Slashdot Mirror

I agreed with you until I read this: http://doc-ok.org/?p=1172

Language is mutable, adapt or become irrelevant.

But the hardware itself isn't even such a great step up from the previous prototypes/devkits, for example, the field-of-view seems to be lacking.

Besides, Linux support has been dropped and Windows 10 is now required.

StarVR. Of all the many the only one with specs that indicate it might be usable at all.

What exactly does the Oculus need a specific operation system for? Its two displays and some HIDs merged into a headset. Control should be by any specific software using it. What does the facebook software do?

But the hardware itself isn't even such a great step up from the previous prototypes/devkits, for example, the field-of-view seems to be lacking.

Besides, Linux support has been dropped and Windows 10 is now required.

That's mostly because the GPU manufacturers sabotage the non-workstation cards at the driver level. Take a look at this: http://doc-ok.org/?p=304

If it's such a success - why don't Microsoft release a single video showing what it _actually_ looks like for the one who wears it? You now, with the narrow field of view, transparent objects etc.

All videos released shows what the graphics look like rendered directly to the camera feed. That's nothing like wearing the real thing.

Honest review here: http://doc-ok.org/?p=1223

Nvidia is really starting to piss me off with their proprietary shit like this, Gsync and their 'nVidia hair' bollocks for games.

There's a lot more than just this stuff, too. Since they went from the 9x00 series to the three-digit GTX series, they've been making more and more proprietary and/or user-hostile decisions as time passes.

Sometime around the GTX switch, for example, they started crippling OpenGL calls not used by games to artificially slow down "gaming" GPUs vs. their more expensive workstation counterparts. There are other examples if you search, but in that one the guy that wrote it re-implemented the OpenGL call via shader and got a massive speed increase because the driver couldn't artificially cripple the shader the same way. He also noticed that, not only did performance drop going from a GTX 200 series card to a GTX 480 series, but that it dropped further going to a GTX 680.

Another example is related to PCI-e passthrough of graphics cards in virtualization. This used to be possible with NV cards, as demoed by Ubisoft in this YouTube video. They used GTX 460 cards, with one passed through to the guest OS to get near-native GPU performance in a VM. Fast forward a generation or two and you have to do shit like this to get the same functionality because nvidia started arbitrarily restricting it. (see also this).

There's also this shit where they removed features from the Linux driver for "feature parity" with Windows.

I've been an nvidia user since the late 90s (started with a Riva TNT card), but the GTX 660 in this aging system is going to be my last until nvidia cleans up its act, if it ever does. Based on what I knew about nvidia's support prior to the 600 series, I bought the 660 intending to do VGA passthrough from a Linux host -- use the GTX 260 as the host GPU, with the 660 on a Windows guest for reboot-free gaming -- and was pretty pissed to find out it got crippled for that purpose. Then I was even more pissed when, later, I found out about the OpenGL crippling and their removal of driver features for Linux users.

So, never again. I'll deal with whatever warts AMD's GPUs and drivers have because they, at least, don't artificially limit niche features to up-sell you to $2000+ GPUs. They don't even do it for their CPUs; even their bog-standard consumer CPUs can be used for niche things like VGA passthrough because AMD doesn't lock them away behind slightly different SKUs and a price hike.

Wow, thanks for answering my rant and especially the bit about hardware modding an nvidia card. How silly.

No problem, I always try to follow up on posts in case there are questions or anything else, even when I post anonymously here. Not much point with logging in since I comment rarely; usually everyone else covers any useful input I'd make before it even hits my RSS reader, so I just lurk and anon-post here. On SoylentNews I actually comment enough to bother being logged in (as Marand), because there aren't as many people contributing already, so I'm more likely to have something to say that won't be redundant.

This page on the Xen wiki has info about hardware that works, as well as some information on what cards need modification. It also has some references such as this one detailing the sort of work required. The actual modification doesn't seem too bad, but the fact that it's needed at all is bullshit. Hell, I'm not even sure what will happen if you try to use the cards for dom-0 (host) while using an AMD or older nvidia card on a guest.

Something else I learned while researching this is that nvidia seems to be deliberately crippling the hardware at the driver level if it thinks you're not using a quadro. I found where this guy went from a 200 series to a 400 series gtx and noticed a massive performance drop on certain operations. He even re-implemented the operations with shaders and the performance difference evaporated, which makes it sound like deliberately gimping of certain GL calls that are used more in non-gaming apps, to sell Quadros.

Also, it seems I was mistaken about the 400 series. I thought I saw before that the 400s would work fine, but the Xen page says they need modding as well. I know my gtx 260 should work on a guest OS, but that's a hell of a downgrade. If/when I try I'll just have to pick up an AMD card I guess.

I've been using nvidia GPUs since the '90s because their drvers always worked well, especially in Linux, but lately I've been finding a lot of reasons to look elsewhere. I hate that, but I'm not going to tie myself to a brand if they're going to go out of their way to make it harder for me to use. Same reason I tend to use AMD processors; it's far easier to find an AMD cpu+mobo that works with all the virt stuff you want.

On another note, H264 streaming of a game from Windows VM to display on the linux desktop would be a way to do the reverse. So you keep the linux desktop. The encoding is done real time by a dedicated unit on the GPU.. and that feature is especially supported on Geforce 600 and 700 series!, i.e. the generation past 400 series. So that's why it's disabled (though there's some level fo consumer support for this if you use a separate computer)

Good point; wasn't that supposed to be a selling point of that SHIELD thing nvidia was pushing? Plus Steam does something similar now and has a Linux client. It might actually be easier to run a second Windows machine with a kvm switch and then stream it to Steam running on Linux, now that the Linux client got support for it.

The pro is that it's likely easier to set up, the con is that you have to duplicate your hardware unless you don't do anything cpu/gpu intensive on the Linux side, in which case you could just have a trash-box for the regular desktop.

Thinking about it, I believe I'm still inclined to go for passthrough instead. I could set up a kvm switch and hook one monitor up to both displays, and just switch that monitor over when I want to play a game, or something like that.

As a side rant, years ago I thought the port of KDE to Windows meant we'd be able to run the KDE desktop on Windows but no it was

Mod parent up.

Look at the video around 1:54, where Musk is saying "go in there and do what you need to do". But all the video actually shows is someone spinning the model around and using a visual cutting plane to display cross sections. At no point in that video is new geometry created. What I was expecting to see was a breakthrough in how to do engineering design in 3D. It's not there.

Back in the late 1980s, Autodesk built a virtual reality system as an experiment in CAD. They got about as far as Musk, although at lower resolution - you could look at models and manipulate them with a gloves-and-goggles interface, but trying to draw surfaces in free space was really hard. Some people can do it. They can also do clay models freehand. Today, there's Autodesk Mudbox, a 3D sculpting tool which is used by pros who can visualize clearly and in detail in 3D. Watch this video to see one at work. That's impressive work. Now see something similar done with 3D input devices. It's like trying to sculpt while wearing oven mittens, and the results are awful.

Somebody will eventually make this work, but the computer, not the human, will be doing most of the design.