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Two comments: 1. The eye is a unique system because the brain has so much post-processing behind it. I agree that your eye has incredibly fast auto-focus, however unlike a camera, you brain combines multiple images, and so in day to day life your perception of the world is that "everything" is sharp. A small sensor digicam does a better job replicating this than a larger sensor. 2. http://www.firingsquad.com/pfucata_digicam_guide_0 4/DOFexample.jpg The distance between the sensor and lens on a D-SLR is greater than that on a small-sensor digicam. The problem is that sometimes the slow shutter speed is impractical without a tripod -- that is the extra effort.

http://www.firingsquad.com/pfucata_digicam_guide_0 4/DOFexample.jpg The distance between the sensor and lens on a D-SLR is greater than that on a small-sensor digicam. The problem is that sometimes the slow shutter speed is impractical without a tripod -- that is the extra effort.

This image showing the effect of a flashbang with the source engine, looks very much like one of the old 'wall hack' cheats.

Here is AMD's PR about this game. Here is Firing Squad's review with ATI cards and mentions Athlon 64 briefly.

I'm running an ASUS AGP-V6800. 4.5 years old. My first thought: tech has come so far that it's looped back on itself!!

DrvTextOut doesn't rasterize the glyphs. It takes pre-rendered glyphs from the software font-rasterizer and alpha-blits them to the screen. This is exactly how Xft/XRender works.

What I'm saying is that most vendors don't bother to properly hardware-accelerate these functions (because it's hard within the confines of the GDI, and nobody uses it anyway), and supply fast software-emulation instead.

It's not a resolution-independent API if you have to set-up the coordinate transform for resolution independence yourself. Also, you would be changing the pixel-level semantics of the GDI if you had a non-identity space transform on by default.

To properly support the PDF 1.4 imaging model,

Please read some of the WinHEC papers about Avalon and the Longhorn Display Driver Model (LDDM) to see why they are replacing GDI.

I look after my disks so I don't need to make backups of them. Some of the people complaining about how this software disables their burning applications and such, should probably read the end of the article where it states that those types of applications are only disabled when the game is being played.

Personally I buy all my games, whether I have the ability to copy them or not, because I want to reward those publishes that make good games. The reason because "we" the consumers are being treated as criminals, is because some of the "we" are acting like criminals, so the fact that I have to put up with these ridiculous methods is because of those that are pirating this software. As ineffective as it is, I cant find fault with PC games publishers wanting to do something to protect their investments.

However publishers and consumers alike should both get off of their soap boxes and do something constructive about the problem instead of both sides making ridiculous arguments and counterclaims.

What did u expect? This is /.

True. :) Most of what bugs me about the "Doom suxors!!!!" posts is that they all seem to be written by people who made up their minds to hate the game before they ever bought/downloaded it. Here's a good example of a review by someone who was dissapointed by the gameplay. He makes the point the Deux Ex 2 is a good game with a bad expereince, while Doom 3 is a bad game with a great experience.

Get the e-vga one if u stil can. Its got Farcry free with it! :-]

I would consider it, but I got a good deal on a PNY card. Actually, I ordered it, then my order was cancelled because PNY raised the price on the reseller by $100 after the fact. At that point I put PNY on my "do not buy, ever" list. However, the reseller strong armed PNY into honoring their origional price, and I reinstated my order...not that I'm taking PNY off my list, the only reason I'm still buying it is because PNY is taking a loss on the card. Much like how the only Microsoft product I will ever purchase is an Xbox, and that's because it will cost them money. :)

What Anandtech's review really seems to show is what an absolute piece of shit the 2.6GHz celeron was. In most of the benchmarks it was beat by the 1.6GHz Duron for fuck sakes. It was also beaten by a P4 1.8GHz, which wasn't too suprising, and even an AMD Athlon 1700+ (which runs at 1.47GHz - we're talking a 1.13GHz gap here).

Of course, last time a celeron interested me was when the good old Abit BP6 board was out.

ATI released a card with multiple GPUs on it a few years ago, putting a pair of Rage 128 chips onto a single card. It provided at best a marginal performance increase, but was still a neat idea at the time.

More info here.

So I wonder how you can calculate the rating need for ths PSU?

Wonder no longer! Power Supply Article

Ok, a few things..... First, you said decent case and power supply. Yes, you can get a case and power supply for $35 - $50 using sites like www.mwave.com. However, if you give a crap about your system and plan on putting in a kick ass video card later, don't ever use the power supplies that come with these cases. They will underpower your whole rig, and then you'll be sorry when you have to replace the motherboard due to bad power. Read this article, and you'll understand a lot more about power supplies and why free ones with cases are bad:

Power

Second, I agree with you that memory is not as important as some people pay for it, but still, 2-2-2 memory is faster than the standard stuff you get, and does indeed improve performance if the rest of your rig is able to keep up already.

> 2: You can't overwrite text. You have to paste in and then change the selection.

-nod- This is really the only issue I have with highlight, middle-click and I've learned to work around it (middle-clicking a url into the main window of most browsers, for instance). Not worth abandoning the overall much better model in my opinion.

> My personal solution would be a mouse with "Cut", "Copy" and "Paste" buttons.

This is the best solution I've heard. I've always wished logitech would release an updated version of the God of All Mice that had a wheel, infrared tracking and thumb and pinky buttons. Sadly, they seem to have abandoned their fat-fingered customer base. =(

That's because the graphics card is doing some kind of spatial partitioning itself. BSP (or stuff like BSP) is still very useful, it's just going on in hardware now.

The technique is called Deferred rendering

stolen from Anandtech

HardOCP
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Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 10.9). Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 12.3). Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 14.9). Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 17.4).

I can complain about STEAM, but Jacub at firingsuad.com summed up the problems with STEAM much better,

This is interesting and surprising, I expected older games to be less likely to rely on Vblanks for timing, but in fact it seems those old games were very well written.

Conversely I recently read a review of an Xbox which had been "upgraded" with a 1400Mhz CPU which showed that lots of games stopped working properly because they relied on the exact timing of the CPU! The review is here if anyone's interested.

Cheapest?? The article said this thing is going to be $500. That aside though, I can't see why anyone would actually want this. It increases the frame rate for a couple of games but because MPEG-2 playback is dependent on the 733 MHz clock the article says that most in-game movies will pause every 3-5 seconds, and most DVD play back has similar problems. Granted, it has a switch on the front to knock it back down to 733 but the article also said that mostly didn't work for video playback.

I applaud the folks at Friendtech for this hack, and their mod chip for the system sounds like it has some pretty cool features for turning the xbox into a media center, but I can't imagine it'd be worth blowing $500 for a partially functional xbox.

There must be a law that says people only mirror or post the text of articles on sites that aren't being slashdotted.

But you forgot the most important line from the article! See the headline:

Building a Basic HTPC
Home > Guides > Choosing Components
February 03, 2004 Alan /.effect Dang > [View My Other Articles]

Makes you wonder whether he was out to destroy this server...

Unpentium? So, so, like this?

smart and get things done

it was frustrating because I clearly knew what I wanted to be doing but it wasn't available to me at the time. It was always: if you want to do computers you need to go to MIT then you go work at a corporation as an engineer and follow "the path." But I dropped out of college, and started my own company. My brother followed a more conventional path. He got a degree and became a stock broker and that's what my mother expected that you're supposed to do. And he's doing OK for himself, but there's nothing like a few Ferarris to rub your parents face in." John Carmack

for those not treading a worn path, what matters (in software anyway) is the quality of the code, delivered on time meeting the design critera. JOS has consistantly made the point (the right one) that he's looking for the top 5%.

but guess what ... this isn't a rant about hiring. This is a gorilla marketing campaign .... We're goin' up to slashdot to put the word to the net .

and the rest

and the rest

It wasn't new for 2003, but I discovered it in 2003. Go to their website to find out more, and to play the demo. It's loads of fun! By the way, if you remember your latin, "pontifex" literally means "maker of bridges," iirc. In this game you're tasked with designing a 3D bridge spanning various bodies of water, capable of withstanding varying loads. It's deceptively simple, but, as far as I can tell, original and fun!

Here's a review of an older version: Firing Squad Review.

But you said " PDA's are getting pretty powerful these days, but trying to compete with the likes of Nintendo and Sony is just insane."

Whereas if you had RTFA you would have seen the page on games and noted games with graphics like this which really are above and beyond what the GBA can handle... so really, they can be better, and the comparison is very valid.

When's it coming out? Any day now
How much does it cost? $925
Has any one besides THG benchmarked one?

Yanno,
If you annoying,
lazy, fanboy fuckers actually
took the time to look for the answers to your own fucking questions,
questions you wouldn't be so fucking annoying.

That's from a 30 SECOND FUCKING GOOGLE SEARCH.

I call that very biased. Benchmarking something thats not out yet. It's not out and that is why AMD wins.

ON WHAT FUCKING PLANET. Jesus. EVERYONE benchmarks stuff before it's released. Where the fuck have you been? AMD LOST. GET OVER IT.

That being said, I'm personally building a dual Opteron system on an MSI Master2 FAR board because $925 for a processor that's only marginally faster than the Opteron is ridiculous. Price/Performance is owned by AMD, but of course, they've owned that for quite a while now.

This wasn't considered /. material yet, even though it's the first article to explain that running >1GB on the Athlon64 drops you down to PC1600 bandwidth, and that the increase in latency on the P4 with >1GB of RAM produces slower real-world results than even the A64 at PC1600.

When you run 3 512MB dimms, the Athlon64 drops to PC1600 speeds. That said, the P4 drop in performance is even worse. You really need the Opteron /Athlon 64 FX-51 to take advantage of huge amounts of memory.

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Other, more reputable hardware sites:
ExtremeTech (broke the story on nVIDIA 3dmark2k3 cheating, uses good benchmarking methods with the GameGauge)
FiringSquad (good mainstream site, quicker more casual reading before getting into the really in-depth stuff)
ArsTechnica (excellent for info on more fundamental aspects of hardware)

If you're looking for general interest sites, a few to check out would be: Shacknews -- www.shacknews.com and Blue's News -- www.bluesnews.com and maybe even the Adrenaline Vault -- www.avault.com and Thresh's FiringSquad -- www.firingsquad.com. While these sites aren't perfect, they aren't nearly as bad as Gamespy and Gamespot.

Better yet are actual fan sites for games you're interested in. A good way to find some is to check the game's official page for a list of fan sites or simply talk to other players. To show you what happens when real gamers put together web sites...

Warcraft III: (Excellent replays)
www.theinclan.com

Counter-Strike: (Replays and configs)
www.sogamed.com

Quake: (News)
www.quake3stuff.com

This is as relevant as the MIPS rating of a CPU (null, to be explicit). I'd really suggest them to take a look at some hardware reviews from gaming sites (e.g. firingsquad) to learn some benchmarking methodology.

And yes, pipes are much faster on Linux than on Windoze. Is it a relevant performance measurement ?

The Raven

An article on FiringSquad goes in depth as to exactly what the Radeon drivers had to sacrifice to gain those speed increases.

Pages three and four on the site detail the quality sacrifices the Radeon drivers make when running Quake3 in order to increase the benchmark scores. They also note how the sacrifices were finely tweaked to keep visual quality as high as possible on eye catching detail areas, while dropping it everywhere else.

The end result are drivers that are literally forcing low-quality optimizations in Quake3 no matter what choices the user makes. Yes it runs faster, but that's because the drivers are not obeying the choices of the user. There is no excuse for this kind of trickery.

Raven

An article on FiringSquad goes in depth as to exactly what the Radeon drivers had to sacrifice to gain those speed increases.

Pages three and four on the site detail the quality sacrifices the Radeon drivers make when running Quake3 in order to increase the benchmark scores. They also note how the sacrifices were finely tweaked to keep visual quality as high as possible on eye catching detail areas, while dropping it everywhere else.

The end result are drivers that are literally forcing low-quality optimizations in Quake3 no matter what choices the user makes. Yes it runs faster, but that's because the drivers are not obeying the choices of the user. There is no excuse for this kind of trickery.

Raven

An article on FiringSquad goes in depth as to exactly what the Radeon drivers had to sacrifice to gain those speed increases.

Pages three and four on the site detail the quality sacrifices the Radeon drivers make when running Quake3 in order to increase the benchmark scores. They also note how the sacrifices were finely tweaked to keep visual quality as high as possible on eye catching detail areas, while dropping it everywhere else.

The end result are drivers that are literally forcing low-quality optimizations in Quake3 no matter what choices the user makes. Yes it runs faster, but that's because the drivers are not obeying the choices of the user. There is no excuse for this kind of trickery.

Raven

FiringSquad posted their XP review and say that XP performs "on par, or better" than 2K.

They also posted full system specs, I am curious to see how much RAM the Infoworld machines had.

HOWEVER: Note that XP did lag behind in a couple benchmarks, including 100 points in 3DMark and a couple FPS in some games. (also: 98SE beat out both 2K and XP in 3DMark 2000)

The author of the article forgot to mention the amount of RAM on the test machines. When publishing the results of a benchmark one is supposed to include all configuration details so that others can replicate it. What's the use of a benchmark if it's not replicable ? The amount of RAM is certainly an important factor for overbloated applications like OfficeXP.

I'd suggest Infoworld to take a look at sites like www.firingsquad.com to learn how to publish benchmarks.

The Raven.

Firingsquad has a article on this as well. It seems the texture quality is hit rather severely with no way to disable this feature (aside from the quackifier). They (firingsquad) also post their own quackifier, source code included, because they weren't 100% sure that the quackifier did only what it was supposed to do.

It seems the real problems are these:
* Quake3 is more a benchamrk than a game right now, so it seems to have been optimized soly to improve benchmark scores.
* There is no way to dissable it.
* It overrides ingame quality settings.
* ATI tried to hide the fact that it does what it does.

Ok, so he may have won... but does he have his own hardware review site? Kidding aside, it is quite an achievement.

Here's my favorite gaming sites to visit almost daily:

VoodooExtreme
Shacknews
Stomped
Computer Gaming Online
GamesSpy
3D News
Firing Squad
Avault
Games Domain
GamesMania
IGN News (PC)

here."over is article the. Polygons than rather (NURBS of derivative a) maps texture quadratic using was it. Dreamcast the for originally developed was which chip NV2 the about bit little a include they that is interesting this makes what. NVIDIA of history the article an posted just"SquadFiring writes Alan

How about this? Single-player Quake is a game. Multi-player Quake is a sport. Single-player Quake III is a sport the way NBA Live is a sport.

There is such a thing as Quake skill or ability. It's how Thresh got the money to buy himself not one, but two dweeby web sites and I'm just posting on Slashdot. I think it's different from getting to the end of Pac Man or Dragon's Lair. Same thing for driving games. The spread of lap times at GPLRank convinces me that there's such a thing as sim racing talent.

Single drive speed can range from anywhere between 20-31Mb/s (b or B? I can't remember). The truth of the matter is, most people do not exceed their IDE controller's maximum bandwidth. An ATA-66 or ATA-100 controller allows bursts of up to those speeds, because data is temporarily stored in the hard drive or controller cache during that short burst period. In practice however, most people see speeds in the 20's range due to random seeking/reading/writing.

ATA-66 made a big difference for me in drive speed for my squid proxy server, where bursts happen frequently. Drive speed is well below the ATA-66 maximum bandwidth, but my IDE bus has sufficient room for regular bursts which help in speed.

When ATA-66 was first released, Thresh's Firing Squad put up some benchmarks comparing ATA-33 to ATA-66, showing considerable speed improvements in ATA-66. These were synthetic tests showing best case scenarios.... but in practice most people on desktops will not notice much of a difference. In a more recent review of the Abit KA7-100 I believe on HardOCP, the reviewer spoke highly of the potential of the ATA-100 on the KA7-100 motherboard, when he was not too impressed by ATA-66.

I didn't need this story to tell me Daikatana sucks - Thresh's put up a review this morning. They tore it up, just like everybody else did, with a score of 25%.

Everybody loves Daikatana! Look at all these great reviews:

• Sharky sez it rawks! yeah right
• FiringSquad: "It is absolutely inferior in almost every conceivable way."
• Damage Gaming say: "I gave it a 3 out of 5, and that's generous"
• CTNews: "in the end all I got was frustration"
• GameSpot gives it a 4.6 out of 10
• DailyRadar: "Ultimate Gas Hands. Need we say more?"
• GameProWorld damns with faint praise: "It's not that bad."
• Computer Games Online gives it 1.5 stars - "amateurish epic lands with a spectacular thud"
• PC.IGN: "It's finally here. And we reviewed it. What? What else do you want us to say?"
• Honest3D - "You all know that I didn't enjoy Soldier of Fortune - well I liked it a lot more than Daikatana."
• GameCenter gives it a 3 out of 10: "Daikatana is a waste of your time and money. Go play Half-Life again instead."
• Happy Puppy: "It'll make you wish it never came out at all"
• GameZone actually seemed to kind of like it
• GameSeek really did like it! "f I had to describe this game in a word or two I would say that it is most entertaining!"
• Ingava didn't hate it all that much
• Game Revolution: "[A]lthough the game is nowhere near as good as it was promoted to be, ... it is not the worst game released this year. It is, however, stunningly outdated and mediocre."
• Maximum PC: "Four years for this?... It sucks. It sucks big-time. In fact, it sucks so bad, we have to wonder what kind of curious monstrosity the developers could have created with an eight-year product cycle.
• GameFan: "It's not as bad as you think."
• PCGamers.Net: "Final Score: 70 out of 100, and I'm disappointed. Sigh."
• GamePig: "Daikatana isn't a bad game, and was often fun to play. However, it's got several flaws that kept me from really enjoying it."

If you're at all curious about how the hell this happened, GameSpot has a great article called "Knee Deep in a Dream: The Story of Daikatana" that gives all the gorey details. They also have a complete walk-through, though the concept kinda makes me shudder...

--
Anonymous cowards are looking forward to the DVD letterboxed release of Ishtar

Don't rush out to buy your T-Birds just yet. To take advantage of the chip (or in many cases for it to work at all) you need to get a motherboard based on the KT133 chipset. That's KT, not KZ folks, because it was renamed at the last minute. KZ was an abbreviation for German concentration camps - now that's a naming flub, forget about Intel's "E" and "B" debacle!

To be honest, I'm disappointed. Previously the cache divider had held Athlons back behind CuMine chips at higher speed, and now that it's integrated I would have figured the T-Bird would have been kicking ass all around the block. I'm sticking with my P III 700E overclocked to 1008 MHz for now...

I'm watching Jerry Sanders, AMD's CEO, on CNBC TV right now talk about the T-Birds and I'm nonplussed.

I believe it is the other way around. NVIDIA uses a method by which the GPU renders each frame at some multiple of the resoluion (I think between 1.5x and 2x) and then scales down. 3dfx uses a supersampling technique. Each pixel is rendered either twice or four times, with .5 pixel offsets. Then the VSA-100 processor(s) blend them. I believe that at 2x (1.5x for NVIDIA) 3dfx and NVIDIA are about the same, but 3dfx has the definite performance advantage. However, at 4x, a level that NVIDIA cannot offer, the image quality is far better than either implementation of 2x. Check out more info here

Thresh's Firingsquad has an excellent (and lengthy) article in which they test the visual quality of the Voodoo5 vs. the GeForce2 in FSAA mode. A quote from the article explains the basic difference between the two different ways the cards perform FSAA:

...3dfx uses a method called RGSS or JGSS (Rotated Grid Super Sampling, Jittered Grid Super Sampling). NVIDIA uses another method called OGSS (Ordered Grid Super Sampling).

The OG!
OGSS is exactly what it sounds like. Ordered grid means that the image is processed in an ordered fashion. Cut the screen up into nice little blocks and you have an ordered grid. Now we have super-sampling. This means, in really dumb downed terms; that the picture is processed except with a bit more data in it. Mind you, this is all going on within a pixel, thus creating a much more detailed image. The image that is represented at 640x480 is actually processed with as much detail as would be present in something that has, as an arbitrary number, 1.5 times as much detail. So in order for the GeForce2 to display a scene with FSAA at 640x480 it must do the work required for displaying an image at 960x720 and then some. Other stuff like color blending goes on to smooth out the image also. So all in all a considerable amount is going on to create the effect that FSAA delivers.

Voodooss
The 3dfx card does another variation of FSAA called jittered grid super-sampling. JGSS is a derivative of RGSS. RGSS, as opposed to OGSS, takes the image that is going to be represented and processes all data at a slight tilt. Jittered grid has the tilted data set, but it has a randomizing factor thrown in to make it seem more natural. If all the data was rotated at the same angle it wouldn't make too much of a difference in comparison to OGSS. This is because our eyes tend to pick up on patterns relatively easily. The random patterns make sure your eyes don't catch on to what is going on. Following this, all the other color blending and hoo-haa takes place to spruce up the image.

"...nVidia in the GeForce GTS at least uses a form of antialiasing similar to Photoshop's bicubic filtering which is computationally FAR more expensive than 3Dfx's pseudo-nearest-neighbor anti-aliasing approach..."

Thresh's Firingsquad recently performed a side-by-side visual quality comparision of the V5 vs. GeForce GTS FSAA. According to the testers, the Voodoo5 had the best picture quality when in 4x mode, while the GeForce was better than the V5's 2x mode in some games. Both cards seemed to have a few glitches in FSAA mode--the V5 had a "bleeding" problem at 1600x1200, while the GeForce wouldn't work with D3D games.

From their conclusion:
"The results from this set of tests were considerably different from that of last time. Seeing the games in motion side by side is truly the only way to compare the two cards. 2x FSAA comparisons yielded mixed results. The quality difference between the two cards was exceedingly close. We tended to like the GF2 FSAA when compared to the Voodoo 2x. However, if we take into account performance figures, the Voodoo is the clear choice. With 2x FSAA, the Voodoo performs considerably better than the GeForce2 FSAA. When it comes to 4x, the Voodoo has no competition in terms of FSAA quality."