X-Received: by 10.140.239.3 with SMTP id k3mr4083949qhc.25.1456225085613; Tue, 23 Feb 2016 02:58:05 -0800 (PST) X-Received: by 10.182.176.8 with SMTP id ce8mr98058obc.15.1456225085554; Tue, 23 Feb 2016 02:58:05 -0800 (PST) Path: csiph.com!usenet.blueworldhosting.com!feeder01.blueworldhosting.com!peer01.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!y89no3423181qge.0!news-out.google.com!pn7ni791igb.0!nntp.google.com!ok5no4537682igc.0!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.graphics.rendering.renderman Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2016 02:58:05 -0800 (PST) In-Reply-To: <390DB958.8C7FB059@pixar.com>#1/1> Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=2601:600:8d00:e2c7:798f:437a:40b7:acef; posting-account=sjksPgoAAACk7ORcr-B09nJa-eVm3_yt NNTP-Posting-Host: 2601:600:8d00:e2c7:798f:437a:40b7:acef References: <39099210.3717024@news.ntlworld.com> <3909BD4B.A107CD05@pixar.com> <390DACB1.A0FC5C9@lanl.gov> <390DB958.8C7FB059@pixar.com>#1/1> User-Agent: G2/1.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: Subject: Re: GeForce2 announcement From: mohd.tahauddin@gmail.com Injection-Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2016 10:58:05 +0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Received-Bytes: 3761 X-Received-Body-CRC: 4027755051 Xref: csiph.com comp.graphics.rendering.renderman:67 Hello Tom: I am not even sure if you are still following this :) I read about your original rebuttal to NVIDIA's marketing hype 16 years ago and for some reason, I wanted to hear your thoughts about modern 3D accelerators with programmable shading languages. How would you compare a modern accelerator in the following context: 1) Replacing/complimenting a render farm from 16 years ago. Do you think a modern graphics card begins to approach the original promise from NVIDIA (comparing against a render farm from 2000). 2) A modern graphics card vs a modern render farm I would really love to hear your thoughts, especially, what needs to change/improve, how much more complex shaders in offline renderers are vs a modern graphics card etc. Thanks, On Monday, May 1, 2000 at 12:00:00 AM UTC-7, Tom Duff wrote: > Allen McPherson wrote: > > I'm curious. Obviously, real-time TS2 frame generation is > > very difficult, especially given the required data rates you > > provided. On the other hand, would it be useful to use this > > technology to preview shaders, different animation scenarios, > > develop new shading algorithms, etc? [on lower resolution > > models and image resolutions of course] > > We certainly use 3D accelerators (SGI rather than NVIDIA) to preview > animation. Until you can compile shading language programs to run on them, > they won't be much use for shading and lighting. > > > Also, rather than one on every desk, what about one in each of > > your 1000+ nodes of the render farm? We work in very different > > domains, but we're looking at building just such a system (though > > only on 32-64 nodes for now). > > 3D accelerators mostly don't do anyting we're interested in doing a lot of. > Of the 1.2 million hours of CPU time that goes into making a set of TS2 > frames, about 1.1 million hours is devoted to executing shading language > code, for which NVIDIA's cards are essentially no help at all. If they could > cache texture off a several-gigabyte UNIX filesystem and pull filtered > texture samples at arbitrary coordinates out at the rates they advertise, > they might be some use, since I think about half of the time we spend in > shading is devoted to sampling texture maps. But note that by Ahmdahl's > law, if their boards were infinitely fast, we'd stilly only see a 50% > rendering speed-up. > > -- > Tom Duff. Some sort of background check is in order.