Yes. the environments are more dynamic with RT. Main drawback is you need a monster multi-GPU setup or relatively simple scenes. RT is at a state that professionals can use it today (and do). In a year or two it will be in gamer's systems, as the new Vulkan APIs for RT have hinted.
There are usability issues with VR today. The screen door effect. Lack of focal range that leads to eyestrain. The problem with users being blind to their real environment that poses a hazard for interactive movement. The amount of space a person needs to play VR. I think AR (augmented reality) and light field displays (or something better?) need to be further along before we see widespread adoption.
raytracing has nothing to do with VR. it has to do with how you handle lighting and illumination. in fact it's easier to scale raytracing to a lower resolution than a higher resolution. although things like "deep shading" help a lot with RT performance.
I don't think you'll see VR suddenly take off. That gimmick is over, and those of us that worked on it are going back to R&D mode for another 10-20 years.
I don't see much of a place for next gen consoles coming out if they aren't going to be capable of ray tracing. The APIs for RT acceleration have already been hammered out and standardized between vendors. We're likely to soon see cards on PCs that do this and game engines that optionally support RT, which greatly improves lighting effects. (ultimately RT is better because global illumination is more realistic to the physics of light than traditionally rendered local illumination)
what if I'm watching a cyber-horror film and the protagonist is accessing files illegally to track down a killer that chops up his victims who is also a failing writer of homeopathic books?
Cheaper in the short term. If Steam wants to drop your platform, that game, or if Valve goes out of business then I guess you'll never see your Steam games again.
I've always bought games slightly faster than I complete them. So I have a backlog of about a hundred games I'm meaning to get around to playing. Steam sales kind of exacerbate my own faults.
20 years from now I'll still be playing Nethack, Moria, and Angband. Probably the highest replay value of any genre of games. But also not to everyone's taste.
Loading and viewing large data sets in science and industry. Maybe you'd do calculations on the data sets on some big network of servers, but at the site you might want to browse the results of your oil and gas survey without access to a network.
And for many of us we only have laptops at work and no longer get powerful desktop workstations. I now have to remotely access the real processing power as it is shared by multiple employees over multiple timezones. I will admit that while inconvenient our new environment is a lot faster than my old 12-core workstation.
At extremely high DPI you might not need to anti-alias fonts, which tends to make them blurry. Even so I calculated that panel to be only 280 DPI. That's nice but it's not the extreme end of things, and in the ball park of the early Retina displays.
Seems fine then to take away people's game purchases, since only a few people are getting screwed.
Windows 7 is about 33% on Steam right now. If it dips below 1% in 2-3 years will it be dropped too? Maybe you'll be using Windows 12 or whatever by then and not care about the principle that some people are unable to play games they purchased unless they keep their computers updated.
Maybe it seems fine when you're a young gamer with disposable income, but it's a bit of a pain to stay on top of the latest technology once you have kids.
Are you willing to support 17 year old software, for free, when you offer a modern version?
Buying hundreds of dollars of games on Steam isn't exactly the same as free. I'm really only asking that Valve continue to host the data on their servers, not that they do any additional updates to my game library.
I don't think any of us really enjoy the frequent updates to the Steam client. Those updates are something we tolerate, but I'm certainly not asking to pay for them.
So much for "buying" games on Steam if I can't access them due to an every changing policy at Valve.. The cloud fails us again.
If Vista is obsolete then it won't be long before Windows 7 is taken off the support list. And the handful of us that don't like the amount of telemetry that Microsoft places in recent OS versions will have to stick to playing crappy free games like Tux Racer.
No, there was a $0.25 license per unit to the IP patent pool, that's for the controller IP. In addition you had a $1 per port fee to Apple. The details changed several times, so I'm not surprised that you think it was different.
In many ways IEEE1394 was great. A very clean design. Good for mass storage, digital cameras, video recorders (Sony i.LINK), flatbed scanners, temporary networks (could do Ethernet-over-Firewire on just about any OS), and more. I used it for remote debugging of bootloader and kernel back in the old days. That later turned out to be a security flaw of IEEE in that a peer can quickly bypass memory protection and access any part of memory.
I hot plugged an ISA card once. The Crynwr packet drivers were good enough to initialize my hotplugged card and make it go.
Who knows what sort of glitches and memory corruption I introduced with that experiment. But this was the DOS days, it was normal for your computer to completely freeze up.
Yup. AT vs XT keyboards, RS232, bus mice, ADB mice, expensive SCSI flatbed scanners, and proprietary cards for handheld scanners.
I remember hotplugging my AT keyboard and blowing a fuse on my motherboard, luckily it was easily fixed with a soldering iron.
IEEE 1394 (Firewire) was pretty nice. But Apple had a lot of fucking balls copying the Gameboy link cable connector then charging $1/port. The power delivery was considered problematic for some because of the large voltage range allowed. But a buck circuit is considered pretty normal these days so I think the limitations were overblown.
Slashdot Mirror
If you resist being a good little cog, you can take these pills.
Yes. the environments are more dynamic with RT. Main drawback is you need a monster multi-GPU setup or relatively simple scenes. RT is at a state that professionals can use it today (and do). In a year or two it will be in gamer's systems, as the new Vulkan APIs for RT have hinted.
There are usability issues with VR today. The screen door effect. Lack of focal range that leads to eyestrain. The problem with users being blind to their real environment that poses a hazard for interactive movement. The amount of space a person needs to play VR. I think AR (augmented reality) and light field displays (or something better?) need to be further along before we see widespread adoption.
raytracing has nothing to do with VR. it has to do with how you handle lighting and illumination. in fact it's easier to scale raytracing to a lower resolution than a higher resolution. although things like "deep shading" help a lot with RT performance.
I don't think you'll see VR suddenly take off. That gimmick is over, and those of us that worked on it are going back to R&D mode for another 10-20 years.
I don't see much of a place for next gen consoles coming out if they aren't going to be capable of ray tracing. The APIs for RT acceleration have already been hammered out and standardized between vendors. We're likely to soon see cards on PCs that do this and game engines that optionally support RT, which greatly improves lighting effects. (ultimately RT is better because global illumination is more realistic to the physics of light than traditionally rendered local illumination)
what if I'm watching a cyber-horror film and the protagonist is accessing files illegally to track down a killer that chops up his victims who is also a failing writer of homeopathic books?
Nice things like a paramilitary police force.
that they don't already exist?
Cheaper in the short term. If Steam wants to drop your platform, that game, or if Valve goes out of business then I guess you'll never see your Steam games again.
I've always bought games slightly faster than I complete them. So I have a backlog of about a hundred games I'm meaning to get around to playing. Steam sales kind of exacerbate my own faults.
Nvidia, MediaTek and Rockchip are all listed as being vulnerable for some if not all of their ARM chips to at least Spectre, if not also Meltdown.
You already can run Mac OS, well it's only System 7. But VII is only III less than X.
2012 13" macbook is 2560x1600 and about 226 DPI. the 15" works out to the same DPI.
When I worked in R&D for an ebook reader we were playing with 300+ DPI eInk/EPD.
if a game worked on my system one day, and stopped working on the next. that's the definition of taking it away.
Maybe you're OK with that compromise. Steam is a convenient service and if it suits you, then great for you.
20 years from now I'll still be playing Nethack, Moria, and Angband. Probably the highest replay value of any genre of games. But also not to everyone's taste.
Loading and viewing large data sets in science and industry. Maybe you'd do calculations on the data sets on some big network of servers, but at the site you might want to browse the results of your oil and gas survey without access to a network.
And for many of us we only have laptops at work and no longer get powerful desktop workstations. I now have to remotely access the real processing power as it is shared by multiple employees over multiple timezones. I will admit that while inconvenient our new environment is a lot faster than my old 12-core workstation.
At extremely high DPI you might not need to anti-alias fonts, which tends to make them blurry. Even so I calculated that panel to be only 280 DPI. That's nice but it's not the extreme end of things, and in the ball park of the early Retina displays.
Seems fine then to take away people's game purchases, since only a few people are getting screwed.
Windows 7 is about 33% on Steam right now. If it dips below 1% in 2-3 years will it be dropped too? Maybe you'll be using Windows 12 or whatever by then and not care about the principle that some people are unable to play games they purchased unless they keep their computers updated.
Maybe it seems fine when you're a young gamer with disposable income, but it's a bit of a pain to stay on top of the latest technology once you have kids.
Don't forget this covers Vista as well.
Are you willing to support 17 year old software, for free, when you offer a modern version?
Buying hundreds of dollars of games on Steam isn't exactly the same as free. I'm really only asking that Valve continue to host the data on their servers, not that they do any additional updates to my game library.
I don't think any of us really enjoy the frequent updates to the Steam client. Those updates are something we tolerate, but I'm certainly not asking to pay for them.
So much for "buying" games on Steam if I can't access them due to an every changing policy at Valve.. The cloud fails us again.
If Vista is obsolete then it won't be long before Windows 7 is taken off the support list. And the handful of us that don't like the amount of telemetry that Microsoft places in recent OS versions will have to stick to playing crappy free games like Tux Racer.
No, there was a $0.25 license per unit to the IP patent pool, that's for the controller IP. In addition you had a $1 per port fee to Apple. The details changed several times, so I'm not surprised that you think it was different.
In many ways IEEE1394 was great. A very clean design. Good for mass storage, digital cameras, video recorders (Sony i.LINK), flatbed scanners, temporary networks (could do Ethernet-over-Firewire on just about any OS), and more. I used it for remote debugging of bootloader and kernel back in the old days. That later turned out to be a security flaw of IEEE in that a peer can quickly bypass memory protection and access any part of memory.
I hot plugged an ISA card once. The Crynwr packet drivers were good enough to initialize my hotplugged card and make it go.
Who knows what sort of glitches and memory corruption I introduced with that experiment. But this was the DOS days, it was normal for your computer to completely freeze up.
And even if he was anti-semitic, racist, xenophobic and homophobic those are not an impeachable offenses.
That might even get him on the $20 bill to replace Andrew Jackson.
Whatever makes my masters more money.
And if Trump fails to negotiate peace with NK will you finally agree to impeach him? Or will you provide some lame excuse.
Yup. AT vs XT keyboards, RS232, bus mice, ADB mice, expensive SCSI flatbed scanners, and proprietary cards for handheld scanners.
I remember hotplugging my AT keyboard and blowing a fuse on my motherboard, luckily it was easily fixed with a soldering iron.
IEEE 1394 (Firewire) was pretty nice. But Apple had a lot of fucking balls copying the Gameboy link cable connector then charging $1/port. The power delivery was considered problematic for some because of the large voltage range allowed. But a buck circuit is considered pretty normal these days so I think the limitations were overblown.