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At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference
downix writes "At Toms Hardware they're running an article where they discuss the next-generation Windows graphics system. The big part of the scoop, it's being done via DirectX. Have to validate those 2Ghz CPU's and GPU's that need their own nuclear power plant to run somehow." Some other interesting things there - quiet PCs, more about the Oqo, etc.
The big part of the scoop, it's being done via DirectX
Lets face it, DirectX has been through fire and brimstone, finally matured, and MS wants to use their baby for other things?
I'm not surprised in the least!
I just went for the low-tech solution to making my computer quiet: bought extension cables for the monitor, keyboard and mouse and put the cabinet itself in a closet in my study. Hmmmm.. no noise to be heard anymore.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
...how the PC industry is going to take Apple's styling, innovations and designs and incorporate them into Windows hardware. I guess its better late than never...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I'd rather see the load being taken off the power supply. I mean, graphics are nice, but as Michael alludes to, it's gonna take a friggin nuclear power plant to supply the juice- I'd rather see the hardware focusing on lower power consumption. you know, perfect what they got before moving to the next step. Now that I live off campus, I see how much juice my machines run, and well, 300watt powersupplies suck for electric bills.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
Graphics hardware gets to power the Windows shell, and compositing is going to be the big deal. Windows will be treated like surfaces, as opposed to rectangular blocks of bits, as they are now. Everything, in effect, is a texture. GPUs certainly know how to move textures around, and manipulate them, and work with them. Longhorn puts the pressure on the 3D engines of GPUs, and Microsoft is exploring minimum hardware requirements and standards for OEMs to aim for.
If windows are textures, it seems like it will be pretty difficult to get perfect 1-to-1 mapping of pixels via a graphics gpu. Right now, the only thing that is a big deal is "jaggies", but noone expects a perfect image of textures. I know part of this is the game itself, but it is very hard to make textures fit exactly how you want them to.
Sounds neat tho, if they can pull it off. Middle of the next decade indeed.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
Lets give DirectX a break. I know that computers running apps for it are completely decked out, but look at the graphics for christ's sake! With all of the enhancements that have been made between the hardware companies (ATI, NVIDIA) in conjunction with M$ (dx 8.1 enhancements) we are seeing some kick ass games, delivered in a relatively fast time due to a universal API. I think it is a good thing.
-Mod me up, I need the karma!!
Yeah...my thoughts exactly.
Have to validate those 2Ghz CPU's and GPU's that need their own nuclear power plant to run somehow."
Ya, and they can use the cooling towers to cool those bad boys too!
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
Personally, I see little driving the next generation windows boxes. I mean seriously, most computers that are 3 years old will do most things the average person could ever want. It'll burn CDs, play DVDs, read email, do word processing, email, blah blah blah...
What's next to drive people to upgrading? Will the game market be enough to drive the market?
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
Ensuring that my 7ghz machine with 40 gigs of ram and 520 TB of HD storage will still choke on a mp12 while scrolling with my MS MindMouse.
Add this to the long list of Microsoft presentation blunders. A too hot for TV MS bloopers tape is due out soon.
What kind of media/entertainment integrated pc device is on your wish list? (It doesn't have to exist yet)
Amazing magic tricks
As Pratchett said (in The Truth), do they mean transparant as in you can see through to their motives or transparant as in you can't see their motives at all.
Microsoft staffers spent a long time hand carving this imposing statue of BillG at the entrance to WinHEC. Based on Native American folklore from the Northwest apparently it wards off government lawyers. :)
Nothing, and that's the beauty of MS's strategy. Windows releases are always endorsed by celebrities, big promo events, etc etc (didn't 'The Rock' help plug Windows XP?). When Microsoft, the OS company, releases a new version or updates their old products, everyone has to have it...regardless of how well their old systems (whether that's hardware or software) work to fit their needs.
Effective marketing, goddman them all.
put the cabinet itself in a closet in my study
Is this "closet" made of wood? If so, you're probably in violation of the fire code. I don't mean to be a code Nazi, and I know that computers don't catch on fire as often as they used to, but if you're not a bachelor living in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, you might think about the consequences of burning your building to the ground.
Well, I think what's happening is companies are tired of seeing office machines being given 3-4 year old graphics cards! :) Most machines for the office don't need (or so someone says) a nice graphics card so now office workers put up with slower graphics because they have a Riva or something to that effect in thier machine. Used to be there was not much difference in a office machine and a home machine. Not anymore. I think Nvidia would like to lower the price of their high end but can't because there are many (I am one of those!) who don't see the point in buying thier firebreather when a Geforce 2 MX works just fine for about 95 percent of the people....even some games can be played just fine on a 2 MX. No Microsoft is feeling the pressure from the hardware folks because for some reason, they can't convince OEMS to use thier firebreathing Geforce and P4 chips in machines that are sold to grandma's (many more grandma's then hardcore gamers). If they could sell more of those, then they don't have to charge 300+ for one of those nice cards. If the OS used it more, then people would be forced to go get that new graphics card. The demand would be up and the price would take a plunge. It's ALL about eyecandy. Users dig it! (I don't need it all of the time, but I dig it too if it can look good and be fast!)
Gorkman
MS trying to corner the PC Gaming industry? Even more so (basically killing what little linux has)?
By making the desktop utilize DirectX, you are making it even EASIER for game programmers to use DirectX for PC games (making using something like OpenGL almost tedious).
Are they attempting to kill off any future competition for PC Gaming?
Quote from article:
24-bit True Color, or 8 bits per pixel, is not enough. Microsoft is pushing graphics board vendors to implement greater than 8 bpp in order.
This is great! Its so awful being stuck with only 256 colours to choose from! Think of all the different shades of blue they'll have in the next version of windows!
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Not to repeat what was said in the slashdot thread to it, but man does the oQo look sweet. I really hope they can pull this off, this looks like the perfect eBook reader, to start with. Too bad games won't run well on it, though I'm sure older ones will work great - GBA emulation on a oQo sounds like another sweet idea. I pray it's not vaporware.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
For the XP4, Trident claims 80% of the performance of a GeForce4 Ti 4600. The kicker for the company is 3W max and 5W static power consumption at this level.
Trident and PERFORMANCE in the same sentence?
Bwaahaha!!
Seriously, these people haven't created a product that doesn't suck for YEARS.
DirectX is a lot more efficient than the old GDI path. Besides, games have been doing interfaces in DirectX for years.
YeeHaW_Jelte beat you to it
The article mentions that the entire desktop will be made in vector graphics. That was mentioned several years ago, and, there is a (slowly developing) project for Linux named Berlin which also is a vector based desktop.
http://www.berlin-consortium.org/
Hopefully that will pace up!
We all know that the colors you see on your monitor don't exactly end up being the same as the colors you get on your inkjet printer, or on your LCD, or in real life.
Why is it gonna take MS 3 more years to implement what Apple did 10 years ago?
(Yeah, I know it's not quite the same thing, but MS still hasn't given us a simple OS-level color matching system!)
I think its a great thing that MS is getting involved in talking to them intel folks(and being nice and "cooperative" and whatnot)... instead of just making "faster" cpu's they(intel) will be forced to start making better ones.
As far as the whole gaming industry is concerned, wasn't it obvious that microsoft was trying to stick its hands in there with the xBox? the major competator of the console system is the PC. MS can simply make the xbox(or the Xbox 2020) sell better by supporting games(in windows) less and less in the future.
I think that Bill Gates has built a minituration device that will shrink humans. He is then going to art colleges around the country and shrinking those liberal pains in the ass. Then M$ ships them back to Washinton and gives them little colored pencils. The final step is inserting them into pc's running windows and hooking them up to the processor. When you turn on the PC they go crazy nuts and draw all the graphics super fast. The only problem is that they die in a week and your pc is full of little dead people. -THat was the technikal xpla-nation
Dust
That crap can kill any PC. Eventually it will die, and die hard.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Moderators, this should be (+5, Insightful), not (+2, Funny)! :)
deus does not exist but if he does
I think that the rapid advancements in graphics technology may to have killed the market in many ways because the hardware advanced faster then the software.
Doom 3 is the only engine that I know of that will actually try to use ALL the new features of the newest generation of nvidia cards. (well almost all) Unreal doesn't seem to be doing it, not that they need too the game already looks awesome without it.
It's not difficult to get this correct. It used to be a problem with the first couple of generations of graphics cards because they didn't all do things the same way, but nowadays it's pretty straightforward, as anything TNT1 level or later will do it correctly. You just need to offset the coordinates by half a pixel, ensuring that when the sample is taken, no filtering is required.
As usual, it's amusing to see MS following the lead of others -- in this case, OS X is using a 3D API (OpenGL) as the implementation base for its GUI and other 2D graphics on the desktop today.
For me, a more interesting question is whether this move indicates the slowdown of the evolution of D3D. D3D has been free to evolve without much concern for release-to-release compatibility largely because game developers change their codebase so much more rapidly than other application developers. But if the mainstream app developers begin to use D3D, the API will gain a lot more inertia.
...copies apple's model of producing closely linked hardware! how long before the xbox model trickles down/up to the pc side?
What's Son's spot on the PC manufacturer list? 8 or 9? Yeah Video seems to be a real killer app.
"Some"? Holy heck, welcome to the problem. I've just built a machine for my brother. An XP 1700+, 256Mb of DDR 2100 and a 64Mb GeForce 2 MX 400 with TV out. We debated hardest on the card. He wanted to go for a GeForce 3 TI to future proof himself. Here's how my reasoning went:
Logic prevailed. Oh, he still wanted the 3 TI, because game mags say it can run at a squillion fps @ 1600x1200x32, but we did manage to establish that the noticable benefit would be zero, because he doesn't have a monitor that can handle that.
I'd advise anyone else thinking of buying a high end graphics card to do this calculation. Unless you've got a 1600x1200 @ 80fps monitor, what the heck do you need a GeForce 3 or 4 TI for? Don't spend money "future proofing": all you're doing is paying a premium on hardware that will be a lot cheaper when you do find yourself needing it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
How can you say video is just a niche?
You've seen all the 'old' home videos in popular culture?
The concept of filming someone's birthday, setting up the projector, and boring the grandma with an hour of dull footage?
It's even easier today with digital camcorders, iMacs, and DVD-Rs
I mean, who's buying half a million iMacs if not people who want to make DVDs?
GPL Deconstructed
hehehe, so they cancel the series claiming that the only appealing aspect of the show had been the strong character of flockhart (sp?). their next series set to debut stars three young female lawyers. hehehe, so 1 wasn't enough -- they'll try it again with 3
dmarien
WinHEC
or
Brazil
From the text under the picture:
Microsoft staffers spent a long time hand carving this imposing statue of BillG at the entrance to WinHEC. Based on Native American folklore from the Northwest apparently it wards off government lawyers.
*grin* Those guys are quite funny, methinks.
95% of games on a GF2?
Fsck. I've yet to have a problem with any game on my TNT2.
We always see all of this cool hardware at these shows. The problem is that production quantities are so small that they always end up costing a lot more than we are willing to pay. The commodity computer hardware has gotten so cheap that we are usually willing to live with this loud, hot PC under our desk because we can get so much more capability for less $$$.
I would love to have some little web pads lying around the house using my 802.11 but for what most of them cost I can get a really nice PC or I can't justify the cost for the utility provided. I have some neat gizmos lying around the house but I always end up picking them up dirt cheap from a liquidator after the product has failed commercially (ala my IPAQ that I use for misc web suring).
I also have difficulty believing that anyone can make this stuff as reliable and easy to configure as it will need to be. The average home user just isn't going to be able to make all of this stuff work. They have enough trouble getting by now. Technology will have to come a lot farther. The user will need to become more sophisticated.
What a ignorant statement. I read that whole article and they didn't say anthing about pc gaming. The only thing about gaming was the x-box.
Pc Gaming is alive and kicking, it's not going anywhere. Why buy a useless console that will be obsolete in a year when you can build a nice computer, and use it for 500 different things, including gaming.
I play games on my pc from the atari, nintendo, and playstation. I would of had to buy 3 consoles just to do that off of a pc and that woudl of cost me more than my comp. What a joke
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
...since, at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, the only guy able to easily get connected to a WiFi access point and use the public wireless network that had been set up was using.... gasp... a PowerBook!
So says Jerry Pournelle, anyway:
"I have tried to get an Orinoco Wireless WiFi (Allchin pronounced it "Wiffy" at least seven times in his market department written presentation) and I can't get it to work with Windows 2000. Alex hasn't managed with Windows XP. No one else in the press section has connected to the Internet with their 802.11 cloud. Allchin couldn't connect to Wiffy. But Peter has connected to the Internet with the same card with his PowerBook == as Peter says, with Apple everything is either easy or impossible. Using the Orinoco card with his PowerBook was easy. With Windows 200o so far it has been impossible... (But that eventually worked see below.)"
"I have managed to get on the Internet. The local network is WINHWC2002. Yesterday it was WinHEC2002. It is case sensitive. Except that Peter's Apple didn't have that problem. He got on yesterday and he's still on today, in a hall that no one else can get on because of very weak signals. Astonishing."
~Philly
Let's say he pays $150 for the 2mx now, and $150 for the 4ti later. He could also pay $300 for the 4ti now (these are hypothetical numbers, they don't make 4ti for iMacs :( ), spend the same amount of money, *and* have the go-jillion FPS now. Just a thought.
MS is a Evil empire . .. they want to rule the world.
Please us Linux or other OS.
So... by halfway through the decade, windows will finally get Aqua-style full-alpha compositing in the windowing system, and they'll do it by requiring a graphics card? That just sounds lazy. Hell, most (all?) games are doing their UI work like that *now*. (Partly 'cause DX8 makes using GDI so hard.)
Also, people have been trying to come up with a 3D shell for years. I haven't seen anything worth using yet. Partly because of reasons others have alluded to: as soon as you start rotating or warping your pretty bitmaps, you lose one-to-one pixel correspondence, and they start looking horrible, even with mip-mapping and good filtering.
A.
Either card will push images to his (expensive) TV or (cheap) monitor as fast as it can take them for any current game.
That's simply not true.
Go play Everquest, get into an area using a bunch of different models and textures, and watch your system choke under a GF2 MX. Last I heard GF4's could handle it all without much problem, but I also haven't played in 3-4 months.
Go look at some of those same benchmarks, particularly for newer games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The GF2MX400 64M barely runs the game adequately at 1024x768. And that's just average frame rate - what kills you are the spikes where the framerate drops through the floor. All the published benchmarks are also with things like sound disabled.
Sure, a GF3 Ti200 is 2.5x the cost of a GF2MX400. That's all of an extra $75. You argued him out of a better video card, one that is not missing major features that are being used by CURRENT games (not even looking at games coming out in under 6 months) over $75?
I think you did him a disservice.
I'm the one that put in the nuclear power plant comment! 8(
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I predicted this when DirectX 1.0 was released. DirectX uses MS's COM architechute. It only made sense that they would eventually move their graphics handlers to use COM. Now we just need to wait for DirectX to work over DCOM and we can have remote displays like Unix has been doing for the last number of years.
Maybe he didn't have the extra 75 dollars? Maybe he DOESN'T play Wolfenstien? There are PLENTY of games out that run fine on the 2MX400. How about Unreal Countrstrike??? It's still popular. So is Q3A. The only reason you could need that big graphics card is so you CAN run games like those and so you CAN spend 50 bucks on that game (instead of doing like I do and wait until they hit the bargin bin). Not everyone has a Slashdot Editors budget for hardware. Also, I can see most everything just fine at 640x480 as well. Sure, I like running the higher resolution as well but the game CAN be played well at 640x480. ALso, for someone who only plays games occasionally, it just costs way to much to buy one of these hot video cards.
Something I think game devlopers have forgotten lately is how to make a game fun. Now it seems all they and the hardcore gamers care about is eye candy. Sure, looking at these things will make your jaw drop, but who care how pretty it is....is it fun? To me, no. The games that center on deathmatching are no fun for me to play occasionally because there are so many players who have more time then I do and thus are much better then I ever will be. I am not saying that they should make it easy to play. I want to be challenged, but to depend on lightening quick reflexes is too much. I respect those who are real good at deathmatches as much as I respect athletes. I also believe there are some people, like myself, who will never be good enough to do well at the game. Just like i will never be as good as Michael Jordan. But to have fun in these games you have to be that good and it feel terrible to get killed every 2 minutes. If I want to feel like that I can just go and try to play basketball. Then I would get the same feeling.
I enjoy games that help you use your brain. Games like Roller Coaster Tycoon and The Sims challenge you to use your brain to be good at them. Quake, Wolfenstien and the upcoming Doom 3 while they would be fun enough to me in one player mode, just would not be fun at all in deathmatching. Sure they do challenge your brain in some ways, but after that, it's mostly quick reflexes and how quick you can move yer stick. Some say games like Starcraft are like this, and they are, to a point, but one can also win with stragtegy. That's where they differ.
Gorkman
So Microsoft is just now talking about something Apple's been doing for well over a year now in a release quality product that runs fine on a 3 year old iMac?
How innovative....
... that kinda like DllHEL?
--j
Maybe he didn't have the extra 75 dollars?
I suspect the brother did, since the brother was wanting to buy the GF3 and the poster disuaded him.
Maybe he DOESN'T play Wolfenstien?
The statement was made that a GF2MX was adequate "for any current game". That's simply not true. Wolfenstein is hardly the only game that can push more data than a GF2MX can handle.
Something I think game devlopers have forgotten lately is how to make a game fun
I enjoy games that help you use your brain
Grats on the non sequiteur. Neither point has anything to do with the original supposition (and this entire thread really has nothing to do with the article). But that said...
Yes, some developers forget the fun part and go for eye candy. The good games don't do this. Yes, they have eye candy, but they also have good gameplay. If you don't have the gameplay, you won't surive, no matter how pretty you attempt to make it. Witness Daikatana. Look at all the really bad strategy games.
As for the "use your brain" - nice way to try and make FPS's look like games for children. They aren't. Frankly, I'm mediocre at best in deathmatch/CTF. I've played with some top calibur people, and while, yes, they have incredible reflexes, they also KNOW what their opponents are going to do. Which is why when you play someone that good you'll wonder how the hell they knew where you were, or how they made that shot. They got inside your head and knew what you would do. Which is why a good player on a modem can defeat some LPB regardless of ping.
Strategy games are a different calibur, and I don't even want to think how much time I've spent playing Civ, Civ2, Masters of Orion, and the like. But they have very different requirements in terms of hardware (although most of the RTS's are now getting high system requirements like FPS's do).
ALso, for someone who only plays games occasionally, it just costs way to much to buy one of these hot video cards.
Did you even READ the original? The guy wanted a bigger card, because he apparantly does play games enough to justify it. And either he could afford it or he was purchasing a new PC for no real purpose in the first place.
If you don't have the requirements for item X, then don't buy item X. The requirements put forth in the prior posting had some incorrect conclusions. Nothing you've said has influenced that.
It's quite a nice coincidence that tomshardware just had this article
I think it'll show you that if you're buying a new computer, and want to play the latest games at a decent resolution and framerate, a 2 MX just isn't sufficient. Of course my definitions of decent may differ from yours, but I don't think 1024x768 is unreasonable.
I don't know how many other states it's incorrect for, but I live in upstate NY and pay my own powerbills.
Power costs ~$0.10/kWh. I assure you of this.
My dual Athlon system adds ~$15/month to my power bill.
(I bet the document you quoted mixed up a factor of ten for every state.)
Microsoft "borrowing" ideas from competitors. Nothing new here, move on...
-- Argel
That's crazy, it's just another MS
proprietary interface. Which wouldn't
be so bad if they hadn't killed off the
existing, truly universal 3d API just
because it wasn't theirs.
Jesus Christ man don't tell them all this!!!
:)
/. holds off from buying stuff while it's expensive, cooler toys will never be developed for us cheapskates!!!
We need everybody else to be early adopters, so the technology advances with them paying for it! Then, we can buy Radeon 8500, 9500, etc. when they're a year old, cheap.
Crap, if everyone on
:)
This is hardly anything new. IRIX has been using OpenGL and/or IrisGL for everything since... a long time ago. OpenGL isn't just for 3D fancy pants games, you know. Also, DirectFB harnesses 3D acceleration of several video cards through the Linux framebuffer to draw its 2D interface. Alas, Microsoft is going to once again claim that they're the first ones ever to use a real graphics library to draw the user interface.
A solution to the problem with music today
flaimbait? what?! you dear sir are a fool!
I demand satisfaction!
pistols at dawn!
Burt "Out of my mind back in 5 minutes"
The copying is getting a little absurd now.
Go look at some of those same benchmarks, particularly for newer games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The GF2MX400 64M barely runs the game adequately at 1024x768. And that's just average frame rate - what kills you are the spikes where the framerate drops through the floor.
And in all likelihood this is just because of crappy coding. Look at games like Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PlayStation 2. They're pushing more polys than the average PC game, with what's already an outdated graphics system and a 300MHz processor with 8K--yes, EIGHT kilobytes--of data cache. On the PC the developers get the latest graphics cards and high end machines, then grudgingly give a little thought at the end of the project toward making it run on something sane.
Odds are that you'll see Return to Castle Wolfenstein ported to a console like the PS2 or Game Cube and it will run faster than it does on the PC and require a factor of four less memory.
A GeForce 2 MX is still a real beast, BTW. It's better than what's in a PS2 in many ways. But while the PS2 coders are going nuts with that hardware, people are sneering down their noses at the GeForce 2 MX. That's a laughable situation. 3D has gotten so fast in recent years that no one knows what to do with it. In all honesty, even the power of Voodoo 2 era cards is rarely, rarely maxed out. Developers just write some half-assed OpenGL or Direct3D renderer and then blame the graphics card, not even looking at their code and realizing that it takes hundreds or thousands of cycles to process a single triangle--or even a vertex--on the CPU side.
Oh, I should have warned fanboys up front to cover their eyes before reading this, so their little worlds aren't shattered.
Thank god! People in the beowulf community were worried for a second there there might be no reason to release even faster CPUs with even better pipelining and faster FPUs! Microsoft is what makes Linux clusters possible -- they're the insurance behind Moore's law.
Sorry, I make (part of) my living off of the Wintel conspiracy fallout building Linux & FreeBSD clusters. Just think, you can be DIV-Xing 2 live tv streams at once and watching another on a regular linux box these days thanks to the relatively cheap mid range CPUs being sold these days! WOOT!
-- Math.
"Package tours are God's way of teaching Japanese tourists about current events." -- me paraphrasing Ambrose Bierce after JP tourists arrive in Bethlehem recently, completely unaware.
The author of the paper you reference got it wrong. Residential KWh in the U.S. are sold at $CENTS/KWh, and it has always been between 3-10 CENTS per KWh in the recent years.
See this DOE link which shows "Average Revenue per Kilowatthour for the Residential Sector by State and Utility, 2000".
They are all around 6 cents /KWh.
0.1 KW (100 watts) constant * 24 * 365 * $.06 = $52.56 per year.
What are you talking about? MS has integrated color management in Win98SE, ME, 2k and XP!
No matter how much fiddling I do with the so-called color managment options under Win2k, I can never get color printouts from MS Office to match what's on the screen (red lines on screen become pink, gray lines become purple, and so on).
When I print these same documents from my PowerBook to the same printer, the colors come out perfect.
And don't get so smugabout Apple. They LOST integrated color management in OSX!
So that "ColorSync" panel I see in the OS X "System Preferences" app is a figment of my imagination?
"What portion of California's recent energy crisis was due to tens of thousands of computers running unused?"
n ergy-studies.html
None of it. The so-called "energy crisis" was a 100% fabricaton of the greedy scumbags and profiteers that run the power companies. Do you think it's a mere coincidence that the "energy crisis" suddenly ended after the Gov. approved a 50% rate increase? Or that the power companies all simultaneously needed to take 30% of their plants offline for "maintenance" as soon as "deregulation" allowed them to start fiddling with supply and prices? Or that the wholesale and distribution companies were reporting record profits even as the retail companies were threatening bankruptcy, when they share a common parent corporation (left hand robs from the right)?
No, the "energy crisis" is a story of greed, not consumption.
Answering your question differently, studies estimate that something like 3% of all electricity consumed in the US is by office equipment. Of this amount, about a third could be saved if users were scrupulous about using equipment in the most energy-efficient manner possible.
Ref: http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/net-e
Some really definitive industry standards for 3D graphics hardware and software. Standards that are not controlled by any one company and that are not bogged down with patents and cross-licensing. I nominate OpenGL 2.0 (-:
Actually, I ment that runs with an x86 chip, because as all mac people like to point out, the mac does support windows (via virtual PC).
If AMD/Intel would release a chip that is designed not to use a fan, it would be a huge step in this direction.
Now it seems all they and the hardcore gamers care about is eye candy.
Someone who only cares about eye candy is not a hardcore gamer.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Do you have links to benchmarks? Sure, you can't run it with all of the detail sliders pushed to the max, but then, if the game is fun Eye Candy should not matter right??? Also, the Geforce 2 MX isn't THAT old. I have run just about everything (in one player mode) just fine. Sure I might have had to lower the resolution and maybe reduce a slider or two, but I have gotten them to work. Of course I have heard even the top Nvidia card has problems with some games. At what point do we blame the hardware and another blame the developer for writing bloated code? I know that games are the toughest programs to write, but with the maddening schedules these guys face, it's a wonder that things aren't running even worse! Are we relying too much on hardware acceleration to fix the bloated code? I won't believe that you can't run even wolfenstien on a 2 MX400 at a acceptable, less detailed level.
Gorkman
Check out the Sub $200 Video card roundup on Anandtech and VGA Charts on Tom's Hardware.
The former has more commentary and a wider range of benchmarks. The latter has a wider range of cards.
And yes, you could bump up performance by turning off options, but, uh... you can turn it back on by spending another $10-25 too.
The games that give the top end cards problems are generally those with really shitty engines. Everquest, for example, has one of the worst engines I know of. But that doesn't change the fact that it's one of the most popular games out there, and that if you're an EQ player you are concerned PURELY with how the system will perform in EQ, not whether or not the code is well written.
It kinda sucks. Apple goes and revives DPS as DPDF, and drastically changes the underlying nature of the display engine of a consumer PC. They have OpenGL and accelerated graphics as part of the core, available to desktop apps and the window manager alike. No tedious driver install. No weird compatibility issues.
Microsoft goes it, and everyone goes bonkers, like its something new. It is new, in a sense, because Apple is just far off everyone's radar.
Now if Apple can just get all the bugs worked out, needed features added, and documentation brought up to date by the time Microsoft rolls out the 1.0... here's hoping.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I never really thought of John Carmac as being a bad coder, thanks for the info. That quake 3 engine must really suck. I guess the developers at Raven are just plum stupid and got suckered like tons of other game developers.
24 bit true colour is 24 bits per pixel, viz 8 bits per channel (RGB). While extra depth on top of this can be used for doing things like alpha channels, IMHO, there's not much need for even more colour depth. I wish I had the notes from my first year remote sensing, but I recall that 24bpp is pretty close to what the human eye can discriminate anyway. We haven't received an office PC at work these last 3-4 years that *hasn't* had a pretty good 24bpp 2D card (certainly not an issue when we buy the most crummy monitors we can get away with).
The only reason I can think of having more channels is so that the windowing can be done on the video card, complete with lots of translucent overlays. Sheesh... as if tasteful textured pastel email stationery in Outhouse wasn't bad enough... roll on the floral decoupage desktop.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Strategy games are a different calibur, and I don't even want to think how much time I've spent playing Civ, Civ2, Masters of Orion, and the like. But they have very different requirements in terms of hardware (although most of the RTS's are now getting high system requirements like FPS's do).
Holy cow! You're comparing Return to Castle Wolfenstein to the original Civilization? Yeah, I think the system requirements will be a tad different, seeing as the one is ten years old (IIRC: DOS 2.11 on an 8088 or better, EGA or better graphics, 640K RAM, 3MB HD (optional), mouse (optional), sound card (optional)).
Wouldn't this make it far easier for MS to slip in or integrate some sort of Digital Restriction Management hooks into it, since they control DirectX? Then, not only could MS then use DMCA, but also SCCCCCCCCCCCA or derivatives, and its new mode of attack through patents to discourage people to implement alternatives (just start throwing patents into DirectX technology, like, say, the DRM integration part of it), but MS then has an immediate suckup to RIAA/MPAA as well.
My work PC has a TNT2 M64. It runs Unreal Tournament just fine, thank you very much. My home has a Geforce2 MX, now that's what I call a fire-breather.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
We could say that, or we could say what I actually said, which was that the 3 (not 4) TI costs 2.5x the cost of the 2MX now, so if he buys it when it's dropped to the price of the 2MX, he saves money. We could also look at the fact that if he does it my way, he gets a spare and very usable 2MX to re-use. Further, we could understand the proposition that he can't see the jillion fps now. It's utterly irrelevant.
Just a thought.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I never really thought of John Carmac as being a bad coder, thanks for the info. That quake 3 engine must really suck. I guess the developers at Raven are just plum stupid and got suckered like tons of other game developers.
Your're missing the point, Mr. Sarcastic. The Quake 3 engine is just the core rendering (and networking) engine. You can make it fast or slow depending on what you do with it. And, as no one outside of the game industry ever seems to realize, 90% of the code in a game has nothing to do with rendering.
Why did you get him such a fast processor? Is he likely to use it? You should have bought an Athlon XP 1500+. It'll run cooler and the video card you chose for him is going to be the bottle-neck in all 3D games he's going to play. The architechture/manufacturing process a CPU is based on is much more important than the clock.
In fact you could have just bought a fast Duron and opted to buy a Thoroughbred (0.13 micron process) when they come out (presuming they will be compatible with your motherboard's regulators and bus clock).
Tseng right? Sure it's not accelerated at all?
I had one too. Doesn't the ISA bus max out at something in the order of tens of MB/s (16 or 8?)and thus isn't it poor for 3D games at VGA/SVGA resolutions? Especially if it's sharing that bus! I found it was nice for most stuff but seemed to limit Doom (and other 3D FPS) frame-rates just slightly.