Jon Peddie Research Professional Graphics CGW Webinar

Jon Peddie Research

Professional GraphicsCGW Webinar

Jon Peddie ResearchJon Peddie Research

Evolution of Professional GraphicsYesterday’s Landscape

Pro graphics distinguished from consumer/corporate graphics by most every metric– Vendor, chips, boards, bus, memory, video I/O, OS,

middleware/APIs, usage, performance, price

Excusive domain of Traditional Proprietary Workstation (TPW) vendors– Sgi, Sun, HP, DEC and IBM drove the innovation

– Proprietary UNIX/VMS were the only OSes

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Evolution of Professional GraphicsToday’s Landscape

Hardware migration from “in-house” to IHV– IHVs are vertical: chips and AIBs– TPW vendors no longer build graphics chips

• Enable IHV hardware with drivers for proprietary Unix • A few unique high-end board configurations

Gaming is driving innovation– E.g. programmable shaders, floating-point precision– Even $1K+ multi-board monsters: Alienware and Nvidia’s

SLI Much harder to distinguish from consumer AIBs

– Cost premium has dropped considerably

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Graphics Hardware DifferentiationProfessional vs. Consumer

Brand Reliability

– ISV certification

Customer support Breadth of driver support

– OpenGL ICDs

– 64-bit Linux and Windows drivers

Performance and price can be a low priority– Legacy requirements can sustain lagging hardware

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Graphics Hardware DifferentiationProfessional vs. Consumer

Remaining GPU differences artificial and/or minor– (Virtually) no difference in “raw” die– Nvidia and ATI lead with same GPU/VPUs from consumer line

• relatively minor driver, package and or board-exposed features

Board-level differences significant at high-end only– Value varies by application– Physical memory

• DCC and vis-sim have never-ending appetite for textures

– Display support optimized for pro applications• Framelock, genlock, interface type (e.g. SDI)• Number and datarate of video interfaces• Ultra-high resolution (e.g. dual dual-link for up to 9 Mpixel displays)

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2003 Professional Graphics Hardware Market

Nearly 2.1 million professional graphics AIBs sold

Almost $1B in revenue Legacy “in-house” graphics from TPW vendors

small but significant– Only 5% of units shipped, but 16% of revenue

– Incremental opportunity for IHVs

Units are in the low-end, but revenue is in the mid-range

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JPR Pro Graphics AIB Classes

 ClassASP Range

min max

2D $400

Entry-3D $350

Mid-range $350 $950

High-end $950 $1,500

Ultra High-end $1,500

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Vendor Profile 5% (units) and 11% (revenue) share in 2003

– but 26% and 44% unit share in high and ultra-high Pro Gfx flagship: Realizm What sets Realizm apart

– Exclusive focus on professional apps– Chip-level scalability– 16-bit FP format in frame buffer– Virtual, paged video memory

Where 3DLabs is going– Fighting hard to keep high-end dominance

• Largest physical memory, Multi-chip AIBs, Genlock / framelock– Realizm trickle-down to mid-range and low-end?

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Vendor Profile 17% (units) and 15% (revenue) share in 2003

– Unbranded presence in “2D” applications

Pro graphics flagship: Fire GL 7100 What sets Fire GL apart

– A strong mid-range focus (31%)– Subjective edge in quality and quality/performance– Perf/W has won mobile and embedded sockets

• ATI dominant in mobile workstations (67%)

Where ATI is going– Best positioned to ride growth in mobile workstation– Can it (should it) ignore high end of market?

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Vendor Profile JPR estimates* 9% (units) and 11% (revenue) share in 2003

– But ~17% in “2D” segment

Slanted heavily toward direct sales Not directly targeting “power renderers”

– Appeal on basis of image quality and specific, niche features

Where is Matrox going?– Road ahead looks difficult in keeping pace on GPUs

• Last major introduction, Parhelia, was out in May 2002• Move to programmable shaders and floating-point requires overhaul

– Some key competitive advantages going away• More “2D” competition from Nvidia, ATI and maybe soon IGPs• Fewer areas of differentiation, e.g. super-high res (9 Mpixel)

– OEM presence declining– Continued focus on custom-fit solutions for large customers

* Matrox is private and does not disclose financials

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Vendor Profile 67% (units) and 47% (revenue) share in 2003 Pro gfx flagship: Quadro FX 4000 (NV40 GPU) What sets Nvidia apart

– Breadth of offerings, entry to ultra-high end– Shader Model 3.0 vs. 2.0– SLI: Board level scalablity– Custom offerings for DCC, vis-sim

Where Nvidia is going– Trying to take share in existing segments

• From 3Dlabs in the high/ultra-high end– Think margin, not units– Sales synergy

• From ATI in the mobile space (MXM and Axiom)

– Getting GPUs into new segments, like render farms

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Pro Graphics Technology Trends Final stage of migration to fully programmable architecture

– Richer, “cleaner” programming: large code, predication, branching– Changing how graphics hardware vendors will compete

Leveraging parallelism– Today’s flagship GPUs: 6 vertex and 16 pixel pipelines (ATI/Nvidia)– Chip-level (3DLabs) and Board-level (Nvidia) scalability

Continuing to “annex” upstream processing– Physics, kinematics, simulation, animation, tessellation

Vehicle for general purpose computing (GPGPU), – Why Intel’s biggest threat may someday be not AMD but Nvidia

Floating-point precision GDDR3 memory

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PCI Express for Graphics Serial, point-to-point, packets

– More a network interconnect than a traditional I/O bus

Variable number of “lanes”– Graphics design center: 16-lane

More bandwidth, but remember:– Directionally constrained: 4GB/s up,

4GB/s down– In-band command, control and

packet overhead reduces bw Just in time to carry the load

– Most apps on most hardware today not constrained by AGP 8X

– Some may be … it all depends• HD video editing• Hybrid CPU/GPU render for DCC

Src: PCI-SIG

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PCI Express Graphics AIBs Form factor derived from PCI Power budgets

– 10W: ×1 cards (<= 6.6” length)– 25W: ×1 cards (> 7.0” length), ×4 cards, ×8 cards, ×16 low-profile graphics

and ×16 server I/O– 75W: full-height graphics cards– High-end Graphics Spec will allow auxiliary power for up to 150W

Src: PCI-SIG

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PCI Express Connectors “Up-plugging” allowed OEMs encouraged to

support wider connectors– Link width not determined by

connector or interface, negotiated at config time

– More end-user flexibility

– Allows dual high-bw (≥ AGP 8X) graphics AIBs Src: PCI-SIG

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GPU Interfaces to PCI ExpressTo bridge or not to bridge

Initial plans spurred some mud-slinging– ATI planned all native PCIe interfaces– Nvidia indicated plans to bridge with on-board HSI (“AGP 16X”)– 3DLabs’ Realizm depends on configuration

In the end, it will most likely be a non-issue– Speedup of full-speed PCIe interface is exception and debatable– ATI will likely bridge back to AGP– HSI does not preclude native PCIe – NV45 is out already– 3DLabs likely to fill in low-end PCIe offerings, too

Dell should ship Nvidia and ATI PCIe AIBs July, 3DLabs later this quarter

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Pro Graphics Market Trend Forecast Strong growth in Mobile Workstations Final phase in transition to all-IHV graphics AIBs configured for specific applications

– Genlock and SDI for DCC studio apps

– Framelock for vis-sim and wall-display applications

IGPs for pro graphics? Never say never.– What about Grantsdale for “2D workstation” apps?

– Why Nvidia/ATI/3DLabs’s biggest competitor may someday be Intel

GPUs to final frame rendering?

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Nvidia’s Application-specific AIB Configurations

Nvidia Quadro FX 3000G I/O Nvidia Quadro FX 4000 SDI I/O

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GPUs in the Render Farm? Graphics hardware is absent in the render farm ISVs/IHVs looking to final-frame speedup as well

– Enablers• Primary: advent of programmable hardware shaders with compilers• Secondary: FP color precision, more flexible programming (larger

code, predication, branching)– Nvidia Gelato, Mental Images’ Mental Ray 3.3

Vendors would welcome 10K’s of incremental professional GPUs

Not a slam-dunk– Global illumination, raycasting techniques (e.g raytracing

and volume rendering) don’t map very well (at least not yet) to GPUs

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Technology ForecastImpact of Longhorn

Image quality– Gamma, sRGB, 32-bit FP, Text enhancements

Virtualization to support Avalon, “Presentation Manager”– Virtual memory, mostly under OS/driver interaction– GPU: “Hyper Threading”-like context management

Pixel rates will be especially stressed– Lots of temporary textures, surfaces to be warped, composited, blended

Dual, cascaded vertex shaders Moving to (optional) programmable hardware tessellation Security & stability

– simpler drivers, hang prevention OpenGL ICDs should be upgraded for Longhorn (but not

required)

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Windows Graphics FoundationLonghorn and Beyond

Src: Microsoft, WinHEC 2004

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Backup Slides

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Hardware Differentiation vs. Consumer Disappearing

Historical Differentiator Future differentiator?

OpenGL vs. DirectX Minor, esp. with OGL2

Anti-aliased points / lines No. Can be rendered with shaded polygons; even enhanced (e.g. miter)

Rendering performance Very little… performance driven by games

Color fidelity Very little … internal FP32, stored as FP16 (display?); attention to sRGB and gamma becoming pervasive

Antialiasing Very little, ># samples at high end

(highest end is software)

Display resolution Yes, at the high end with 9 MPix

2nd order rendering features:

e.g. two-sided lighting, user clip planes

Very little … implemented with shader

Multi-display Little … even IGP’s going dual-display

Genlock, Framelock Yes, at high end

Multi-chip implementations Yes, at high end

Overlay planes Yes, but trivial to implement

Stereo Yes, but relatively easy to implement