189 Million GPUs: Nvidia Unplugged and Uncut, Part Two

That's right, Nvidia's GeForce install base is right around 189 million discrete GPUs, a number Nvidia only recently elected to disclose. Put that in perspective: Sony's PlayStation 2 topped 120 million worldwide in 2007 (according to Sony). Nvidia's number tabulates consumers with GeForce 5, 6, 7, and 8 series GPUs for desktops and notebooks. That's counting only a small number of motherboard GPUs, and none of Nvidia's contract deals making specialty chips for anyone else (including console manufacturers).

The information was recently disclosed in an interview with Nvidia's Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations, and James Wang who works in the company's technical marketing group. This is the second part of that interview.

Part One | Part Three

On Crysis hacks, DX10 vs. DX9, and Nvidia's worldwide GeForce install base

Game On: Tell me about Nvidia's involvement with Crysis. At what point did you become involved with that game, and to what degree?

Roy Taylor: We were involved in every aspect of the game coming to market. We started working with Crytek about 18 months, nearly two years before the launch. For that particular game and that particular team I was personally involved as well.

James Wang: And of course we started working with Crytek when they were making Far Cry back in 2001, so we have a long relationship with that developer.

GO: I spoke with Cevat Yerli and Jack Mamais at Crytek back in early 2006 and wrote the story that actually broke the news to the U.S. about Crysis's existence, and I recall Yerli reacting to DX10 as supported, but not integral. Over the course of the game's development that obviously shifted, and perhaps owing in part to the game's lengthy delay, the final product was much more DX10-centric than originally planned. That manifested in the form of elaborate press videos highlighting purported "DirectX 10 gameplay." So you have this big DX10 marketing push and Microsoft behind it and everyone talking Crysis and DX10, then this so-called hack arrives that lets you access what certainly looks a lot like these claimed DirectX 10 exclusive effects, except running notably faster under XP and DirectX 9. What's the story there?

RT: First of all, the important thing to realize is that, during the early and mid stages of putting the game together, for the artists, they were requested to start working on DX10 effects before they even had DX10 hardware. And even when we got the first DX10 hardware, there wasn't always enough to go around for everyone. So the artists started to work on the quality of art that could be run or used in DX10 from the early stages. Now some of that was left in the game and so what that hack effectively does is call out some of the work-in-progress art that was actually there for the DX10 version. So the hack enables you to use that. But because it's a hack, what tends to happen is some of the close up stuff is there but some of distance stuff isn't.

So for example, parallax occlusion mapping, which gives you the great terrain effects, might look like they can be reproduced with the hack. But if you want to try and look at some of the view distance stuff it doesn't work, because it's not actually running in DirectX 10. Some of the trees and foliage for the view distance just don't come on, none of that is enabled, for example. Some of the caustic effects might also look like they can be reproduced, but they can not.

But probably the biggest difference you'll notice is with the day and night effects. None of the DirectX 10 visuals are present, because the art there is the early stuff, and the new stuff wasn't included in the final shipping version of the game, thus you don't get any of the visuals that take place during the day and nighttime effect changes.

It's hard to show in a screenshot, but much of DX10 is often hard to show in a screenshot, because it's to do with movement and realtime effects. Those are just some of the examples of what you can and can't see.

GO: So there are definitively DX10-only effects in addition to the acknowledged DX10-specific Shader 4.0 capabilities that simply aren't occurring under XP?

RT: Absolutely. Now some of those effects as well will be exposed only to those, and I'll admit this frankly, with the very best hardware. Now as hardware improves, and gets better and the systems run faster, those effects will become more apparent. In addition to that, with the patches that are coming through, more effects are going to be exposed, as they manage to improve the performance.

GO: Speaking of performance, where do you see the biggest changes occurring the fastest? Driver? Operating system? Application? API?

RT: It's a mixture of the driver and the application and the DirectX API itself. And the reason is because the more time we and the developers and Microsoft spend with the APi and the games and the drivers, the more we learn. So for example, what might take four or five lines of code to produce a particular effect when we first launch, we might learn that there are ways to produce the same effect with only three lines of code. There are also other effects that we can use to better improve the way things are produced. So we might use texture maps in a particular scene, and then find out that we don't need to, because we can do them in a different way, or produce them without using texture maps, which are very resource heavy. There might be improvements to specific lighting instructions, and so on. The other thing is we might have an effect we want to enable, which will run fast in DX10, which would be excruciatingly slow in DirectX 9.

Let me give an example of that. One of the things that DirectX 10 does very, very well is what's called volumetric effects. That's true volumetric smoke or clouds or mist. It's a very cool effect and really adds a lot to the game. But whilst in DirectX 10 it's truly volumetric with good performance, volumetric effects are extremely expensive in DirectX 9. So you might be able to produce some really good volumetric smoke in DirectX 10 on a midrange PC, but to produce that same volumetric smoke on a DX9 PC would require a very high end DirectX 9 PC.

GO: How does Nvidia work with or assist or caution a publisher in deciding on the minimum specs and the minimum number of effects in a game, versus the install base they want to sell the game to?

RT: That's a really good question, and one I love to answer because one of my frustrations has been why are we not, as an industry, answering the question "Why are graphics just pretty? and "Why aren't they in the gameplay?" And the answer again and again from the publishers was "Well, we want to sell it to as many people as possible." And so what I then did was look at the numbers, and to my surprise, I discovered that a successful PC game sold on average about 2 million copies. There are exceptions. The Sims have sold over 20 million. But most PC games are considered a success at a million copies.

Then I went to the installed GeForce base and found we had an installed active user base of GeForce performance enthusiasts graphics of over 60 million. Which then led us to say a 60 to 1 ratio hit rate to sell a game is pretty good. If we can't convince at least 1 in 60 to buy your game, we're doing something wrong. And that's when we changed the Nvidia "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" program to focus on introducing good games with good effects to the 60 million installed active users.

So what we do, in answer to your question, is that we will share with the developer what we believe that forecast installed base of graphics is at the time the game launches. So right now for games that are due two years from now, we already give detailed forecasts of what the installed base will be, and then we tell them what the minimum number of effects will be possible with that installed based at the time. That's leading already to a big jump in improvement in terms of the effects that are getting implemented.

JW: What's the latest number for GeForce install base, Roy?

RT: It's 189 million GeForce users in the world. We have the largest install base of any console in the industry.

GO: How do you get that number? Aggregate lifetime Nvidia chips?

RT: That's GeForce only. We look at how many have been shipped inside a tax period of three years, minus deductions for anything which knowingly went into a workstation SKU, so anything that ended up in a Dell OptiPlex or HP Vectra SKU is excluded. Then we break it down into mainstream, performance and enthusiast segments, and if you do that, then we can see that by far the bulk of it is mainstream.

Now for mainstream, it's entirely possible that someone just bought the PC or notebook and they're not really aware of the graphics. We know that a lot of them are, but we know that a lot of them aren't. And we're right now looking to research in detail to break that out how many, if you want to put it this way, how many of those mainstream users are GeForce aware, and we don't have that number for you today. We're still working on that. However, what we do know is that the number of performance and enthusiasts who either knowingly paid more for their notebook or desktop because of the graphics in the PC, or they made a decision to pay more when they built the PC themselves, or they upgraded -- that number is in excess of 60 million.

Next: DX10 for XP, annual single-card and SLI driver improvements, and driver nightmares when Vista launched