I was specifically NOT talking about polygon count. I was talking about percieved performance increase.
Not according to the context of your comment in the thread, and not according to your phrasing.
Parham (892904) I always got the impression that the Wii was only a little better (hardware-wise) than the Gamecube. Everything I've read has either suggested that the Wii was only slightly better in hardware than the Gamecube (if not equal in some aspects). However, if the Wii has 2 to 2.5 times the hardware power of the Gamecube as the above article suggests, then they've fulfilled my expectations by more than enough.
Ford Prefect (8777) A 2 to 2.5 times increase in performance is pretty shitty for five years of additional development - it suggests that the new graphics chip is really, really cheap compared with the old one.
7Prime (871679) These "2 or 2.5 times more powerful" figures are pretty arbitrary, don't you think? I mean, what does that actually mean? To be honest, I'd define the PS2's graphics as being about "2 to 3 times as powerful" as the PS1s. I'd put the XBox 360s as being about twice the power of the original XBox. The N64 seemed a little more, more like 4 or 5 times as powerful as the SNES (probably mostly due to it's adoption of 3D graphics processing). I was rolling my eyes when Sony and MS were claiming things like 25 - 30 X more powerful!
Parham and Ford Prefect are addressing hardware power. Numbers. If you want to talk about how the visual quality improved, you have to use words like those. If you're still using the word "powerful" in a discussion over performance numbers, how do you think readers should interpret you? To me and probably those who modded me up, you sound like you are disputing the hardware performance increase of the 360 vs. the xbox. It sounds like you are guessing the actual hardware performance increases.
Worse, then you bring in Sony and MS' claim about their's being 25-30x more powerful. By doing so, you've reassociated your numbers of 2x or 2-3x, with raw hardware performance numbers.
I basically agree with what you wrote, but I was just replying to 7prime with respect to polygon performance, which is what he was talking about, not perceived performance improvement, or even if the visuals matter all that much.
If 7prime was talking about perception, then that was his mistake, becuase the great-grandparent's comment says
A 2 to 2.5 times increase in performance is pretty shitty for five years of additional development - it suggests that the new graphics chip is really, really cheap compared with the old one.
Ford Prefect is clearly talking about the polygon pushing power of the new chip, not perception.
Furthermore, 7prime is presumably talking about polygons because he compares Sony and MS's claims of 30x power to his experiences. Since he knows Sony and MS mean polygons, his comparison logically relates to polygons with respect to the Wii's 2-3x.
See I don't understand that. Maybe it's because of how specialized the design of consoles is. 720p is 3x as many pixels as 480p/i. 1280x960 is 4x as many pixels as 640x480, or 2.56x as 800x600. Yet modern video cards do not have a 2.56x fps difference between 1280 and 800. They often end up being CPU limited. Internally the memory bandwidth is what matters, and these cards have more than enough because they don't really take a fps hit until 1600x1200 or above.
So a modern console GPU doesn't need to devote most of it's power to the higher resolutions. As I remember, nVidia claims they designed their chip to have no performance hit in HD, and I presume, no performance gain in SD.
Also, shading and particle effects are most definitely noticeable at 640x480. Good looking sparks, fire, smoke, and water, are quite visible on xbox games at SD. Pixel shaders and High Dynamic Range Lighting will make 360 games played at SD look much better too.
Does Oblivion look like an xbox game when played at 640x480? Does Burnout Revenge on the 360 look like the xbox version? Nope and nope. HD is not required to make the games worth it.
Look at the specs for the xbox and the 360, then just use some common sense.
Going from a Celeron 733MHz to three PowerPC cores at 3.2GHz is going to offer much more than double the performance. Going from a GeForce 3 GPU to a chip competitive with a 7800 is going to do over eight times as many polygons with many more effects. A GF 5900 was twice as powerful as a GF 3. The 6800 was 2x compared to the 5900, and the 7800 was 2x compared to the 6800.
PC Games bear this out, as will the 360 games this Christmas.
Last.fm is on the right track, but incomplete. Registered users submit the tracks they play, and the algorithm considers how many plays each artist got. But it doesn't look at a per-song level, just artists. There's no way to tell it which songs you dislike.
This is bad because many of us have bought an album and realized we only liked a few tracks. Yet the big fans of that artist like all the songs, or different ones. Jamiroquai - Virtual Insanity got lots of airplay, but the rest of the album is much slower and disco-y. Consequently, Last.fm is highly unlikely to recommend the artist and of course that song to listeners who missed it six years ago.
Last.fm thinks I should like lots of Radiohead, Coldplay, and The White Stripes because other users who listen to the same artists I do have also listened to those bands a lot. Well I only like a few songs from the first two and really dislike the last band. Too much whining in the vocals. If only Last.fm let me tell it the songs I like and the ones I don't. Then it could find users who also dislike the same music as I. Consequently, it would recommend just songs I'm probably going to like; certain Ska songs by Reel Big Fish and others, certain Rock/Swing by The Cherry Poppin' Daddies and The Brian Setzer Orchestra.
Then I don't have to skip through albums getting annoyed with how much of them I don't like because I'm not a huge Ska or Swing fan.
When I listen to Best of albums by Garth Brooks and Clint Black, along with select Shania Twain, and the Black Dog soundtrack, I should get song recommendations for Travis Tritt that only include the few tracks I'll probably like.
If Last.fm could increase their computing power per user by about 30x, I think it could be recommending all kinds of obscure hits and tracks that users would never think of otherwise and human community members couldn't think of either. After all, I like a bunch of hip-hop and techno too. In fact I have extremely varied musical interests, but probably most people do and they're too stuck in a few genres because there's too much chaff among the wheat to branch out and find the select songs they'll enjoy.
If you pay to rent a storage space, and I pay you for a copy of the key, if there's no contract or verbal prohibitions, why shouldn't I assume the storage space is available for me to use as well?
The fan on top has nothing to do with cooling the cpu directly. It is there to remove heated air from the inside of the case.
To make that phrase more clear, I would have said 'It is there to blow cool air into the case.'
That removes any ambiguity about which way the fan is blowing.
As for your idea, one tweak I would make is that if the video card doesn't have a heatsink on the back, then don't remove the card bracket cover for the back of the card. It's better to make the air flow closer to the CPU heatsink and out the case holes nearest to that. Finally, since your idea is to blow air into the case from above, why not just put a quiet 120mm fan at the front-bottom of the case, and dremmel out the plastic and metal in the front? That way the air will directly flow over the hard drives, helping them last longer.
Next time read the second page of the article. The first case reviewed has a 250mm fan on the side for cooling. It spins at 800rpm for quiet operation. The front fan is a 120mm that is also quiet, although there were no dB numbers given. The rest of the cases impede airflow with useless plastic and extra grating, but the first one was pretty good.
Your suggestion about leaving the doors off is only good for people without pets or young children. Furthermore, if the power supply is blocking the fan-propelled air from directly reaching the CPU heatsink, its possible the CPU will actually operate at a higher temperature than if the doors were on and quiet fans placed in the pre-punched case mounts.
You said it yourself. It's not about new gameplay, it's about hi-res. It's about going from 4MB VRAM in the PS2 to 256MB. If just the textures are doubled in dimentions - a 4x storage increase, what once fit in 4.7GB now needs most of a dual-layer, dual-sided DVD. PS2 games that use both layers of one side will benefit from Bluray.
Now that 720p will be a common console resolution, gamers are going to want to play their games at it. They've already spent $500-700 on the console. If they can afford that, they or their parents can probably afford a 720p HDTV. $1000 now buys a good-enough picture and sized HDTV that will satisfy gamers and parents alike. Folks who can't afford a 360 now will get one in two or three years. By then HDTV prices will have fallen further as well.
UMD is too different. The discs cost more, had less content, and were displayed at a lower res than DVD. No wonder it's failing.
HD movies are going to catch on after a few years, and it's quite possible Sony will be collecting fees from most of the players made and discs stamped.
Weren't laserdisc movies $30 or $40 while VHS was $15-20? In a few years I expect HD movies to cost just a few dollars more than DVD, if not the same price. Also, did laserdisc players come down to $100, or just $50 the way good and cheap quality DVD players have?
Most consumers won't spend $80 on HDMI cables because Walmart will stock a cheap cable that gets the digital signal through just fine.
HD movies will slowly catch on over the next ten years as consumers upgrading to their first or second HDTV see gorgeous displays in Best Buy showing demo clips of 1080p movies at full resolution and not grainy upsampled DVD at 720p.
More like FPS/Strategy/Fighter. If a game did it right, there are limited combos, because there are counter-strategies that force the players to think as they fight.
Shadowbane might have come closest to what I'm talking about. If it's first year hadn't been so problematic, it would likely still be going strong.
Maybe it's unusual, but not odd. Compare to previous consoles dropping in price to $179 or $129. I think it's an excellent price because "22" keeps people thinking it's close to $200. It mentally gets people willing to buy it for $200, but Nintendo gets a few dollars extra profit.
The hardware was not the same. the Genesis 68000 ran at 7.67 MHz and could only display 61 colors on screen, which is why the SNES' 256 made games look so much more colorful. The Sega CD attachment included a 12.5 MHz 68000 in order to do crude polygon games and video decompression.
You're mistaken. The 6150 is at least as powerful as a 5700, and good enough to play WoW or City of Heroes at 1024x768 with medium quality settings. I know because a month ago my friend's generic-brand computer died and I helped him pick out a Compaq pre-built for $649 that came with a AMD 3800+ and $50 rebate.
(The price was the same at CompUSA as Compaq's page on HP.com. That model's been discontinued though and replaced with a 3700+ and inferior ATI Radeon Xpress 200 graphics with 256MB shared video memory)
His budget was $800 and the plan was to buy that system and get a 7600GS from newegg for $130 or a less-cripled 7600 for $170. When we found the box alone could play as good as or better than his Athlon XP 2000+ with 5700, he decided to leave it alone until an MMO or other game comes out that he'll need to spend that $170 for a new video card.
So for integrated graphics that don't raise the mobo price very much at all, the 6150 is a nice deal.
The margins on Sony consumer electronics and music are very low and have been losing money on and off for the past five to ten years. The Playstation is what's keeping the company afloat and competitive. Development of the PS3 is a multi-billion dollar investment that could cripple the company if it fails to pay off.
The 3D0 came out in 1993, a year ahead of the Playstation. Wikipedia says the CPU was a 32-bit 12.5 MHz RISC (ARM60) made by Advanced RISC Machines (roughly equivalent to 25 MHz 68030)
More importantly, it had the best ports of games compared to the other systems, and quite a few great original titles that took advantage of the CDROM and 3D.
Great games: Need for Speed, Jurassic Park Interactive, Crash N' Burn, Slayer, Killing Time, and the first console port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, which exceeded the original with CD-quality audio. The Horde, Myst, PO'ed, Total Eclipse, Twisted: The Game Show
The 3DO had at least a dozen top-notch titles, and a dozen more very good ones. It wasn't the lack of good games that stopped people from buying it, it was the price. That's the implication for the PS3. It will have a dozen or two good-to-great games for it after two years, but how many people will pay $500 initially, or even $400. If during those two years the 360 and Wii take 80% of the market, developer support will swing towards those platforms, and Sony's multi-billion dollar investment may cost them dearly.
I can see the PS3 selling 30 million units, but the Wii and 360 will sell closer to 150 million.
If your artists end up filling megatextures with repeating fill patterns... what have you accomplished?
You have made the game look more real and the ground less distracting because the texture is never visibly repeating. At 32000x32000 the camera has to get thousands of feet high, and most of the time miles high, to see the megatexture repeat.
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Not according to the context of your comment in the thread, and not according to your phrasing.
Parham and Ford Prefect are addressing hardware power. Numbers. If you want to talk about how the visual quality improved, you have to use words like those. If you're still using the word "powerful" in a discussion over performance numbers, how do you think readers should interpret you? To me and probably those who modded me up, you sound like you are disputing the hardware performance increase of the 360 vs. the xbox. It sounds like you are guessing the actual hardware performance increases.
Worse, then you bring in Sony and MS' claim about their's being 25-30x more powerful. By doing so, you've reassociated your numbers of 2x or 2-3x, with raw hardware performance numbers.
I basically agree with what you wrote, but I was just replying to 7prime with respect to polygon performance, which is what he was talking about, not perceived performance improvement, or even if the visuals matter all that much.
Ford Prefect is clearly talking about the polygon pushing power of the new chip, not perception.
Furthermore, 7prime is presumably talking about polygons because he compares Sony and MS's claims of 30x power to his experiences. Since he knows Sony and MS mean polygons, his comparison logically relates to polygons with respect to the Wii's 2-3x.
See I don't understand that. Maybe it's because of how specialized the design of consoles is. 720p is 3x as many pixels as 480p/i. 1280x960 is 4x as many pixels as 640x480, or 2.56x as 800x600. Yet modern video cards do not have a 2.56x fps difference between 1280 and 800. They often end up being CPU limited. Internally the memory bandwidth is what matters, and these cards have more than enough because they don't really take a fps hit until 1600x1200 or above.
So a modern console GPU doesn't need to devote most of it's power to the higher resolutions. As I remember, nVidia claims they designed their chip to have no performance hit in HD, and I presume, no performance gain in SD.
Also, shading and particle effects are most definitely noticeable at 640x480. Good looking sparks, fire, smoke, and water, are quite visible on xbox games at SD. Pixel shaders and High Dynamic Range Lighting will make 360 games played at SD look much better too.
Does Oblivion look like an xbox game when played at 640x480? Does Burnout Revenge on the 360 look like the xbox version? Nope and nope. HD is not required to make the games worth it.
Look at the specs for the xbox and the 360, then just use some common sense.
Going from a Celeron 733MHz to three PowerPC cores at 3.2GHz is going to offer much more than double the performance. Going from a GeForce 3 GPU to a chip competitive with a 7800 is going to do over eight times as many polygons with many more effects. A GF 5900 was twice as powerful as a GF 3. The 6800 was 2x compared to the 5900, and the 7800 was 2x compared to the 6800.
PC Games bear this out, as will the 360 games this Christmas.
Last.fm is on the right track, but incomplete. Registered users submit the tracks they play, and the algorithm considers how many plays each artist got. But it doesn't look at a per-song level, just artists. There's no way to tell it which songs you dislike.
This is bad because many of us have bought an album and realized we only liked a few tracks. Yet the big fans of that artist like all the songs, or different ones. Jamiroquai - Virtual Insanity got lots of airplay, but the rest of the album is much slower and disco-y. Consequently, Last.fm is highly unlikely to recommend the artist and of course that song to listeners who missed it six years ago.
Last.fm thinks I should like lots of Radiohead, Coldplay, and The White Stripes because other users who listen to the same artists I do have also listened to those bands a lot. Well I only like a few songs from the first two and really dislike the last band. Too much whining in the vocals. If only Last.fm let me tell it the songs I like and the ones I don't. Then it could find users who also dislike the same music as I. Consequently, it would recommend just songs I'm probably going to like; certain Ska songs by Reel Big Fish and others, certain Rock/Swing by The Cherry Poppin' Daddies and The Brian Setzer Orchestra.
Then I don't have to skip through albums getting annoyed with how much of them I don't like because I'm not a huge Ska or Swing fan.
When I listen to Best of albums by Garth Brooks and Clint Black, along with select Shania Twain, and the Black Dog soundtrack, I should get song recommendations for Travis Tritt that only include the few tracks I'll probably like.
If Last.fm could increase their computing power per user by about 30x, I think it could be recommending all kinds of obscure hits and tracks that users would never think of otherwise and human community members couldn't think of either. After all, I like a bunch of hip-hop and techno too. In fact I have extremely varied musical interests, but probably most people do and they're too stuck in a few genres because there's too much chaff among the wheat to branch out and find the select songs they'll enjoy.
If you pay to rent a storage space, and I pay you for a copy of the key, if there's no contract or verbal prohibitions, why shouldn't I assume the storage space is available for me to use as well?
However facts, such as passwords, cannot be copyrighted. Those came with the laptop.
The fan on top has nothing to do with cooling the cpu directly. It is there to remove heated air from the inside of the case.
To make that phrase more clear, I would have said 'It is there to blow cool air into the case.'
That removes any ambiguity about which way the fan is blowing.
As for your idea, one tweak I would make is that if the video card doesn't have a heatsink on the back, then don't remove the card bracket cover for the back of the card. It's better to make the air flow closer to the CPU heatsink and out the case holes nearest to that. Finally, since your idea is to blow air into the case from above, why not just put a quiet 120mm fan at the front-bottom of the case, and dremmel out the plastic and metal in the front? That way the air will directly flow over the hard drives, helping them last longer.
You said
Now cut a blowhole in the top of the case, bolt the fan on top blowing into the case...
if you'd said 'blowing out of the case' I would have gotten your meaning.
Of course my own reading comprehension failed at your line about the L brackets, sorry.
Next time read the second page of the article. The first case reviewed has a 250mm fan on the side for cooling. It spins at 800rpm for quiet operation. The front fan is a 120mm that is also quiet, although there were no dB numbers given. The rest of the cases impede airflow with useless plastic and extra grating, but the first one was pretty good.
Your suggestion about leaving the doors off is only good for people without pets or young children. Furthermore, if the power supply is blocking the fan-propelled air from directly reaching the CPU heatsink, its possible the CPU will actually operate at a higher temperature than if the doors were on and quiet fans placed in the pre-punched case mounts.
You said it yourself. It's not about new gameplay, it's about hi-res. It's about going from 4MB VRAM in the PS2 to 256MB. If just the textures are doubled in dimentions - a 4x storage increase, what once fit in 4.7GB now needs most of a dual-layer, dual-sided DVD. PS2 games that use both layers of one side will benefit from Bluray.
Now that 720p will be a common console resolution, gamers are going to want to play their games at it. They've already spent $500-700 on the console. If they can afford that, they or their parents can probably afford a 720p HDTV. $1000 now buys a good-enough picture and sized HDTV that will satisfy gamers and parents alike. Folks who can't afford a 360 now will get one in two or three years. By then HDTV prices will have fallen further as well.
UMD is too different. The discs cost more, had less content, and were displayed at a lower res than DVD. No wonder it's failing.
HD movies are going to catch on after a few years, and it's quite possible Sony will be collecting fees from most of the players made and discs stamped.
Weren't laserdisc movies $30 or $40 while VHS was $15-20? In a few years I expect HD movies to cost just a few dollars more than DVD, if not the same price. Also, did laserdisc players come down to $100, or just $50 the way good and cheap quality DVD players have?
Most consumers won't spend $80 on HDMI cables because Walmart will stock a cheap cable that gets the digital signal through just fine.
HD movies will slowly catch on over the next ten years as consumers upgrading to their first or second HDTV see gorgeous displays in Best Buy showing demo clips of 1080p movies at full resolution and not grainy upsampled DVD at 720p.
More like FPS/Strategy/Fighter. If a game did it right, there are limited combos, because there are counter-strategies that force the players to think as they fight.
Shadowbane might have come closest to what I'm talking about. If it's first year hadn't been so problematic, it would likely still be going strong.
Maybe it's unusual, but not odd. Compare to previous consoles dropping in price to $179 or $129. I think it's an excellent price because "22" keeps people thinking it's close to $200. It mentally gets people willing to buy it for $200, but Nintendo gets a few dollars extra profit.
The hardware was not the same. the Genesis 68000 ran at 7.67 MHz and could only display 61 colors on screen, which is why the SNES' 256 made games look so much more colorful. The Sega CD attachment included a 12.5 MHz 68000 in order to do crude polygon games and video decompression.
You're mistaken. The 6150 is at least as powerful as a 5700, and good enough to play WoW or City of Heroes at 1024x768 with medium quality settings. I know because a month ago my friend's generic-brand computer died and I helped him pick out a Compaq pre-built for $649 that came with a AMD 3800+ and $50 rebate.
(The price was the same at CompUSA as Compaq's page on HP.com. That model's been discontinued though and replaced with a 3700+ and inferior ATI Radeon Xpress 200 graphics with 256MB shared video memory)
His budget was $800 and the plan was to buy that system and get a 7600GS from newegg for $130 or a less-cripled 7600 for $170. When we found the box alone could play as good as or better than his Athlon XP 2000+ with 5700, he decided to leave it alone until an MMO or other game comes out that he'll need to spend that $170 for a new video card.
So for integrated graphics that don't raise the mobo price very much at all, the 6150 is a nice deal.
The margins on Sony consumer electronics and music are very low and have been losing money on and off for the past five to ten years. The Playstation is what's keeping the company afloat and competitive. Development of the PS3 is a multi-billion dollar investment that could cripple the company if it fails to pay off.
The 3D0 came out in 1993, a year ahead of the Playstation. Wikipedia says the CPU was a 32-bit 12.5 MHz RISC (ARM60) made by Advanced RISC Machines (roughly equivalent to 25 MHz 68030)
More importantly, it had the best ports of games compared to the other systems, and quite a few great original titles that took advantage of the CDROM and 3D.
Great games:
Need for Speed, Jurassic Park Interactive, Crash N' Burn, Slayer, Killing Time, and the first console port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, which exceeded the original with CD-quality audio. The Horde, Myst, PO'ed, Total Eclipse, Twisted: The Game Show
HD-DVD also uses a 405nm blue laser.
The 3DO had at least a dozen top-notch titles, and a dozen more very good ones. It wasn't the lack of good games that stopped people from buying it, it was the price. That's the implication for the PS3. It will have a dozen or two good-to-great games for it after two years, but how many people will pay $500 initially, or even $400. If during those two years the 360 and Wii take 80% of the market, developer support will swing towards those platforms, and Sony's multi-billion dollar investment may cost them dearly.
I can see the PS3 selling 30 million units, but the Wii and 360 will sell closer to 150 million.
If your artists end up filling megatextures with repeating fill patterns ... what have you accomplished?
You have made the game look more real and the ground less distracting because the texture is never visibly repeating. At 32000x32000 the camera has to get thousands of feet high, and most of the time miles high, to see the megatexture repeat.
Might developers see that their games can be pirated now with a double layer disc and decide to develop for the PS3 instead?