Re:Unfortunately, they don't exist.
on
Clockless Chips
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· Score: 2
Read the article. Intel already made an async Pentium-compatible back in '97 - which was 3x faster & used less power.
They scrapped the project because they felt it'd take so long to develop & improve the technology that clocked designs would overtake it anyway, by the time it was ready.
How am I gonna overclock my machine now?!
on
Clockless Chips
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· Score: 2
What do I adjust? Sheesh.
Still, if it runs at whatever speed it can, I suppose it'll speed up automatically when I cool it, and slow down when it overheats. Wonder if this will eliminate burnt-out chips... riskless overclocking for the masses. Maybe I should buy shares in heatsink/fan manufacturers:-)
This is also going to make consistent benchmarking a thing of the past. You'll never get the same run twice on the same chip, let alone different chips in different environments.
Re:Why the bloody hell does the release day matter
on
Gamecube Hits US Early
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· Score: 2
Kids certainly are a large part of the market, they're just not the majority (around 43% I heard).
Most of the people I know with Gameboy/GA Advance are adults. Then again, most of them are buying Gamecubes too...
I put it to you that most parents would shop at Walmart/Toys'R'Us & similar department stores, so they'll sell more Cubes, and I'd expect people working there to notice that. But places like EB will sell more XBoxen.
But, in the final analysis, who knows. Cheap & cute vs feature-laden & adult-oriented... still anyone's game, but you can't ignore the half-billion-dollar marketing budget behind the XBox...
Re:Why the bloody hell does the release day matter
on
Gamecube Hits US Early
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Kids are actually the smaller part of the market. MS is aiming at the 18-30+ crowd, who buy their own consoles.
To them, XBox might look "cool" rather than "ugly", and the games are certainly more oriented their way. Have you seen the recent ads for Dead or Alive 3?
Look at the article again - all speed comparisons and quoted framerates are with anti-aliasing enabled.
That's why the scores seem low, and that's also why there's such a dramatic improvement over the GF2Go and Mobile Radeon 7500.
The NV17M does multi-sampled AA, which one texture lookup per pixel, instead of one texture lookup per sample. This gives considerably greater performance, but the quality of the texture filtering is not as high. The GF2Go and Mobile Radeon 7500 both use supersampling, which uses the slower (but arguably higher quality) method.
XBox renders everything at 480p anyway. For display on an ordinary SDTV, each field is extracted, throwing away half the detail. On a 480p-capable set, you'll see the full quality of the picture.
Full 1080i output is also possible, though I don't know if MS are mandating games to support this or not. This will work on an HDTV or (AFAIK) a large VGA monitor too.
Interlacing provides one very imporant feature that you didn't mention: flicker reduction.
Actually, the reverse is true. Interlaced images almost always flicker MORE than progressive images.
While it's true that a VGA monitor at 60 Hz does flicker a little, 72+ Hz refresh eliminates this for most people. Video is transmitted at 60 fields per second, but each scanline in the full frame is transmitted at only 30 frames per second.
The result of this is more flicker, not less. Especially if you have sharp horizontal lines in your image, the interlacing flicker can be appalling. This can be reduced by reducing contrast between scanlines - softening the picture will help, but decreases detail. Long persistance phosphors will help too, but cause streaking and trails on moving objects.
For a still image with comparable detail and phosphors, progressive will always look better than interlaced.
Sorry, I have to agree with donglekey here. I too am a software developer, in the digital content creation market, and yes, I (and my customers) want every CPU cycle I can get my grubby hands on.
I run a dual Xeon 1.6 GHz machine, and it isn't enough. If we could afford a 6-CPU Alpha AXP box, it wouldn't be enough either. My customers use render farms of 100+ CPUs @ 1+ GHz each, and even that still takes days, nay, weeks to render the hundreds of layers of globally-illuminated 3D that they use. Sure, I can compile adequately fast (though a full build of our whole software tree still takes hours), but to test my image processing code on a sequence of 200 MB film-resolution images requires considerable patience.
Just because your needs don't require anything more than last year's gfx card and last decade's CPU does not mean others are happy to sit around and wait for their more complex tasks to complete. More CPU power means more possibilities. That's why we can now produce visual effects like Final Fantasy, Swordfish and SW:TPM instead of Tron and Wargames, to pick examples from just my industry out of hundreds.
In 1980, I read a column in an early computer magazine wondering why people were so keen on the newfangled 16 bit CPUs, with awesomely powerful 32 bit CPUs on the horizon too! He felt that his 4 MHz Z-80 ran his CP/M word processor & spreadsheet quite adequately, thank you very much. Perhaps you too would be happy with that setup for your current line of work?
The number one reason DirectX is popular among developers is because every consumer vendor has a decent DirectX driver, and few have decent OpenGL drivers.
DirectX was much simpler when it first came out, so was easier to implement. It had Microsoft's weight behind it, it was being steadily improved, and it supported 90%+ of the target market. So vendors implemented drivers for that as part of their normal Windows support.
A few (luckily influential) die-hards (like Carmack) used & promoted OpenGL, which forced minimal support from vendors (remember 3dfx's mini-driver?), but few vendors bothered to go the whole way & write a full OpenGL ICD.
Direct3D was the lazy way out, so that's what people got.
nVidia's extensions alone total more than 500 pages, compared to 230 pages for the entire OpenGL 1.3 spec. ATI has their own comprehensive list of extensions, as does SGI and many others. Since there's little natural overlap, each vendor implements similar features in a different way (e.g vertex shaders), and you have to code for each vendor's set of extensions separately. The OpenGL ARB can "ratify" extensions to promote standardization, but you still have to cope with them not being present at all.
This is exactly the problem developers have with DirectX - MS regularly revs the entire API to try and support features from every vendor, so there's an ever-increasing number of ways the underlying hardware differences are exposed, and the number of hardware caps that have to be checked before doing anything is growing rapidly. There are 4 different versions of pixel shaders that a vendor can support in DX 8.1, and the only reason it's not more of a mess is that there's only two chips which support any of them so far (and one of those isn't even available yet).
Regular simplification & unification of all these diverging directions is required. Vendors should of course be able to add innovative extensions, but a core of Really Useful standard features must be maintained & extended, so that hardware vendors have a baseline to target, developers can rely on the features being present, and the lowest common denominator gets steadily pushed higher for everyone.
There's a lot of discussion on how/when/why they want to move forward to OpenGL 2.0. Gives some interesting insights into how these things are done.
Also, there's some talk about nVidia's new position on opening up their vertex shading IP, GL_vertex_program_NV vs. ATI's GL_EXT_vertex_shader, and which approach would be better for OpenGL 2.0 (low-level vs. high-level).
I'd have to disagree too - this baby will sit in a muffled case in my lounge room, connected to the TV & 5.1 sound system, possibly with a Radeon 8500DV in it.
The bandwidth performance is up there with the best, the low-latency ethernet is a bonus, the integrated video provides a decent fallback if I decide to relocate the main gfx card, but I'd buy it for the high-performance Dolby Digital sound alone. A single connection to the amp, and I get full 5.1 speaker support in all my games:-)
Well worth a little extra, for the enthusiast. There's a lot more to this board than the integrated video!
IIRC, the blitter copied bitmaps (and also drew lines) at 1 million pixels per second. Small bickies by our current gigapixel standards, but for comparison, the Macintosh at the time could barely manage 110,000 pixels/s. (PC? Hah! Pixels? What are pixels?)
I seem to recall that outran some dedicated graphics machines of that era.
And of course, as other people have pointed out, there was also the copper, the sound & sprites hardware etc etc. The 2090A disk controller had a Z-80 CPU on it, and even the keyboard was driven by a 6502 variant...
If you are going to stuff it with an AGP video card, etc. you might as well just get the KT266A.
Except that the extra bandwidth is also needed for the onboard sound DSP processing, disk I/O, ethernet etc.
If you use any of that, particularly the 3D sound, the dual DDR will deliver higher overall performance. If you used a plugin 3D soundcard with its own onboard RAM, that'd eliminate most of the bandwidth drain, but it'd also push the cost of a KT266A well past that of an nForce...
The CPU and integrated video aren't the only things using that bandwidth.
Everything on the MCP southbridge does too. The IDE drives can DMA up to 100 MB/s, the Ethernet chips in a bit, and the audio DSP can actually use a great deal of it when rendering audio effects (which it does to the system RAM - it doesn't have RAM of its own).
nVidia have said that the MCP southbridge can use over 500 MB/s of the available 800 MB/s HyperTransport link between the two chips, when you turn everything on. That bandwidth will also be coming out of system RAM. A shame none of Anand's tests covered that, though I guess he was a little limited in what he could make it do without an S/PDIF output on the reference board (why did they leave that off?!)
I would bet that the 420 will show a clear advantage over the 220 when doing disk I/O and heavy sound processing, even without using the integrated video. That's a good reason for enthusiasts to spend the extra on the 420, even with an AGP card being used.
From what it says there, DVD+RW is both cheaper and more compatible than DVD-RW, for about the same capacity. DVD+RW uses a slightly different technique that reduces gaps between data to give compatibility with the "vast majority" of existing DVD players. It is also apparently more flexible in burning compatible discs, 7x faster to close the session, and allows erasing of individual sections, rather than just the whole disc.
HP are shipping their first dvd100i DVD+RW drive this month for US$599. DVD+RW media will reportedly sell for about US$16 (compared to the US$24 I've seen for DVD-RW media). Philips have announced their standalone DVD+RW unit, and will ship the bare drive in October.
Apparently, initial units will only support DVD+RW/DVD-ROM/CD-R/CD-RW/CD-ROM, but DVD+R (analogous to DVD-R, but apparently also cheaper/more compatible) is promised shortly via a firmware upgrade. DVD-R media support may also be available.
FWIW, my own experiences with DVD-R are mixed; 2 of the 4 DVD players and DVD-ROM drives I've tried DVD-R discs with would not recognise the discs at all. I plan to get a dvd100i as soon as they're available:-)
No need for AIs to train new AIs; just make a duplicate.
Of course, that's assuming the AI neural net standard data format remains backwards compatible. Or that the RIAA or their successors haven't legislated to put AI personality copy protection in place...
Go find a theatre playing something in ShowScan format - that's 60 fps, and looks lovely. Even the grain is reduced, at that framerate.
Not many features released in ShowScan, I'll agree. But you occasionally see it turning up in amusement rides & Vegas "experiences".
Re:The road to closed PC hardware?
on
nVidia nForce
·
· Score: 1
It's called licensed code.
That is their problem. Perhaps they shouldn't have used licensed code? Food for though, eh?
For a very long time nVidia didn't bother to support the 1% of Linux gamers at all, so licensing 3rd party software to get what is arguably the best drivers in the consumer gfx business probably seemed like a good decision at the time.
In any case, regardless of whose problem it is, the decision to release open source drivers is no longer theirs to make. Whether or not they support open source software in principle is irrelevant (though IIRC I have heard their Linux driver engineers do, very much).
You do realize that drivers are hardware specific, right?
I guess you don't realise that full OpenGL drivers are only 5% hardware specific, and the other 95% of the code implements the entire OpenGL pipeline, far more than just the hardware supports.
Slashdot Mirror
They scrapped the project because they felt it'd take so long to develop & improve the technology that clocked designs would overtake it anyway, by the time it was ready.
Still, if it runs at whatever speed it can, I suppose it'll speed up automatically when I cool it, and slow down when it overheats. Wonder if this will eliminate burnt-out chips... riskless overclocking for the masses. Maybe I should buy shares in heatsink/fan manufacturers :-)
This is also going to make consistent benchmarking a thing of the past. You'll never get the same run twice on the same chip, let alone different chips in different environments.
Most of the people I know with Gameboy/GA Advance are adults. Then again, most of them are buying Gamecubes too...
I put it to you that most parents would shop at Walmart/Toys'R'Us & similar department stores, so they'll sell more Cubes, and I'd expect people working there to notice that. But places like EB will sell more XBoxen.
But, in the final analysis, who knows. Cheap & cute vs feature-laden & adult-oriented... still anyone's game, but you can't ignore the half-billion-dollar marketing budget behind the XBox...
To them, XBox might look "cool" rather than "ugly", and the games are certainly more oriented their way. Have you seen the recent ads for Dead or Alive 3?
That's why the scores seem low, and that's also why there's such a dramatic improvement over the GF2Go and Mobile Radeon 7500.
The NV17M does multi-sampled AA, which one texture lookup per pixel, instead of one texture lookup per sample. This gives considerably greater performance, but the quality of the texture filtering is not as high. The GF2Go and Mobile Radeon 7500 both use supersampling, which uses the slower (but arguably higher quality) method.
I have the For The Birds sneak peak mirrored on Morpheus/KaZaa. Search for ftb_sneak_320.
For those interested, the Japanese release date is Dec 14th.
Full 1080i output is also possible, though I don't know if MS are mandating games to support this or not. This will work on an HDTV or (AFAIK) a large VGA monitor too.
Actually, the reverse is true. Interlaced images almost always flicker MORE than progressive images.
While it's true that a VGA monitor at 60 Hz does flicker a little, 72+ Hz refresh eliminates this for most people. Video is transmitted at 60 fields per second, but each scanline in the full frame is transmitted at only 30 frames per second.
The result of this is more flicker, not less. Especially if you have sharp horizontal lines in your image, the interlacing flicker can be appalling. This can be reduced by reducing contrast between scanlines - softening the picture will help, but decreases detail. Long persistance phosphors will help too, but cause streaking and trails on moving objects.
For a still image with comparable detail and phosphors, progressive will always look better than interlaced.
I run a dual Xeon 1.6 GHz machine, and it isn't enough. If we could afford a 6-CPU Alpha AXP box, it wouldn't be enough either. My customers use render farms of 100+ CPUs @ 1+ GHz each, and even that still takes days, nay, weeks to render the hundreds of layers of globally-illuminated 3D that they use. Sure, I can compile adequately fast (though a full build of our whole software tree still takes hours), but to test my image processing code on a sequence of 200 MB film-resolution images requires considerable patience.
Just because your needs don't require anything more than last year's gfx card and last decade's CPU does not mean others are happy to sit around and wait for their more complex tasks to complete. More CPU power means more possibilities. That's why we can now produce visual effects like Final Fantasy, Swordfish and SW:TPM instead of Tron and Wargames, to pick examples from just my industry out of hundreds.
In 1980, I read a column in an early computer magazine wondering why people were so keen on the newfangled 16 bit CPUs, with awesomely powerful 32 bit CPUs on the horizon too! He felt that his 4 MHz Z-80 ran his CP/M word processor & spreadsheet quite adequately, thank you very much. Perhaps you too would be happy with that setup for your current line of work?
DirectX was much simpler when it first came out, so was easier to implement. It had Microsoft's weight behind it, it was being steadily improved, and it supported 90%+ of the target market. So vendors implemented drivers for that as part of their normal Windows support.
A few (luckily influential) die-hards (like Carmack) used & promoted OpenGL, which forced minimal support from vendors (remember 3dfx's mini-driver?), but few vendors bothered to go the whole way & write a full OpenGL ICD.
Direct3D was the lazy way out, so that's what people got.
nVidia's extensions alone total more than 500 pages, compared to 230 pages for the entire OpenGL 1.3 spec. ATI has their own comprehensive list of extensions, as does SGI and many others. Since there's little natural overlap, each vendor implements similar features in a different way (e.g vertex shaders), and you have to code for each vendor's set of extensions separately. The OpenGL ARB can "ratify" extensions to promote standardization, but you still have to cope with them not being present at all.
This is exactly the problem developers have with DirectX - MS regularly revs the entire API to try and support features from every vendor, so there's an ever-increasing number of ways the underlying hardware differences are exposed, and the number of hardware caps that have to be checked before doing anything is growing rapidly. There are 4 different versions of pixel shaders that a vendor can support in DX 8.1, and the only reason it's not more of a mess is that there's only two chips which support any of them so far (and one of those isn't even available yet).
Regular simplification & unification of all these diverging directions is required. Vendors should of course be able to add innovative extensions, but a core of Really Useful standard features must be maintained & extended, so that hardware vendors have a baseline to target, developers can rely on the features being present, and the lowest common denominator gets steadily pushed higher for everyone.
There's a lot of discussion on how/when/why they want to move forward to OpenGL 2.0. Gives some interesting insights into how these things are done.
Also, there's some talk about nVidia's new position on opening up their vertex shading IP, GL_vertex_program_NV vs. ATI's GL_EXT_vertex_shader, and which approach would be better for OpenGL 2.0 (low-level vs. high-level).
Not in many other reviews. And no vertex or pixel shaders...
The bandwidth performance is up there with the best, the low-latency ethernet is a bonus, the integrated video provides a decent fallback if I decide to relocate the main gfx card, but I'd buy it for the high-performance Dolby Digital sound alone. A single connection to the amp, and I get full 5.1 speaker support in all my games :-)
Well worth a little extra, for the enthusiast. There's a lot more to this board than the integrated video!
However, they also said that this was planned for the next revision of the nForce chipset.
I seem to recall that outran some dedicated graphics machines of that era.
And of course, as other people have pointed out, there was also the copper, the sound & sprites hardware etc etc. The 2090A disk controller had a Z-80 CPU on it, and even the keyboard was driven by a 6502 variant...
Except that the extra bandwidth is also needed for the onboard sound DSP processing, disk I/O, ethernet etc.
If you use any of that, particularly the 3D sound, the dual DDR will deliver higher overall performance. If you used a plugin 3D soundcard with its own onboard RAM, that'd eliminate most of the bandwidth drain, but it'd also push the cost of a KT266A well past that of an nForce...
Everything on the MCP southbridge does too. The IDE drives can DMA up to 100 MB/s, the Ethernet chips in a bit, and the audio DSP can actually use a great deal of it when rendering audio effects (which it does to the system RAM - it doesn't have RAM of its own).
nVidia have said that the MCP southbridge can use over 500 MB/s of the available 800 MB/s HyperTransport link between the two chips, when you turn everything on. That bandwidth will also be coming out of system RAM. A shame none of Anand's tests covered that, though I guess he was a little limited in what he could make it do without an S/PDIF output on the reference board (why did they leave that off?!)
I would bet that the 420 will show a clear advantage over the 220 when doing disk I/O and heavy sound processing, even without using the integrated video. That's a good reason for enthusiasts to spend the extra on the 420, even with an AGP card being used.
Here is a lot of good info about DVD+RW.
:-)
From what it says there, DVD+RW is both cheaper and more compatible than DVD-RW, for about the same capacity. DVD+RW uses a slightly different technique that reduces gaps between data to give compatibility with the "vast majority" of existing DVD players. It is also apparently more flexible in burning compatible discs, 7x faster to close the session, and allows erasing of individual sections, rather than just the whole disc.
HP are shipping their first dvd100i DVD+RW drive this month for US$599. DVD+RW media will reportedly sell for about US$16 (compared to the US$24 I've seen for DVD-RW media). Philips have announced their standalone DVD+RW unit, and will ship the bare drive in October.
Apparently, initial units will only support DVD+RW/DVD-ROM/CD-R/CD-RW/CD-ROM, but DVD+R (analogous to DVD-R, but apparently also cheaper/more compatible) is promised shortly via a firmware upgrade. DVD-R media support may also be available.
FWIW, my own experiences with DVD-R are mixed; 2 of the 4 DVD players and DVD-ROM drives I've tried DVD-R discs with would not recognise the discs at all. I plan to get a dvd100i as soon as they're available
Those steppings overclock even better than the famous Celeron 300A.
Of course, that's assuming the AI neural net standard data format remains backwards compatible. Or that the RIAA or their successors haven't legislated to put AI personality copy protection in place...
Not many features released in ShowScan, I'll agree. But you occasionally see it turning up in amusement rides & Vegas "experiences".
For a very long time nVidia didn't bother to support the 1% of Linux gamers at all, so licensing 3rd party software to get what is arguably the best drivers in the consumer gfx business probably seemed like a good decision at the time.
In any case, regardless of whose problem it is, the decision to release open source drivers is no longer theirs to make. Whether or not they support open source software in principle is irrelevant (though IIRC I have heard their Linux driver engineers do, very much).
I guess you don't realise that full OpenGL drivers are only 5% hardware specific, and the other 95% of the code implements the entire OpenGL pipeline, far more than just the hardware supports.
I stand partially corrected :-) Maybe I should do that to mine...