Actually, with the transistor counts on the GPU these days, I like to think of the CPU as the co-processor. (I'm actually half-ways serious. My company does far more raw computation on the GPU than on the CPU.)
You're the ignorant one. Movie rendering has been done on the CPU forever. This for the first time is doing final movie rendering on the GPU.
This is definitely something new on the market. Point me to another product that does final movie rendering with hardware acceleration provided by the GPU, and I'll eat my hat.
I imagine its still incredibly more profitable to use a CPU than GPU.
Why? Because it's faster? Bzzzt. That's the whole point. Take a look at the transistor counts for the latest and greatest GPU, and then look at the transistor counts for the latest and greatest CPU. GPUs are clearly outpacing CPUs, and for tasks such as rendering, will soon be able to run circles around software renderers (if they're not doing it already.)
Time is money. If it turns out you can render the same frame in 95% of the time using this technology, you'd be an idiot to not buy a quadro. A 5% speed-up over a period of months-to-years adds up.
But for in-game recording...
This has absolutely nothing to do with in-game rendering, let alone in-game recording. This is an offline (read: not real-time) renderer, suitable for such things as rendering final frames of a movie, not in-game rendering in real time.
I wonder if PCI-Express...
Video cards have been capable of sending final renders back to the CPU for a really long time. PCI-Express just makes it faster.
Using programmable graphics hardware (possibly through OpenGL) for final rendering is not that far off. (Definitely not in real-time, but as a more cost-effective way to do it, anyway.) Especially with the massive parallelism of rendering, and the fact that GPUs are far outpacing CPUs in terms of their speed and transistor counts.
OpenGL is much more similar to micropolygon rendering (REYES) than it is to raytracing in the first place. The shaders are where you spend all of your time, anyway.
Heck, do you think nVIDIA bought ExLuna (Larry Gritz, author of BMRT, and former Pixar employee) just for the fun of it?
Software for translating from RenderMan Shading Language to Cg?
And what about RenderMonkey supporting RenderMan?
Do you even remember PixelFlow from Pixar? Do you see the name Marc Olano on that paper? The same Marc Olano who talks about rendering on consumer-level graphics hardware? These things have far more in common than you seem to realize.
While I know that you (Avihson) were trying to respond to the AC, it looks (to people viewing with Nesting, and a threshold of 1) as though you responded to this message from CrashPoint:
Kinda like how you can't hijack a plane with a boxknife?
With this response:
we can only hope for that day!
When actually, you were responding to this message from an AC:
Parent comment will be "insightful" when they start confiscating cell phones at security checkpoints.
With this message:
we can only hope for that day!
This is not your fault, Avihson.
I respectfully submit that the Slashdot Threshold system is broken, if it allows mis-interpretations like this. Perhaps Avihson's reply to an AC should not be displayed at all, to prohibit just this kind of "mistaken parenthood" for a post.
I so often hear that industry should be allowed to "self-regulate." It about makes me want to vomit. Replacing the word "industry" with "sociopaths" in that sentance highlights the repulsive nature of that view, in my eyes.
Also, thinking about it in these terms reinforces my opinion that laws to protect whistle-blowers needs to be greater and stronger. Re-watch The Insider, or Erin Brokovich.
If it's really true that Bill Gates has done that much financial harm to the world (granted, he's done more good than harm, but that doesn't excuse the harm he's done!), is his crime somehow less than that of someone who commits a minor crime and gets raped in prison?
If you want to cure prison rape, then that's great - cure prison rape. But don't expect any sympathy for the incredibly minor fraction of inmates who happen to be in for white-collar crime - they have (in my opinion) caused greater harm to the world than their blue-collar counterparts, in financial terms.
My Apple IIc and add-on's cost $2000 when I got it. And the PC I'm planning on buying for Half-Life 2 and Doom III will cost, you guessed it, $2000.
Now, sure, other appliances in your home may have more and more computing power, and they're certainly reaching more and more affordable prices. But the point is, people are willing to pay top dollar for the latest and greatest in computing horse-power. That's not going to change.
I think you remember the conversation we had recently at this art show in Brabant. You came up to me and told me how the Dogs Playing Poker stuff I was talking about was mostly useless, because it is mass-produced, people need to pay for it and that companies charging for art are evil anyways - especially DogsPlayingPokerCorp. Unfortunately, email hasn't been invented yet, but I am sure this will reach you.
First, I would like to thank you for the interesting conversation that developed and to make sure that none of what was said just fades away, I'll tell you here once again what I am thinking about what you do, what you think and - most importantly about your future.
When I was 21 - like you were at some point - I was also at university and was pursuing an art degree. Back then, I was very enthusiastic about art and creating stuff that mattered. And thought that I was the best artist the field has ever seen and everyone else was mostly worthless. And I did indeed paint some art that mattered and made a difference. The painting I spent 3 years drawing in pastels from when I was 18 was for my father's business. Because the business he's in requires a long time to do, his customers spent about 2-3 dialy hours on average sitting in a waiting room. When I was done with my painting and he put it in his waiting room, people started enjoying their time there. That was art that absolutely improved the wuality of life for all his customers! And his friends and colleagues loved it, too. I didn't make many prints of it at the time (I think I had 3 customers), but each one was worth 1500 German Marks and that was a huge heap of money for me. I mean - I was living at my parent's house, getting a monthly allowance of 120 German Marks and worked as an ink grip for a couple of printing presses every once in a while - maybe 2-3 times a month. And if I ever had 400 Marks per month I could really consider myself massively rich at the time and for my age, because I had very minimal additional expenses. So 4500 Marks on top of that? Fantastic. Where did the money go? I can't really remember where it all went, but I guess "lot of partying" or "Brahms, Bethoven, and Beauties" would be a reasonably good explanation. Hey, I was 21 and that's what one is supposed to do at that age, right?
That was in 1880 - let's fast forward to 1894 and you. All art that you and your father could possibly be interested in has already been painted. That's probably not true, but it's hard to think of something, right? Ok, the art may not be as pretty as you like and may cost money, but what you can immediately think of is likely there. So where do you put all your energy? Into this absolutely amazing art you paint. I mean, really, the stuff that you are doing there is truly impressive. There are a couple of things I'd probably do differently in terms of design and composition, but it looks nice and that's mostly what matters. And you do make an impact as well. I know that one person has bought one of your paintings. That's great.
However, I start to wonder where your benefit is. You are - out of principle - not making much money out of this, because it is art for art's sake and you insist that it must be respected. So you are putting all of that time and energy into this painting for what? Fame? To found a career? Come on.
If someone buys your prints from an art gallery as part of a collection of paintings, they couldn't care less who you are. The whole fame thing you are telling me only works amongst painters. The good looking, intelligent girl over there at the bistro that you'd really like to talk to doesn't care much whether you are famous amongst a group of painters and neither does she even remotely fathom why you'd be famous for that stuff in the first place. I mean - get real here.
So once you get your degree from school, what's the plan?
Right now, your university education is free like in many places
I hope and pray that someone realizes the potential of the DVD of the movie.
I want them to shoot video of all of the actors doing the voices, and have a "commentary track" on the DVD, where you get to see a picture-in-picture window with the actors doing the voices.
What would you recommend to someone curious about starting on the 68HC11?
I'm thinking a "programming 68HC11 ASM" book, an emulator, cross-assembler, possibly a C cross-compiler, or C++ cross-compiler... libraries worth having... debugging system... visual emulator with register states... running under Windows...?
Essentially, have an infinite number of computers - and execute every 0-bit program (all 1 of them.) Then every 1-bit program (all 2 of them.) Then every 2-bit program (all 4 of them.) Etc. Eventually, you will have run every possible program - discounting timing, and hardware differences.
Also, if I'm not mistaken, this will find the shortest possible program that produces a given input.
In practice can you implement it? Not really. But it's an interesting theoretical argument - just like most of the CA stuff in the book...
Did anyone bother to read Joe Weiss's review on amazon? Best. Review. Ever. Posted here in its entirety:
The Emperor's New Kind of Clothes, February 28, 2003 by Joe Weiss
This review took almost one year. Unlike many previous referees (rank them by Amazon.com's "most helpful" feature) I read all 1197 pages including notes. Just to make sure I won't miss the odd novel insight hidden among a million trivial platitudes.
On page 27 Wolfram explains "probably the single most surprising discovery I have ever made:" a simple program can produce output that seems irregular and complex.
This has been known for six decades. Every computer science (CS) student knows the dovetailer, a very simple 2 line program that systematically lists and executes all possible programs for a universal computersuch as a Turing machine (TM). It computes all computable patterns, including all those in Wolfram's book, embodies the well-known limits of computability, and is basis of uncountable CS exercises.
Wolfram does know (page 1119) Minsky's very simple universal TMs from the 1960s. Using extensive simulations, he finds a slightly simpler one. New science? Small addition to old science. On page 675 we find a particularly simple cellular automaton (CA) and Matthew Cook's universality proof(?). This might be the most interesting chapter. It reflects that today's PCs are more powerful systematic searchers for simple rules than those of 40 years ago. No new paradigm though.
Was Wolfram at least first to view programs as potential explanations of everything? Nope. That was Zuse. Wolfram mentions him in exactly one line (page 1026): "Konrad Zuse suggested that [the universe] could be a continuous CA." This is totally misleading. Zuse's 1967 paper suggested the universe is DISCRETELY computable, possibly on a DISCRETE CA just like Wolfram's. Wolfram's causal networks (CA's with variable toplogy, chapter 9) will run on any universal CA a la Ulam & von Neumann & Conway & Zuse. Page 715 explains Wolfram's "key unifying idea" of the "principle of computational equivalence:" all processes can be viewed as computations. Well, that's exactly what Zuse wrote 3 decades ago.
Chapter 9 (2nd law of thermodynamics) elaborates (without reference)on Zuse's old insight that entropy cannot really increase in deterministically computed systems, although it often SEEMS to increase. Wolfram extends Zuse's work by a tiny margin, using today's more powerful computers to perform experiments as suggested in Zuse's 1969 book. I find it embarassing how Wolfram tries to suggest it was him who shifted a paradigm, not the legendary Zuse.
Some reviews cite Wolfram's previous reputation as a physicist and software entrepreneur, giving him the benefit of the doubt instead of immediately dismissing him as just another plagiator. Zuse's reputation is in a different league though: He built world's very first general purpose computers (1935-1941), while Wolfram is just one of many creators of useful software (Mathematica). Remarkably, in his history of computing (page 1107) Wolfram appears to try to diminuish Zuse's contributions by only mentioning Aiken's later 1944 machine.
On page 465 ff (and 505 ff on multiway systems) Wolfram asks whether there is a simple program that computes the universe. Here he sounds like Schmidhuber in his 1997 paper "A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe, and Everything." Schmidhuber applied the above-mentioned simple dovetailer to all computable universes. His widely known writings come out on top when you google for "computable universes" etc, so Wolfram must have known them too, for he read an "immense number of articles books and web sites" (page xii) and executed "more than a hundred thousand mouse miles" (page xiv). He endorses Schmidhuber's "no-CA-but-TM approach" (page 486, no reference) but not his suggestion of using Levin's asymptotically optimal program searcher (1973) to find our universe's code.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, with the transistor counts on the GPU these days, I like to think of the CPU as the co-processor. (I'm actually half-ways serious. My company does far more raw computation on the GPU than on the CPU.)
RTFA.
You're the ignorant one. Movie rendering has been done on the CPU forever. This for the first time is doing final movie rendering on the GPU.
This is definitely something new on the market. Point me to another product that does final movie rendering with hardware acceleration provided by the GPU, and I'll eat my hat.
I imagine its still incredibly more profitable to use a CPU than GPU.
Why? Because it's faster? Bzzzt. That's the whole point. Take a look at the transistor counts for the latest and greatest GPU, and then look at the transistor counts for the latest and greatest CPU. GPUs are clearly outpacing CPUs, and for tasks such as rendering, will soon be able to run circles around software renderers (if they're not doing it already.)
Time is money. If it turns out you can render the same frame in 95% of the time using this technology, you'd be an idiot to not buy a quadro. A 5% speed-up over a period of months-to-years adds up.
But for in-game recording...
This has absolutely nothing to do with in-game rendering, let alone in-game recording. This is an offline (read: not real-time) renderer, suitable for such things as rendering final frames of a movie, not in-game rendering in real time.
I wonder if PCI-Express...
Video cards have been capable of sending final renders back to the CPU for a really long time. PCI-Express just makes it faster.
What do you mean there's no link? RTFA.
www.greatamericannovel.com
Peercy and Olano (Click on "PDF" in the upper right)
Presentation
ASHLI
GPGPU
More than Moore's Law
Moore's law : still for wimps
Using programmable graphics hardware (possibly through OpenGL) for final rendering is not that far off. (Definitely not in real-time, but as a more cost-effective way to do it, anyway.) Especially with the massive parallelism of rendering, and the fact that GPUs are far outpacing CPUs in terms of their speed and transistor counts.
OpenGL is much more similar to micropolygon rendering (REYES) than it is to raytracing in the first place. The shaders are where you spend all of your time, anyway.
Heck, do you think nVIDIA bought ExLuna (Larry Gritz, author of BMRT, and former Pixar employee) just for the fun of it?
Software for translating from RenderMan Shading Language to Cg?
And what about RenderMonkey supporting RenderMan?
Do you even remember PixelFlow from Pixar? Do you see the name Marc Olano on that paper? The same Marc Olano who talks about rendering on consumer-level graphics hardware? These things have far more in common than you seem to realize.
The "workaround" is to browse at -1. I stand by my assertion that the Slashdot Threshold system is broken.
While I know that you (Avihson) were trying to respond to the AC, it looks (to people viewing with Nesting, and a threshold of 1) as though you responded to this message from CrashPoint:
Kinda like how you can't hijack a plane with a boxknife?
With this response:
we can only hope for that day!
When actually, you were responding to this message from an AC:
Parent comment will be "insightful" when they start confiscating cell phones at security checkpoints.
With this message:
we can only hope for that day!
This is not your fault, Avihson.
I respectfully submit that the Slashdot Threshold system is broken, if it allows mis-interpretations like this. Perhaps Avihson's reply to an AC should not be displayed at all, to prohibit just this kind of "mistaken parenthood" for a post.
Well stated.
I so often hear that industry should be allowed to "self-regulate." It about makes me want to vomit. Replacing the word "industry" with "sociopaths" in that sentance highlights the repulsive nature of that view, in my eyes.
Also, thinking about it in these terms reinforces my opinion that laws to protect whistle-blowers needs to be greater and stronger. Re-watch The Insider, or Erin Brokovich.
If it's really true that Bill Gates has done that much financial harm to the world (granted, he's done more good than harm, but that doesn't excuse the harm he's done!), is his crime somehow less than that of someone who commits a minor crime and gets raped in prison?
If you want to cure prison rape, then that's great - cure prison rape. But don't expect any sympathy for the incredibly minor fraction of inmates who happen to be in for white-collar crime - they have (in my opinion) caused greater harm to the world than their blue-collar counterparts, in financial terms.
PCs don't cost less over time.
My Apple IIc and add-on's cost $2000 when I got it. And the PC I'm planning on buying for Half-Life 2 and Doom III will cost, you guessed it, $2000.
Now, sure, other appliances in your home may have more and more computing power, and they're certainly reaching more and more affordable prices. But the point is, people are willing to pay top dollar for the latest and greatest in computing horse-power. That's not going to change.
Didn't I read somewhere that it was going to $99 by Labor Day? Or was that just an ugly rumor, and this is the only price drop I can really expect?
Nope, I'm not nuts - this was the rumor.
(With tongue firmly in cheek...)
Dear Vincent Van Gogh,
I think you remember the conversation we had recently at this art show in Brabant. You came up to me and told me how the Dogs Playing Poker stuff I was talking about was mostly useless, because it is mass-produced, people need to pay for it and that companies charging for art are evil anyways - especially DogsPlayingPokerCorp. Unfortunately, email hasn't been invented yet, but I am sure this will reach you.
First, I would like to thank you for the interesting conversation that developed and to make sure that none of what was said just fades away, I'll tell you here once again what I am thinking about what you do, what you think and - most importantly about your future.
When I was 21 - like you were at some point - I was also at university and was pursuing an art degree. Back then, I was very enthusiastic about art and creating stuff that mattered. And thought that I was the best artist the field has ever seen and everyone else was mostly worthless. And I did indeed paint some art that mattered and made a difference. The painting I spent 3 years drawing in pastels from when I was 18 was for my father's business. Because the business he's in requires a long time to do, his customers spent about 2-3 dialy hours on average sitting in a waiting room. When I was done with my painting and he put it in his waiting room, people started enjoying their time there. That was art that absolutely improved the wuality of life for all his customers! And his friends and colleagues loved it, too. I didn't make many prints of it at the time (I think I had 3 customers), but each one was worth 1500 German Marks and that was a huge heap of money for me. I mean - I was living at my parent's house, getting a monthly allowance of 120 German Marks and worked as an ink grip for a couple of printing presses every once in a while - maybe 2-3 times a month. And if I ever had 400 Marks per month I could really consider myself massively rich at the time and for my age, because I had very minimal additional expenses. So 4500 Marks on top of that? Fantastic. Where did the money go? I can't really remember where it all went, but I guess "lot of partying" or "Brahms, Bethoven, and Beauties" would be a reasonably good explanation. Hey, I was 21 and that's what one is supposed to do at that age, right?
That was in 1880 - let's fast forward to 1894 and you. All art that you and your father could possibly be interested in has already been painted. That's probably not true, but it's hard to think of something, right? Ok, the art may not be as pretty as you like and may cost money, but what you can immediately think of is likely there. So where do you put all your energy? Into this absolutely amazing art you paint. I mean, really, the stuff that you are doing there is truly impressive. There are a couple of things I'd probably do differently in terms of design and composition, but it looks nice and that's mostly what matters. And you do make an impact as well. I know that one person has bought one of your paintings. That's great.
However, I start to wonder where your benefit is. You are - out of principle - not making much money out of this, because it is art for art's sake and you insist that it must be respected. So you are putting all of that time and energy into this painting for what? Fame? To found a career? Come on.
If someone buys your prints from an art gallery as part of a collection of paintings, they couldn't care less who you are. The whole fame thing you are telling me only works amongst painters. The good looking, intelligent girl over there at the bistro that you'd really like to talk to doesn't care much whether you are famous amongst a group of painters and neither does she even remotely fathom why you'd be famous for that stuff in the first place. I mean - get real here.
So once you get your degree from school, what's the plan?
Right now, your university education is free like in many places
Meet the Feebles.
I hope and pray that someone realizes the potential of the DVD of the movie.
I want them to shoot video of all of the actors doing the voices, and have a "commentary track" on the DVD, where you get to see a picture-in-picture window with the actors doing the voices.
Plus, I hope they swear like crazy. =)
As Bart would say, "The ironing is delicious!"
Thank you. I was going to post the same thing.
Yeah, but we'll complain about it in top Comic Book Guy form!
Worst. Special Editions. Ever.
I only bought four copies.
Feh.
If you're going to fix ANYTHING in the trilogy, fix Ben's lightsaber, in his duel with Vader!
And they didn't fix that!!! Argh!
I'm replying to this posting in an effort to draw more attention to it.
PLEASE sign this petition, if you want the original versions of the trilogy to make it to DVD.
I would love a cleaned-up print, but I would hate to have to watch Greedo shooting first for the rest of my life.
What would you recommend to someone curious about starting on the 68HC11?
I'm thinking a "programming 68HC11 ASM" book, an emulator, cross-assembler, possibly a C cross-compiler, or C++ cross-compiler... libraries worth having... debugging system... visual emulator with register states... running under Windows...?
Any suggestions?
I didn't write the original article - I just posted it... But this exact thing hung me up, too.
These were the best articles that I found:
universes
And especially this email:
dovetailer
Essentially, have an infinite number of computers - and execute every 0-bit program (all 1 of them.) Then every 1-bit program (all 2 of them.) Then every 2-bit program (all 4 of them.) Etc. Eventually, you will have run every possible program - discounting timing, and hardware differences.
Also, if I'm not mistaken, this will find the shortest possible program that produces a given input.
In practice can you implement it? Not really. But it's an interesting theoretical argument - just like most of the CA stuff in the book...
Did anyone bother to read Joe Weiss's review on amazon? Best. Review. Ever. Posted here in its entirety:
The Emperor's New Kind of Clothes, February 28, 2003 by Joe Weiss
This review took almost one year. Unlike many previous referees (rank them by Amazon.com's "most helpful" feature) I read all 1197 pages including notes. Just to make sure I won't miss the odd novel insight hidden among a million trivial platitudes.
On page 27 Wolfram explains "probably the single most surprising discovery I have ever made:" a simple program can produce output that seems irregular and complex.
This has been known for six decades. Every computer science (CS) student knows the dovetailer, a very simple 2 line program that systematically lists and executes all possible programs for a universal computersuch as a Turing machine (TM). It computes all computable patterns, including all those in Wolfram's book, embodies the well-known limits of computability, and is basis of uncountable CS exercises.
Wolfram does know (page 1119) Minsky's very simple universal TMs from the 1960s. Using extensive simulations, he finds a slightly simpler one. New science? Small addition to old science. On page 675 we find a particularly simple cellular automaton (CA) and Matthew Cook's universality proof(?). This might be the most interesting chapter. It reflects that today's PCs are more powerful systematic searchers for simple rules than those of 40 years ago. No new paradigm though.
Was Wolfram at least first to view programs as potential explanations of everything? Nope. That was Zuse. Wolfram mentions him in exactly one line (page 1026): "Konrad Zuse suggested that [the universe] could be a continuous CA." This is totally misleading. Zuse's 1967 paper suggested the universe is DISCRETELY computable, possibly on a DISCRETE CA just like Wolfram's. Wolfram's causal networks (CA's with variable toplogy, chapter 9) will run on any universal CA a la Ulam & von Neumann & Conway & Zuse. Page 715 explains Wolfram's "key unifying idea" of the "principle of computational equivalence:" all processes can be viewed as computations. Well, that's exactly what Zuse wrote 3 decades ago.
Chapter 9 (2nd law of thermodynamics) elaborates (without reference)on Zuse's old insight that entropy cannot really increase in deterministically computed systems, although it often SEEMS to increase. Wolfram extends Zuse's work by a tiny margin, using today's more powerful computers to perform experiments as suggested in Zuse's 1969 book. I find it embarassing how Wolfram tries to suggest it was him who shifted a paradigm, not the legendary Zuse.
Some reviews cite Wolfram's previous reputation as a physicist and software entrepreneur, giving him the benefit of the doubt instead of immediately dismissing him as just another plagiator. Zuse's reputation is in a different league though: He built world's very first general purpose computers (1935-1941), while Wolfram is just one of many creators of useful software (Mathematica). Remarkably, in his history of computing (page 1107) Wolfram appears to try to diminuish Zuse's contributions by only mentioning Aiken's later 1944 machine.
On page 465 ff (and 505 ff on multiway systems) Wolfram asks whether there is a simple program that computes the universe. Here he sounds like Schmidhuber in his 1997 paper "A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe, and Everything." Schmidhuber applied the above-mentioned simple dovetailer to all computable universes. His widely known writings come out on top when you google for "computable universes" etc, so Wolfram must have known them too, for he read an "immense number of articles books and web sites" (page xii) and executed "more than a hundred thousand mouse miles" (page xiv). He endorses Schmidhuber's "no-CA-but-TM approach" (page 486, no reference) but not his suggestion of using Levin's asymptotically optimal program searcher (1973) to find our universe's code.
On page 469 we are told that the simp
No - doubles are just as lousy, in the long run.
Use Int64s.
$92,233,720,368,547,758.07 to -$92,233,720,368,547,758.08 should be enough range for most folks. Most governments, too.
...and now Deep Thoughts By Jack Handy:
I think that whether or not we find life there, we should declare Mars an enemy planet.
Crime? Hunger? Even longevity is beneficially affected by education.
You forgot to mention drug use (including alcohol and cigarettes), teen pregnancy, depression, abuse, run-aways, and suicide.
Education is the silver bullet.
They should assign the patent to the FSF.
Or we should put together a campaign to buy it from them.