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


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


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


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)


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


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


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?


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?


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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?


Nvidia’s Application-specific AIB Configurations

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


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


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)


Windows Graphics FoundationLonghorn and Beyond

Src: Microsoft, WinHEC 2004

Jon Peddie Research

Backup Slides


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

Documents

Jon Peddie Research Professional Graphics CGW Webinar