For CUDA core is actually comparable to a CPU core in terms of raw processing power, what it lacks is branch prediction and a significant and intelligent cache control mechanism. As far as being more limited in what it can do? No. CUDA cores have a full floating point, integer, logical operation and branching instruction set. They can do anything a CPU core can.
I'm a GPU programmer who is intimately familiar with CUDA, and there are a plethora of extremely important TECHNICAL reasons for NVidia's decision. PhysX is advantageous to CPU based physics processing not only because it is COMPUTING the collision detection and kinematics on the GPU, but also because the physics data describing the matrix transforms can be shared between the physics and graphics context for a large speed boost.
This requires PhysX to work intimately with the graphics card that is responsible for rendering using those transforms. ATI consistently releases products with poor GPGPU features and probably isn't much interested in documenting their architecture enough for NVidia to maintain and debug a version of PhysX which is capable of interacting with ATI cards in this regard.
If you have an ATI card you can still use CPU processed PhysX with your ATI graphics card, which speaks directly to the fact that this is a TECHNICAL limitation. Jesus Christ, don't let that stop your holy war though.
Sorry, I guess Slashdot decided to only use half of my edits there. What I meant to say was that I guess their big cocern is they don't have a secure development platform like XNA is to prevent people from doing things they wouldn't want (replacing the dashboard, hacking, messing up the saves on the disk, that kind of stuff). XNA is pretty locked down and won't let developers do much other than make games and all the things they need to do to do that.
You're confusing developing with publishing. Just because indie developers can develop a game doesn't mean Nintendo is under any obligation to publish it. Letting people try doesn't hurt anyone, which why it is so baffling that Nintendo and Sony didn't followed MS's lead in this regard. I guess their big concern was that If the game is terrible after it's done, nobody has to publish it!
Of course, MS in addition to offering a cheap development platform also offered free (as included in the price of the XNA membership) publishing in on the Xbox live marketplace, though I heard that's been somewhat neutered recently.
I actually laughed out loud when I scrolled down the article and saw the picture of the man wearing the glasses. While I'm sure it looks lovely when you're wearing them, as long as your 3D display technology requires headgear it will never replace or even slightly displace mainstream conventional displays. Period.
Instead of wasting their time developing this kind of technology they should be working on developing alternatives.
And what does DirectX 11 offer over DirectX 10, or even 9?
The first and foremost thing to mention is that no DirectX 11 class hardware actually exists at retail right now, and might not be for some time. DirectX 11's major new features are new pipeline stages that make it better suited to GPGPU-style processing without trying to make your algorithms fit into the vertex and pixel processing pipelines. CUDA and OpenCL are both existing technologies that allow developers to do this, and (especially recently) integration of GPGPU using CUDA / OpenCL into a graphics application is efficient and relatively easy. DirectX 11's exclusive features are some marginal optimizations and changes to the ROP stage of the pipeline that at least theoretically should make some kind of performance difference (just like DirectX 10 was way faster than 9!), and even these will be available as OpenGL extensions from the get-go.
On top of this I'd say it's a reasonable expectation that driver support, especially initially will be bad for both performance and stability as seen in Vista / DirectX 10, and the new features may end up with an implementation that is so inefficient in the driver it may make them worthless for almost anything but a handful of applications (just like geometry shaders in DirectX 10). On top of that you could list the games that actually have any DirectX 10 exclusive features whatsoever on one-hand and 10 has been around for quite a while already, and 11 will probaby be the same for that or worse.
Not exactly on topic, but why would you compare the archaic JPG format to anything? The JPEG2000 format has been standardized for a while now (you'll never guess how long) and offers vastly superior quality over any other compressed image file format and has a lossless encoding quality and compression ratio that rivals the lossy rates of other file formats, especially for photograph-like images. It also supports an arbitrary number of channels with arbitrary precision.
I'd like to further expound on this. Dividing by 1,000 or 1,000,000 might be easier for the GP in his head on or on paper but honestly nobody gives a shit how fast humans can calculate anything nowdays. There are many places where computers would need to make the calculation and integer division by a power of 10 is non-trivial in base 2, in many cases requiring a dozen or more cycles even on modern architectures, whereas division (or multiplication) by any power of 2 will compile to a bit shifting operation, which on many architectures isn't even 1 cycle.
Now all we need is a network cable that can carry on the tasks of this NIC allowing it to sleep when it isn't busy, waking it when it needs to wake the main computer! Wait...
This is why whenever I hear a story about some new mandatory device for vehicles that will make speeding impossible / automatically ticket them for it I'm always hoping that they will succeed in pushing it through because if stupid laws that nobody actually agreed with like most speed limits weren't selectively enforced anymore there would finally be enough public rage to get the laws changed.
That sounds lovely. My commute is about 50 seconds, on foot. Why did you choose to live so far from where you work exactly? No 5 bedroom houses with a private yard for your family of 3 in the area?
He didn't offer any details about how it would be implemented.
Because he doesn't know, obviously. Oh, and there is no copy protection that won't be cracked on release day. Again, there is one and only one method I've seen so far that worked: make the server you control essential to gameplay, see WoW. (Oh, and Blizzard actually releases their client without copy protection whatsoever.)
You don't control my computer, and you deserve to go bankrupt for trying.
Unless you count the free to play pirate servers that emulate the functionality of the official Blizzard servers. There aren't completely the same and often quite buggy, but the game is / was in a somewhat playable state without the aid of Blizzard's servers. You're right anyway though, offering an exclusive service for your product is often a better business model than selling any product.
Oh no, it's not invisible light. It's visible. You just can't see it.
That's what I keep trying to tell people about these gnomes that keep stealing my underpants! With this newfound scientific evidence I will finally be able to make the nay-sayers eat their words.
If there are people who have vision that is 1,000 times normal, then they must get blinded by the sun really easily...
Human sensitivity and our perception of light, as is the case with most senses is not a linear response with intensity, it is closer to logarithmic. That said, the parts of the human eye responsible for perception of very low levels of light (like at night) are very noisey and cannot distinguish between colors and I highly doubt that any person would ever be capable of actually seeing this glow even in a pitch black environment.
In x86 protected mode memory is allocated in 4 kilobyte pages, each of which is marked specifically as either executable, readable, writeable, and a few other flags. A program that can read itself and generate new parts of the program is still trivial with DEP on, which enforces the execute disable flag on mapped pages, the program just needs to use the API the operating system provides to change the usage bits for the program pages in memory it has generated to enable execution and then jump to a valid instruction address in that page.
I'm the first person to spout off about what Microsoft has done with XNA and why this is an amazing opportunity for indie developers and a much better commitment to indie development than either Nintendo or Sony has. However, I really don't think this is as much about keeping quality levels of visible titles high than providing appeasement for larger publishers who are creating content for the Xbox Live service. There are many ways to regulate the quality of user created content, the Slashdot moderation system is an obvious of a system that works pretty well without enforcing any direct limitations on who can contribute and how much they can contribute.
You'll need the $100 a year developer subscription if you want to play/test your stuff on the real hardware, or play 'unpublished' games, and it's severely locked down (Much like running homebrew on the PS3).
Still, just the piece of kit an indie developer needs: Cheap development environment, easy distributing to a system with a huge install base.
We're going to complain about $100 / year now? Seriously? We're talking about a cost that is slightly more than half of your World of Warcraft subscription here. If $100/year is going to break you, I'd argue you were never even remotely capable or serious enough to develop even an indie quality game.
Severely locked down like the PS3? Not even close to the same thing. XNA exposes an API for storage, network connectivity, input, and display (with full GPU acceleration). The only thing you can't do is load native libraries written in another language (this would be meaningless anyway, since the CPU instruction-set != x86). Using XNA you can easily create something that rivals the quality of any 1st party commercial ships-on-a-dvd game. Contrast this with the PS3 homebrew in which Sony has gone to great lengths to prevent users from accessing the GPU in any way shape or form minus being able to write to the framebuffer with no hardware acceleration. Ask anyone who has used Linux on the PS3 what that is like. It's so brutally slow for any graphical application as to be almost useless, even web browsing is pretty bad. Yeah, that's totally the same.
Or should we always wait until irreversible damage is done before we prosecute criminals? You'll find that every legal jurisdiction in the world has some concept of conspiracy culpability.
Absolutely not! That's why we should lock up everyone who has ever made an idle threat in anger, anyone who has ever had a perverse sexual fantasy, and anyone who has ever written complaints to their local political representatives. That would be a good start, but we'd only REALLY be safe once we had the technology to lock up people who were considering making an idle threat in anger, having a perverse sexual fantasy, or writing a complaint to their local political representative. Tapping everyone's phone lines and internet connections is a good start but what we really need is a way to read the brain waves of these dangerous and volatile perverted terrorists we call citizens en masse to really expedite the process.
I don't care how games perform, I care about efficiency of the OS in general, and it clearly shows a defeciency. I actually write graphics applications that aren't games (crazy, I know).
Anyway, this isn't a vsync problem, I'm talking the difference in frame rate between 250 and 400 fps for Vista and XP respectively (my monitor's refresh rate is just 60 hz). Also this has nothing to do with Nvidia's AA implementation. RTHDRIBL's AA is actually done using multiple passes and jittering, since when it was released hardware MSAA on FP16 or FP32 render targets was not a supported feature, nor would it be for several years.
Now benchmark Windows 7 against XP in both GPU and CPU limited graphics intensive applications.
Seriously, I've done the tests myself a thousand times. I use to dual boot Vista with XP, kept both completely up to date, all the latest drivers, patches, trimmed down my Vista services, disabled indexing and all that good stuff, and Vista was literally 40% slower in completely GPU bound applications (RTHDRIBL was my main test suite, as it is a good example of higher GPU load with modern shaders and little CPU processing). This was both with Aero on and with Aero off, both fullscreen and windowed. In reality most games these days are CPU-bound so most benchmarks probably don't reflect this gap, or to a smaller degree, that isn't the main port here, the main point is that graphics performance decreased substantially. The only two possible explanations for this are that the new user mode graphics driver model makes writing a graphics driver that is as efficient as XP's was impossible, or Nvidia's Vista driver team couldn't even come close in the performance they achieved in the XP driver for some other reason.
Fastforward a few years to Windows 7. Now I dual boot the RC with good ol' XP, and likewise again I keep both up to date, latest drivers as well and I boot back in to run the same tests every few months. RTHDRIBL shows 7 with about a 25% performance disadvantage to XP, which is an improvement I suppose, but there's still absolutely no way in hell I'm sacrificing that kind of performance for any number of new features.
Morally: I know plenty of adults who are too stupid to understand what they are consenting to most of time, are extremely easily persuaded or convinced of things that are obviously false, and believe in things like ghosts and spirits. Is it equally wrong to seduce an adult who may later regret it? If it is, why isn't this equally punishable?
Legally: That doesn't sound like a legal definition from any sane country. I've dated girls older than me who looked young, and yes, even engaged with intercourse with them. Are we so irrational as to believe that it only matters if a girl looks somewhat young or underdeveloped for it to be a crime punishable by (basically) death now?
Slashdot Mirror
For CUDA core is actually comparable to a CPU core in terms of raw processing power, what it lacks is branch prediction and a significant and intelligent cache control mechanism. As far as being more limited in what it can do? No. CUDA cores have a full floating point, integer, logical operation and branching instruction set. They can do anything a CPU core can.
Are you retarded?
I'm a GPU programmer who is intimately familiar with CUDA, and there are a plethora of extremely important TECHNICAL reasons for NVidia's decision. PhysX is advantageous to CPU based physics processing not only because it is COMPUTING the collision detection and kinematics on the GPU, but also because the physics data describing the matrix transforms can be shared between the physics and graphics context for a large speed boost.
This requires PhysX to work intimately with the graphics card that is responsible for rendering using those transforms. ATI consistently releases products with poor GPGPU features and probably isn't much interested in documenting their architecture enough for NVidia to maintain and debug a version of PhysX which is capable of interacting with ATI cards in this regard.
If you have an ATI card you can still use CPU processed PhysX with your ATI graphics card, which speaks directly to the fact that this is a TECHNICAL limitation. Jesus Christ, don't let that stop your holy war though.
Sorry, I guess Slashdot decided to only use half of my edits there. What I meant to say was that I guess their big cocern is they don't have a secure development platform like XNA is to prevent people from doing things they wouldn't want (replacing the dashboard, hacking, messing up the saves on the disk, that kind of stuff). XNA is pretty locked down and won't let developers do much other than make games and all the things they need to do to do that.
You're confusing developing with publishing. Just because indie developers can develop a game doesn't mean Nintendo is under any obligation to publish it. Letting people try doesn't hurt anyone, which why it is so baffling that Nintendo and Sony didn't followed MS's lead in this regard. I guess their big concern was that If the game is terrible after it's done, nobody has to publish it!
Of course, MS in addition to offering a cheap development platform also offered free (as included in the price of the XNA membership) publishing in on the Xbox live marketplace, though I heard that's been somewhat neutered recently.
I actually laughed out loud when I scrolled down the article and saw the picture of the man wearing the glasses. While I'm sure it looks lovely when you're wearing them, as long as your 3D display technology requires headgear it will never replace or even slightly displace mainstream conventional displays. Period.
Instead of wasting their time developing this kind of technology they should be working on developing alternatives.
Sorry, I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Is there some way you could make an automobile related analogy here?
You don't? I can't go a month without seeing at least one anti-nuclear power protest where I live.
The first and foremost thing to mention is that no DirectX 11 class hardware actually exists at retail right now, and might not be for some time. DirectX 11's major new features are new pipeline stages that make it better suited to GPGPU-style processing without trying to make your algorithms fit into the vertex and pixel processing pipelines. CUDA and OpenCL are both existing technologies that allow developers to do this, and (especially recently) integration of GPGPU using CUDA / OpenCL into a graphics application is efficient and relatively easy. DirectX 11's exclusive features are some marginal optimizations and changes to the ROP stage of the pipeline that at least theoretically should make some kind of performance difference (just like DirectX 10 was way faster than 9!), and even these will be available as OpenGL extensions from the get-go.
On top of this I'd say it's a reasonable expectation that driver support, especially initially will be bad for both performance and stability as seen in Vista / DirectX 10, and the new features may end up with an implementation that is so inefficient in the driver it may make them worthless for almost anything but a handful of applications (just like geometry shaders in DirectX 10). On top of that you could list the games that actually have any DirectX 10 exclusive features whatsoever on one-hand and 10 has been around for quite a while already, and 11 will probaby be the same for that or worse.
Not exactly on topic, but why would you compare the archaic JPG format to anything? The JPEG2000 format has been standardized for a while now (you'll never guess how long) and offers vastly superior quality over any other compressed image file format and has a lossless encoding quality and compression ratio that rivals the lossy rates of other file formats, especially for photograph-like images. It also supports an arbitrary number of channels with arbitrary precision.
I'd like to further expound on this. Dividing by 1,000 or 1,000,000 might be easier for the GP in his head on or on paper but honestly nobody gives a shit how fast humans can calculate anything nowdays. There are many places where computers would need to make the calculation and integer division by a power of 10 is non-trivial in base 2, in many cases requiring a dozen or more cycles even on modern architectures, whereas division (or multiplication) by any power of 2 will compile to a bit shifting operation, which on many architectures isn't even 1 cycle.
Now all we need is a network cable that can carry on the tasks of this NIC allowing it to sleep when it isn't busy, waking it when it needs to wake the main computer! Wait...
This is why whenever I hear a story about some new mandatory device for vehicles that will make speeding impossible / automatically ticket them for it I'm always hoping that they will succeed in pushing it through because if stupid laws that nobody actually agreed with like most speed limits weren't selectively enforced anymore there would finally be enough public rage to get the laws changed.
That sounds lovely. My commute is about 50 seconds, on foot. Why did you choose to live so far from where you work exactly? No 5 bedroom houses with a private yard for your family of 3 in the area?
He didn't offer any details about how it would be implemented.
Because he doesn't know, obviously. Oh, and there is no copy protection that won't be cracked on release day. Again, there is one and only one method I've seen so far that worked: make the server you control essential to gameplay, see WoW. (Oh, and Blizzard actually releases their client without copy protection whatsoever.)
You don't control my computer, and you deserve to go bankrupt for trying.
Unless you count the free to play pirate servers that emulate the functionality of the official Blizzard servers. There aren't completely the same and often quite buggy, but the game is / was in a somewhat playable state without the aid of Blizzard's servers. You're right anyway though, offering an exclusive service for your product is often a better business model than selling any product.
Oh no, it's not invisible light. It's visible. You just can't see it.
That's what I keep trying to tell people about these gnomes that keep stealing my underpants! With this newfound scientific evidence I will finally be able to make the nay-sayers eat their words.
If there are people who have vision that is 1,000 times normal, then they must get blinded by the sun really easily...
Human sensitivity and our perception of light, as is the case with most senses is not a linear response with intensity, it is closer to logarithmic. That said, the parts of the human eye responsible for perception of very low levels of light (like at night) are very noisey and cannot distinguish between colors and I highly doubt that any person would ever be capable of actually seeing this glow even in a pitch black environment.
and safe (I have small kids) solution.
Well there goes all my ideas!
In x86 protected mode memory is allocated in 4 kilobyte pages, each of which is marked specifically as either executable, readable, writeable, and a few other flags. A program that can read itself and generate new parts of the program is still trivial with DEP on, which enforces the execute disable flag on mapped pages, the program just needs to use the API the operating system provides to change the usage bits for the program pages in memory it has generated to enable execution and then jump to a valid instruction address in that page.
I'm the first person to spout off about what Microsoft has done with XNA and why this is an amazing opportunity for indie developers and a much better commitment to indie development than either Nintendo or Sony has. However, I really don't think this is as much about keeping quality levels of visible titles high than providing appeasement for larger publishers who are creating content for the Xbox Live service. There are many ways to regulate the quality of user created content, the Slashdot moderation system is an obvious of a system that works pretty well without enforcing any direct limitations on who can contribute and how much they can contribute.
You'll need the $100 a year developer subscription if you want to play/test your stuff on the real hardware, or play 'unpublished' games, and it's severely locked down (Much like running homebrew on the PS3). Still, just the piece of kit an indie developer needs: Cheap development environment, easy distributing to a system with a huge install base.
We're going to complain about $100 / year now? Seriously? We're talking about a cost that is slightly more than half of your World of Warcraft subscription here. If $100/year is going to break you, I'd argue you were never even remotely capable or serious enough to develop even an indie quality game.
Severely locked down like the PS3? Not even close to the same thing. XNA exposes an API for storage, network connectivity, input, and display (with full GPU acceleration). The only thing you can't do is load native libraries written in another language (this would be meaningless anyway, since the CPU instruction-set != x86). Using XNA you can easily create something that rivals the quality of any 1st party commercial ships-on-a-dvd game. Contrast this with the PS3 homebrew in which Sony has gone to great lengths to prevent users from accessing the GPU in any way shape or form minus being able to write to the framebuffer with no hardware acceleration. Ask anyone who has used Linux on the PS3 what that is like. It's so brutally slow for any graphical application as to be almost useless, even web browsing is pretty bad. Yeah, that's totally the same.
Or should we always wait until irreversible damage is done before we prosecute criminals? You'll find that every legal jurisdiction in the world has some concept of conspiracy culpability.
Absolutely not! That's why we should lock up everyone who has ever made an idle threat in anger, anyone who has ever had a perverse sexual fantasy, and anyone who has ever written complaints to their local political representatives. That would be a good start, but we'd only REALLY be safe once we had the technology to lock up people who were considering making an idle threat in anger, having a perverse sexual fantasy, or writing a complaint to their local political representative. Tapping everyone's phone lines and internet connections is a good start but what we really need is a way to read the brain waves of these dangerous and volatile perverted terrorists we call citizens en masse to really expedite the process.
I know you were joking, but "Real-time High Dynamic Range Image Based Lighting". :P
I don't care how games perform, I care about efficiency of the OS in general, and it clearly shows a defeciency. I actually write graphics applications that aren't games (crazy, I know).
Anyway, this isn't a vsync problem, I'm talking the difference in frame rate between 250 and 400 fps for Vista and XP respectively (my monitor's refresh rate is just 60 hz). Also this has nothing to do with Nvidia's AA implementation. RTHDRIBL's AA is actually done using multiple passes and jittering, since when it was released hardware MSAA on FP16 or FP32 render targets was not a supported feature, nor would it be for several years.
Now benchmark Windows 7 against XP in both GPU and CPU limited graphics intensive applications.
Seriously, I've done the tests myself a thousand times. I use to dual boot Vista with XP, kept both completely up to date, all the latest drivers, patches, trimmed down my Vista services, disabled indexing and all that good stuff, and Vista was literally 40% slower in completely GPU bound applications (RTHDRIBL was my main test suite, as it is a good example of higher GPU load with modern shaders and little CPU processing). This was both with Aero on and with Aero off, both fullscreen and windowed. In reality most games these days are CPU-bound so most benchmarks probably don't reflect this gap, or to a smaller degree, that isn't the main port here, the main point is that graphics performance decreased substantially. The only two possible explanations for this are that the new user mode graphics driver model makes writing a graphics driver that is as efficient as XP's was impossible, or Nvidia's Vista driver team couldn't even come close in the performance they achieved in the XP driver for some other reason.
Fastforward a few years to Windows 7. Now I dual boot the RC with good ol' XP, and likewise again I keep both up to date, latest drivers as well and I boot back in to run the same tests every few months. RTHDRIBL shows 7 with about a 25% performance disadvantage to XP, which is an improvement I suppose, but there's still absolutely no way in hell I'm sacrificing that kind of performance for any number of new features.
Morally: I know plenty of adults who are too stupid to understand what they are consenting to most of time, are extremely easily persuaded or convinced of things that are obviously false, and believe in things like ghosts and spirits. Is it equally wrong to seduce an adult who may later regret it? If it is, why isn't this equally punishable?
Legally: That doesn't sound like a legal definition from any sane country. I've dated girls older than me who looked young, and yes, even engaged with intercourse with them. Are we so irrational as to believe that it only matters if a girl looks somewhat young or underdeveloped for it to be a crime punishable by (basically) death now?