The main problem is the speed at which manufacturers are expected to act. They constantly throw current development out the window to embrace the "new" tech, which in turn, just starts getting hot, only to be thrown out again when something "new" comes along.
But you're blaming NVidia?! NVidia is still releasing drivers for the TNT! How's that for legacy support. If there are any functions from the TNT-chipset that you miss on your Annihalator Pro I'd like to hear them.
As for completely using a design before trading if for a new one, NVidia has released the GeForce256 -chipset three times now. As GeForce256, GeForce2 GTS and GeForce2 GTS Ultra, which are basically the same card with the exact same features. The only difference is the speed.
I take it you don't play Quake3 then. In single player, G400 is barely fast enough to make 800x600x16 playable, but against human opponents?
Not a chance. G400 is nice allround card with stunning 2D, but hardly a gamer's choice. It's good enough for a lot of people, but there's no need to get defensive like that.
They just showed off their 2ghz part (not finished) and here they are can't even get the 1.13ghz part out the door without a limp. Clearly the emperor has no clothes.
Oh, quit yer FUDding. The 2GHz part was Willamette, dammit, a 20-stage pipeline design with very little in common with the poor coppermine (good ol' P6 core) which they tried running on 1.13GHz. You're comparing apples & oranges.
A penny for your thoughts.
...really high resolution textures would make games look dramatically better, but is difficult or impossible with current video cards. A single high resolution, 24-bit texture, covering a wall or floor for instance, might easily be over 1 MB.
Actually, this is quite possible with todays hardware using texture compression. The problem is that most people do not have the most current generation of 3D-cards, and game designers need to make games that run on as many machines as possible.
A 1024x1024 16-bit texture is two megabytes.
If you want 32-bit it's four megabytes. Apply
S3TC texture compression, and voila it's under
700k. If you used 3dfx' texture compression sceme,and your four megabytes texture is a mere 512k. Most of the time you won't even need textures as large as this since you can do trickery with detail textures.
I don't think we'll ever see any gamers-level graphics cards pushing all textures over the bus, but I don't think we'll be seeing many cards with more than 128MB of ram. It might even go down a bit, but graphics cards will always have a bit of ram that's faster and more expensive than system ram, for the same reason CPUs will always have cache.
Calls to tech support because the video camera they just bought seems "slow",
I'm quite confident that I'll manage to configure my own system properly, so this only applies for people working in Tech support, (god have mercy on their souls) and people without the know-how.
(b) "Pollution Free." To freeze something takes energy. To free somthing to >-200F takes LOT of energy. How do you get the energy?
A neat thing about gasses is that they're fairly easy to transport. Hydrogen and Nitrogen will most likely become the fuel of the future, but large quantities will of course not be produced in countries that has to burn fuel to get electricity!
They will be produced in countries like Iceland, which has a practically limitless supply of free energy from volcanic activity, and it will be produced and stored by countries that have a surplus in their hydroelectric plants.
Transporting gas is a lot easier and more efficient than sending electricity through cables. It is also one of the best ways to store large ammounts of energy.
I assume that the nitrogen will be drawn from the air, seems like the best place to get nitrogen, so it would be silly to worry about releasing it ito the atmosphere since that's where it came from in the first place.
Liquid nitrogen is already produced in large quantities around the world. For all intents and purposes it is a commodity item. All university labs know how to get some when they need it.
And the price? Just short of a buck per litre. For americans this probably sounds horrendous, but in Scandinavia, that's cheaper than gas.
Sure, $500 is a lot of money, but this card isn't for everyone. NVidia will eventually release a new entry-level card, the one codenamed NV20, sometime this autumn or maybe early next year This card however is in the same pricerange as 3dfx' infamous Voodoo5 6000, which is supposed to be released this month. Without the Ultra, the Voodoo5 6000 would've been performance leader. Now it's gonna be a much closer race.
I don't think NVidia expects to sell many of these. It's a silly product for a silly performance war which is more about publicity than anything else. If they wantet a serious solution that people would buy they would've made a new faster Quadro, not a $500 card for gamers.
But I guess that isn't such a bad thing, though it is weird to see a company act that way. I think most companies would rather have hype than surprise. Maybe its all a control/power thing.
What it's about is Steve Jobs wanting to have his little surprises on stage. Where would the fun be
if everyone knew what he was going to say?
I suspect that the people at MacExpos would applaud if Steve Jobs took a sh*t on a plate and told them to eat it. Heck, he's already made them believe that Apple invented streaming mpeg. Rule of thumb, when Jobs uses the words "we've never seen that before", he means never before on the Mac.
Personally I'm waiting for a wireless padless-optical mouse with two buttons & a rollerwheel. But how many times a day will it require a change of batteries?:) A penny for your thoughts.
The reason the web appears so much more vulnerable in this study than in previous studies and general opinion is that they focus on something different from the usual. They're looking at the web, not the internet.
But hey, %4 of the most interconnected websides? It's that something in the order of several thousands of servers? That doesn't sound very vulnerable to me. The routers however... I'm an island myself whenever my ISP's provider f*cks up.
Even if ASUS decides to not make these Drivers.. you know someone else will decide too, Actually, the good people at Wicked3D did the exact same thing a few years ago, but they pulled the drivers because of how the gaming community reacted. A penny for your thoughts.
Sure it can. It's done on ASUS & ELSA drivers every time someone wants to use their LCD shutter glasses. Two separate images are rendered at two different camera positions. Granted, the camera doesn't move much, but it does move, and could probably be made to move a lot more if you wanted to use it for something other than drawing stereo pairs.
Of course, both scenes would contain the same polygons, it would be impossible to move the camera at a totally different location which required new textures and geometry. A penny for your thoughts.
No, hair is not sharp bumps. Bumpmapping is just a lighting trick. You're talking about displacement mapping which adds true geometrical complexity. In that setting hair could be sharp bumps, but unless you want your object to look like a cactus, you'd want som sort of nonlinear transformation there aswell. Usually hair is implemented thrugh either lots and lots of geometry, or a volume shader.
Fractal algorithms have been used in computer graphics modelling for ages, not in consumer level hardware yet though, and probably not very soon either.
What this means is that you, as a gamer who wants to see games ported to Linux, should boycott game companies like Epic
Why would a Linux-user boycott a game company that doesn't make Linux-games anyway? It looks to me like the Linux-users are the ones being boycotted by Epic.
If anything, Epic has learned the hard way that supporting more than one 3d-api and making them all run equally fast is a pain in the butt. They have to pick one API and stay with it, and they picked the one that is the most supported by hardware vendors, that have the most stable drivers, and have support for most of the new features those 3d-hardware guys keep comming up with.
Can you really blame them?
This said, it looks to me like Epic is very busy trying to make Microsoft happy. I wonder if we'll ever see Quake-something om the X-Box.
you most certainly can get 100fps on a screen set a 85hz.
Well, Sir. I dissagree. Let's say your're running at 100Hz and by disabling v-sync you get a steady 200fps. That means you'll get two halves of a frame in one screen refresh 100/2 + 100/2 = 100 whole frames/sec.:-)
(anti-aliasing, T & L, bump mapping) . Are these features being taken advantage of by OpenGL, or are they just useless add-ons unless the games add specific support for these new features.
I don't know for sure about bump mapping, but I'm guessing yes. Antialiasing and T&L has been there for ages.
Also how can you get 100 fps on a screen running at 85 hz?
You can't. But the issue here is to have enough overkill so that you never drop _below_ the screen refresh rate, no matter how much the action heats up. Also, if the card can crank out 100 fps on todays games, it should also be somewhat future-proof.
Sure. Is it worth 300 dollars a year for an extra few FPS in Quake 3?
Maybe not, but nobody's twisting your arm. I think it's great that consumer 3d-graphics advances at this speed. Too bad the target platform for most developers is in the Voodoo2/TNT to Voodoo3/TNT2 area, as they need as large a customer base as possible.
There are still a lot of people with TNT/Voodoo2's out there, and a GeForce2 GTS i certainly a great upgrade.
if anyone has ever compared the GeForce and a Voodoo 3 on Unreal, they would see that the Voodoos has a couple of extra features. (Such as the fractal-like texturing....)
They're called detail-textures and not implemented in the D3D-mode of Unreal for performance reasons. Unreal was written specifically for Glide, and it's still showing.
Detail-texturing is easilly implemented in D3D, and is not a feature limited to Glide/Voodoo.
What the h*ll is that supposed to mean? T&L offloads some of the geometry workload from the CPU to the graphics card. Quake3 does exactly that which, is why it was equally as playable on my Celeron 300a as it is on my P3 750E.
How much T&L will help is a function of CPU power and geometry complexity. Slower CPUs will benifit more than fast ones, but to say Q3 doesn't use T&L because a fast processor isn't geometry bound, is just plain wrong.
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But you're blaming NVidia?! NVidia is still releasing drivers for the TNT! How's that for legacy support. If there are any functions from the TNT-chipset that you miss on your Annihalator Pro I'd like to hear them.
As for completely using a design before trading if for a new one, NVidia has released the GeForce256 -chipset three times now. As GeForce256, GeForce2 GTS and GeForce2 GTS Ultra, which are basically the same card with the exact same features. The only difference is the speed.
I guess you must be talking about Bizarro-NVidia.
A penny for your thoughts.
I take it you don't play Quake3 then. In single player, G400 is barely fast enough to make 800x600x16 playable, but against human opponents? Not a chance. G400 is nice allround card with stunning 2D, but hardly a gamer's choice. It's good enough for a lot of people, but there's no need to get defensive like that.
A penny for your thoughts.
Oh, quit yer FUDding. The 2GHz part was Willamette, dammit, a 20-stage pipeline design with very little in common with the poor coppermine (good ol' P6 core) which they tried running on 1.13GHz. You're comparing apples & oranges.
A penny for your thoughts.
Actually, this is quite possible with todays hardware using texture compression. The problem is that most people do not have the most current generation of 3D-cards, and game designers need to make games that run on as many machines as possible.
A 1024x1024 16-bit texture is two megabytes.
If you want 32-bit it's four megabytes.
Apply S3TC texture compression, and voila it's under 700k. If you used 3dfx' texture compression sceme,and your four megabytes texture is a mere 512k. Most of the time you won't even need textures as large as this since you can do trickery with detail textures.
I don't think we'll ever see any gamers-level graphics cards pushing all textures over the bus, but I don't think we'll be seeing many cards with more than 128MB of ram. It might even go down a bit, but graphics cards will always have a bit of ram that's faster and more expensive than system ram, for the same reason CPUs will always have cache.
A penny for your thoughts.
I'm quite confident that I'll manage to configure my own system properly, so this only applies for people working in Tech support, (god have mercy on their souls) and people without the know-how.
In other words, OPP. :)
A penny for your thoughts.
a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Not if they were called stenchblossoms!
A penny for your thoughts.
A neat thing about gasses is that they're fairly easy to transport. Hydrogen and Nitrogen will most likely become the fuel of the future, but large quantities will of course not be produced in countries that has to burn fuel to get electricity! They will be produced in countries like Iceland, which has a practically limitless supply of free energy from volcanic activity, and it will be produced and stored by countries that have a surplus in their hydroelectric plants. Transporting gas is a lot easier and more efficient than sending electricity through cables. It is also one of the best ways to store large ammounts of energy. I assume that the nitrogen will be drawn from the air, seems like the best place to get nitrogen, so it would be silly to worry about releasing it ito the atmosphere since that's where it came from in the first place. Liquid nitrogen is already produced in large quantities around the world. For all intents and purposes it is a commodity item. All university labs know how to get some when they need it. And the price? Just short of a buck per litre. For americans this probably sounds horrendous, but in Scandinavia, that's cheaper than gas.
A penny for your thoughts.
Sure, $500 is a lot of money, but this card isn't for everyone. NVidia will eventually release a new entry-level card, the one codenamed NV20, sometime this autumn or maybe early next year This card however is in the same pricerange as 3dfx' infamous Voodoo5 6000, which is supposed to be released this month. Without the Ultra, the Voodoo5 6000 would've been performance leader. Now it's gonna be a much closer race.
I don't think NVidia expects to sell many of these. It's a silly product for a silly performance war which is more about publicity than anything else. If they wantet a serious solution that people would buy they would've made a new faster Quadro, not a $500 card for gamers.
A penny for your thoughts.
But I guess that isn't such a bad thing, though it is weird to see a company act that way. I think most companies would rather have hype than surprise. Maybe its all a control/power thing.
What it's about is Steve Jobs wanting to have his little surprises on stage. Where would the fun be if everyone knew what he was going to say? I suspect that the people at MacExpos would applaud if Steve Jobs took a sh*t on a plate and told them to eat it. Heck, he's already made them believe that Apple invented streaming mpeg. Rule of thumb, when Jobs uses the words "we've never seen that before", he means never before on the Mac.
A penny for your thoughts.
People are saying that the mouse is horrible for gaming, since there's only one mouse button and no wheel.
And they're right. It IS horrible for gaming.
Can't Quake3 without a wheel, moving your left hand to switch weapons is certain death.
I know that when I go to my friend's house and he has a Logitech 4-button mouse I just can't immediately figure out how to use it.
And why should you? That's your friend's mouse. Do you think he's uncomfortable with it?
A penny for your thoughts.
Personally I'm waiting for a wireless padless-optical mouse with two buttons & a rollerwheel. But how many times a day will it require a change of batteries? :)
A penny for your thoughts.
The reason the web appears so much more vulnerable in this study than in previous studies and general opinion is that they focus on something different from the usual. They're looking at the web, not the internet.
But hey, %4 of the most interconnected websides? It's that something in the order of several thousands of servers? That doesn't sound very vulnerable to me. The routers however... I'm an island myself whenever my ISP's provider f*cks up.
A penny for your thoughts.
Even if ASUS decides to not make these Drivers.. you know someone else will decide too, Actually, the good people at Wicked3D did the exact same thing a few years ago, but they pulled the drivers because of how the gaming community reacted.
A penny for your thoughts.
Sure it can. It's done on ASUS & ELSA drivers every time someone wants to use their LCD shutter glasses. Two separate images are rendered at two different camera positions. Granted, the camera doesn't move much, but it does move, and could probably be made to move a lot more if you wanted to use it for something other than drawing stereo pairs.
Of course, both scenes would contain the same polygons, it would be impossible to move the camera at a totally different location which required new textures and geometry.
A penny for your thoughts.
No, hair is not sharp bumps. Bumpmapping is just a lighting trick. You're talking about displacement mapping which adds true geometrical complexity. In that setting hair could be sharp bumps, but unless you want your object to look like a cactus, you'd want som sort of nonlinear transformation there aswell. Usually hair is implemented thrugh either lots and lots of geometry, or a volume shader.
Fractal algorithms have been used in computer graphics modelling for ages, not in consumer level hardware yet though, and probably not very soon either.
A penny for your thoughts.
What this means is that you, as a gamer who wants to see games ported to Linux, should boycott game companies like Epic
Why would a Linux-user boycott a game company that doesn't make Linux-games anyway?
It looks to me like the Linux-users are the ones being boycotted by Epic.
If anything, Epic has learned the hard way that supporting more than one 3d-api and making them all run equally fast is a pain in the butt. They have to pick one API and stay with it, and they picked the one that is the most supported by hardware vendors, that have the most stable drivers, and have support for most of the new features those 3d-hardware guys keep comming up with.
Can you really blame them?
This said, it looks to me like Epic is very busy trying to make Microsoft happy. I wonder if we'll ever see Quake-something om the X-Box.
A penny for your thoughts.
you most certainly can get 100fps on a screen set a 85hz.
:-)
Well, Sir. I dissagree.
Let's say your're running at 100Hz and by disabling v-sync you get a steady 200fps. That means you'll get two halves of a frame in one screen refresh 100/2 + 100/2 = 100 whole frames/sec.
A penny for your thoughts.
(anti-aliasing, T & L, bump mapping) . Are these features being taken advantage of by OpenGL, or are they just useless add-ons unless the games add specific support for these new features.
I don't know for sure about bump mapping, but I'm guessing yes. Antialiasing and T&L has been there for ages.
Also how can you get 100 fps on a screen running at 85 hz?
You can't. But the issue here is to have enough overkill so that you never drop _below_ the screen refresh rate, no matter how much the action heats up. Also, if the card can crank out 100 fps on todays games, it should also be somewhat future-proof.
A penny for your thoughts.
I think M$ released the tech specs and they stated that the X-box will have a geforce1 chipset driving the graphics.
You think wrong.
They are getting something brand new and MS have paid them $200 million in advance for R&D.
A penny for your thoughts.
Sure. Is it worth 300 dollars a year for an extra few FPS in Quake 3?
Maybe not, but nobody's twisting your arm. I think it's great that consumer 3d-graphics advances at this speed. Too bad the target platform for most developers is in the Voodoo2/TNT to Voodoo3/TNT2 area, as they need as large a customer base as possible.
There are still a lot of people with TNT/Voodoo2's out there, and a GeForce2 GTS i certainly a great upgrade.
A penny for your thoughts.
if anyone has ever compared the GeForce and a Voodoo 3 on Unreal, they would see that the Voodoos has a couple of extra features. (Such as the fractal-like texturing....)
They're called detail-textures and not implemented in the D3D-mode of Unreal for performance reasons. Unreal was written specifically for Glide, and it's still showing.
Detail-texturing is easilly implemented in D3D, and is not a feature limited to Glide/Voodoo.
A penny for your thoughts.
What the h*ll is that supposed to mean? T&L offloads some of the geometry workload from the CPU to the graphics card. Quake3 does exactly that which, is why it was equally as playable on my Celeron 300a as it is on my P3 750E.
How much T&L will help is a function of CPU power and geometry complexity. Slower CPUs will benifit more than fast ones, but to say Q3 doesn't use T&L because a fast processor isn't geometry bound, is just plain wrong.
A penny for your thoughts.