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[Tom|Nbk]

http://www.gamershell.com/news/39138.html

ATI Radeon HD 2000 Family Demo and Movies

ATI has released a demo and two movies, showcasing the capabilities of their Radeon HD 2000 series products. The Whiteout demo requires Windows Vista, an ATI Radeon HD series product with 512MB of video memory and a high end CPU with 1GB of RAM. Thanks: Doc.

Thanks MarkyB!!!

 

[markyb]

np I expect some screenies real soon to make our mouth water

 

[Cyber-Mav]

why nothing on ati website? is this an unofficial release?

 

[Tom|Nbk]

why nothing on ati website? is this an unofficial release?

Well you could say that. Its still the real deal though, Im trying this soon will post some screenies

 

[Cyber-Mav]

make sure you don;t compress them cuz they gonna loose quality then/

 

[Squakingcow]

Ok, dl'ing all 3 now=D

 

[Cyber-Mav]

where the screenshots at?

don;t tell me your machines are crashing when trying to run this

 

[lay-z-boy]

we need some h@x so 8 series users can run it too *cough*

 

[Cyber-Mav]

we need some h@x so 8 series users can run it too *cough*

no screenshots so far which probably means 2900 users hare having problems running it

 

[lay-z-boy]

*chuckles*

 

[Squakingcow]

no screenshots so far which probably means 2900 users hare having problems running it

Or we just don't have vista:/

 

[Tom|Nbk]

no screenshots so far which probably means 2900 users hare having problems running it

Why would a 2900 user have problems running one of it's own demos, you just made yourself look like even more of a fool right there typical.

Anyway the demo runs smooth as butter (as you would expect) much more enjoyable seeing it being rendered real time than on a movie. Amazing how much stuff is going on with no slowdown , there are interactive parts of the demo, two of which i will show here. One shows off the tessalator unit on the card being used and the other showing off the HDR in the demo.

Here is the Tessalator demo it shows how you can add snow onto the mountain top and add different levels of snow coverage VERY impressive.



And here is the HDR showing off the lighting you can move the mouse about and see how it affects the environment and what have you



It's a shame i couldnt get Fraps to work even when running as an Administrator otherwise I could have shown some more.

 

[Tom|Nbk]

we need some h@x so 8 series users can run it too *cough*

Which is impossible even with "h@x" as the 8 series dosn't feature a tessalator unit

 

[Cyber-Mav]

whats with the black bars at the bottom of the screenshots? rendering errors?

no display of framerate?

 

[lay-z-boy]

That mountain looks like its made out of treacle & syrup :/

What does a tessalator unit do? Make it slower than an 8800gtx?

 

[Tom|Nbk]

That mountain looks like its made out of treacle & syrup :/

What does a tessalator unit do? Make it slower than an 8800gtx?

"Among some of the new features of the 2000 series include a programmable Tessellation Unit. This feature enables the GPUs to apply image enhancements when support is written in games such that game developers have a much easier time doing up simpler graphics, and letting the GPU do the image enhancements. This also supposedly saves on GPU Horsepower as you can see below. You get 2.3x performance compared to a conventionally rendered scene."

Should help it run faster than the GTX once the developers start using it

 

[Combat squirrel]

Why would a 2900 user have problems running one of it's own demos, you just made yourself look like even more of a fool right there typical.

I do beleive the ' ' was to indicate a joke, chill man

Which is impossible even with "h@x" as the 8 series dosn't feature a tessalator unit

hmmmmmm is all ill say hmmmmmmm, always had ATI cards have we? (the was to indicate a joke, banter, abit of a harmless jibe)

"Among some of the new features of the 2000 series include a programmable Tessellation Unit. This feature enables the GPUs to apply image enhancements when support is written in games such that game developers have a much easier time doing up simpler graphics, and letting the GPU do the image enhancements. This also supposedly saves on GPU Horsepower as you can see below. You get 2.3x performance compared to a conventionally rendered scene."

Should help it run faster than the GTX once the developers start using it

Hmmm sounds like its another development not needed, what was that ATI thing that made more triangles to produce cleaner images?, the dolphin demo, where it automatically made more triangles for a more detailed model? anyways it wasnt part of the DX spec so didnt take off. Is tesselaiton unit a part of DX10 ? if not I REALLY dont see it working or taking off, as with the past attempts at propritery tech.

 

[Boogle]

I shall stoop down to fanboy level in explaining the tesselator:

Its amazing innit! Basically reet, it does this cool stuff where it adds detail to the scene. It makes it amazingly uber cool, better than all the other cards innit! OMFG this is soooo amazing!!!1111oneonetwo I was like no way!?! But it did it, omg I can't believe it did it!

Now for the people who actually want to know what it does:

It performs a complicated analysis from a surface (however, I wouldn't be surprised if there were numerous weights a game dev can apply, maybe even sending the original heightmap to the driver), and then adds vertices where there were none before. In essence the terrain can become extremely detailed with no extra work being performed by the CPU, or the game devs.

Now - you could just send over a high detail mesh, but you would quickly bottleneck the PCI-E bus. Additionally you wouldn't have *that* much control over LOD since shaders won't increase performance anywhere near as much as the tesselator. In essence you can have a LOT of vertices right in front of you and smoothly decrease the LOD as the terrain gets further away. You don't have to worry about sending new meshes, performing LOD on the CPU, etc. etc. Its a very cool feature, and a primary reason why you can get very large highly detailed outdoor scenes on the Xbox 360 (think Kameo).

Since it uses a dedicated unit, all these calculations have no impact on shader performance, actually quite the reverse.

 

[Final8y]

The jokes have become tiresome from the same small group of people who don't own the card so have less to complain about but do so because they have nothing better todo.

 

[Boogle]

Hmmm sounds like its another development not needed, what was that ATI thing that made more triangles to produce cleaner images?, the dolphin demo, where it automatically made more triangles for a more detailed model? anyways it wasnt part of the DX spec so didnt take off. Is tesselaiton unit a part of DX10 ? if not I REALLY dont see it working or taking off, as with the past attempts at propritery tech.

Common mistake It was part of DX, n-patches iirc. Essentially you specified a few vertices and it would extrapolate the rest. Unfortunately the DX spec wasn't paticularly strict and NV/ATI implemented it differently. ATI implemented in such a way that any model could have the effect applied, resulting in TruForm. Unfortunately some of the games that supported the feature also enabled it on NV (since the bit in DX said 'supported') - causing the game to drop fps like a stone.

Since the feature wasn't used much at all, ATI in their next card used the NV method (or did they just drop it entirely?). Then ATI had the whole performance issue that NV did. In the end both NV and ATI disabled support in the drivers to stop these performance issues occuring for their end users. It was an optional DX feature anyway

The tesselator in the 2900XT is a completely different kettle of fish. It performs a similiar function, but on a much, much grander scale. Plus afaik it will only work with terrain, or other large meshes without overhangs. Could be wrong mind.