NVIDIA - The Power of 3

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian

Aug. 9, 2005

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NVIDIA - The Power of 3

The above banner is a static frame taken from an animated Flash banner being displayed on NVIDIA's website. You can see the banner while it lasts on NVIDIA's home page. The banner's full message is "You don't buy vinyl records. You don't use a typewriter. You don't use dial-up. So don't buy old graphics for your PC. On August 11th, NVIDIA delivers The Power Of 3" and it is causing quite a bit of speculation as to the meaning behind it. What exactly is "The Power of 3?' A quick search on Google for "NVIDIA the power of 3" brings up results on several popular forums discussing possible interpretations.

Some think that this means NVIDIA will choose to unveil two new cards on August 11th - the 7800 GT and the 7800 Ultra. It could also mean that the full range of 7-series cards will be unveiled: the 7200s, 7600s, and the rest of the 7800 line. Perhaps this wouldn't be the best decision since ATI is lagging behind and all of NVIDIA's cards would be on the table; or it could be a good thing as they'd be totally dominating the market and ATI would be left an entire generation behind. Of course, none of this speculation is based on any hard facts, and to date there has been no word about any 7200 or 7600 cards or their equivalents - and yes, I've asked. There is also the possibility that we could see three video cards in SLI - I don't think this is likely, and I don't think it would make a lot of sense, but it's still possible. Still, we're left with the possibility that a 7800 GT or Ultra version could be released - and while we'd all love to see the Ultra, all the rumors seem to point in the direct of the GT.

We poked around and asked questions, and have gotten some answers. From what we have been told, "The Power of 3' supposedly stands for: SM (Shader Model) 3.0, HDR (High Dynamic Range lighting), and SLI (Scalable Link Interface). The reason why NVIDIA is touting these three product features as The Power of 3 is (once again, supposedly) because these are three features that the competition, ATI, doesn't have and by NVIDIA's standards, any card without these features is old and obsolete.

There is a lot of controversy regarding SM 3.0, and I'm not going to argue that SM3.0 is necessarily enough on its own to warrant buying one card over another. What I will say, however, is that SM3.0 is a better platform for developers and some of the more recent games such as Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory take advantage of it, and it will be used more and more in future games. Rumor also has it that ATI's next-gen cards (R520) will support SM 3.0, so it's not so much an issue of whether or not SM3.0 is good, it's just that ATI chose not to support it with the current generation.

If you have seen Far Cry, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, or Valve's Lost Coast demos, you know that HDR can help to make a 3D environment more immersive and life-like. However, HDR isn't exactly an NVIDIA-only feature. In fact, just last week a patch was released for Chaos Theory (1.04) which enables support for SM2.0, consequentially enabling support for HDR as well.

HDR can be rendered on ATI cards, but is limited in its abilities and performance. In order for a graphics card to process HDR efficiently, the GPU must support FP (floating point) 16 filtering and blending. It is also worth noting that SM3.0 requires an FP16 buffer. While both GeForce 6 and 7 series cards support FP16, ATI's most recent cards do not and don't support FP blending. HDR can be rendered in a number of ways, but so far, the most popular is the OpenEXR format which requires FP16 and SM3.0. OpenEXR could be modified to work on ATI hardware, but would either reduce the precision, or run in multiple passes causing a drop in performance. In addition, HDR produces a color range beyond what current monitors can display. Tone mapping, a feature specific to SM3.0, modifies that color range to fit within what current LCDs and CRTs can display. While ATI's cards can render HDR, NVIDIA has the upper hand for now.

The last of the three is SLI - this is a big one for NVIDIA as they are currently the only option for those seeking a multi-GPU solution. Although SLI has been a huge hit, ATI will counter with its own multi-GPU solution named CrossFire, supposedly due out in September. Word has it that CrossFire will be a worthy competitor to SLI, but like ATI's future SM3.0 support, it is planned but currently non-existant in the eyes of the consumer. Only time will tell how that pans out.

In the end, we think that The Power of 3 is just a clever marketing campaign to build hype and cause speculation. If this is the case, it has certainly worked. Of course, we would absolutely love to be wrong in this case, as we'd have a lot to talk about in a couple of days if they release multiple video cards or if we actually see a system running with a triple-SLI configuration. To find out for sure what The Power of 3 really means, we will have to wait to see what happens on Thursday, August 11.

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7 User Comments

1 - Posted by Guest on August 11, 2005 - 12:51 am

On correction, tone mapping is not SM3.0 specific.

Tone mapping is making an image with a bunch of different brightnesses viewale similar to the way the human eye works vs. a camera.

Quick example: imagine looking at the sun and holding a single piece of notebook paper up in front of it to block it out from view. Also in the centre of the piece of paper you glued a white piece of card board.

If you take a picture with a camera you will end up selecting one brightness level. If you choose the paper then the white cardboard in the centre will look very dark while the super bright sky will look all white and washed out.

However when you look at this in real life you can see all three different brightness levels no problem because your brain can do tonemapping, even though an old mechanical camera can't.

Tone mapping simulates your brain by analyzing a high dynamic range image such as I just described and for each region/pixel chooses an appropriate brightness level and covnerts it to a low range image displayable by a monitor.

You can witness your own human body do 'tone mapping' if you ever walk into a dark room from being outside on a bright day.

Without tonemapping HDR is impossible. It is very much do-able on current Radeons, as we've seen demonstrated by a handful of current games.

2 - Posted by blackjet on August 29, 2005 - 4:49 am

so what was the power of 3 in the end?

3 - Posted by Kurtis on August 29, 2005 - 12:22 pm

precisely what i predicted.

check out the "nvidia's booth" section towards the bottom in the quakecon day 1 article where we confirmed what i said in The Power of 3 article.

4 - Posted by blackjet on August 30, 2005 - 4:25 am

....who’s a clever boy then?

5 - Posted by Brian on August 30, 2005 - 1:06 pm

lol! Predicted... You mean what someone told you? :-P

6 - Posted by Kurtis on August 30, 2005 - 1:32 pm

lol. yeah, a marketing guy with an NVIDIA partner told me when I asked him, but he could have been lying :-P my prediction was basically that there wasn't any 'secret' thing they were keeping from me, that it was nothing more than a marketing campaign for the sake of creating hype

7 - Posted by CTM420 on August 30, 2005 - 6:50 pm

Honestly, with jaded consumers these days, any casual observer could have seen through the marketing to the ultimate goal, hype, which any technology advertising campaign employs to get people to satiating over the nrxt waste of money.

But cool coverage of the QuakeCon though.

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