it’s very limited since only one launch is allowed with standard settings. I guess we should find soon the Basic version (or Advanced) as part of the bundle of some graphics cards…

Here is a little compilation of links to help you to start with 3DMark Vantage:

- 3DMark Vantage @ Futurmark

- 3DMark Vantage Whitepaper
- 3DMark Vantage Testing Guidelines

Download:
- 3DMark Vantage @ Guru3D
- 3DMark Vantage @ MajorGeeks
- 3DMark Vantage @ Revioo

Graphics Drivers
- NVIDIA Forceware 175.12 Vista 32
- NVIDIA Forceware 175.12 Vista 64
- ATI Catalyst 3DMark Vantage Hotfix Released for Radeon 2k/3k

Misc:
- 3DMark Vantage, new torture for your gaming setup @ expreview.com
- Futuremark 3DMark Vantage Review @ Overclockers Club
- Futuremark 3DMark Vantage - The Gamers New Benchmark @ Legit Reviews
- 3DMark Vantage Overview and Performance @ FiringSquad
- Futuremark 3DMark Vantage @ AnandTech
- 3DMark Vantage quick user guide @ Guru3D
- 3DMark Vantage formal version screenshots @ hardspell
- 3DMark Vantage Presentation @ accelenation
- 3DMark Vantage est enfin là @ pcinpact

Post moved to Geeks3D - Jump HERE to read it.

Post moved to Geeks3D - Jump HERE to read it.

A graphics card with a very nice looking GPU cooler. Unfortunately, this card will available in Korea only…

- Source

I’m back to France for an indeterminate period. In a word, I left that:

Something tells me my life in Paris will be short…

But even so, there are some nice things in Panam (yep guys, another way to tell Paris in french) and I’m going to popup them here in this blog (under a new category: Paris)… For this first entry about Paris, here are some pictures:

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I found this thread on [H]ard|Forum where we can read this:

“That fur demo is known to get cards the hottest, it is also known for smoking cards as well (it was the last thing run for a number of people on the extremesystems forums).”

I knew FurMark was good for heating the graphics cards up but I didn’t know it’s also good to really kill them. I feel the summer will be hot for some graphics cards…

Here is the list of OpenGL extensions supported by Forceware 174.20 drivers.

OpenGL Extensions: 161 extensions

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Here is the list of OpenGL extensions supported by Catalyst 8.3 drivers. There are 96 extensions.

• Drivers Version: 8.471.0.0 - Catalyst 08.3
• ATI Catalyst Version String: 08.3
• ATI Catalyst Release Version String: 8.471-080225a1-059746C-ATI

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This demo uses instancing techniques (simple instancing, pseudo-instancing and geometry instancing(or GI)) to render a ring made of 10,000 small spheres. The demo is delivered in 5 versions:

• each sphere is made of 1,800 triangles (18 millions triangles for the whole ring)
• each sphere is made of 800 triangles (8 millions triangles for the whole ring)
• each sphere is made of 200 triangles (2 millions triangles for the whole ring)
• each sphere is made of 72 triangles (720,000 triangles for the whole ring)
• each sphere is made of 18 triangles (180,000 triangles for the whole ring)

I added in the last moment a bonus: a 20,000 instances version, each instance made of 5,000 triangles. We get the monstruous count of 100 millions triangles (file Demo_Instancing_100MTriangles_20kInstances.exe).

DOWNLOAD

OpenGL Instancing DemoPack - (2676k)

Several instancing techniques are used and you can select them with F1 to F6 keys.

• F1: simple instancing with camera frustum culling: there is one source for geometry (a mesh) and it’s rendered for each instance. The tranformation matrix calculation is done on the CPU as well as the camera frustum test. OpenGL rendering uses the glDrawElements() function.
• F2: simple instancing without camera frustum culling: there is one source for geometry (a mesh) and it’s rendered for each instance. The tranformation matrix calculation is done on the CPU but there is no longer camera frustum test. OpenGL rendering uses the glDrawElements() function.
• F3: slow pseudo-instancing: there is one source for geometry (a mesh) and it’s rendered for each instance. Now the tranformation matrix calculation is done on the GPU and per-instance data are passed via uniform variables. There is no camera frustum test. OpenGL rendering uses the glDrawElements() function.
• F4: pseudo-instancing: there is one source for geometry (a mesh) and it’s rendered for each instance. The tranformation matrix calculation is done on the GPU and per-instance data are passed via persistent vertex attributes (like texture coordinates or color). This technique has been shown by NVIDIA in the following whitepaper: GLSL Pseudo-Instancing. There is no camera frustum test. OpenGL rendering uses the glDrawElements() function.
• F5: geometry instancing: it’s the real hardware instancing. There is one source for geometry (a mesh) and rendering is done by batchs of 400 instances per draw-call. The whole rendering of the ring requires 25 draw-calls instead of 10,000. The tranformation matrix calculation is done on the GPU and per-batch data is passed via uniform arrays. There is no camera frustum test. OpenGL rendering uses the glDrawElementsInstancedEXT() function. Currently, only NVIDIA GeForce 8 (and higher) support this function.
• F6: geometry instancing with persistant vertex attributes: it’s the hardware instancing coupled with the transmission of parameters is done via the persistent vertex attributes. But the number of persistent vertex attributes is very limited. The best I did is to render 4 instances per draw-call. But oddly, I got the best results with 2 instances per draw-call. In that case, the rendering of whole ring requires 5000 draw-calls. The tranformation matrix calculation is done on the GPU and per-batch data is passed via uniform arrays. There is no camera frustum test. OpenGL rendering uses the glDrawElementsInstancedEXT() function. Currently, only NVIDIA GeForce 8 (and higher) support this function.

Ok now, let’s see some results with a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX and an ATI Radeon HD 3870. Both cards have been tested with an AMD 64 3800+.

18 millions triangles - 1800 tri/instance

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX - Forceware 169.38 XP32

• F1: 223MTris/sec - 13FPS
• F2: 223MTris/sec - 13FPS
• F3: 223MTris/sec - 13FPS
• F4: 223MTris/sec - 13FPS
• F5: 223MTris/sec - 13FPS
• F6: 171MTris/sec - 10FPS

ATI Radeon HD 3870 - Catalyst 8.2 XP32

• F1: 429MTris/sec - 25FPS
• F2: 463MTris/sec - 27FPS
• F3: 446MTris/sec - 26FPS
• F4: 274MTris/sec - 16FPS
• F5: mode not available
• F6: mode not available

8 millions de triangles - 800 tri/instance

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX - Forceware 169.38 XP32

• F1: 190MTri/sec - 25FPS
• F2: 190MTri/sec - 25FPS
• F3: 205MTri/sec - 27FPS
• F4: 213MTri/sec - 28FPS
• F5: 205MTri/sec - 27FPS
• F6: 152MTri/sec - 20FPS

ATI Radeon HD 3870 - Catalyst 8.2 XP32

• F1: 251MTris/sec - 33FPS
• F2: 236MTris/sec - 31FPS
• F3: 297MTris/sec - 39FPS
• F4: 251MTris/sec - 33FPS
• F5: mode not available
• F6: mode not available

2 millions de triangles - 200 tri/instance

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX - Forceware 169.38 XP32

• F1: 47MTri/sec - 25FPS
• F2: 47MTri/sec - 25FPS
• F3: 57MTri/sec - 30FPS
• F4: 131MTri/sec - 69FPS
• F5: 167MTri/sec - 88FPS
• F6: 148MTri/sec - 78FPS

ATI Radeon HD 3870 - Catalyst 8.2 XP32

• F1: 47MTris/sec - 25FPS
• F2: 59MTris/sec - 31FPS
• F3: 74MTris/sec - 39FPS
• F4: 112MTris/sec - 59FPS
• F5: mode not available
• F6: mode not available

720,000 triangles - 72 tri/instance

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX - Forceware 169.38 XP32

• F1: 17MTri/sec - 25FPS
• F2: 17MTri/sec - 25FPS
• F3: 20MTri/sec - 30FPS
• F4: 47MTri/sec - 69FPS
• F5: 60MTri/sec - 88FPS
• F6: 53MTri/sec - 78FPS

ATI Radeon HD 3870 - Catalyst 8.2 XP32

• F1: 17MTris/sec - 25FPS
• F2: 21MTris/sec - 31FPS
• F3: 26MTris/sec - 39FPS
• F4: 40MTris/sec - 59FPS
• F5: mode not available
• F6: mode not available

180000 triangles - 18 tri/instance

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX - Forceware 169.38 XP32

• F1: 4MTri/sec - 25FPS
• F2: 4MTri/sec - 25FPS
• F3: 5MTri/sec - 30FPS
• F4: 11MTri/sec - 69FPS
• F5: 15MTri/sec - 89FPS
• F6: 13MTri/sec - 79FPS

ATI Radeon HD 3870 - Catalyst 8.2 XP32

• F1: 4MTris/sec - 25FPS
• F2: 5MTris/sec - 31FPS
• F3: 6MTris/sec - 39FPS
• F4: 10MTris/sec - 59FPS
• F5: mode not available
• F6: mode not available

Quick results analysis:

• we now understand why NVIDIA has called the technique using persistent vertex attributes “Pseudo-Instancing” (key F4). OpenGL glDrawElements() function is extremly fastand persistent vertex attributes require less overhead than uniforms to be passed to vertex shader. Both coupled together give this performance boost.
• benefit of real hardware geometry instancing is mostly visible with few triangles per instance.
• when there are many triangles per instance (1,800), the hardware implementation of glDrawElements() seems to be more efficient (twice!) on RV670 GPU than on G80.

Conclusion

From the results, hardware geometry instancing isn’t the kill-feature I expected. I find that very weird since the différence between 10000 render-calls with glDrawElements and 25 render-calls with glDrawElementsInstancedEXT is not verx important. Seems the instancing management (gl_InstanceID variable in the vertex shader) is a GPU-cycle eater!What a pity ATI hasn’t implemented yet geometry instancing in the Catalyst drivers. I’d be very curious to test hardware GI with a RV670.

Tested Version: 1.02

GLC_Player is an OBJ {Alias|Wavefront} object viewer. OBJ is the ascii standard file format to describe 3d objects. This format is very simple and do not force to follow a strict file structure. But this liberty has a price: the parsing is, in some case, quite difficult. And I must confess that GLC_Player does the job rather well.

GLC_Player offers a Virtual Trackball camera, which is very handy to handle the object and examine it under all possible angles. GLC_Player is delivered with some samples of OBJ files but for the infamous lab it’s out the question to use GLC_Player loadable certified objects!

So I jumped on that page and I downloaded the Ferrari F40 model. This model is provided in MAX format. This format is conveniant for my tests because I can convert it using MAX OB exporter.

For the test I also used HyperView3D in order to compare the way both tools load OBJ files.

- Ferrari F40 and GLC_Player:

- Ferrari F40 and HyperView3D:

The strange tasks in the hood come from the normals exported by MAX that are not correct at these places. Let’s forget this detail. We can see that GLC_Player has had a little problem to load some textures (the Ferrari logo on the hood) and does not take into account transparent materials (windshield and headlights).

The other thing that can prevent a detailed analyze of the 3d models is the way the meshes are managed. GLC_Player loads the OBJ file into a big and unique mesh even though the model has 36 distinct meshes.

Conclusion: if you need a tool to quickly view OBJ files, GLC_Player is that tool. What’s more GLC_Player is available for Windows and Linux. From now on, it lies in my graphics toolbox next to HyperView3D. But if you need a more accurate analysis of a 3d model in order to exploit it in a real time 3d application (Demoniak3D?) GLC_Player is not adapted yet.