cM :: MORLEY|DIGITAL

Rahul Sood for years now has written about the PC industry and his experience with it.  Most of the time it’s entertaining, and it’s always well written.  I personally have a lot of respect for him as a person and his accomplishments in this business.  The few times I’ve gotten to spend some face to face time with him were always enjoyable and stimulating.

But since his acquisition by HP, much of his musings have turned into pontifications that have most of us scratching our heads.  His latest proclamation that the high-end gaming PC is dead, merely a few months after announcing a $20,000 Omen desktop PC, illicited a very stern response from my compatriot, Ed Borden.

Rahul’s latest mini-interview with PCWorld leads me to put in my two cents.

Not that this post will make it outside the industry circles, and my friends on Facebook; Rahul is in a position now where he can say what he wants with impunity.  He can reach his target market and deliver messages that resonate with HP’s consumer base.  And he doesn’t have to worry about his former peers and colleagues in the industry.  But that won’t stop me or others from at least putting something down on the record.

Rahul now seems very concerned about the environment.  In PC World he spins the new Voodoo Firebird as an earth-saving gaming PC.  He says the Firebird is a “hybrid high-performance PC” that uses “one-fifth the energy used by an average high-performance PC.”  According to Rahul it draws 350 watts under load.  For the purposes of this article I’ll assume he means a fully loaded Firebird with a desktop Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, dual 9800 MXM graphics, and 4GB of RAM.

Reality:

Rahul is making the subtle comparison between the Firebird’s capabilities with systems that require 1000+ watt power supplies.   Those configurations include triple-SLI or CrossFireX, and INCREDIBLY overclocked processors.  They would absolutely destroy the Firebird in benchmarks.  I’ve already made the case that these configurations are outside of the mainstream, and wholly unnecessary, yet Rahul needs to make the comparison for his premise to hold up.

At 350 watts maximum (slightly less power than an 80+ efficient 500 watt power supply), you can stuff a helluva lot of performance into a desktop PC.  The physical footprint of the Firebird has nothing to do with power saving.  If anything it’s the fact that it uses mobile graphics cards.  In fact, it’s just a laptop in a desktop chassis - with the exception that it uses a power-hungry desktop CPU.  

But with a quality 500 watt power supply (assuming 400w total power is available to me,) I can drive a Q9550 and a GeForce GTX 260 Core 216, which would exceed the performance (and perhaps even the performance per watt!) of a fully-loaded Firebird.  And the very slight performance saving, which would be slim, would do nothing to combat the fact that the Firebird starts at $1799 (I would love to know what the actual base specs are,) well above the price of a retail configuration with similar power.  The total cost of ownership of the Firebird will still be higher over its lifetime compared to a comparable desktop PC.  And in this economy, people are looking to the bottom line.

So while what Rahul has to say sounds all well and good, it just doesn’t stand up to reality.

Never has there been a better time to be a PC gamer.  With all the great titles available now including Far Cry 2, Dead Space, Left4Dead, etc. I just don’t have enough time to bask in all the awesomeness.  Bolstered in no small part by great PC hardware products from every player out there, 3D graphics have never looked so good nor performed so well.

But all’s not been so in the world of graphics accelerators.  The API showdown of the late 90s that sputtered out in the first part of this decade produced some truly awful and horried graphics accelerators.  The shift from dedicated accelerators to 2D/3D combo accelerators and the emergence of DirectX and downfall of Glide brought forth stupendously dumb products, vaporware, and massive disappointments.

So in this festive holiday season, let’s get our Grinch on and take a trip down memory lane:

#6 Intel i740 - Release Date Early 1998

Intel’s i740 was their first foray into the 3D market. Some research firms said outlandish things like “Make no mistake about it, Intel’s entry into the 3D graphics is a wake up call to the industry and marks a significant milestone for 3D graphics capabilities that will forever change the landscape of the industry.”  Wow, that’s amazing, and I’m sure it was copied directly from an Intel slide deck.  However, the i740 was a massive disappointment.  It was designed to take full advantage of AGP that included AGP texturing, and on board memory was used exclusively for the frame buffer.  This meant the video card had to fight for precious memory  bandwidth with the CPU and other devices in your PC.  PCI variants of this card often turned out to be faster than their AGP brethren because both textures and the frame buffer had to be stored locally, mitigating the rather slow AGP texturing process.  

Furthermore, the i740 was one of the first cards to optimize for synthetic benchmarks, getting everyone excited about this low-cost, kick ass solution that was going to change the game.  However, it only provided  competition to the Riva 128 and got absolutely destroyed by the dominating Voodoo II.  Some may say that the Voodoo II was 3D only and required a 2D solution in addition, but remember that most PCs sold back then had built in 2D video to begin with.  And the i740 only had a couple of months before the Riva TNT hit the market.  By January of ‘99, most review publications didn’t even include the i740 in their roundups with newcomers like the Banshee, Savage3D, and Rage128 coming down the pipe.  Personally, I used my i740 merely for a 2D companion to my Voodoo II SLI setup.

#5 3DFX Voodoo Banshee - Release Date Late 1998

With NVIDIA, Matrox, and ATI all with their eye on the prize, 3DFX was the company to beat.  They had mind share.  Their GLide API was considered the best in the business.  But emerging standards such as Direct3D from Microsoft and the cross-platform and highly versatile OpenGL were make strides.  So much so that 3DFX was forced to create drivers to support these competing APIs.  The Voodoo Banshee came on the heels of the 3D-only Voodoo II and was designed to take on 2D/3D accelerators like the nVidia/nVIDIA/NVIDA Riva TNT.  It wasn’t the first 2D/3D combo from 3DFX, the first being the Voodoo Rush, and it’s a toss-up as to which was a bigger failure.  However, the Rush was released in 1997, disqualifying it for this list.

While the Riva TNT couldn’t stand up to the Voodoo II because it had to be clocked lower because of heat (90MHz vs a planned 125MHz, actually making a it a candidate for this list), it shined against the Voodoo Banshee that discarded the second TMU (texture management unit) design of the venerable Voodoo II.  While a hit with the value crowd, it marked the first time that 3DFX started losing market share to NVIDIA.  OEMs by that point were hooked on the TNT’s support for 32-bit color, which the Banshee did not support, and 3DFX would not support until the Voodoo 4/5, released nearly 2 years later.  By that time the nails were being hammered into 3DFX, which was later bought by NVIDIA.  Personally, I think 3DFX should have never bought STB.

#4 NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra - Release Date Early-Mid 2003

The first fruit of the buyout of 3DFX, the GeForce FX 5800 was probably one of the most anticipated and most hyped NVIDIA graphics chips ever.  And it was the biggest, most abject failure since the NV1.  Nicknamed “The Dustbuster,” the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra was the noisy attempt from NVIDIA to reclaim the speed crown from ATI’s balls-to-the-wall Radeon 9700 Pro and its successor, the 9800 Pro.  It failed miserably.  The problem was the emergence of the importance of “shader” calculations in DirectX 9.  This threw the simple concept of pixel pipelines out the window. 

NVIDIA hyped up its Shader Model 2.0a features as the “dawn of cinematic computing,” but ended up falling well short of the competition in speed.  Keep in mind this was well after the 9700 Pro was released.  Its poor performance is attributed primarily to two factors.  The first was its mixed precision programming of FP16 and FP32, the former was lower than the required standard, and the latter was just plain slow.  ATI’s 9700 Pro operated at FP24 100% of the time, which was the required DirectX 9 standard.  The second issue was that the card’s performance relied heavily on the driver’s shader compiler.  Properly sorted and programmed, updated drivers could significantly boost the GeForce 5800 Ultra’s performance.  Without them, pipeline stalls and poor instruction order would severely cripple the card in some games.  This required optimization would lead NVIDIA to create one of the most important programs in company history: “The Way It’s Meant To Be Played” - allowing game developers complete access to technical resources to make their games better.  And hopefully better on NVIDIA cards.

Speaking of developers, probably the most embarrassing thing about the FX debacle was Valve’s Gabe Newell making the announcement that in his new blockbuster, Half Life 2, the updated FX 5900 Ultra flagship was no faster than ATI’s mid-range Radeon 9600.  Furthermore, because of this, Valve decided to force FX-series video cards render in DirectX 8.1 mode, its only strong point.  Ouch.

#3 S3 Savage 2000 - Release Date Late 1999

I have a strong loathing for this particular card.  See, back in the 90’s, S3 was still a contender.  It was during a time that anyone could snatch the performance crown with their next video card release.  And their proprietary S3TC texture compression was truly cool and made a real difference in 3D quality.  The flame wars of the late nineties over Matrox, NVIDIA, 3DFX, ATI, and S3 were epic.  All you forum fanbois of today are a bunch of weaklings compared to the utter rage that these discussions invariably led to.

But, back to the trash that was the Savage 2000. At the turn of the century,  Hardware Transformation and Lighting (TnL) were the buzz words, with NVIDIA’s GeForce (Geometry Force) SDR and DDR being the cards to beat.  S3 announced in 1999 that they had an answer.  Its awesome clock speed (on paper) of 175MHz meant it had a higher theoretical fill rate than its GeForce competition.  The hype on this card verged on the hysterical.

But it was all too good to be true.  Analysis showed that its TnL engine contained incredibly fewer transistors than did the GeForce chips, which raised some eyebrows, and it shipped without TnL enabled in the drivers.  Combined with a very disappointing drop in production clock speeds of 125MHz (vs 175MHz or up to 200MHz according to some sources), the Savage 2000 was a ho-hum product at launch with unpredictable performance.  To make matters worse, when drivers shipped that “enabled” hardware TnL, it was shown that they had no impact on performance, leading most to believe that hardware TnL was broken, poorly implemented, or just not there at all.  Driver updates ceased in 2002.  It was the last video card S3 designed before being sold to VIA.  Of course that turned out just great for them.  </sarcasm>

#2 TWO WAY TIE!!

Matrox Parhelia - Released 2002

The Matrox Parhelia was long overdue for Matrox.  Their very competitive and very popular G400 was getting long in the tooth.  ATI was gearing up to destroy everyone with the 9700 Pro and the GeForce 4 was the current king of the hill; seemingly untouchable.

The Parhelia had amazing specs.  It had a 256-bit memory bus, but was the first to feature a 512-bit “ring bus.”  Sound familiar?  However, it featured absolutely ZERO bandwidth saving features.  NVIDIA and ATI had LMA II and HyperZ, but Matrox had nothing.  It supported ridiculously high 16x fragment anti-aliasing, which was impressive.  It also had fantastic 2D performance thanks to its 10-bit, 400MHz RAMDAC.  

The problem was that the top of the line 256MB Parhelia at $399 got its ass kicked by the older GeForce 4 Ti 4600.  I mean it got destroyed.  It basically performed at the level of the previous-generation GeForce 3.  Its 4×4 pixel pipeline design offered zero real-world advantages.

But the worst part was that it was supposed to support DirectX 9.0 shaders, but didn’t.  Later in its life Matrox acknowledged that their vertex shaders were not DirectX 9-compliant, as advertised.  But it didn’t matter, the Parhelia sucked in DX9 titles, even without more complicated DX9 shader code to run.

In the end, it was concluded that Matrox engineers simply weren’t as talented as NVIDIA’s and ATI’s.  Ouch.  Matrox continues to pump out professional cards that perform well in 2D and multimedia applications, but never would they set foot in the consumer 3D arena.  Well, unless you count the M-Series announced in June, which FINALLY added support for Windows Vista Aero.  Double ouch.

(Silver Lining: the Parhelia chip founds its stride in Matrox’s HD video editing solution, which I absolutely loved when I worked for BOXX Tecnologies.)

ATI Rage Fury MAXX (Dual Rage128 Pro) - Released January 2000

OMG, a DUAL graphics chip video card? WOW.  Unlike the Voodoo II with its two separate texture management units, the Rage Fury MAXX featured two full Rage 128 chips that worked in tandem on a single card to accelerate 3D games.  The method that this was acheived by was called “Alternate Frame Rendering” - one chip would render one frame, the other chip would render the next.

There were several problems with this.  ATI’s Rage128 chip was crap when it was launched - nearly NINE MONTHS LATE.  The drivers were abysmal.  I know, I bought one for $249 from Best Buy the friggin’ day it came out.  Back to the MAXX though - while the Rage128 drivers had matured, so had the chip, and there was tough competition from NVIDA and 3DFX with the GeForce series and the Voodoo 3 series.  So ATI decided to slap two of them together on one card and call it day.  Believe me, it almost worked.  In late December 1999 the early previews were promising.  It was beating the GeForce SDR at higher resolutions but also at a higher price tag.  By February of 2000, however, the reviews were swinging back towards NVIDIA’s corner, and the GeForce DDR provided better frame rates than the MAXX.  Combined with its lack of hardware TnL and higher price tag, reviewers had a hard time what to make of this card.

In the end, and the reason that this card is high up my list is because it flat out did not work as advertised in Windows 5.x operating systems, meaning Windows 2000 and XP.  In these operating systems, which did not support the method ATI used for dual AGP graphics, the ATI Rage Fury MAXX only worked in single chip mode.  Face, meet palm. 

#1 BitBoys Glaze3D - Never released

Oh boy there was nothing more fun than taking jabs at BitBoys and their never-released Glaze3D.  Seriosly, this was the first time I had every heard the word “vaporware.”   Its specs seemed to magically morph every time a new card was released by NVIDIA, 3DFX, or ATI to make it look like it was a killer solution.

First announced in 2000, the BitBoys Glaze3D specs would place it as the equivalent of the 3-years-away GeForce FX 5200 Ultra while its claimed performance would place it at the same level as a GeForce 3 Ti 500.  I remember very well their claims of 200 frames per second in Quake III.  They released screen shots of what they said it was capable of and they looked as good as a DirectX 9 video game.  Remember, this was back in 2000.

It was a friggin’ joke which would be released first, the Glaze3D, or Duke Nukem Forever.  I said more than once that if BitBoys every released a consumer desktop graphics card I’d grind it up and drink it in a shake.

While BitBoys claimed that bug-hunting and production issues kept them from releasing the Glaze3D, it didn’t keep them from talking about new vaporware chips they were developing.  Subsequent vaporware featured embedded DRAM for stupid amounts of bandwidth to be used on anti-aliasing, as well as ever evolving support for new DirectX standards.  In the end, BitBoys focused on handheld graphics, and were eventually picked up by ATI in 2006.  So now AMD owns them.  So I guess they showed us.

 

Dishonorable mentions:  

2900XT for being a big, hot letdown and not able to beat the nearly year old 8800GTX.  

The 7950GX2 Quad SLI for being a total bitch that only boutiques and certain OEMs got initial access to it.  Oh, and for not having Vista support till it was completely irrelevant.

3DLabs P10/P9 - what happened to this “game changing” chip?  It made its way into workstations but the big buzz was the purported advanced performance for consumers.  Oh well.

One of these systems from an acclaimed boutique builder claims to be “expertly engineered” and features “meticulous hand assembly” with every cable “thoughtfully secured out of the way” - can you tell the difference from the cheaper Tier 1s?  Boutiques should stick to what they know best - high dollar niche gaming PCs that truly deliver on their promises.

Intel’s tick-tock strategy kicks butt.  First, a new architecture.  Follow that up with a tweak and then wash, rinse, repeat.  It started with the launch of Core 2 in the summer of 2006 (tock.)  They followed up with the “tick” late last year with the move to a 45nm process.  Now here comes the first follow up “tock” and it’s a doozy.  I think they should consider renaming their process “beat you into submission and then kick you when you’re down.”  The Core i7’s got some wicked fast processing power and it brings to the table features that, while have been used by AMD for a while now, serve to propel Intel’s new chip into the stratosphere.  Without going too far into it, the key features are: integrated triple-channel memory controller, monolithic quad-core, QPI (Intel’s answer to AMD’s HyperTransport), and the return of HyperThreading.  

Of course, with all these changes, a new chipset is in order.  Enter Intel’s X58.  That’s it.  Nothing from NVIDIA, and no mainstream variant from Intel.  The integrated memory controller and increased pin count make the new Core i7 understandably incompatible with previous platforms.

The interesting thing is that the X58 chipset, without the need for an integrated memory controller, is not as expensive to make as its predecessor.  In batch pricing the cost of an X58 chip is $52.  The X48 is $70.  In comparison, the mainstream, CrossFire-capable P45 chipset for today’s Core 2 lineup is $40.  

So now we have an affordable, performance-oriented chipset that is significantly cheaper that its predecessor, a completely new CPU core that starts under $300 in batches of 1000, so this should be a game changer, right?  

It’s not that black and white.  Intel’s venerable Core 2 lineup is still good.  VERY good in fact.  I’d argue that for most of the market, Core 2 is not only enough computing power, but more than some even need.  Heck, for gamers, we’re still GPU bound.  And Intel’s able to pump Core 2 chips out like crazy and at a healthy profit.  So why kill off a good thing?  If there were P and G variant 5x chipsets, allowing for motherboard manufacturers to make products for different price brands, OEMs would en masse run towards Core i7.  But as it stands all motherboards in the channel are full ATX, high-end parts that start around $249 and run north of $300!  And keep in mind you need to buy three sticks of DDR3 memory as well!  This puts it squarely in the 5% DIY and Enthusiast crowd.

Of course, Intel has plans to introduce lower cost chipsets and Core i7 variants that include integrated graphics and support for dual instead of triple channel memory.  But those are a ways off.  Intel, in the interim, plans on keeping Core 2 around for a while.  And for good reason.  It’s a great product, serves the mainstream market well, and allows them to amortize the cost of it for a bit longer.

So keep in mind that, while totally melt-your-face-off fast the Core i7 is, you can still find awesome deals on great Intel Core 2 hardware that will keep you and your wallet happy for quite a while.  (It sure is good to be a DIY guy right now, though.)

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I gotta tell you what, on the heels of AMD annoucing they’ve sold 2,000,000 Radeon HD 4800 series graphics cards, this video is not only hysterical, but indicates a more confident AMD/ATI - a company that is having a personality disorder right now with their lopsided strengths in the CPU/GPU market.

This video, however, makes digs at NVIDIA in ways that only geeks understand.  Hinting at manufacturing processes and defaults, memory speeds, etc.  The reference to the X58 is dubious as NVIDIA has said publicly that they will certify BIOSs for native X58 SLI support without requiring motherboard manufacturers to license MCP 200 chips - that’s only necessary if you want maximum bandwidth on multiple x16 slots.  But like I’ve said, the value of multiple graphics cards these days are dubious at best.

These “viral” videos are great fun to watch.  But it’s preaching to the choir.  It’s not going to prompt consumer behavior.  It’s not going to drive consumers to ditch NVIDIA and go ATI.  And if your branding campaign only creates awareness and doesn’t deliver to the bottom line, you win a big bag of fail.

A good example of similar marketing that is successful would be the Apple I’m a Mac commercials.  They aren’t successful because they are funny or witty.  They are successful because they communicate the simple premise that Macs are fun, easy, and reliable, and PCs are boring, bloated, and broken.  Of course, I would argue that most I’m a Mac commercials are down right lies at worst, and I chuckle every time I watch them on my ultra-reliable, uber-cool Vista Media Center PC with digital cable tuners.  But the point is that Apple has effectively convinced a large segment of the mainstream market the fundamental idea that Mac = good and PC = bad.  Republicans and Democrats do this all the time.

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But Apple is beginning to lose focus.  While the G4saurus video is cute and funny to people like me and most of you who read this blog, it’s really just AMD/ATI’s engineering group giving NVIDIA’s engineering group the metaphorical finger through their marketing department.  Apple has done basically the same thing with their latest I’m a Mac commercial - their marketing department is giving Microsoft’s marketing department the metaphorical finger after Microsoft’s relatively successful, relevant, and above all positive  response to the I’m a Mac commercials.  Of course you know I’m talking about the commercials where people from all walks of life state they are a PC and they are all different.  It’s simple, it’s relevant, and it’s positive.  It doesn’t stoop to Apple’s level and I think they’re quite enjoyable.  But it doesn’t prompt consumer action.  That’s where Mojave comes in.  Just check it out for yourself, I don’t need to expound upon it here.

My point is, while AMD has delivered the funniest viral video I’ve seen in this business, they need to come up with an effective campaign that not only creates awareness, but brings more customers to the table.  And that means they need a successful Phenom II launch, stay focused on the platform story, and continue to keep the channel happy.  Wait, where’d marketing fit into all that?  ;-)