|
Hello
Ben
Bar-Haim, and
thanks for letting us steal a few moments of your time
here. With the 3D Graphics market poised for yet
another flurry of new hardware technology and competitive
positioning, we thought it made sense to catch up with
ATi and
learn a little bit more about the Software side of your
game plan.
[Ben]
I?d like to start by thanking you for this great
opportunity. I am the Vice President of Software at ATI
Technologies and I am responsible for all the software
ATI produces for desktop PCs, notebooks and multimedia
products. This basically means that CATALYSTTM,
ATI's software suite, which is made up of our display
driver, our HydravisionTM
(multi-monitor software), Multimedia CenterTM
(our multimedia application) and Remote Wonder SoftwareTM,
Linux and Mac operating systems, all fall under my
jurisdiction.
[Ben]
Good question. We are always looking for new ways to
improve the performance, stability and features of our
drivers. In fact, we have a very talented team engaged
in making our performance better, and we definitely plan
to demonstrate better performance with each new release
of CATALYST. Believe me when I say this ? if there is
room for improvement, we will find it. We never hold
back.
-
The
quality of ATI's drivers has steadily improved over the
past year, and you've been releasing drivers more
frequently. What tools or techniques were used to
make these strides, and is there still room for
improvement? Or was it sheer engineering effort
and resources that helped bear these fruits?
[Ben]
Our entire approach to software development has changed
for the better over the last 18 months. First, we have a
process to control, plan, prioritize and implement new
features (software modifications). We also now have a
Unified Development Process that permits us to
seamlessly integrate software work done in various
places in the world, into one complete and fully-tested
release. Finally, we have invested heavily in setting up
and staffing an efficient, independent and competent
Software Quality Assurance organization. This has
already reduced the level of "escapes" (i.e., bugs
detected in the field) by about 50%. These new processes
permit our engineers to spend more time creating and
carefully testing new features and less time fixing
"escapes".
Is
there still room for improvement? Absolutely. We have
only begun. While we know that we already offer the most
stable 3D-enabled driver in the industry, we are
committed to leading the way and continuously improving
stability, performance and features.
-
Although many of the issues are already resolved, can
you give us your thoughts on some of the instability
issues seen with initial AGP8X implementations on
various motherboards, and your RADEON 9700/9500 product?
[Ben]
The initial boards released had been fully qualified and
tuned against Intel AGP 8X reference motherboards.
Later, when other chipset vendors and motherboard
manufacturers released their AGP 8X motherboards, there
were some hardware and software incompatibility problems
that affected a small number of the initial boards that
were sold. We subsequently worked with the chipset and
motherboard vendors and implemented changes on both
sides to address these issues. We continue to work with
these companies on co-validating new products as they
become available in order to prevent any future
compatibility issues customers might encounter.
[Ben]
ATI is committed to supporting the two industry standard
APIs: DirectX and OpenGL. ATI offers developers a
complete software developer kit (SDK) and a number of
revolutionary developer tools, including RenderMonkey,
an extensible shader development tool that allows
programmers and artists to collaborate on creating
real-time shader effects. ATI also hosts a number
of educational developer events and presents at industry
conferences such as GDC and Siggraph. All of ATI's
developer presentations, white papers, tools and samples
can be found at
http://www.ati.com/developer/
[Ben] We were very proud to be the first
to market with a fully compliant and certified DirectX9
driver for our entire RADEON family. We still haven?t
seen such a driver from any of our competitors ? which
of course, is a point of pride for us. Since we have
been working on it for well over a year we think our
current driver is complete with regards to DirectX9
features. The only planned new DX9 feature for the 9700
is line AA. We don't have this feature tied
to a specific release yet, but it will be in as soon as
we have the resource available to implement it.
At the
same time, we continue to work with customers and the
public at large via our CATALYST CREW program to find
ways to improve the software, including better exposure
of features and controls via our Control Panel. If any
of your readers would like to offer us some feed back,
please go to our Website
http://apps.ati.com/driverfeedback/.
[Ben]
Without surprises, what fun would there be in this
world? I can?t provide any details lest I be tarred and
feathered, but I can tell you this: more features is
definitely a high priority area for us. The user
experience is shaped, to a large extent, by how the
driver is controlled through our Control Panel. Since we
hope to achieve an excellent user experience, we must
pay close attention to the Control Panel. We have
recently noticed that some of the design principles in
our control panels are being adopted by competitors,
which is very flattering. We will continue to push the
limits in this area.
-
NVIDIA has always given the end user the ability to
overclock their cards, via registry setting tweaks,
which enable clock adjustments in the driver control
panels. Various end users have released hacks and
tweak programs that allow this for ATI cards as well.
Will we ever see this type of functionality with ATI
released drivers?
[Ben]
ATI does extensive testing to determine the appropriate
clock levels for our products, and the result is both
stable and supportable. Of course, once the product is
sold, it belongs to the user who may choose to
experiment with higher clock settings. While we caution
against any experimentation that could reduce a board?s
stability, many boards built by ATI partners include
overclocking utilities. It is up to our individual
partners to decide if they are interested in providing
overclocking utilities or not.
ATI
has already developed a closed source Linux driver for
the FIRE GLTM line. This driver is a
derivative of the Windows Fire GL Workstation driver and
is fully performance optimized for all OpenGL
applications. Though the driver is actually targeted to
all Linux based FIRE GL workstation customers, it is a
unified driver, which means it supports a broad range of
ATI desktop products. This driver is available at
www.ati.com
-
With
respect to the Professional CAD market, what sort of
optimizations is ATI bringing forth, in terms of driver
and software support, for the FIRE GL product line?
Drivers for the ATI FIRE GL Workstation
product line are extensively tested under all major CAD
ISV applications. The drivers are certified for all the
Tier 1 ISVs.
The
FIRE GL drivers are specifically optimized for
performance and stability with respect to:
1)
Major synthetic OpenGL
benchmarks for graphic system performance evaluation
like i.e. SPECviewperf 7.0 (see
http://www.specbench.org/gpc/
);
2)
Major application level
OpenGL performance evaluation benchmarks like SPECapc
(see
http://www.specbench.org/gpc/ ); and
3)
ISV specific certification
test suites.
The
special CAD-related optimizations are all done with
respect to optimized performance while working with the
real world applications, not just for synthetic
benchmark cases. With respect to CAD, this is for
example targeted to optimized display list memory
management as well as display list playback performance,
which is very important to some CAD application packages
like Unigraphics. There are also many tweaks for
optimized immediate mode vertex throughput as well as
vertex array processing. CAD applications like ProE take
great advantage of the immediate mode optimizations. In
Summary, most of the CAD-related optimizations are
targeted to high polygon count scenes, where the
bottleneck is more the geometry processing part of the
graphics pipeline (vrs the bottleneck in games, which is
more pixel fill rate related).
Thanks for your time
Ben! Best of luck to you in 2003!
Thanks Dave
and keep the feedback coming? open discussion about ideas
and issues make us better.
Cheers!
Discuss This Article In HotHardware's PC Hardware Forum,
Now!
| 
