Cg (cont’d)/Detonator 50

FiringSquad: So basically Cg isn’t going away exactly but it’s going to be less emphasized?

Kirk: Well there’s no need for us to focus on it on Windows and DirectX because we have such a good opportunity to work with Microsoft on it.

FiringSquad: I guess you didn’t see the rapid adoption of HLSL, when you came up with Cg?

Kirk: Well, going back as I said when we came up with Cg there was no HLSL. It’s not the rapid adoption, there wasn’t any. So once Microsoft and the rest of the industry have embraced high level shading languages there’s an opportunity for us to not be the sole developer on that technology. It’s much better for us to do it along with everyone else than to do it on our own.

FiringSquad: Could you give us some specific examples of the Detonator 50 drivers and where you guys think you can improve your performance and where you were inefficient before with Detonator 40 series and how you feel Detonator 50 is shaping up?

Kirk: I think that question is really hard to answer because what we’ve done with Detonator 50 is improve the quality of the instruction generation from the pixel shader (extrapolating pixel shader programs into hardware instruction set) and so the main place where I think you’ll see it is in applications that have shaders. Every shader will be optimized differently now than was before and will hopefully be optimized better. It’s not something you can say it’s going to help just here. Each instruction sequence in each shader is going to be progressively better with each optimizing compiler release.

I think the observation is when we first released GeForce FX we had not invested enough in the compilation and optimization technologies so we were not always generating very good programs for the hardware. Over time it will continue to improve as we go forward.

FiringSquad: Regarding Tomb Raider…is there anything in particular that you guys feel has been inaccurate in terms of the benchmarks that have been posted with Tomb Raider?

Kirk: Well I think the Tomb Raider as well as the Half-Life discussions; you see a lot of that on the web. And I think if I continue to comment on it, it just inflames it…the right way to look at all of these things is we really think benchmarks should be representative of gameplay and often in early release of benchmarks just like with early releases of drivers people are trying things out and I don’t really believe they end up being representative of actual game performance. So I think we need to give it a little time and you also need to just not think of a single benchmark, think of a collection of benchmarks as that being representative, because no one benchmark can really represent the hardware’s performance on all games.