Well Nvidia recently bought MentalImages and now Ageia. Some people already think about if it would make sense for NVIDIA to buy AMD/ATI, too.

For many years now I always favored NVIDIA Gfx cards. ATI was said to have good hardware too, but for many years their drivers simply didn't work well enough for me. Acceleration for 3ds max wasn't working well and dual-screen support for accelerated 3D fullscreen content wasn't available for some years neither.

I was a bit disappointed about the usability when Nvidia switched their control panel GUI/System. It improved though over time, but recently I was surprised how bad dual screen management has become. I had a hard time to make the driver do what I wanted and sometimes it totally failed until I reinstalled the driver. Somehow the second output popped back to HD TV and wrong resolution very frequently. Then it somehow worked for a while and sometimes it stopped working again. Not very transparent…

In addition to that we sometimes hit randomly blue screens in a over 50 nodes cluster. I don't know if it's a Virtools issue, because I know that sometimes in the past years Virtools was able to create blue screens. Recently Virtools told me, that they have more people reporting them about unstable Nvidia hard-/software. I also found quite a large number of hits in google with the bluescreen keyword that is referring to the Nvidia driver. Many of them from 2007. This makes me think the following:

Vista and DX10 was important for Microsoft and Nvidia. It was two big and new things: DX10 driver/hardware plus new OS system with significant changes. This combo probably consumed a lot of manpower. I wonder if all this may had an effect on quality/stability? If so, it may mean that if Nvidia goes more and more into other markets (partly forced by INTELs efforts) and grows and grows … quality may suffer (even more)?

I hope not! We will see, it's certainly interesting times ahead …

If you are using Nvidia cards, do also feel that they become less solid/stable - or is still everything for you like always?

I just saw the press release - there is now a website for Virtools MP. It contains the video we already know with slightly better resolution and some more details - but not yet that extensive to satisfy the curiosity of existing Virtools Dev users.

Interesting aspects are: data is stored as XML which is probably much better for atomic handling, OO Behaviour-Graphs maybe similar in approach to the BG instancing that comes with Dev 4.1 , customizable build process, media processing, render slots (whatever this means), customizable culling, streaming of levels/stages (stage = scene?), advanced shadow system, gameplay templates.

 Virtools MP website

A custom build and media processor is actually something we created in our company for DEV, too. It really boosts productivity! We use schematic scripting to implement the media processing and store media in special folders and with special tags in names. It allows the GFX teams to add new content of existing types without the need of a developer for assets integration. 

This is from the press release

Wider Platform & File Support: Virtools 4.1 and 3D Life Player are now compatible with Microsoft Vista and 3D XML V4. In addition, the Virtools SDK is moving to Visual Studio.net 2005.

Improved Usability Enhancements to Reduce Production Time: One much awaited feature for Virtools is the ability to instantiate a behavior graph that is introduced through a new "Call Behavior" building block. Using this new feature, developers will be able to considerably improve production workflow and delivery time.
Virtools 4.1 also provides rich ergonomic and schematic improvements as well as new commented video tutorials, significantly shortening the Virtools 4.1 learning curve.

Simplified Virtual Reality Production Capabilities: Both the Virtools VR Library and the VR Publisher model have evolved to respond to VR community feedback. The simpler publishing model is now available in two versions: "classic", targeted to mainstream VR displays (simple stereo HMDs or Walls) or "unlimited", supporting higher-end systems, including multi GPUs or clusters. This new VR Pack 2.5 also provides better clustering support, improving synchronization performance and quality when using Nvidia Quadro Fx G-Sync hardware, and better supporting multi-pipe and multi-core systems. It also includes new ready-to-use application templates (VRNR), provides support for recent VR devices like Natural Point Optitrack and Xsens MTi/MTx, and adds numerous development and deployment time-savers. New demos have been included, enabling new users and integrators to even better demonstrate the power of their VR equipment.

Enhanced Artificial Intelligence Capabilities: Partnering with Kynogon, Virtools 4.1 provides integration of a new AI library 2.0, which simplifies path-finding generation and design of Non-Playable Characters’ behaviors.

Looks like they addressed some interesting aspects. Personally I only heard negative things about the older AI pack. Hopefully this new iteration is useful. The VR Pack license scheme was also weird. I wonder if the new approach has an effect on costs. I also wonder what they mean with better clustering support. I am currently helping with probably the biggest Virtools cluster in the world and in our case more functionality for controlling and debugging the cluster is needed.

The BG instance thingy is very interesting - I hope it works well with tracing/debugging. I also hope we get our "center to BG on closing" 'rich ergonomic' feature. Anyways, much too early to do any serious commenting on it - it's just I don't write a lot on my blog recently so putting the press text without any 'blahblah' comments sounded like a bad deal.

p.s. more details are now available on the virtools site .