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Dreadnought Demos Released
John Callaham writes to tell us that Gamecloud is heralding the latest release from Torc Interactive and AMD. The latest demos for the upcoming FPS, Dreadnought, have been released. The first is strictly a gameplay movie while the other gives a comparison between the game running on a 64 bit processor (which it was ultimately designed for) and a 32 bit processor.
So what's new here? Another engine, another game with slick graphics but the SAME OLD story line.
Compare this: 32-bit image vs. 64-bit image.
Seriously, this looks like a pile of BS. Unless it was running on full CPU (which is stupid and not sensible for real-world situations), the differences between those screenshots should be handled almost entirely on the GPU. The difference between 32 and 64 bit shouldn't really affect a lighting effect like that. As for the texture resolution, that's pretty much memory bound...
(Not to mention that the graphics in these screenshots are not "advanced" by today's standards. It's pretty ugly.)
yeah, it feels like the 32bit version is just intentionally crappier than the 64 bit one.
that's fucking bad marketing, I'm not about to install winxp64bit just to get better graphics from a game that intentionally looks ugly on 32 bit - I'm just going to skip the whole game.
shame on you amd and torc.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
All of what they say pretty much pertains only to the graphics card's capabilities.
No compression for textures? Cards with 512MB are the hot things now, and there's not really a good use for it. With 32 bit addressing, we can address 4GB of memory. That's what? 8 times what's currently available on anything less than a ginormous SGI simulation center? Yeah. 64 bit doesn't help us there, not even in the long term.
There's not a graphics card alive that's going to need 64 bit addressing to render literally billions of particles, and there won't be for at least 10 years, barring some extreme advances, or the use of alien technology (teehee). Same with decals, even if you "only" had memory to store the location of 512 million of 'em, there's no way the system will handle displaying even a few thousand all at once.
Glows? Unless they need 64 precision math done on the CPU (which they don't), yeah, non-issue. Consumer GPUs are limited to what? 24 bit plus alpha? Same for pixel shaders, this has nothing to do with the CPU in almost all instances.
So yeah, for games, as with most general purpose computing, this is pretty much useless. What's really sad is that they've rallied around arguments for their 64 bit push that are essentially limited by the decidedly non-64 bit GPU. Brilliant.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
I don't follow. Quake 3 was not its own OS and still had to rely on Windows (or Linux) to provide resource allocation and management.
The example you're looking for is pretty much ANY complex game ~95/96 which still required you to launch it off a special dos bootdisk. It was these games that had their own video drivers, their own sound drivers, their own protected mode kernel, their own task management, their own memory allocation routines, etc. An older example of this phenomenon is Doom (the original one).
The Admiral Ushakov is an old Soviet Kirov class nuclear missile cruiser which disappeared in the Barents sea 4 years ago and was believed lost at sea with all hands. It reappeared off the coast of Iceland recently and is believed to have fallen into terrorist hands and is being used to carry out bio-weapon research.
1) Fer crying out loud. A "dreadnought" used to mean a kick-ass battleship, not some whiny little cruiser.
2) If we can't find one fucking cruiser for 4 years with the satellites we have now, China deserves to kick our ass. (Or, just look it up on Google Earth.)
3) OK, if a cruiser DID fall into terrorist hands and is parked out in the middle of nowhere: send a sub, sink the boat and move on to the next problem. (Unless you've seen one too many Steven Seagal movie, I guess...)
4) Enough, already, my brain hurts!
First of all, I don't see how this belongs on the front page at all; perhaps in the Games section, but not on the front page. It's just a technology demo put out by some company working on some game engine. Maybe if it was the next Half-Life, Doom, or Quake engine, but not some no-name game.
Secondly, it is a big fat load of bullshit. Others have pointed out the obvious.
Thirdly, why the fuck is AMD teaming with these people? Hmm. If you were betting your company on the jump to 64-bit, what would you be willing to do to improve your presence? Perhaps team up with somebody who intentionally cripples a 32-bit application in order to show how awesome your 64-bit products are? No, that could never happen. AMD can do no evil!