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NVIDIA and Ubisoft Team Up for Pick Your Path Gaming Promotion
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NVIDIA and Ubisoft Team Up for Pick Your Path Gaming Promotion

This morning NVIDIA announced a new gaming bundle for their top GPUS. New buyers of GTX 980, 970, 780 Ti, or 780 desktop GPUs qualify for the offer, along with any purchases of notebooks with GTX 980M or 970M GPUs. The bundle features three games from Ubisoft, all of which make use of one or more of NVIDIA’s GameWorks libraries and which are part of NVIDIA’s The Way It’s Meant To Be Played program.

The games in question are Assassin’s Creed Unity, Far Cry 4, and The Crew, and since none of the games have shipped yet this presents a nice opportunity to grab some new hardware to power a brand new game for the holidays. What better way to get into the spirit of giving than to buy yourself a new GPU, right? Or I suppose you could give the game and/or GPU to someone else if you’re feeling nice. 🙂

To quickly run through the games and technologies, Assassin’s Creed Unity features support for HBAO+, TXAA, and PCSS. One interesting note regarding Assassin’s Creed Unity is that we’ve heard it will have a frame rate cap of 60FPS, which is unfortunately becoming more and more common on multi-platform releases. Next up, Far Cry 4 also features support for HBAO+, TXAA, and PCSS; it adds NVIDIA’s updated Godrays technology along with HairWorks. The Crew is the third option, a racing game that makes use of HBAO+ and TXAA technologies. All of the games also feature “enhanced 4K support”, which basically means 4K rendering has been tested and performance optimizations are in place to make it more usable.

For those of you that don’t keep up with acronyms, HBAO+ (Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion) is an alternative to SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) that helps with rendering more realistic shadows. TXAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing) is an alternative to MSAA (Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing) or SSAA (Super-Sample Anti-Aliasing) that combines MSAA techniques with custom filters to reduce the appearance of jaggies; in particular it can help with jaggies that aren’t on the edges of a polygon. PCSS (Percentage Closer Soft Shadows – PDF link) is a way to improve the look of shadow maps by softening the shadows based on how far an object is from a surface.

Next, we’ve seen Godrays in various forms for a while, and the latest iteration apparently uses tessellation to project transparent polygons (from the shadow maps) that can then be lit up to provide more realistic looking rays of light. Finally, HairWorks uses tessellation to dynamically render potentially hundreds of thousands of strands of hair in place of detail textures. Also worth note is that while TXAA and HBAO+ are restricted to NVIDIA GPUs, the Godrays, HairWorks, and PCSS libraries are (I believe) GPU platform agnostic.

NVIDIA Current Desktop Game Bundles
Video Card Bundle
GeForce GTX
980/970/780 Ti/780		 Pick Your Path (Far Cry 4/The Crew/Assassin’s Creed Unity)
GeForce GTX 770/760 N/A
GeForce GTX 750/750Ti $150 Free To Play (Strife, War Thunder, Infinite Crisis)
NVIDIA Current Mobile Game Bundles
Video Card Bundle
GeForce GTX
980M/970M		 Pick Your Path (Far Cry 4/The Crew/Assassin’s Creed Unity)
GeForce GTX 800M $150 Free To Play (Strife, War Thunder, Infinite Crisis)
GeForce GT/GTX 700M N/A

You can get more information on the Pick Your Path promotion on NVIDIA’s site. As for the games, Assassin’s Creed Unity is slated for launch on November 11, Far Cry 4 follows a week later on November 18, and The Crew has a release date of December 2 (according to Steam). All three games have a current MSRP of $59.99, so if you’re already looking at a GTX 970 and one of these titles that’s a nice discount. There’s no indication how long the promotion will run, but it’s likely a case of “until we run out of codes” and most likely at least through the end of 2014.

NVIDIA and Ubisoft Team Up for Pick Your Path Gaming Promotion
  • Comments are Closed

NVIDIA and Ubisoft Team Up for Pick Your Path Gaming Promotion

This morning NVIDIA announced a new gaming bundle for their top GPUS. New buyers of GTX 980, 970, 780 Ti, or 780 desktop GPUs qualify for the offer, along with any purchases of notebooks with GTX 980M or 970M GPUs. The bundle features three games from Ubisoft, all of which make use of one or more of NVIDIA’s GameWorks libraries and which are part of NVIDIA’s The Way It’s Meant To Be Played program.

The games in question are Assassin’s Creed Unity, Far Cry 4, and The Crew, and since none of the games have shipped yet this presents a nice opportunity to grab some new hardware to power a brand new game for the holidays. What better way to get into the spirit of giving than to buy yourself a new GPU, right? Or I suppose you could give the game and/or GPU to someone else if you’re feeling nice. 🙂

To quickly run through the games and technologies, Assassin’s Creed Unity features support for HBAO+, TXAA, and PCSS. One interesting note regarding Assassin’s Creed Unity is that we’ve heard it will have a frame rate cap of 60FPS, which is unfortunately becoming more and more common on multi-platform releases. Next up, Far Cry 4 also features support for HBAO+, TXAA, and PCSS; it adds NVIDIA’s updated Godrays technology along with HairWorks. The Crew is the third option, a racing game that makes use of HBAO+ and TXAA technologies. All of the games also feature “enhanced 4K support”, which basically means 4K rendering has been tested and performance optimizations are in place to make it more usable.

For those of you that don’t keep up with acronyms, HBAO+ (Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion) is an alternative to SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) that helps with rendering more realistic shadows. TXAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing) is an alternative to MSAA (Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing) or SSAA (Super-Sample Anti-Aliasing) that combines MSAA techniques with custom filters to reduce the appearance of jaggies; in particular it can help with jaggies that aren’t on the edges of a polygon. PCSS (Percentage Closer Soft Shadows – PDF link) is a way to improve the look of shadow maps by softening the shadows based on how far an object is from a surface.

Next, we’ve seen Godrays in various forms for a while, and the latest iteration apparently uses tessellation to project transparent polygons (from the shadow maps) that can then be lit up to provide more realistic looking rays of light. Finally, HairWorks uses tessellation to dynamically render potentially hundreds of thousands of strands of hair in place of detail textures. Also worth note is that while TXAA and HBAO+ are restricted to NVIDIA GPUs, the Godrays, HairWorks, and PCSS libraries are (I believe) GPU platform agnostic.

NVIDIA Current Desktop Game Bundles
Video Card Bundle
GeForce GTX
980/970/780 Ti/780		 Pick Your Path (Far Cry 4/The Crew/Assassin’s Creed Unity)
GeForce GTX 770/760 N/A
GeForce GTX 750/750Ti $150 Free To Play (Strife, War Thunder, Infinite Crisis)
NVIDIA Current Mobile Game Bundles
Video Card Bundle
GeForce GTX
980M/970M		 Pick Your Path (Far Cry 4/The Crew/Assassin’s Creed Unity)
GeForce GTX 800M $150 Free To Play (Strife, War Thunder, Infinite Crisis)
GeForce GT/GTX 700M N/A

You can get more information on the Pick Your Path promotion on NVIDIA’s site. As for the games, Assassin’s Creed Unity is slated for launch on November 11, Far Cry 4 follows a week later on November 18, and The Crew has a release date of December 2 (according to Steam). All three games have a current MSRP of $59.99, so if you’re already looking at a GTX 970 and one of these titles that’s a nice discount. There’s no indication how long the promotion will run, but it’s likely a case of “until we run out of codes” and most likely at least through the end of 2014.

Tegile Launches T3600 & T3700 All-Flash Arrays
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Tegile Launches T3600 & T3700 All-Flash Arrays

Last week we expanded our enterprise storage coverage with flash arrays and today the coverage continues with Tegile’s announcement of the T3600 and T3700. To bring everyone up to the speed, let’s start with a brief introduction of the company. Tegile was founded in 2009 by Rohit Kshetrapal, Rajesh Nair, Justin Cheen and Alok Agrawal and operated in stealth mode until 2012. The founders share a history at Perfigo, which was a developer of packaged network access control solutions that was acquired by Cisco in 2004. As a result Tegile’s expertise lies in the networking and connectivity aspect of the array, and hence Tegile provides both hybrid and all-flash arrays.

SanDisk and Western Digital (i.e. HGST) are strategic investors in the company, which guarantees Tegile access to the latest SSDs at competitive prices. Currently all Tegile’s arrays use SAS SSDs, for which SanDisk and HGST both have extensive lineups, but as the industry moves towards PCIe Tegile will be making the transition as well. Tegile is already evaluating some of Fusion-io’s PCIe SSDs now that the company is under SanDisk, but there are no finalized plans for a product yet.

The T3600 and T3700 are additions to Tegile’s all-flash arrays and bring smaller capacity points to the lineup. The existing T3800 started at 48TB raw, but Tegile told me that many customers were looking for something around 10-20TB in capacity and the T3800 was too beefy (read: expensive) for that. The T3600 and T3700 have 9.6TB and 24TB of raw flash respectively, which can be extended by using expansion shelves.

The expansion shelves are basically just a bunch of drives that connect to the array and use its logic, but it should be kept in mind that the shelves are their own units and thus eat up rack space. 2U and 4U expansions are available with the T3600 and T3700 having support for either four 2U (ESF-10/25/50) or two 4U (ESF-145) expansions. The maximum effective capacity is achieved with two ESF-145 expansions that are 144TB each and a 5x multiplier from compression and de-duplication, which Tegile claims is the typical increase in usable capacity. Obviously, the actual multiplier depends on the stored data and some workloads are inherently more compressible than others, so the 5x multiplier is merely an ideal guideline.

The T3400 is different from the rest in the sense that it supports the HDD-based 72TB ES4000 expansion shelf, whereas the other T3000 series models don’t. The reason lies in the architecture as the T3400 utilizes a pool of very low latency SSDs (likely SLC-based) that are used for metadata handling. The way Tegile handles metadata is actually one of its core advantages because Tegile stores the host and meta data separately, which is essential for efficient data de-duplication and also prevents the metadata from fragmenting. The usage of lower latency SSDs in the T3400 makes sense because all the meta data IOs need to be offloaded from the HDDs, but since that is not a problem with the rest of the T3000 lineup, high density eMLC SSDs are used in other models. All drives in the array are Self Encrypting Drives (SEDs) with AES-256 support.

On the connectivity side, all T3000 series models have 14 1Gbps Ethernet ports with two of them dedicated to management. Additional connectivity options include dual-port 4/8 Fibre-Channel, 10Gbps Ethernet and quad-port 1Gbps Ethernet. Protocol support includes iSCSI, FC, NFS, CIFS and SMB protocols.

Along with the T3600 and T3700 releases, Tegile has updated its IntelliFlash OS to 3.0. The provisioning process has been streamlined and the provisioning profiles have been enhanced. The idea behind the provisioning profiles is to give IT administrators an easy way to set up provisioning based on the workload because not all IT administrators necessarily understand the complex storage architectures and what is the optimal provisioning for their workload.

Tegile is also releasing cloud-based IntelliCare customer support, which automatically collects various data points from the array and sends them to Tegile’s servers for analysis. The analysis allows Tegile to inform the customer about any potential component failures or other issues, and what’s interesting is that Tegile customers can view metrics of another customer’s Tegile array. Hence IT administrators can compare their array against other Tegile arrays in the wild and can see if there are any settings that could be toggled for more optimized performance.

The T3600 and T3700 are both available now and start at $220,000 (~$23/GB) and $300,000 ($12.50/GB) respectively.

Tegile Launches T3600 & T3700 All-Flash Arrays
  • Comments are Closed

Tegile Launches T3600 & T3700 All-Flash Arrays

Last week we expanded our enterprise storage coverage with flash arrays and today the coverage continues with Tegile’s announcement of the T3600 and T3700. To bring everyone up to the speed, let’s start with a brief introduction of the company. Tegile was founded in 2009 by Rohit Kshetrapal, Rajesh Nair, Justin Cheen and Alok Agrawal and operated in stealth mode until 2012. The founders share a history at Perfigo, which was a developer of packaged network access control solutions that was acquired by Cisco in 2004. As a result Tegile’s expertise lies in the networking and connectivity aspect of the array, and hence Tegile provides both hybrid and all-flash arrays.

SanDisk and Western Digital (i.e. HGST) are strategic investors in the company, which guarantees Tegile access to the latest SSDs at competitive prices. Currently all Tegile’s arrays use SAS SSDs, for which SanDisk and HGST both have extensive lineups, but as the industry moves towards PCIe Tegile will be making the transition as well. Tegile is already evaluating some of Fusion-io’s PCIe SSDs now that the company is under SanDisk, but there are no finalized plans for a product yet.

The T3600 and T3700 are additions to Tegile’s all-flash arrays and bring smaller capacity points to the lineup. The existing T3800 started at 48TB raw, but Tegile told me that many customers were looking for something around 10-20TB in capacity and the T3800 was too beefy (read: expensive) for that. The T3600 and T3700 have 9.6TB and 24TB of raw flash respectively, which can be extended by using expansion shelves.

The expansion shelves are basically just a bunch of drives that connect to the array and use its logic, but it should be kept in mind that the shelves are their own units and thus eat up rack space. 2U and 4U expansions are available with the T3600 and T3700 having support for either four 2U (ESF-10/25/50) or two 4U (ESF-145) expansions. The maximum effective capacity is achieved with two ESF-145 expansions that are 144TB each and a 5x multiplier from compression and de-duplication, which Tegile claims is the typical increase in usable capacity. Obviously, the actual multiplier depends on the stored data and some workloads are inherently more compressible than others, so the 5x multiplier is merely an ideal guideline.

The T3400 is different from the rest in the sense that it supports the HDD-based 72TB ES4000 expansion shelf, whereas the other T3000 series models don’t. The reason lies in the architecture as the T3400 utilizes a pool of very low latency SSDs (likely SLC-based) that are used for metadata handling. The way Tegile handles metadata is actually one of its core advantages because Tegile stores the host and meta data separately, which is essential for efficient data de-duplication and also prevents the metadata from fragmenting. The usage of lower latency SSDs in the T3400 makes sense because all the meta data IOs need to be offloaded from the HDDs, but since that is not a problem with the rest of the T3000 lineup, high density eMLC SSDs are used in other models. All drives in the array are Self Encrypting Drives (SEDs) with AES-256 support.

On the connectivity side, all T3000 series models have 14 1Gbps Ethernet ports with two of them dedicated to management. Additional connectivity options include dual-port 4/8 Fibre-Channel, 10Gbps Ethernet and quad-port 1Gbps Ethernet. Protocol support includes iSCSI, FC, NFS, CIFS and SMB protocols.

Along with the T3600 and T3700 releases, Tegile has updated its IntelliFlash OS to 3.0. The provisioning process has been streamlined and the provisioning profiles have been enhanced. The idea behind the provisioning profiles is to give IT administrators an easy way to set up provisioning based on the workload because not all IT administrators necessarily understand the complex storage architectures and what is the optimal provisioning for their workload.

Tegile is also releasing cloud-based IntelliCare customer support, which automatically collects various data points from the array and sends them to Tegile’s servers for analysis. The analysis allows Tegile to inform the customer about any potential component failures or other issues, and what’s interesting is that Tegile customers can view metrics of another customer’s Tegile array. Hence IT administrators can compare their array against other Tegile arrays in the wild and can see if there are any settings that could be toggled for more optimized performance.

The T3600 and T3700 are both available now and start at $220,000 (~$23/GB) and $300,000 ($12.50/GB) respectively.