The Matrox's 10 bit framebuffer & DACs will be great for previewing deep-colour images, e.g. in film work and some broadcast. It's not the first (SGI do 12 bit, Sun's new card does 10 bit, so does the newly-announced P10 from 3Dlabs). But it's not a solution for professional video output.
As someone else pointed out, 10 bits of RGB does not equate to 10 bits of YUV. The Parhelia will give great 10 bit RGB previews (completely independant of output quality), and will even output a 10 bit YUV video signal - but only via S-Video, where the two colour signals get encoded together anyway. You need 10 bit component output, or 10 bit SDI, neither of which can be done by the Parhelia. It's more aimed at the 10 bit DVD market than a professional output solution.
The two-bit alpha limitation is largely irrelevant. For display on a monitor, RGB is all you need. Processing of deep-colour images should be done with at least 16 bits per component (including alpha) in memory for best results, then dithered down to 10 bit RGB for display. Key channel output requires a second video connector, so it won't do that at all.
That tired old line again? As with everyone else who trots this one out, you're ignoring a number of things:
- First off, Q3A is used as THE single standard metric to see how a card will perform under a common load. It's a very good way to judge the raw speed of a card overall, and often provides good pointers as to overall performance in fancier modes or other games, but it certainly doesn't mean every game you play will be 100+ fps.
- Second, that figure is an AVERAGE. When actually gaming, the average framerate is not the issue - the MINIMUM framerate is the killer. 60 fps average is fine, but when the framerate drops to 10-15 fps in a heavy firefight, you're in trouble. A higher average framerate usually translates to a higher minimum as well. In fact, many sites have taken to quoting minimums as well, or even showing a complete framerate graph.
- Third, the ability to manage 100 fps at e.g. 1024x768 means only around 40 fps at 1600x1200, if your monitor extends that far, or perhaps only 30 fps at 1024x768 with 4x AA if it doesn't. Your card will need to score 200 fps if you want to improve your resolution/AA, or maybe even 300 fps if you want to do that and still keep your minimum fps above 60.
- Fourth, the same argument applies to other quality improvements like trilinear and anisotropic filtering. Taking 32 texture samples instead of 4 can really kill your framerate, so you better hope you're getting enormous framerates with non-anisotropic filtering if you hope to get acceptable speed with anisotropic filtering enabled.
- Fifth, Q3A is not the only game out there. There are a lot of more demanding games available today, even those based on the Q3A engine like RtCW, that will give you much lower framerates.
Combining two or more of the above factors can bring the fastest graphics card to its knees, even if it scores 200 fps in Q3A. We'll have to wait until we see scores of 300 or 400 before we can expect to play Jedi Knight II at 1600x1200 with 9x AA and 16-sample anisotropic filtering, while never dropping below at least 30 fps. But boy, will it look good when we can:-)
Ideally, a review will give individual scores for all the above - high resolution, AA, anisotropic filtering, a range of modern games, and all combinations of the above. But since this would entail a vast amount of testing and a huge array of numbers, most reviews settle for a few known tests that are indicative of performance in other tests. And the most popular of those is good old Q3A.
This thing looks great on paper - depth-adpative displacement mapping, and enough vertex shaders to deal with the resulting critical mass of triangles. Quad texturing on each of four pipes, and the requisite 256 bit DDR memory bus to keep it fed. And all running at 350 MHz... sounds like a monster - but there's a couple of significant gotchas raised by the Digit-Life translation.
First, that massive 20 GB/s of bandwidth is going to be needed, every bit of it. There is no bandwidth-saving logic on the chip at all, unlike ATI & nVidia's latest. Since occlusion detection can make a significant difference, and Z compression & fast Z clear also help a great deal (ATI claims their 8.8 GB/s performs like a 12+ GB/s system, a 36% boost), the Parhelia could be considered to have only 55% more bandwidth than a GF4 Ti4600 instead of 110%. If the next-gen offerings from ATI & nVidia have similar memory specs, the Parhelia could be at a significant disadvantage almost as soon as it comes out.
Second, the Digit-Life article mentions that early scores (from very raw drivers) show a mere 20-30% increase in scores over a Ti4600. Now admittedly this should increase, but Matrox are not known for their 3D driver optimisations, and nVidia are. A unified driver architecture will give you a head start right out of the gate, as you can take some advantage of previous optimisations immediately, whereas Matrox will have more work in front of them to get their drivers performing near the potential of the hardware. Look at ATI; it took them 6 months of focussed effort (and the odd quality hack along the way) to get their drivers up to scratch. Matrox have not traditionally given their 3D side or their software side as much attention, in my experience.
To me, while the triple-head feature could be useful to some (though I dislike external DACs - it's difficult to sync them closely to internal DACs, causing monitor beats), the 10 bit colour is to be applauded, and the vertex handling sounds very nice, anyone looking for performance would be better advised to wait for R300 and NV30.
On a slightly different note, was anyone else disappointed by the quality of the 16x AA screenshots? I expected more. The edge-only AA feature sounds like a very good idea (though it will not help alpha textures, just like multisampled implementations), but I'm a bit jaded after the miracles promised by ATI's SmoothVision didn't exactly set the world on fire. Guess we'll have to wait for performance figures.
Also, I wonder what their yields will be like. 80 million transistors on a 0.15 micron process sounds like something that's difficult to do cheaply.
With 2 PCI ATI or GF4MX cards, you can get 2, 3 or 4 monitor support. Cheaper/faster and quite likely better 3D drivers than Matrox, based on past experience.
How exactly can you write a screenshot to disk, causing the system to stutter, and then capture the screenshot while it's stuttering? Doesn't that violate causality?
Most software I've heard of actually obtains the data before saving it to disk...
CORUSCANT -- Presiding over a memorial service commemorating the victims of the attack on the Death Star, the Emperor declared that while recent
victories over the Rebel Alliance were "encouraging, the War on Terror is not over yet."
"We will continue to fight these terrorists, and the rogue governments who harbor them, until the universe is safe, once and for all, and the security of the Neo-New Cosmik Order ensured."
It was one year ago today that the Death Star, perhaps the greatest symbol of the Empire's might, was destroyed in an attack by fanatic Rebels, who used small, single-person crafts to infiltrate seemingly impenetrable
defenses. Thousands of mourners were on hand to remember and pay tribute to the victims and their families.
"We lost our innocence that day," reflected one mourner. "I guess we thought we were immune from the kind of violence that happens in other galaxies. We were wrong." "I lost hundreds of buddies that day," said one teary-eyed
Stormtrooper. "Guys whose only crime was trying make the Universe a safer place."
Although the day was colored by sadness, the mourners found some relief in the news of a decisive victory over the Rebels. In an attack led by Darth Vader, Empire forces were able to rout hundreds of Rebels from a network of
caves underneath the surface of the planet Hoth. "We're not sure we got them all," says a Vader spokesman. "There are a lot of places to hide in those caves. But we've delivered a powerful blow to the terrorist's
infrastructure, that's for sure. Today, the Empire has struck back."
Initial reports are unclear as to the fate of Luke Skywalker, a hero among the Rebels, who is rumored to have delivered the fatal blow to the Death Star. Skywalker, a former desert-dweller from the planet Tattooine, became a part of the Rebellion after family members were killed. Skywalker was trained by a militant wing of the Rebels, known as "Jedi Knights." Fanatical
in their religious beliefs, the Jedi Knights claim to derive their power from the mystical "Force."
It's believed that Skywalker was specifically trained by infamous terrorist O bin Wankanobi. Wankanobi, occasionally called "Ben" and easily recognized by his bearded visage and long, flowing robes, achieved near-martyr status
among the Rebels after his death last year during a spy mission. His more fervent followers believe that Wan Kenobi lives on within them today, some
even claiming to hear his voice during times of duress.
The attack on the Death Star came shortly after the Empire's destruction of Alderstaan, a planet whose government was known to harbor terrorists.
Responding to criticism over the total annihilation of the planet, Vader stated, "There is no middle ground in the War on Terror. Those who harbor terrorists are terrorists themselves. Alderaan was issued ample warning. The fight for continuing Freedom is often burdened by terrible cost."
The cost of this war can still be seen today in the continuing efforts to build a coalition government on Tattooine. Longstanding animosities among the planets various ethnic groups, including the Jawas, Tusken Raiders and scattered human settlers, have been an impediment to the peace process. The Empire continues to maintain a small peace keeping force until a provisional
government is finally in place.
Much of the difficulty in fighting the Rebel forces stems from their lack of a central organizing structure. "They don't play by the traditional rules of war," complained one spokesman. "They come in all shapes and sizes, united only by their single-minded desire to destroy the Empire before it destroys
them."
The Emperor closed his comments today by stating that "the cowardly attack on the Death Star left a deep scar on the Empire. However, we will not stop fighting until every last evildoer has been brought to justice." He paused for several moments, wiping away a tear and then added with determination, "We will never forget."
"I wish we could all just get along," said one of the mourners. "But it's hard to offer an olive branch to a cult of religious fanatics whose main
tool is violence and who insist on calling us the Dark Side."
(OK, it's old. So sue me.)
I do software for film visual effects, and when you're dealing with dozens of layers of footage that's 250 MB PER FRAME, you need all the CPU power you can get, trust me. I have customers with 100-CPU render farms, and those farms do not sit idle. There is still an ever-growing need for high-powered machines, even if it's not in your house.
Every time I hear a comment like this, I think of an article I read in 1980, from a columnist who grumbled that the new-fangled 16 bit CPUs were just too fast - his 8-bit CPU was quite enough to run WordStar and 1-2-3, thank you very much. I wonder if he still thinks the same.
I run XP and an 8500DV. I have my share of complaints about the software & drivers, but now that I've found a config that's merely annoying instead of hopelessly broken (with the aid of a software update and a lot of workarounds), I can say that most things do work, some of them quite well.
However, there's still some plain stupid things that remain broken, like the massive memory leak(100s of MBs) when ffwding through their own.vcr files, or how it's unable to remember the Custom capture setting if you happen to choose one of the.vcr format settings, or the random crashes on scheduled recordings, to pick three out of dozens.
I reported all of these issues and many more in the MMC 7.5 software, months ago. I offered my help in reproducing them & tracking them down. I got no followup, and surprise surprise, they're all still broken in the recent MMC 7.6 update.
The hardware is definitely done well, quality is great, and I'm usually willing to give software a chance to mature, but seeing these kinds of major bugs persisting in software through that many revisions, I've lost a lot of faith.
Yeah, but just you try using it. I have one, and I find it frustrating as hell - the mousepad isn't pressure sensitive, so it's very hard to maneouvre accurately. Not to mention its "programmable" buttons can only be programmed to do useless things.
Go buy a MouseRemote from X10 (yeah yeah, just do it), and get the MaX10 software. So much nicer to use, far more flexible, and it's a regular pre-programmed universal IR remote & X10 gadget controller too:-)
If you're willing to spend the money to get the speed, the nVidia Quadro4 900XGL is the current SPECviewperf recordholder, supports two displays (2048x1536 each, better than the XVR's dual 1280x1024), and costs well under half the XVR-1000. It also supports stereo viewing and a programmable vertex & pixel pipeline.
True, its DACs are 24 bits instead of 30 bits (SGI workstations are still the go there, with 36 bit RGB DACs), but the NV30 may change that. It also does multisampled anti-aliasing (currently 9-tap 4-sample, though older drivers did offer a 16-sample mode too).
As for raw compute performance, if you believe Sun's SPEC ratings from their product site, a 1.05GHz SPARC CPU is only just lagging behind an Intel 2.2GHz PIV on integer performance and beating it on FP.
Where do they claim that? According to the SPECcpu website, a 1.05 GHz SPARC III Cu gets 537 base SPECint and 701 SPECfp, while a 2.2 GHz P4 easily beats it with 790 SPECint and 779 SPECfp.
Intel is way ahead in integer, and although the Sun catches up somewhat in FP, if you look at the individual results, it's entirely due to one massive spike on the art test. They recently figured out a (controversial) compiler trick that gave them nearly an order of magnitude increase on that one SPECfp test, and doubled their overall SPECfp score. Sun are known for their stability & scalability, but not their CPU speed.
Of course, if you have 106 of the things, that's different. But you'll be paying over US$4M for it, which isn't exactly workstation class anymore.
It's not "Beta vs. VHS" all over again. The difference this time is that discs produced by each standard are readable by the other standard.
The only format issue between the two is the media they can burn to. Presuming that the new +R-capable drives are at least as compatible as -R, the differences come down to price, speed & features.
So far, -R drives are cheaper, and +R drives (when they arrive in April) are faster & more flexible to work with. Take your pick.
Ah yes - that would be one of the "almost a dozen DVD-Video players" that will accept DVD-RAM 2.0 discs?:-)
I looked up DVD-RAM on their website. Seems that DVD-RAM 2.0 discs (not the 1.0 cartridges of course) can actually be read by an extremely limited subset of players & DVD-ROM drives (most of which I assume are made by Panasonic).
So, not totally incompatible, but pretty darn close.
Since no-one's used +R yet, how can you know that it plays the same as -RW?
+RW and -RW have the same compatibility issues because they both have different reflectivity to normal pressed single-layer discs. +R and -R both have similar reflectivity to single-layer discs, so both should have similar compatibility. In fact, +R should have slightly better compatibility because its lossless linking produces discs more like pressed discs than -R, which corrupts a 2k sector whenever it restarts burning.
Perhaps I should have said "flexible erasing". DVD+RW allows you to add video to a DVD-Video-compatible disc. DVD-RW requires you to erase the entire disc first. That's what I mean by "more flexible".
"Background formatting" means a new +RW disc is formatted in the background to make it suitable for dragging & dropping files to it. I can insert a DVD+RW disc and immediately drop files on it - the formatting is interrupted, and continues when I'm finished. It's like it's not doing it all. With DVD-RW, you have to wait an hour until the disc is formatted before you can drag & drop files to it.
Next time, try reading up on what you're talking about. I'm not quoting from press releases, I'm quoting from reports by people who own the things - see www.dvdplusrw.com. You have no knowledge backing your assertions, and (wisely) refuse to even provide your identity.
Best of both worlds... here's the (German) link, or use the fish:
One of our highlights on the CeBIT 2002: We present you the prototypes of the first dualcompatible Sony of DVD recorder. The Clou: The device is compatibly with the again-recordable formats DVD+RW and DVD-RW. thus offers this high-quality conceived DVD Player of the Sony QS series a future-reliable solution. Further information receives you at our status on the CeBIT 2002!
You mean, if you want to find out who calls a DVD a DVD. It's a trademark issue on the DVD logo, nothing more.
The DVD Forum also claim that DVD-RAM cartridges are somehow DVDs, presumably because they've approved them as such & stamped their logo on them. That doesn't make them work on any of the vast majority of "DVD" players or drives out there. So do they have any more right to be described as "DVDs" than DVD+R/RW discs? Clearly, the DVD logo is not a badge of universal compatibility.
You want to split hairs, fine - I hereby swear never to call a DVD+RW disc a DVD-RW disc, which it isn't. But, since the word "DVD" isn't trademarked, and is almost universally used to describe discs that can be played in DVD-Video players, all but the most pedantic of people will happily describe DVD-Video, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R and DVD-RW discs as "DVDs".
Even if the DVD+ format wins out, there will still be quite a few people making disks down the road.
It's not that big a deal, actually. I've heard a lot of "Beta vs. VHS" talk, but since both formats are quite readable by each other's drives, all you have to worry about is availability (& perhaps price) of the media for writing.
Compatibility was a huge issue for me.
For drives bought today, sure. DVD-R is more compatible than DVD-RW or DVD+RW, since the rewritable formats have a different reflectivity which confuses older players into thinking the disc is dual layer.
However, since DVD+R/RW models were announced today by HP, available mid-April, and since DVD+R should be just as compatible as DVD-R (or perhaps more so, due to its lossless linking feature), that should no longer be an issue.
...companies promising DVD+R upgrades (HP included) have quietly removed this notice from their websites and their products.
Yeah, they did do this, and this did get a number of people upset. However, the word is that "HP will within the next week or so announce either a buy back or trade-up policy for existing 100i owners (they haven't decided which one at this point) to the next generation device (200i I assume) which is promised to have +R compatibility". So we'll see. From past experience, I personally held off purchasing until DVD+R writing was confirmed.
Best Buy had one on the shelf for $300 with an additional 10% off at the register.
Well, that's a good incentive, sure:-) I'm willing to pay a little extra for the faster burning speed, background formatting & more flexible rewriting of DVD+RWs, but not everyone needs that.
Seems DVD+R will be available (from HP at least) by mid-April. Now at last I might buy one:-)
Given all the other advantages that DVD+R/RW has (greater compatibility, more flexible recording, faster recording, background formatting, etc etc), Panasonic are going to have to drop the prices on the DVD-RW units even more to stay in the market, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone else pointed out, 10 bits of RGB does not equate to 10 bits of YUV. The Parhelia will give great 10 bit RGB previews (completely independant of output quality), and will even output a 10 bit YUV video signal - but only via S-Video, where the two colour signals get encoded together anyway. You need 10 bit component output, or 10 bit SDI, neither of which can be done by the Parhelia. It's more aimed at the 10 bit DVD market than a professional output solution.
The two-bit alpha limitation is largely irrelevant. For display on a monitor, RGB is all you need. Processing of deep-colour images should be done with at least 16 bits per component (including alpha) in memory for best results, then dithered down to 10 bit RGB for display. Key channel output requires a second video connector, so it won't do that at all.
- First off, Q3A is used as THE single standard metric to see how a card will perform under a common load. It's a very good way to judge the raw speed of a card overall, and often provides good pointers as to overall performance in fancier modes or other games, but it certainly doesn't mean every game you play will be 100+ fps.
- Second, that figure is an AVERAGE. When actually gaming, the average framerate is not the issue - the MINIMUM framerate is the killer. 60 fps average is fine, but when the framerate drops to 10-15 fps in a heavy firefight, you're in trouble. A higher average framerate usually translates to a higher minimum as well. In fact, many sites have taken to quoting minimums as well, or even showing a complete framerate graph.
- Third, the ability to manage 100 fps at e.g. 1024x768 means only around 40 fps at 1600x1200, if your monitor extends that far, or perhaps only 30 fps at 1024x768 with 4x AA if it doesn't. Your card will need to score 200 fps if you want to improve your resolution/AA, or maybe even 300 fps if you want to do that and still keep your minimum fps above 60.
- Fourth, the same argument applies to other quality improvements like trilinear and anisotropic filtering. Taking 32 texture samples instead of 4 can really kill your framerate, so you better hope you're getting enormous framerates with non-anisotropic filtering if you hope to get acceptable speed with anisotropic filtering enabled.
- Fifth, Q3A is not the only game out there. There are a lot of more demanding games available today, even those based on the Q3A engine like RtCW, that will give you much lower framerates.
Combining two or more of the above factors can bring the fastest graphics card to its knees, even if it scores 200 fps in Q3A. We'll have to wait until we see scores of 300 or 400 before we can expect to play Jedi Knight II at 1600x1200 with 9x AA and 16-sample anisotropic filtering, while never dropping below at least 30 fps. But boy, will it look good when we can :-)
Ideally, a review will give individual scores for all the above - high resolution, AA, anisotropic filtering, a range of modern games, and all combinations of the above. But since this would entail a vast amount of testing and a huge array of numbers, most reviews settle for a few known tests that are indicative of performance in other tests. And the most popular of those is good old Q3A.
80 million transistors - 350 MHz - 0.15 micron. Passively cooled? No chance. Think "dual-head air-conditioning" instead.
Environment-mapped bump-mapping, which Matrox first brought to consumer hardware with the G400, was actually invented by none other than BitBoys Oy.
First, that massive 20 GB/s of bandwidth is going to be needed, every bit of it. There is no bandwidth-saving logic on the chip at all, unlike ATI & nVidia's latest. Since occlusion detection can make a significant difference, and Z compression & fast Z clear also help a great deal (ATI claims their 8.8 GB/s performs like a 12+ GB/s system, a 36% boost), the Parhelia could be considered to have only 55% more bandwidth than a GF4 Ti4600 instead of 110%. If the next-gen offerings from ATI & nVidia have similar memory specs, the Parhelia could be at a significant disadvantage almost as soon as it comes out.
Second, the Digit-Life article mentions that early scores (from very raw drivers) show a mere 20-30% increase in scores over a Ti4600. Now admittedly this should increase, but Matrox are not known for their 3D driver optimisations, and nVidia are. A unified driver architecture will give you a head start right out of the gate, as you can take some advantage of previous optimisations immediately, whereas Matrox will have more work in front of them to get their drivers performing near the potential of the hardware. Look at ATI; it took them 6 months of focussed effort (and the odd quality hack along the way) to get their drivers up to scratch. Matrox have not traditionally given their 3D side or their software side as much attention, in my experience.
To me, while the triple-head feature could be useful to some (though I dislike external DACs - it's difficult to sync them closely to internal DACs, causing monitor beats), the 10 bit colour is to be applauded, and the vertex handling sounds very nice, anyone looking for performance would be better advised to wait for R300 and NV30.
On a slightly different note, was anyone else disappointed by the quality of the 16x AA screenshots? I expected more. The edge-only AA feature sounds like a very good idea (though it will not help alpha textures, just like multisampled implementations), but I'm a bit jaded after the miracles promised by ATI's SmoothVision didn't exactly set the world on fire. Guess we'll have to wait for performance figures.
Also, I wonder what their yields will be like. 80 million transistors on a 0.15 micron process sounds like something that's difficult to do cheaply.
Actually, forget the three-headed card - gimme the four-assed Mephisto Special card instead :-)
With 2 PCI ATI or GF4MX cards, you can get 2, 3 or 4 monitor support. Cheaper/faster and quite likely better 3D drivers than Matrox, based on past experience.
Most software I've heard of actually obtains the data before saving it to disk...
"We will continue to fight these terrorists, and the rogue governments who harbor them, until the universe is safe, once and for all, and the security of the Neo-New Cosmik Order ensured."
It was one year ago today that the Death Star, perhaps the greatest symbol of the Empire's might, was destroyed in an attack by fanatic Rebels, who used small, single-person crafts to infiltrate seemingly impenetrable defenses. Thousands of mourners were on hand to remember and pay tribute to the victims and their families.
"We lost our innocence that day," reflected one mourner. "I guess we thought we were immune from the kind of violence that happens in other galaxies. We were wrong." "I lost hundreds of buddies that day," said one teary-eyed Stormtrooper. "Guys whose only crime was trying make the Universe a safer place."
Although the day was colored by sadness, the mourners found some relief in the news of a decisive victory over the Rebels. In an attack led by Darth Vader, Empire forces were able to rout hundreds of Rebels from a network of caves underneath the surface of the planet Hoth. "We're not sure we got them all," says a Vader spokesman. "There are a lot of places to hide in those caves. But we've delivered a powerful blow to the terrorist's infrastructure, that's for sure. Today, the Empire has struck back."
Initial reports are unclear as to the fate of Luke Skywalker, a hero among the Rebels, who is rumored to have delivered the fatal blow to the Death Star. Skywalker, a former desert-dweller from the planet Tattooine, became a part of the Rebellion after family members were killed. Skywalker was trained by a militant wing of the Rebels, known as "Jedi Knights." Fanatical in their religious beliefs, the Jedi Knights claim to derive their power from the mystical "Force."
It's believed that Skywalker was specifically trained by infamous terrorist O bin Wankanobi. Wankanobi, occasionally called "Ben" and easily recognized by his bearded visage and long, flowing robes, achieved near-martyr status among the Rebels after his death last year during a spy mission. His more fervent followers believe that Wan Kenobi lives on within them today, some even claiming to hear his voice during times of duress.
The attack on the Death Star came shortly after the Empire's destruction of Alderstaan, a planet whose government was known to harbor terrorists. Responding to criticism over the total annihilation of the planet, Vader stated, "There is no middle ground in the War on Terror. Those who harbor terrorists are terrorists themselves. Alderaan was issued ample warning. The fight for continuing Freedom is often burdened by terrible cost."
The cost of this war can still be seen today in the continuing efforts to build a coalition government on Tattooine. Longstanding animosities among the planets various ethnic groups, including the Jawas, Tusken Raiders and scattered human settlers, have been an impediment to the peace process. The Empire continues to maintain a small peace keeping force until a provisional government is finally in place.
Much of the difficulty in fighting the Rebel forces stems from their lack of a central organizing structure. "They don't play by the traditional rules of war," complained one spokesman. "They come in all shapes and sizes, united only by their single-minded desire to destroy the Empire before it destroys them."
The Emperor closed his comments today by stating that "the cowardly attack on the Death Star left a deep scar on the Empire. However, we will not stop fighting until every last evildoer has been brought to justice." He paused for several moments, wiping away a tear and then added with determination, "We will never forget."
"I wish we could all just get along," said one of the mourners. "But it's hard to offer an olive branch to a cult of religious fanatics whose main tool is violence and who insist on calling us the Dark Side." (OK, it's old. So sue me.)
I do software for film visual effects, and when you're dealing with dozens of layers of footage that's 250 MB PER FRAME, you need all the CPU power you can get, trust me. I have customers with 100-CPU render farms, and those farms do not sit idle. There is still an ever-growing need for high-powered machines, even if it's not in your house.
Every time I hear a comment like this, I think of an article I read in 1980, from a columnist who grumbled that the new-fangled 16 bit CPUs were just too fast - his 8-bit CPU was quite enough to run WordStar and 1-2-3, thank you very much. I wonder if he still thinks the same.
However, there's still some plain stupid things that remain broken, like the massive memory leak(100s of MBs) when ffwding through their own .vcr files, or how it's unable to remember the Custom capture setting if you happen to choose one of the .vcr format settings, or the random crashes on scheduled recordings, to pick three out of dozens.
I reported all of these issues and many more in the MMC 7.5 software, months ago. I offered my help in reproducing them & tracking them down. I got no followup, and surprise surprise, they're all still broken in the recent MMC 7.6 update.
The hardware is definitely done well, quality is great, and I'm usually willing to give software a chance to mature, but seeing these kinds of major bugs persisting in software through that many revisions, I've lost a lot of faith.
Go buy a MouseRemote from X10 (yeah yeah, just do it), and get the MaX10 software. So much nicer to use, far more flexible, and it's a regular pre-programmed universal IR remote & X10 gadget controller too :-)
I think they did.
I'm impressed - I didn't even get my Amiga until after it was released end of 1985...
Actually, my BeBox came with dual PPC 603s. The original design had AT&T Hobbits, but AFAIK that was never available.
If you're willing to spend the money to get the speed, the nVidia Quadro4 900XGL is the current SPECviewperf record holder, supports two displays (2048x1536 each, better than the XVR's dual 1280x1024), and costs well under half the XVR-1000. It also supports stereo viewing and a programmable vertex & pixel pipeline.
True, its DACs are 24 bits instead of 30 bits (SGI workstations are still the go there, with 36 bit RGB DACs), but the NV30 may change that. It also does multisampled anti-aliasing (currently 9-tap 4-sample, though older drivers did offer a 16-sample mode too).
Where do they claim that? According to the SPECcpu website, a 1.05 GHz SPARC III Cu gets 537 base SPECint and 701 SPECfp, while a 2.2 GHz P4 easily beats it with 790 SPECint and 779 SPECfp.
Intel is way ahead in integer, and although the Sun catches up somewhat in FP, if you look at the individual results, it's entirely due to one massive spike on the art test. They recently figured out a (controversial) compiler trick that gave them nearly an order of magnitude increase on that one SPECfp test, and doubled their overall SPECfp score. Sun are known for their stability & scalability, but not their CPU speed.
Of course, if you have 106 of the things, that's different. But you'll be paying over US$4M for it, which isn't exactly workstation class anymore.
Double layer discs are very unlikely. It wouldn't be easy to burn to the underneath layer.
The only format issue between the two is the media they can burn to. Presuming that the new +R-capable drives are at least as compatible as -R, the differences come down to price, speed & features.
So far, -R drives are cheaper, and +R drives (when they arrive in April) are faster & more flexible to work with. Take your pick.
I looked up DVD-RAM on their website. Seems that DVD-RAM 2.0 discs (not the 1.0 cartridges of course) can actually be read by an extremely limited subset of players & DVD-ROM drives (most of which I assume are made by Panasonic).
So, not totally incompatible, but pretty darn close.
+RW and -RW have the same compatibility issues because they both have different reflectivity to normal pressed single-layer discs. +R and -R both have similar reflectivity to single-layer discs, so both should have similar compatibility. In fact, +R should have slightly better compatibility because its lossless linking produces discs more like pressed discs than -R, which corrupts a 2k sector whenever it restarts burning.
Perhaps I should have said "flexible erasing". DVD+RW allows you to add video to a DVD-Video-compatible disc. DVD-RW requires you to erase the entire disc first. That's what I mean by "more flexible".
"Background formatting" means a new +RW disc is formatted in the background to make it suitable for dragging & dropping files to it. I can insert a DVD+RW disc and immediately drop files on it - the formatting is interrupted, and continues when I'm finished. It's like it's not doing it all. With DVD-RW, you have to wait an hour until the disc is formatted before you can drag & drop files to it.
Next time, try reading up on what you're talking about. I'm not quoting from press releases, I'm quoting from reports by people who own the things - see www.dvdplusrw.com. You have no knowledge backing your assertions, and (wisely) refuse to even provide your identity.
The DVD Forum also claim that DVD-RAM cartridges are somehow DVDs, presumably because they've approved them as such & stamped their logo on them. That doesn't make them work on any of the vast majority of "DVD" players or drives out there. So do they have any more right to be described as "DVDs" than DVD+R/RW discs? Clearly, the DVD logo is not a badge of universal compatibility.
You want to split hairs, fine - I hereby swear never to call a DVD+RW disc a DVD-RW disc, which it isn't. But, since the word "DVD" isn't trademarked, and is almost universally used to describe discs that can be played in DVD-Video players, all but the most pedantic of people will happily describe DVD-Video, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R and DVD-RW discs as "DVDs".
But not DVD-RAM.
It's not that big a deal, actually. I've heard a lot of "Beta vs. VHS" talk, but since both formats are quite readable by each other's drives, all you have to worry about is availability (& perhaps price) of the media for writing.
For drives bought today, sure. DVD-R is more compatible than DVD-RW or DVD+RW, since the rewritable formats have a different reflectivity which confuses older players into thinking the disc is dual layer.
However, since DVD+R/RW models were announced today by HP, available mid-April, and since DVD+R should be just as compatible as DVD-R (or perhaps more so, due to its lossless linking feature), that should no longer be an issue.
Yeah, they did do this, and this did get a number of people upset. However, the word is that "HP will within the next week or so announce either a buy back or trade-up policy for existing 100i owners (they haven't decided which one at this point) to the next generation device (200i I assume) which is promised to have +R compatibility". So we'll see. From past experience, I personally held off purchasing until DVD+R writing was confirmed.
Well, that's a good incentive, sure :-) I'm willing to pay a little extra for the faster burning speed, background formatting & more flexible rewriting of DVD+RWs, but not everyone needs that.
Given all the other advantages that DVD+R/RW has (greater compatibility, more flexible recording, faster recording, background formatting, etc etc), Panasonic are going to have to drop the prices on the DVD-RW units even more to stay in the market, IMHO.