【访谈】NV资深业务拓展经理Keita Iida

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http://pc.ign.com/articles/780/780314p1.html

Interview: NVIDIA's Keita Iida
The future of Direct X, Crysis and PS3 under the spotlight.
by Bennett Ring and Patch Kolan, IGN AU

Australia, April 12, 2007 - Keita Iida, Director of Content Management at NVIDIA sat down with IGN AU to discuss all things Direct X 10 and the evolution of their Geforce graphics cards. Iida goes into detail on the differences between developing for the PS3's RSX graphics processor, and the latest development tools to hit the scene. We also pressed him for comment on Ubisoft's jaggy-infested PC versions of Ghost Recon, Silent Hunter and others.

IGN AU: Can you tell us a little about what your team does, apart from crank out graphics cards?

Keita Iida: We have a team worldwide of about 150 people, doing everything from writing demos to show what's possible with next-generation graphics, to teams building tools and software development kits and things of that nature - not only for PCs, but also for cell phones and obviously PS3 as well. We also have a dedicated team who educate developers and work with them, making sure the game works well on PC; compatibility is always a big issue. We kind of have this broad array of functions; the primary thing being that, at the end of the day, when we develop a chip, we don't just figure out how many new transistors and what new features to put in. We want to make sure we build the right chip for the developers who want to utilise those features.

IGN AU: You mentioned that part of your work is tech demonstrations; 'Dawn' was the DX9 figurehead - who's the DX10 model?

Keita Iida: Well, Geforce FX was the first DX9 chip; that was Dawn, the fairy. We had the mermaid Nalu for Geforce 6; for Geforce 7, we had a Lucy Liu-looking girl in an armoured superhero suit. With Geforce 8 - which is DX10, we have Adrianne Curry, based on the reality-TV star.

IGN AU: These demos are all well and good, but games haven't come close to that - it's one character on screen with no AI, no backgrounds. Now, we've seen some cool DX10 demos, such as the Microsoft Flight Simulator X side-by-side comparison shots, but no one has seen that running yet. Running on today's hardware - an 8800 GTX - with all effects on, is that going to be a 'slideshow'?

Keita Iida: Yeah, I mean, you may have to make some compromises in terms of draw distances or certain effects. However, the one thing that can't be answered at this point is the extent that the rendering engine can be optimised as much as possible. But as you build the game, there's a lot of optimisation, both on the driver and application side. It's really hard to tell, at the end of the day, exactly what the performance level is going to be - which is why you never have a publisher or a developer call out the specs; especially in terms of minimum recommended specs, until they're printing the box.

Given that the DX10 version of Flight Simulator X patch is still a while away, we can't just come out and say the game is going to run at 30 frames per second at this resolution on a single-card 8800. Naturally, given that we have the only current hardware on the market, and they're using that as the reference hardware for DX10 development, it makes sense for both parties to make sure that people with 8800 GTXs will have a great experience.

Keita Iida, at this year's GO3 event in Perth, Western Australia.


IGN AU: Crysis is probably the other really big DX10 example. We've heard a few reports about the performance of that under DX10 and we have an expectation of how this game will look, based on all the screens that have come out. Can you comment on the performance of that? Will we get to see all of this eye candy running on today's hardware?

Keita Iida: We have nothing but pure confidence - especially with 8800-series cards - that with Crysis, you're going to have a tremendous experience. Again, since they're developing with 8800 as a reference, their target is going to be 30, if not 60, frames per second at relatively high resolutions. With DX10, given that it's a clean break from DX9, there are a lot of new art assets that need to be created; there are a lot of special effects that need to be written. Usually what they do is, when they take the DX9 engine and port it to DX10, they need the underlying renderer to support the DX10 features, and then they add the features on top of it - whether it's art or game-building.

What happens is, first, you need to get the game up and running; get the features implemented. Right now, Crytek, with Crysis, is in the process of adding new features and will soon be at the optimisation stage. That said, we would love to show you the game running on 8800 hardware, but we're bound by NDAs, and that's a decision bound by EA and Crytek; but we have every confidence that, by the time it's ready to be demonstrated to the public on DX10 with the 8800 or whatever advanced hardware is available at the time, it's going to run perfectly fine.

IGN AU: What are your thoughts on Microsoft effectively forcing gamers to upgrade to Vista in order to run Direct X 10 - when there's no real reason why it can't run on Windows XP?

Keita Iida: It's a business and marketing decision.

NVIDIA's demonstration model of Adrienne Curry, rendered in real-time.


IGN AU: You're pushing DX10 hardware and yet you're limited by the number of people who are running DX10 because of Microsoft's decision…

Keita Iida: Initially, to some degree, it's in our best interest as the only provider of that solution to have DX10 software as early as possible. And to that extent, maybe if they had made DX10 available on XP, this would've facilitated the development and adoption of DX10 features much faster. Also, the user base would've been higher because people with 8800s who have XP could already have DX10 available to them.

That said, the underlying kernel of the operating system and the code of Vista is a clean-break from XP - it really is. There's not as much legacy code as XP had from [Windows] 98 or 95. It slowed the progress of DX10 development and it slowed the user base, but in the long run, we feel it's not going to have any impact - in fact, it may be better. From a quality assurance standpoint, you have to account for so many variables, it makes sense to make a clean break from legacy hardware specs, and just package Direct3D and Direct X with Vista and just make a future-move that way.

IGN AU: Can you comment on what happened with NVIDIA's Vista drivers? You guys have had access to Vista for years to build drivers and at the launch of Vista there were no drivers. The ones that are out now are still basically crippled. Why did this happen?

Keita Iida: On a high level, we had to prioritise. In our case, we have DX9, DX10, multiple APIs, Vista and XP - the driver models are completely different, and the DX9 and 10 drivers are completely different. Then you have single- and multi-card SLI - there are many variables to consider. Given that we were so far ahead with DX10 hardware, we've had to make sure that the drivers, although not necessarily available to a wide degree, or not stable, were good enough from a development standpoint.

If you compare our situation to our competitor's, we have double the variables to consider when we write the drivers; they have much more time to optimise and make sure their drivers work well on their DX10 hardware when it comes out. We've had to balance our priorities between making sure we have proper DX10 feature-supported drivers to facilitate development of DX10 content, but also make sure that the end user will have a good experience on Vista. To some degree, I think that we may have underestimated how many resources were necessary to have a stable Vista driver off the bat. I can assure you and your readers that our first priority right now is not performance, not anything else; it's stability and all the features supported on Vista.

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IGN AU: So what kind of timeline are we looking at until the end user can be comfortable with Vista drivers? With DX9 drivers that work as stably and quickly as they do with XP?

Keita Iida: We're ramping up the frequency of our Vista driver releases. Users will probably understand that we release a number of beta drivers on our site, so we're making incremental progress. We believe that, in a very short time we will have addressed the vast majority, if not all of the issues. We've had teams who were working on other projects who have mobilised to make sure that as quickly as possible we have the drivers fixed. I'm not going to give you an exact timeframe, but it's going to be very soon. We're disappointed that we couldn't do it right off the bat, but we hear what everyone is saying and we're willing to fix it.

IGN AU: Moving onto PS3, there's a lot of talk about the difficulty of developing for the PS3. As with any console launch, but perhaps more so for the PS3, there's a lot of potential that hasn't been touched. However, Sony recently announced new tools to help developers, called 'Edge'. Were NVIDIA involved in the development of 'Edge' - the new software development tools for the PS3?

Keita Iida: We're kind of bound by the NDA, and in fact, developers who are part of the dev-net are privy to that information, but from our end we are cooperating very closely with Sony on many of the tools they are delivering to developers.

The PS3's RSX graphics processor was designed around NVIDIA's technology.


IGN AU: How much, percentage-wise, would you say the RSX (the PS3's graphics hardware) is being taken advantage of with these first generation titles? And what sort of potential does the hardware hold?

Keita Iida: There are substantial differences between the RSX and the standard PC-equivalent GPU, given the memory bus is different and how it communicates with the Cell-processor itself, as it's a completely different CPU. There's a lot that's had to be re-architected and rewritten, so from a developer's standpoint, the architecture of the RSX is well understood.

IGN AU: So Cell is the area they need to 'decode'?

Keita Iida: Well, you're right. Relative to RSX, the potential of Cell has not been maximised to the extent that RSX has. I think both of them have a lot of headroom left; you're going to see some spectacular things.

IGN AU: Do you think 1080p will become the norm, then, on PS3? Does RSX have the power to make this the standard resolution?

Keita Iida: Obviously it does - but it depends on the content.

IGN AU: Well, it can with tennis games with two characters - but more complex games with more effects on-screen are 720p.

Keita Iida: Right. Well, it's a trade-off. It depends on the game, how it was written, what hardware it's running on - in which case, the PS3 is locked hardware. It should run in 1080p, but it just depends on how much the developers have put into the game. Since we're not the ones creating the games, we can't guarantee that every game is going to run at 1080p, 60 frames per second. All we can do is work with Sony to continue to ensure that the developers begin to better understand our hardware, make it easier to develop for, extract better performance and make it as apparent to them as possible.

IGN AU: Because of the potential for unique configurations, a lot of the potential for PCs goes untapped, when compared with consoles. For high-end PC hardware, how much of that potential is not being used?

Keita Iida: It's certainly not being used completely. At GDC, we released a new suite of tools designed for DX10's next-gen features, specifically for the 8800 series. In terms of PCs and why they haven't been maximised, I think it's pretty simple. If you're a publisher and you want to make money, you have to account for the user base as a whole - not just the high-end gamer. A lot of times a developer, depending on what genre their game is, will target Geforce FX, or Geforce 6 or 7, and then they create their art assets and to the extent that they can, branch off and make the game scaleable. That's where we come in.

First of all, for higher-end games, we focus a lot on marketing and creating awareness. The second thing we do is that is, the investment to enhance your game is not trivial in terms of resources - which is why we create tools - to help facilitate their adoption as quickly as possible and as a low-cost proposition. Companies know that from a ROI (Return on Investment) standpoint, to target the 8800 consumer is - from a PR stand point, it's cool - but the majority of people don't have that hardware. We want reach them, and we think it makes sense for companies to do it if it's cheap enough and easy enough and they can do it quickly enough.



Easily one of the most visually impressive games ever, Crysis was designed to run on 8800-series graphics cards.


IGN AU: Ubisoft has been given NVIDIA tools with which to develop their games, and yet their last 3 big PC titles - Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Rainbow Six and Silent Hunter - have broken key features. None support anti-aliasing. Why, if they have these tools, is this happening? Why are they breaking your drivers? And how has NVIDIA reacted internally?

Keita Iida: Certainly, at a high level, we're very disappointed. We were disappointed that we were not able to engage to a level where that was not prevented, that we couldn't have done something about that. As we said before, one of the biggest impediments of PCs is the image of less compatibility compared with consoles, and certainly we make it our mission to address [this]. We try and touch on as many companies and titles as possible. Ubisoft, as one of the larger and more well-established companies - we should be doing a better job of that.

That said, if you look the hundreds of titles that come out for PC, we try to touch all of them - and for some reason some of them fall through the cracks.

IGN AU: Except that these are big titles. Based on the fact the same engine is behind GRAW 2 as it was for the original, there's a good chance that anti-aliasing won't run on that, too. Have these issues been recognised?

Keita Iida: Oh absolutely. Whether, it's a driver fix, or a game patch, we're working with them to address it. They are high-profile titles, and it would be ludicrous not to make sure that's addressed, and we'll do everything in our power to help them on that.

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