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Dreadnought Demos Released

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the shiny-bits-of-distraction dept.

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.

6 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Simple by detritus` · · Score: 5, Funny

    If it weren't for video games then what other reason would we have to continue to build faster computers?

    one word: porn

    --
    drunk chemists
    1. Re:Simple by iibagod · · Score: 5, Funny

      Thats just faster download speeds and bigger hard drives. My PIII plays all the porn I have.......uh, I mean... I IMAGINE my PIII would play any porn somebody MIGHT want to download.

  2. Re:64 bit _Really_ necessary? by Suddenly_Dead · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.)

  3. 64 bit... Uhuh... by modecx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. Re:AMD64 by tji · · Score: 5, Interesting

    HD video.

    MPEG2 is tough on a CPU, but within the capabilities of current processors.

    AVC / H.264 / MPEG4.10 is much harder. Doing 1080p AVC is beyond the capabilities of most current processors, and is certainly not do-able with other stuff going on (e.g. a MythTV PVR, recording a couple HD streams simultaneously, transcoding another, while viewing one.

    AVC, or future codecs, will require either much faster CPUs, hardware acceleration, or both.

  5. Re:AMD64 by parasonic · · Score: 5, Funny

    what other reason would we have to continue to build faster computers?

    Windows Vista