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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.
I agree, and not only that, but when you have three or four boxes running in a single room in the summer, the heat gets to be an issue as well. When your poor and hot, choosing between running A/C (and using a lot of electricity) and running the computers is a hard choice to make. Basically, the more power efficent, the better.
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!
A decent 250W one is enough for most typical PCs, that is, one or two hard-drives, one or two optical drives, and one or two fans on top of the internal PSU fan. PSU are one more thing where buying quality stuff pays out in the end...
When your AthlonXP 1800 eats 85W by itself, I wouldn't be in a hurry to test this. insufficient voltage can be bad for chips and expansion cards. However, I do agree with the high quality PSU sentiment.
Heh, A Powermac uses a 125W PSU. That's for TWO processors, an optical drive, zip drive, up to 4 HD's, two fans, tumbler digital audio amplifier, AND flat panel display. If there's one thing they've got down at Apple is low power consumption. I wish they'd look into rackspace applications, since in that market, their HW wouldn't be any more than PC counterparts.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
The higher wattage power supplies are of higher quality. Just because its rated for 300 watts, doesn't mean it uses any more than a 200 watt power supply when idle. In fact, the larger diameter copper windings and larger capacitors may increase its efficiency. Operating lifetime is improved, since power components are under less stress.
My computer has a 300 watt power supply and draws less than 40 watts (ok, its a 486, but...)
Well, apart from the underlying sentiment against commoditization that was mentioned in Tom's review of WinHEC that will impede the rollout of the next killer app, there are a few things that come to mind.
- Smaller, quieter PCs that don't make a SOHO look like a machine room. I've got a 60 lb monitor sitting on my desk next to a noisy midtower case. If I could replace it with an LCD at equivalent resolution and a Tranmeta like OQO driving it I'd pay for such an upgrade.
- Greater telephony integration. If I could plug phones, fax machines into RJ11 slots into the computer and use cheap easy software for voicemail, for automatically calling out, forwarding messages to my work number, etc.
- Wireless networking to conventional Consumer Electronic devices such as TVs, PVRs, FM stereo receivers, CD players, portable MP3 players, etc.
I know that with enough money and with specialized Knerdly Knowledge it is possible to build systems to do some of these things even today, but what's needed is for it to be cheap and convenient for the average Joe.It could be that way if all the major players weren't so worried about protecting their existing revenue streams - I suspect it will be necessary for new companies to provide these innovations. From the gist of the conference, you can tell that MS and the other attendees are not entirely unaware of what people would like to have.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I'm no John Carmack, but the reason higher than 24/32 bit color is important is that most 3D graphcis these days use multiple texture passes per polygon. So for one car model, say, you may have a base texture, a 'damage' texture, a bump map texture, an enviornmental mapping (ohhhh shiny!!!) texture, etc. When you composite all of those textures together using multiple passes or multi-texturing, colorspace errors that would normally be imperceptable tend to accumulate and you wind up with ugly artifacts like color banding.
You can buy a power meter if you want. Or you can use the power meter on the side of your house. Most power meters have a spinning wheel that turns X number of times per unit of energy. The rating should be listed on the power meter.
This is what you do: turn off all the PCs for just a few minutes. Useing a stop watch count the number of revolutions in a minute (or ten seconds, or whatever). Do the math and you will be able to get you baseline power consumtion. It is best to do this with as much as possible turned off. Now turn just the PCs on. Count the number of revolutions, do the math and you have your total power. Subtract your baseline power consumption and you have just the PC power consumption.
I have done this myself and compared the results with a decent power meter. I was only off by 10%.
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.