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NVIDIA's Roy Taylor Interview
PC Interview by Rob Fahey
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Graphics chip maker NVIDIA is the closest thing the PC games market has to a platform holder. It may have its dalliances with consoles - it makes the RSX, the chip which powers the PS3's graphics, for example - but the beating heart of the company is the GeForce series of PC graphics cards, which have been the most popular cards among PC gamers for several years.
Never a company to shy away from controversy, in recent years NVIDIA has been outspoken on everything from PC game piracy to what it sees as the damaging behaviour of PC sellers who use integrated graphics chipsets in their machines. Recently, the firm's favourite target has been Intel - whose chips, it claims, aren't as important as graphics cards in terms of system performance.
We caught up with Roy Taylor - the firm's VP of Content Business Development, which basically means he's "head of videogames" - to find out what's in the future for NVIDIA, for the PC market in general, and why we should be holding off on that Quad-Core CPU purchase.
Eurogamer: A lot of the performance you've been getting out of the PC recently has been through multi-card, SLI solutions. Is that the future for graphics cards, or are there significant advances still to be made in single-chip technology?
Roy Taylor: At the same time, we're going to continue to develop SLI - and the reason for that is scalability. The problems which we're solving, in graphics, physics and AI, are all to do with scalability. As a result of that, it doesn't matter how powerful a high-end part we make - you're always going to get an even better experience if you have two of them, three of them and so on. So we're committed to both.
NVIDIA will always continue to develop high-end graphics cards - the 9800GX2, for instance, seen here - according to Taylor.
Eurogamer: Do you see SLI as being a "hardcore" option, or is it something that developers can reasonably create games for now?
Roy Taylor: So the first part of the answer is that it's been a very successful product in the enthusiast space. However, I think to answer the question more fully, as we see greater scalability through the increased use of physics and AI in games, the appeal of having two cards is going to broaden. Therefore, I think we'll see SLI breaking out of the enthusiast market, and becoming more mainstream in terms of its adoption.
Eurogamer: Do you see Intel essentially as a rival, given that most people have a set amount of money to spend on a PC - and they have to choose, primarily, how much of that goes on the CPU and how much on the GPU?
Roy Taylor: We do believe however that until now, too much emphasis and money has been spent on sequential or serial processing, and not enough on parallel processing. That's why we've been pushing the Optimised PC platform, which says that if you spend a little bit less on your serial processor, and a little bit more on your parallel processor, you'll have a more balanced PC.
We don't believe that we're in competition - in that we're not trying to get rid of the CPU. We do believe that there ought to be a better spread on the load inside the PC. So, do we consider them a competitor? Right now, no. Do we think that there's justification for a more balanced PC? Yes. That might change in the future, depending on if and when Larrabee [Intel's new GPU, due to appear by the end of this year] ever turns up, but right now, they're not strictly speaking a competitor.
Taylor says Intel isn't seen as a competitor, but that NVIDIA doesn't see a future of multi-core CPUs.
Eurogamer: Intel must see you as a threat of some description. You're essentially saying that you'd like to stop the push into quad- or eight-core processors, and demote their role to a single, sequential unit doing housekeeping. It's hardly a bright future for them, is it?
Roy Taylor: Well, I think that if you look at the facts, the facts are that for just about anything you want to do in a PC today, a parallel processor adds more value than the serial processor. Whether it's gaming, video encode or decode, or any kind of multimedia task - our parallel processor adds more value as you increase the number of processors than you get on a serial processor. We didn't invent that situation - that situation is just where it's at today.
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seasidebaz
10/06/08 @ 10:43
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So... my Core2Duo isn't a parallel processor?
Seems to me I can do 2 things at once on it... And how would an nVidia GPU speed up a multithreaded database application? |
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@seasidebaz - no it's not. You are multi-processing, not parallel-processing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_... You can do two things at once on it because you have two cores, each doing one thing. But they are not parallel processing - they are multitasking. You need specially written code to parallel process. @xXxSTARSxXx - all PC games are shit other than Diablo 2? |
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"I'm sorry but you need a good CPU to get the best from your GPU and vice versa, an 8800GT on P4 is just a waste of money.
Graphics cards alone do not a pc make....." EXACTLY !!! Taylor is right but all his answers were pro GPU - OS's like MS' aren't centred around the GPUs parallel processing abilities but around the serial and sequential abilities (multi-task) of your CPU. The gcard will always be a cpu's bitch for a long time to come. He makes some good points but people should strike a balance on their investments with medium market components and OC ! SIMPLE !!! EVGA Forums FTW ... its becoming very simple these days tbh I work as .Net Deployment Engineer, a gpu is not going to help me crunch numbers like a cpu would but i don;t think that situation is going to change so long as the helm is upheld by intel for a long time to come.
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most recently on 10/06/08 @ 12:11
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Nice interview.
The comment about there being 180 million Geforce users was a bit cheeky though. Especially since anything older than a 6800 is not going to be able to play the latest games and, arguably, you really need a 8800 card (and a decent base PC) to match what the 360 and PS3 are putting out. That said, I do agree that PC gaming has a good future ahead of it as long as publishers and developers continue to treat it as an equal with the consoles. The biggest threat is this tendency to launch a game with the console versions and follow up with the PC later. In that sense, Bioshock got it right; Halo 2 is a very obvious example of getting it very, very wrong. And I think I'm right in saying that the sales of those two games reflected that. |
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Gears of War superior on PC ? I dont think so. That game stuttered like crazy on even the highest-end rigs, the experience was awful, and still theres no patch to sort it out. It wouldnt surprise me that a reason people pirate PC games is to avoid being bit on the arse when games like that come out with the headaches they cause. No one likes spending money on a PC game most stores wont accept back if it doesnt work properly. As much as i like Epic, that game left a real bad taste in my mouth (on the 360 it was awesome however).
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most recently on 10/06/08 @ 12:15
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I personally believe PC piracy is nothing to worry about on the PC platform for developers.
Just let developers make crysis for the 360, make their money of the fan boys ... then release a better version orientated, aimed, optimized for PCs such as GoW / Cod4 /Ass' Creed / GTA 4 / Mass Effect and etc. Some haven't been released but you should get what i mean. If Gow and Cred are anything to go by, am happy to wait after the console releases for a better version of the game with added content for a lower price tag. What's to complain with that formula so far? DUDE - i played and finished GoW on the PC and am half way threw the co-op campaign. What r u on abt? If you were to tell me crysis runs like a dream on your said machine then am sorry but your talking s*it. I second chalees comment. \o/
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most recently on 10/06/08 @ 12:20
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seasidebaz
10/06/08 @ 11:16
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@systems:
I mean from the perspective of development, if I run two seperate commands on different cores, utilising different threads, is that not parallel processing? It seems that what he was saying was that no matter how many cores your machine has, it only ever executes things one after the other. Unless you have an nVidia card. I could show him a bit of code that proves otherwise, would take about 10 minutes to write. |
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I'm glad I own a 360, a PS3 and a good Quad-core 8800GT PC, I can pick and choose the best version of every game. Being a PC-only gamer would kill me, having to wait for the PC version or not getting games outright.
That said I have to say, when you own a 360 there is very little reason for a high end PC, especially if you're on a budget. No hassle, you get most of the games even earlier. The only game I'd really have missed without this PC is Crysis, and while it is extremely good, it's not exactly worth 600 euros alone to play. |
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Crysis runs smoothly on my rig. GoW stutters throughout the game. Just search for "gears of war stutter" on google and you will see how bad it is. My rig -
AMD X2 6000+ 4GB DDR2 Memory GeForce 8800GT 512MB Vista Home Premium I run the game with everything on highest, in DX9. The game runs at 60+ FPS, but the stutters ruin it. Im not a PC fuckwit, i keep this system clean as a whistle and updated. I dont overclock, i dont fiddle with nvidia settings, everything at stock. Other games using the UE3 engine run absolutely fine (Even UT3, infact thats a damn well optimized game) but GoW has problems. |
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seasidebaz
10/06/08 @ 11:28
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"I run the game with everything on highest, in DX9"
I thought that running DX9 on vista used a compatibility layer, and so everything ran better in DX10? Might be wrong though... |
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Agreed, Gears is a very buggy piece of software that has a number of different problems (apart from the problem of being MS' flagship GFW title).
Your issue however is a bug rather than a performance problem, there's no doubt if the bugs were fixed it would be a far superior experince to the 360 version. |
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BadBoyBonner
10/06/08 @ 11:30
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Ogs
Gears of War Stuttering Fix - Worked For Me C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\My Documents\My Games\Gears of War for Windows\WarGame\Config\WarEngineUserSettings.ini Change: OnlyStreamInTextures=FALSE into OnlyStreamInTextures=TRUE http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=13... |
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kingdumpalot
10/06/08 @ 11:33
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I totally agree that having a fast graphics card is more important than having a fast processor.
That's been the case for a while with regards to games, but this is going to become doubly important when we start seeing CUDA enabled applications, which use all that graphics ability for number crunching in everyday programs. Then the graphics card will not just be about games, as it traditionally has been. I've always thought the the graphics hardware is completely wasted for 95% of the time, I'm glad they're making moves to harness it. Is it too much to ask for microsoft to have Windows 7 using the graphics card, as well as the CPU for it's work? One thing that does puzzle me is the timeframe we're looking at for these things. It's been said the new photoshop will use the GPU this winter, but I've heard literally nothing else using CUDA or the ATI equivalent. Not even open source stuff, which I'd have thought would be the first people to take advantage of it! |
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Trust me when i say ive tried every stutter "fix" out there, none have worked (1 of them just made the game look absolutely terrible, and it still stuttered). I was following it 2 months after release and nothing came around to sorting it. Not even Epic would say anything on the matter. Ive just given up, its just far too much to expect out of a customer.
@ skillian - Your right, and thats why it pisses me off so much. GoW on the PC would absolutely cripple the 360 version imo, more content, better graphics, better controls (imo), but the stutter kills it.
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"We estimate that we have over 180 million active GeForce users. That's a much bigger installed base than PS3 or Xbox 360!"
Ok, so now subtract the number that are being used as work PC's, and then the number of normal home PC's with a standard midrange GFX card, and let's see what we have left. And from those leftovers lets see how many have SLI 8800's or 9800's. I bet there are more people with launch day PS3's than those running high end SLI rigs! People in my line of work are predicting the death of GFX cards in a few years anyway. When the CPU has enough cores, expect the GFX chip to move back to the northbridge (as it was before the voodoo cards) and just do basic screen drawing operations. All the processing will be done on the CPU with shared memory for lightning fast read/write access from all processes. AMD/ATI also hinted at this at Develop conference last year too. |
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seasidebaz
10/06/08 @ 12:14
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@BobsUncle:
A dedicated graphics chip will ALWAYS outperform a multipurpose CPU for graphics tasks. But the shared memory thing will probably be correct. Plus, don't forget that if they started doing it that way, they will have just made nearly every PC in existence obsolete. |
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When Intel or AMD change their pin layout they've also made just about every PC obsolete too.
[edit] I'm talking about CPU's with hundreds or thousands or cores anyway, not just some 16 core job coming out next year. And if the CPU includes optimisations for certain GFX operations performance could be equal. AMD predicted core speeds to stay around 3-4GHZ, but the number or cores to rise rapidly.
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most recently on 10/06/08 @ 13:22
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thesombrerokid
10/06/08 @ 12:35
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each of the three graphics chip makers are pushing the market in different directions, i'd be careful about taking ones approach as the defacto future of graphics architecture
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"the numbering is meaningless" and has been since the GF4. Nividia will fix that when pigs learn to fly. It makes them more money not to fix it plus they started it, their fault and no reason to continue at all. So yes they can fix it - I doubt they will actually.
hmm multicore cpu is a parallel processor but not as massively parallel as a modern GPU but he's still doing the marketing speak, not much in it and a CPU processor unit is much more general so can actually do more than a GPU processor unit. He also feebly ignores the question how far back are they counting geforce processors as to we are the biggest graphics manufacturer in the world situation as in some ways the older intel integrated graphics can cope better than the gf 2 or 3 now esp with Nvidia's buggy and rubbish driver support (can we get a driver that doesn't bork the 7950 GX2 please? oh no we can't as nvidia want you to buy a new card - nice). That wasn't news and that bloke is worse than a politician for spouting crap and dodging the real questions. |
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I don't buy into this whole "PC version of a game is better than the console" thing because it very much depends on whether you have a high-end machine or not.
In my experience, some PC games require a lot more than the equivalent console spec to get it running at the same performace level as the console version because the code isn't as highly optimised. How can it be when there are several trillion variations of PC hardware compared with the fixed systems consoles use? Of course, if I spent £2,000 on a PC I'd quite rightly expect the games to look and run better than on my Xbox 360 or PS3. In terms of performance per pound though, I'm not sure PCs quite deliver on the games front especially as you find yourself having to upgrade graphics cards, CPUs and/or HDDs several times over the same lifespan a console has. Yeah, PC games are cheaper which offsets the hardware costs somewhat but that doesn't quite make up for the extra hassle you get from trying to get those games to work properly or the fact that you still might not have the hardware to see the game running at its best, as is the case with Crysis. All those things put me off gaming on the PC and as such I can see why people think that market is dying. It certainly is for me. |
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You don't even need to spend 700 quid though. You can get a Crysis capable machine for 500 quid.
I also wish people wouldn't make such extravagant claims as "pc games are all shit" - I mean, pc games are console games, 75% of the time! They are just different versions of it! For all the people saying "I have a 360 so can't justify the extra expense of a gaming pc" there are people like me who say "I have a gaming pc so can't justify the expense of a 360". |
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"the numbering is meaningless" and has been since the GF4.
It's not meaningless - the first number tells you what series the card is (7 series, 8 series etc.), and the second number tells you how powerful the card is within that series (7800 is better than a 7500, and a 7900 is better than both). That system does make it hard to compare cards from different series, and the GT/GTX/GS thing is confusing too, but there is some method to the madness. |
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@ Ahab: Lol @ 20000 pieces of rubble being a great ROI, this is about the most cliched PC-geek argument I've ever heard...I never thought anyone would actually say something this retarded.
May be taken at face value, but when you look at something like the environment & damage modelling in GRID, then think about what GRID2 will be able to do with next gen cards... & btw, I have a now decidedly lowly X1900XT & it plays with high settgins at a higher res than a 360... |
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seasidebaz
10/06/08 @ 14:13
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Also: you don't need a multicore CPU for Crysis, as it's a single-threaded game. Dual/Quad core makes no difference to the game whatsoever.
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One of the truly great things about consoles is that you can play any of its games without worrying about whether it'll actually run properly or whether you'll have to lower the detail settings and resolution to get a playable framerate. That's a huge plus for the consoles and a negative as far as the PC is concerned as it makes buying new games a hit and miss affair if there's no demo to try. And if you do like a game but it runs like shit on your setup then it's a pain to have to consider buying an upgrade just for the sake of that game. For the average person, I'd say gaming on a PC is just too much hassle for them compared with consoles. It also explains why games like The Sims and World of Warcraft are hugely popular because they don't require the latest hardware to run them.
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AlphaOmega
10/06/08 @ 14:32
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Don't know about limey pricing but you can put together a decent gaming PC from scratch with monitor for under 1000 USD that will run circles around any console. It's true it takes a little effort to spec out, buy, and assemble the machine, but you certainly don't need a PhD. I hope this dispels any myth that consoles are for stupid, poor, lazy people, even though the kinds of games that tend to ship for them would also tend to support that.
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thesombrerokid
10/06/08 @ 14:36
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i got a pc for £380 a month after crysis came out for £380 it could run it with everything on high at 1920x1200 at 30fps, granted i didn't buy a psu case keyboard and mouse or monitor with that but you don't get a monitor with a console and you can get the other components for under £50 between them PC's are not more expensive than consoles in anyway, they are a lot cheaper, a monitor is easy half the price of an equivelant pc too
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rhubarbandcustard
10/06/08 @ 14:37
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Assuming you have or are buying a PC, who realistically can afford to run a gaming PC in this day and age?
Electricity prices are expected to rise a further 40% this year alone. Prediction: Double SLi owners will be among the first demographic to face default on their mortgage payments. Triple Sli owners will simply be burned at the stake by the eco crowd. PC gaming is dead. There I said it. |
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rhubarbandcustard
10/06/08 @ 14:43
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I earn over the average national wage and freely admit that I can't afford to game on the PC.
If I can't, that means the number of people who can must be pretty damn small. So small that PC gaming is dead. There, I've said it again. |
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But, but, but - Crysis, Bioshock etc. - all sold over a million! Is that not a lot anymore?
I earn 400 quid a month fannying around whilst being a student, but I still have a top pc. You know, they're only as expensive as buying a ps3 and a 360. The games cost half as much as well, so past the initial investment, its no more expensive and arguably cheaper to run a gaming pc. |
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"Gave up PC gaming many years ago after I was done playing Diablo 2, have not missed PC gaming at all. Will buy a new PC when Diablo 3 comes out.
Only game on PC I care about, the rest are shit." Yes that is obviously the case, they're all shit. Oh no, sorry that's YOUR OPINION not an actual fact. |
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