I started coding when I was 3 or 4 on a brand new 48k spectrum (am now 30). If you wanted to play a game, you had to type it in from listings - and that's one hell of a big motivation for a child to learn how to program!
The keywords were assigned to letters (eg l == let, etc), so typos weren't *that* much of a problem. Really it was just an advanced version of a 'fit the square peg in the square hole' game. Understanding of what the code did, how variables worked etc, didn't come until a few years later. Even so, by the time I was about 6 or 7 I could program some basic graphical games from scratch. Admittedly the code would probably suck big time if I read it now, and I doubt I had fully understood all of the concepts - but they were games, and they worked. Never underestimate the curiosity of a young mind when the reward is great enough....
Yeah sure. I can't say this is representative of the whole industry, just my experiences... You've got to remember that we didn't just switch over night;)
We'd been using various SGI units, O2's, octanes et al for a number of years - replacing them every year. Around 1998, SGI announced the end of their Mips line. This pretty much killed our Sgi upgrades, since we were waiting for the new Itanium machines. And we waited. And waited. And waited. And nothing appeared. By the start of 2000 or so, we had to start making other plans
The NT based Sgi workstations had arrived, but we never bought them, nor we were interested in them. We had used Irix for years, and had a fairly large custom toolchain developed for that platform - porting that to NT wasn't something we were really all that interested in doing tbh.
The new workstations we did get weren't SGIs (who'd buy an underpowered Mips workstation that was slower than a P2 for 3 times the cost?) but bog standard Xeon PC's. For a time we swapped the older Sgi units over to NT boxes, so that the artists were split roughly down the middle - half NT, half Irix. That situation only lasted for about a year i think, until Maya4.0 eventually got released for linux (IIRC start of 2002?) then we all switched over.
To be brutally honest, the switch to linux wasn't quite as smooth as we'd hoped! We had god knows how many problems with things like sound drivers, strange maya bugs and loads of other quirks. About the only thing that was fairly good was nvidia's drivers (at least they were good enough for our needs - we don't push the graphics cards as much as people thing we do! If it can draw triangles, and lots of them, that's enough for 80% of the departments... ). I'd say it took probably another couple of years before the problems had all been resolved.
At about the same time we fully switched over, Sgi released the Mips based fuels, but by then it was a little bit too late!
IIRC, the renderfarm had been gradually switching over for a year or 2 by the time we fully switched the workstations over. By all accounts that transition was seamless.....
nah. What put the boot into SGI systems was their premature jump to Intel Itanium processors. We (the CG industry) had been quite happy spending lots of cash for these pretty blue machines with Mips processors, and then one day Sgi declared they were dropping mips for Intel Itanium CPU's. The Itanium then had problems, and so SGi hastily crapped out a new mips CPU on their Fuel workstations. We didn't buy them, because we were waiting for the Itanium ones. So they switched to Intel Xeon CPU's running NT, and we didn't buy them, because as we know, the Itanium hit problems, and a dell workstation running linux was a cheaper option. Over the course of a couple of years Sgi machines literally vanished from the Cg industry.
Then to make matters worse, most of the engineers from the graphics dept of Sgi jumped ship, and all went to join Nvidia (Mark Kilgard et al). The comsumer grade Geforce cards had better OpenGL support + features than an Sgi unit at a fraction of the cost.
This is probably the only realistic comparison you can make between SGI and Apple. Apple (having seen a computer company crash and burn due to a switch to Intel) must have studied what went wrong with Sgi, and made damn sure they didn't repeat the same mistakes.... If Sgi had managed the transition as well as Apple, it would still be a powerhouse in the industry.
1. You should try installing windows7 on said hardware before making offhand comments like that. I've installed in on plenty of old hardware for testing purposes, and it runs surprisingly well.... (enough to be a better choice than XP on that hardware).
2. FYI. MS is in the content business, and have been for years, or have you forgotten it's game studios? (lionhead, rare etc).
3. Sounds like every single shareware application from the 90's to me.
OpenGL isn't playing catchup, they've always been ahead by going in the right direction as far as their way of doing things.
Complete and utter BS. The OpenGL3.2 spec, released just 21days ago, has just added geometry shaders to the core spec.
DX10 got geometry shaders 3 years ago.
You must have a very blinkered view of the current mess openGL is in - because those of us who have to develop with it every day, don't share your views on the matter.
DX10 came out November 30, 2006 - which gave DX10 devs geometry shaders
The OpenGL 3.2 spec was released 21 days ago (spec != drivers though!), which finally put Geometry shaders into the core specification. That's only, what, almost 3 years after DX developers got them.
So... if you need to use geometry shaders in your game, what GL extension do you code against? GL_EXT_geometry_shader4? GL_ARB_geometry_shader4? NV_geometry_program? or the core spec? Chances are you'll end up coding against all 4, because you can be absolutely certain most cards will support 1 of those extensions, but each card will probably support a different one.
If the Khronos group keep insisting that they must keep the OpenGL APi 3 years behind D3D10, it's not difficult to see why developers aren't all that keen to go with OpenGL. If the Khronos group continue to keep giving us information which they later back track on (like the entire OpenGL3 spec), it's not surprising to see game developers ditching OpenGL3 in droves. To see Carmack ditching OpenGL really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone working with OpenGL3. I've worked with OpenGL for the past ten years or so, and I'm sad to say that I'm currently stripping all OpenGL out of our codebase in favour of the 'other' API. Currently it seems to be what every developer is doing at the moment. OpenGL is just a royal pita these days. Let it die.
Your rig needs five fans, but makes a little less noise than the Wii? I can't even hear my Wii's fan from across the room, especially not over my computer's fans even when idling and the CPU and graphics card fans are at their lowest speeds.
My PC is *almost* silent. It can be heard if you listen carefully, but it's quieter than ambient background noise. Assuming you have decent silent fans, a silent power supply, and an aftermarket CPU cooler, the addition of:
will pretty much silence any PC. The only remaining noise i have a few frequencies from the hard drives, but it's now so quiet that it no longer bothers me. If i had money to replace my hard drives with SSD's, my PC would actually be quieter than my wii......
What does a better CPU have to do with running windows? You seem hell bent on believing that you need some sort of top of the range i7 to run windows 7. You don't.
You don't need DX10 hardware to run windows 7, nor do you need DX10 to run aero (will work on DX9 hardware, though I've not tried anything lower than that). Try putting Windows7 on your 3.3Ghz machine, and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised....
UAC in vista sucks, and then vista continues to moan at you if you turn it off. I understand the reasoning behind it, however in vista it's just an annoying pita that won't go away. It's so much better in windows 7, with it's nice "how much of a retarded computer user are you" slider, and the simple fact it doesn't bug you for turning it off.
Installed windows 7 on a 7 year old dual HT xeon with 1Gb ram, and it's absolutely fine (The machine is very old and uses RDRAM - that stuff's £180 per gig! So no, memory is not cheap!).
It's faster than Vista to be sure. I got given a 7 year old Dual Xeon workstation (with all manner of esoteric hardware), and could only find XP drivers for anything. I partitioned up the drives, and installed XP/Vista/7 side by side to see which would be the best option. I was surprised to see that vista and 7 installed fine (Albeit after a lot of fighting with BIOS settings to get the raid controllers to register, but then there are 3 of them in the machine! ).
Anyhow, since I had all 3 os's cleanly installed, i ran a few benchmarks to see how it would perform. Well, the results told me something I already knew: vista's crap. Across the board it's noticeably slower than the XP/7, in some cases up to 30% slower. XP and 7 perform similarly, however 7 is a far nicer user experience (though it does take a week or two to get used to it).
If you have to use windows, then windows 7 is definitely the version to go for.... (and yes it works on crap hardware).
In all fairness it's not all to do with the cell, it's the more to do with the fecked up wacky ideas sony had in how that should integrate with the rest of the PS3. Not to mention the awful dev tools that shipped with it.
Apple walking away from power probably had the effect of IBM re-assessing their market, making them divert resources from the mobile chips to the server and console products. Net result: the power7 looks pretty good...
And that's really the problem with the cell. You need 2 or 3 good (additional) engineers to get the best out of it - and finding people good enough is not an easy task. The biggest problem however, given the current economic climate, is that most games companies are struggling to find the extra cash needed to pay their wages. Given the number of PS3's out there vs the number of Wii's and 360's in the wild, it's hard to justify that additional cost for the SKU with the least market share. The result is that the PS3 games aren't fully exploiting the hardware, and i suspect only a small handful ever will.
Slashdot Mirror
I started coding when I was 3 or 4 on a brand new 48k spectrum (am now 30). If you wanted to play a game, you had to type it in from listings - and that's one hell of a big motivation for a child to learn how to program!
The keywords were assigned to letters (eg l == let, etc), so typos weren't *that* much of a problem. Really it was just an advanced version of a 'fit the square peg in the square hole' game. Understanding of what the code did, how variables worked etc, didn't come until a few years later. Even so, by the time I was about 6 or 7 I could program some basic graphical games from scratch. Admittedly the code would probably suck big time if I read it now, and I doubt I had fully understood all of the concepts - but they were games, and they worked. Never underestimate the curiosity of a young mind when the reward is great enough....
Yeah sure. I can't say this is representative of the whole industry, just my experiences... You've got to remember that we didn't just switch over night ;)
We'd been using various SGI units, O2's, octanes et al for a number of years - replacing them every year. Around 1998, SGI announced the end of their Mips line. This pretty much killed our Sgi upgrades, since we were waiting for the new Itanium machines. And we waited. And waited. And waited. And nothing appeared. By the start of 2000 or so, we had to start making other plans
The NT based Sgi workstations had arrived, but we never bought them, nor we were interested in them. We had used Irix for years, and had a fairly large custom toolchain developed for that platform - porting that to NT wasn't something we were really all that interested in doing tbh.
The new workstations we did get weren't SGIs (who'd buy an underpowered Mips workstation that was slower than a P2 for 3 times the cost?) but bog standard Xeon PC's. For a time we swapped the older Sgi units over to NT boxes, so that the artists were split roughly down the middle - half NT, half Irix. That situation only lasted for about a year i think, until Maya4.0 eventually got released for linux (IIRC start of 2002?) then we all switched over.
To be brutally honest, the switch to linux wasn't quite as smooth as we'd hoped! We had god knows how many problems with things like sound drivers, strange maya bugs and loads of other quirks. About the only thing that was fairly good was nvidia's drivers (at least they were good enough for our needs - we don't push the graphics cards as much as people thing we do! If it can draw triangles, and lots of them, that's enough for 80% of the departments... ). I'd say it took probably another couple of years before the problems had all been resolved.
At about the same time we fully switched over, Sgi released the Mips based fuels, but by then it was a little bit too late!
IIRC, the renderfarm had been gradually switching over for a year or 2 by the time we fully switched the workstations over. By all accounts that transition was seamless.....
nah. What put the boot into SGI systems was their premature jump to Intel Itanium processors. We (the CG industry) had been quite happy spending lots of cash for these pretty blue machines with Mips processors, and then one day Sgi declared they were dropping mips for Intel Itanium CPU's. The Itanium then had problems, and so SGi hastily crapped out a new mips CPU on their Fuel workstations. We didn't buy them, because we were waiting for the Itanium ones. So they switched to Intel Xeon CPU's running NT, and we didn't buy them, because as we know, the Itanium hit problems, and a dell workstation running linux was a cheaper option. Over the course of a couple of years Sgi machines literally vanished from the Cg industry.
Then to make matters worse, most of the engineers from the graphics dept of Sgi jumped ship, and all went to join Nvidia (Mark Kilgard et al). The comsumer grade Geforce cards had better OpenGL support + features than an Sgi unit at a fraction of the cost.
This is probably the only realistic comparison you can make between SGI and Apple. Apple (having seen a computer company crash and burn due to a switch to Intel) must have studied what went wrong with Sgi, and made damn sure they didn't repeat the same mistakes.... If Sgi had managed the transition as well as Apple, it would still be a powerhouse in the industry.
Yeah, I got some tesco value HDMI cables (no seriously!)
I don't think they signed up to the British Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act of 1927. I might be wrong though....
Damn. I just knew those tales of St George were true!
Or to be exact and factually correct: Vista SP2
1. You should try installing windows7 on said hardware before making offhand comments like that. I've installed in on plenty of old hardware for testing purposes, and it runs surprisingly well.... (enough to be a better choice than XP on that hardware).
2. FYI. MS is in the content business, and have been for years, or have you forgotten it's game studios? (lionhead, rare etc).
3. Sounds like every single shareware application from the 90's to me.
sorry for going off-topic, but if you were a woman who has recently undergone a mastectomy, you'd see the attraction....
Opengl only wins for nvidia and ATI, which can crap out a new extension, and add a bullet point feature onto the box of the new card.
For developers and end users, the OpenGL extension mechanism is a pita.
OpenGL isn't playing catchup, they've always been ahead by going in the right direction as far as their way of doing things.
Complete and utter BS. The OpenGL3.2 spec, released just 21days ago, has just added geometry shaders to the core spec.
DX10 got geometry shaders 3 years ago.
You must have a very blinkered view of the current mess openGL is in - because those of us who have to develop with it every day, don't share your views on the matter.
You've not developed for OpenGL3 have you?
DX10 came out November 30, 2006 - which gave DX10 devs geometry shaders
The OpenGL 3.2 spec was released 21 days ago (spec != drivers though!), which finally put Geometry shaders into the core specification. That's only, what, almost 3 years after DX developers got them.
So... if you need to use geometry shaders in your game, what GL extension do you code against? GL_EXT_geometry_shader4? GL_ARB_geometry_shader4? NV_geometry_program? or the core spec? Chances are you'll end up coding against all 4, because you can be absolutely certain most cards will support 1 of those extensions, but each card will probably support a different one.
If the Khronos group keep insisting that they must keep the OpenGL APi 3 years behind D3D10, it's not difficult to see why developers aren't all that keen to go with OpenGL. If the Khronos group continue to keep giving us information which they later back track on (like the entire OpenGL3 spec), it's not surprising to see game developers ditching OpenGL3 in droves. To see Carmack ditching OpenGL really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone working with OpenGL3. I've worked with OpenGL for the past ten years or so, and I'm sad to say that I'm currently stripping all OpenGL out of our codebase in favour of the 'other' API. Currently it seems to be what every developer is doing at the moment. OpenGL is just a royal pita these days. Let it die.
here :p
Your rig needs five fans, but makes a little less noise than the Wii? I can't even hear my Wii's fan from across the room, especially not over my computer's fans even when idling and the CPU and graphics card fans are at their lowest speeds.
My PC is *almost* silent. It can be heard if you listen carefully, but it's quieter than ambient background noise. Assuming you have decent silent fans, a silent power supply, and an aftermarket CPU cooler, the addition of:
a fan controller (any will do)
acoustipack-ultimate
will pretty much silence any PC. The only remaining noise i have a few frequencies from the hard drives, but it's now so quiet that it no longer bothers me. If i had money to replace my hard drives with SSD's, my PC would actually be quieter than my wii......
RC != beta.
What does a better CPU have to do with running windows? You seem hell bent on believing that you need some sort of top of the range i7 to run windows 7. You don't.
You don't need DX10 hardware to run windows 7, nor do you need DX10 to run aero (will work on DX9 hardware, though I've not tried anything lower than that). Try putting Windows7 on your 3.3Ghz machine, and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised....
Not bloody likely when it is a billion dollar industry.
[citation needed]
UAC in vista sucks, and then vista continues to moan at you if you turn it off. I understand the reasoning behind it, however in vista it's just an annoying pita that won't go away. It's so much better in windows 7, with it's nice "how much of a retarded computer user are you" slider, and the simple fact it doesn't bug you for turning it off.
Installed windows 7 on a 7 year old dual HT xeon with 1Gb ram, and it's absolutely fine (The machine is very old and uses RDRAM - that stuff's £180 per gig! So no, memory is not cheap!).
* I should mention that all of the windows XP drivers installed and worked fine under windows7, much to my amazement....
It's faster than Vista to be sure. I got given a 7 year old Dual Xeon workstation (with all manner of esoteric hardware), and could only find XP drivers for anything. I partitioned up the drives, and installed XP/Vista/7 side by side to see which would be the best option. I was surprised to see that vista and 7 installed fine (Albeit after a lot of fighting with BIOS settings to get the raid controllers to register, but then there are 3 of them in the machine! ).
Anyhow, since I had all 3 os's cleanly installed, i ran a few benchmarks to see how it would perform. Well, the results told me something I already knew: vista's crap. Across the board it's noticeably slower than the XP/7, in some cases up to 30% slower. XP and 7 perform similarly, however 7 is a far nicer user experience (though it does take a week or two to get used to it).
If you have to use windows, then windows 7 is definitely the version to go for.... (and yes it works on crap hardware).
otherwise known as the xbox 360....
In all fairness it's not all to do with the cell, it's the more to do with the fecked up wacky ideas sony had in how that should integrate with the rest of the PS3. Not to mention the awful dev tools that shipped with it.
chicken and egg.
Apple walking away from power probably had the effect of IBM re-assessing their market, making them divert resources from the mobile chips to the server and console products. Net result: the power7 looks pretty good...
And that's really the problem with the cell. You need 2 or 3 good (additional) engineers to get the best out of it - and finding people good enough is not an easy task. The biggest problem however, given the current economic climate, is that most games companies are struggling to find the extra cash needed to pay their wages. Given the number of PS3's out there vs the number of Wii's and 360's in the wild, it's hard to justify that additional cost for the SKU with the least market share. The result is that the PS3 games aren't fully exploiting the hardware, and i suspect only a small handful ever will.