ATI全球开发者协作总监Neil Robison专访 2006年4月27日

Edison

Guru3D: As stated in the first question, the latest hottest title supporting the combo was Oblivion and there where some rumors that the "patch" was done in less than 12 hours. Why is it so simple to implement on the X1000 family of graphics cards ?

Neal:  That’s a great question.  I can tell you that the patch to the ATI Catalyst driver took a little more than 12 hours – but not much more.  Most of the time was spent in testing the solution – not in the implementation.  The secret lays in the simple fact that HDR + AA was designed into the ATI video cards from the very start.  It’s not some trick…it’s not some brilliant hack…it’s designed to be a part of a fantastic gaming experience.

Enabling HDR + AA in a game really is a simple process – but only if a developer has gone through the process of integrating HDR into their graphics pipeline.  I appreciate the game developers that have taken the time to bring these types of rich graphics features to their consumers.  That way, integrating HDR and AA is easy…and the pay-off for consumers is huge.

Guru3D: Can you name some new upcoming titles that will have support for this lovely eye-candy and thus do you plan to push game-developers to integrate support for high dynamic range lighting with AA enabled in the future?

Neal:  We definitely plan to continue to show game developers why this feature is important for consumers.  The awesome positive response to HDR + AA in Oblivion is a great tool to show how a little effort on the development side of things can pay off with fantastic results.  I’m not in a position to announce features of games that aren’t quite finished (publishers don’t like when I do that).  However, we are working with some high-profile developers on their next games.  In addition, we’re always looking for opportunities to release a minor patch to our driver, that will enable these features in some of the biggest games.

Guru3D: By the time this interview will be published we'll see Ageia PhysX cards in-stock in the stores. Physics acceleration could very well be the next big thing in the graphics card industry. Much again a product that will rely on heavy support from the gaming industry. We all noticed the press-releases from both NVIDIA and ATI. Do your think that Physics acceleration should be a part of the graphics processor, as a stand-alone solution, or even a process that should be running over the CPU. Can you tell us a little about that ATI is planning precisely when it comes to physics acceleration.

Neal:  I think better physics in games is one of the best advances, outside of graphics, that will be made in technology over the next two years.  Physics is a real interest for ATI.  It’s part of a larger story that is commonly known as GPGPU (General Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units). As GPUs have grown in raw processing power, they are capable of performing more than the specific graphics computations for which we designed them. They are now capable coprocessors, and their speed makes them useful for a variety of applications.  To give you an idea, the latest dual-core CPUs are able to handle around 10 GFLOPS.  Our latest GPUs, by comparison, can handle around 375 GLOPS.

That’s a huge difference.  We can use a portion of that raw processing power to handle tasks like physics in a game.  We talked about this back in September 2005, when we introduced the X1000 family of Radeon graphics cards to the press.  Personally, I think an interesting gaming rig would include a set of CrossFire ATI video cards – where one card handles graphics and the other can handle physics in a game.  When there are no physics to be calculated, you get the benefit of two powerful graphics cards that work with all games, all the time.

原文：http://www.guru3d.com/article/article/341/1/