The upcoming chip is expected to set a new milestone in programmability -- the capacity of a chip to run programs that can bring the realism of real-time-rendered 3D graphics closer to that found in movie special effects. Nvidia was the first to market with a mainstream programmable GPU last year, in the form of the GeForce3, and the next generation will continue the trend, Nvidia said. However, programmability greatly increases the complexity of the tasks a GPU must carry out. "In this generation the frequency is really important. These are real processors now, running programs on them," Vivoli said. "Before they were doing graphics calls, and now they're doing loops and branches and all kinds of things. They need high frequencies and a lot of power." The shift to greater programmability will also mean that the NV30's architecture needs to be far more precise in order to carry out more complex computations without errors, Vivoli said. Programmability has emerged as a major theme in the graphics world, with Microsoft and the backers of OpenGL racing to add programmable features into the two dominant graphics APIs (application programming interfaces). Features such as vertex shaders are complex to build into games, however, and currently require developers to target a particular API and GPU and to write complex assembly code. To combat this limitation, Nvidia -- backed by Microsoft -- has introduced a high-level language called Cg. This makes shader programming considerably simpler for developers and, Nvidia hopes, will mean that the advanced functions of its high-end graphics chips will be more widely used in games. 3DLabs is leading the charge to introduce high-level programming capabilities into the next generation of OpenGL, called OpenGL 2.0. Nvidia hopes that Cg will give the company access to the potentially lucrative graphics market of Hollywood special effects, and Vivoli said that all of the major Hollywood studios were either committed to using Cg or were "dabbling pretty seriously" with it. He said that games developers had also shown huge interest, given that the Cg rendering software is still only available in an incomplete test version. However, Nvidia acknowledges that the most high-end games developers like id software, creators of Doom and Quake, will always want to write assembly code in order to have the highest level of control over the finished product. "They don't mind doing the assembly language," he said. "They're the true rocket scientists of the graphics world."
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