Display illustration has been in vogue since the time human beings learned the art of communication dating back to the Egyptian age when people used papyrus, a kind of grass material that was used to write scripts in pictorial language before paper was invented, even before alphabets came into existence. As humans we often are more influenced by visual effect than any other form of illustration – the very reason television gain popularity rapidly over radio and DVD gave CDs a run for their money. With time the visual display technology has gone through an ocean change. During the time of our grandfathers a visual unit – generally the television – was no less than a heavy box of wood packed with all kinds of wires inside and a curved glass in front for the display and to dislodge it you would need no less than a team of two well-built hunks.
With time this has been replaces by the sleek LCDs, LEDs and so on and so forth, and day by day the tech world has been making it more and more compact, sleek and versatile to the extent that now we carry a television in our pocket, a statement at which people would have scoffed and packed you to the mental asylum about thirty-odd years back. So let’s have look at one of the pioneers in the world of visual graphic display and what is the next star to come out of their production line.
Nvidia the game changer
Nvidia Corporation (NVDA, Financial) is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California, with a legacy of creating ground-breaking graphic processing units since 1993. The company majors in creating marvels in the graphic hardware domain. It manufactures graphics processing units (GPUs), as well as system-on-a-chip units (SOCs) for the mobile computing market. The marvels from the Nvidia shop floor are GeForce, Shield Portable, Shield Tablet and Tegra Note 7.
In addition to GPU manufacturing, Nvidia also provides parallel processing capabilities to researchers and scientists that allow them to efficiently run high-performance applications. Nvidia has also set its strong foothold into the mobile computing market, by producing Tegra mobile processors for smartphones and tablets, as well as vehicle navigation and entertainment systems. In addition to Advanced Micro Devices, its competitors include Intel (INTC, Financial) and Qualcomm (QCOM, Financial). It has been reported that Nvidia is coming up with another new visual delight for the tech citizens of the world. Let us have a firsthand look into what is about to come out of the Pandora’s Box of Nvidia.
Nvidia’s new offering
In a recent event in California the visual graphic giant formally launched the GM204, the first full-bodied Maxwell chip. This chip will support both the Nvidia GTX 970 and GTX 980 which has already hit the shelves. This chip will enhance the performance of both GTX 970 and GTX 980 by boosting their efficiency-to-output ratio to a great extent. The GM204 is an utterly monstrous chip, comprising 5.2 billion transistors, 2048 CUDA cores spread across 16 streaming multiprocessors (SMs), 64 ROPs and 2MB of L2 cache. That’s not the most impressive thing, though: the GTX 980, powered by the GM204 chip, has a TDP of just 165W –Â down from 250W for the previous flagship, the GTX 780.
The Maxwell chip would outdo its closest competitor the Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s (AMD, Financial) R9 290X by around 10-20%, with just under half the TDP? To quote Joel Hruska, the famous hardware analyst, “This card has no flaws.”
The main difference between Kepler and Maxwell appears to be the new Maxwell Streaming Multiprocessor (SMM), which we first saw with the Maxwell-based GTX 750 Ti. Nvidia moved way ahead of its competitors by redesigning the SMM architecture, but it went ahead a few extra miles to bolster its new graphic monster to such a level that cannot be matched by its close peers in the near future. It has added such new features in the Maxwell core that the game developers are yet to develop in order to harness all its features in the gaming environment. Taking a look at these new features:
Dynamic Super Resolution renders games at 4K (3840×2160) on the GPU, and then the GPU filters and downsizes the output frames to your monitor’s resolution (1080p) rather than supersizing, where the game still renders at 1920×1080 resolution, and then the GPU upsizes, then filters back down. With Dynamic Super Resolution, the game actually thinks it’s being played on a 4K monitor. This will be rolled out via the GeForce Experience and then made available to the gaming world.
Global illumination (GI) –Â or its short falls –Â is one of the primary reasons why graphics either look surprisingly realistic or obviously computer-generated. Unfortunately, GI is computationally incredibly expensive –Â which is why it isn’t really used outside of pre-rendered computer graphics. Maxwell supports Voxel Global Illumination (VXGI), which is apparently a very efficient way of hardware accelerating GI. But it will still need to be deployed on a per-game basis.
Support for HDMI 2.0, 5K and 4K @ 60 fps. The GM204/GTX 980 is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.0, which means it can output 4K @ 60 fps. The GTX 980 powered by the GM204 will stack up the display to four 4K MST, twice as that of Keplar and maximizes the output resolution to 5120×3200 (5K), up from Kepler’s 4K.
Multi-frame sampled anti-aliasing (MFAA). This technique would capacitate displaying of image quality close to 8xAA, while consuming processing time equivalent to 4xAA. .
These were just a few of the prominent attributes of this new star Maxwell chip, but its quality pool does not end here. It will also support Direct3D 11.3, and D3D 12 –Â and some D3D 12 features are being back-ported to D3D 11.2 under Windows Threshold/9. There are some updates to Game Works, and some new memory compression techniques and cache enhancements that will boost performance considerably. They have also empowered the Maxwell GM204 with VR Direct, which reduces the all-important latency for VR headsets.
Nvidia’s prowess
With this new innovation Nvidia as a company has certainly steered miles ahead of its peers, and for Nvidia to maintain this lead in this tech market – where the shelf life of all components is shorter than we can imagine due to the rapid and never ending evolution process – it would need to continuously create marvels like this which it has already been doing since its inception in 1993. For now it is best to secure our positions in the company and reap the benefits once the new star starts shining all over the tech world.
