I've recently optimized my home power consumption, after my last PC upgrade caused the breakers to blow repeatedly. Here's the breakdown of my various PCs:
Pentium Pro 200mhz (firewall/router) : 40w (no difference under load) AMD Athlon X2 3800+, underclocked to 950mhz (file server) : 100w idle, 120w load (with 8 hard drives) Dell 22" entry-level LCD : 45w in-use, 1w standby Viewsonic 19" CRT : 40w in-use, 1w standby (surprising!)
And finally, my new baby. An Intel Quad-core Q6600 oc'ed to 4ghz, with water cooling, Geforce 8800GTS and a crapload of hard drives. I call her Scorch. She goes to S3 sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity, otherwise I'd be tacking an extra $40-50 onto my hydro bill every month.
Idle: 350w. 100% CPU load: 550w. Everything loaded: 750+w.
I have no idea why it needs 350w to sit idle, when the X2 it replaced sips on a third of that. Sure, the water rig eats up about 50w, but that leaves 300w just to power a board, cpu and video card. I've heard the Geforce 8800 eats about 80 to 100w doing nothing, which is really pathetic! I think the manufacturers should put more effort into conserving energy. I'm fine with it chewing over half a kilowatt under load, because it's getting the work done in a quarter of the time it used to take, but after the work is done, it should go back to a low power draw.
I contemplated setting up another PC, just for the common, light daily tasks like surfing and email... maybe a laptop or Mac Mini. Ideally I would want my main rig to scale from low power to high power according to demand. CPU throttling does too little, if I don't need the full 4.0ghz, then dropping to 2.7ghz is probably still overkill. I think the throttling should be able to drop down all the way to 1x multiplier (450mhz in my case), which would be plenty for what I'm doing right now: posting on Slashdot. I know there are bullshit manufacturing excuses as to why this isn't possible, but ideally if a 45w machine from ten years ago can handle the current task, then I would expect the latest technology to scale down to 45w (or less) to do that exact same task. Today's power supplies are more efficient, CPUs are supposedly more efficient (on paper), and this machine has more Ram than the old one has disk space. Screw SuperFetch, I could netboot this thing diskless in a heartbeat, so what's wrong with the industry and where do they think they're going ? Will my next PC need a dedicated 30amp circuit to print a Word document ? wtf!
How is this new ? Macs have been doing something very similar to this for years. The average 15-year-old Linux weenie could hack this up over a weekend.
More importantly: what does this mean for data security ? File security is implemented at the OS level, so if this brainless "pre-boot" feature bypasses the OS, the only thing a would-be attacker needs to do is power-cycle the machine and they get full access to your rig. It frees them from the incriminating chore of actually stealing the hard drive out of the box.
I'd be happy if OS makers could provide a quick and easy "recovery console" kind of environment, without having to resort to a boot dis(c/k). Just something to let me un-screw Windows or recompile a broken Linux kernel. I'm really liking the new Asus boards with a small solid-state Linux distro built-in, but it seems like this would be an easy thing to build right into the OS.
Then you get rid of the patent system, and the so-called "inventors", if they're too puny to start their own business, well they can do what people used to do, which is meet with the established companies and try to sell your invention.
The way the system works right now, someone can mail in an application without ever doing anything tangible, sit on an idea for 20 years and wait for the right victim to come along, then sue them for way too much money thanks to the wonderfully broken legal system we have. Those same quacks would have gotten a fraction of the payout had then been honest from the beginning and sold/licensed their idea. The patent system just gives them too much power.
You, like many others before you, are confusing BIOS with what was once called "CMOS Setup".
The BIOS is essentially a set of low-level device drivers for the motherboard and basic peripherals (keyboard, display). Overclockers don't care about it, as long as it works.
The "CMOS Setup", or more appropriately System Setup, is an interface to configure the motherboard's features. The fancier ones offer many tweaking options, some even have a minimal Linux OS like the Asus P5K3 Deluxe (extremely handy for pre-boot stuff - or web/media browsing). Overclockers love big feature-rich control panel on their board as they allow them to tweak their system to further heights, and offer added functionality like built-in flashing (from a USB key or hard drive) and "smart" overclocking which is like the opposite of Intel Speedstep:)
Just like the USA and many other nations, things get weird and stupid the closer we get to elections. It's all just one huge pissing match between overgrown suit-wearing preschoolers.
This won't accomplish anything useful, but it does garner lots of attention and sets up an opportunity for some political leader to "be a hero". It's all just a game
Yes, I'll say it again. The venue industry is killing show business!
Tickets cost an arm and a leg, with an extra 20-25% tacked on for "venue fees". Concessions misplace the decimal period in their prices. And the ticket scarcity bullshit... seriously, if so many people want to see these shows, then book more shows! Build mega concert halls if that can alleviate the issue, there's no reason why we should all stuff into a tiny hockey arena with terrible seats to see live music.
The longer this goes on, the further the show-going experience will get distanced from the actual show, and much like CD sales, the fans will stop consuming. Who will the RIAA blame when people don't go to concerts anymore ? The Internet ?:P
The problem with ERP (software), like any other big-money big-market app, is that every single commercial ERP solution is a steaming pile of shit. Massive development teams of varying (lack of) skill, textbook project management that meets deadlines at the expense of code quality, sales and training staff that earn way more than the developers, but most importantly the absolute ignorance of clients who buy into these systems without even knowning what they want out of it.
I've been involved in ERP systems big and small, and the one thing that's constant about them is they do very little and cost very much. How hard is it, really, in 2007 to manage a few lists of assets, costs and schedules ? It often takes more people to install and maintain the app, than it did for humans to do all the work on paper before the ERP got implemented. The prime difference is that once the app is launched, you give all your PHBs a login and they can run zillions of misinterpreted reports at whim. You don't gain efficiency, you gain the illusion thereof.
Of course, the logical next step is to make it into a game. Log File Centipede!!!!1!11
Curiously, I spent a good half-minute staring at the animation. For a busy site this could actually be really useful, to watch a slashdotting as it unfolds in real-time, and to a skilled sysadmin it could offer the kind of timely info required to properly tune the server to survive the bursts.
I'm not going to start watching this thing 8 hours a day (though some drones would), but it definitely does have limited uses that aren't currently matched by other analysis tools.
In fact I'm avoiding every form of physical media, because in this day and age we shouldn't even need a disc at all. We have networking technology that can ferry movies, music and anything other digital data in real-time, anywhere on the globe. There is no good reason why North America can't have hyperfast internet access. To hell with these greedy telecoms!
I don't have Blu-Ray, nor HD-DVD, and I play all my movies on a media center PC. I've been doing this for years now, it's not the "way of the future", it should be the way of today. The main thing holding us back is the financial interest of a petty group of media tyrants and their senator friends.
I get out plenty... in fact I'm still buzzed from last night's drinking as I type this at 10:30 in the morning.
The fact remains that every year brings more and more power to the desktop, and I choose to root for whomever's winning the race. I would be very impressed and proud if NVidia were to follow suit and release dev specs for their graphics hardware, because right now that's where my money is. Next year when I upgrade again, if ATI is on top, I'll switch back. My point is: I don't want to have to choose between performance or Linux compatibility... there's no reason why we can't all have both!
That's funny, because I was just contemplating replacing my 320mb with a 640 because I can make this card chug pretty hard in certain recent games. Mind you, I like my 16x AA+AF so I'm probably taxing it harder than the more reasonable folks out there, but there is definitely a point to having more video ram.
We've had 256mb cards for a few years now for "normal" resolutions like 1024x768 and 1280x1024... but that's not hardcore anymore. Hardcore is SLI GTX'es (or HD2900s) driving a 30" Dell at 2560x1600. We now have games that have the rendering chops to look awesome at that rez, whereas the old stuff would be showing its blocky flaws and jumping polys.
Some folks blow $5k on a plasma tv, I prefer to blow mine on a killer PC:) Same diff.
Anyone who's ever submitted such "well-intended" reports, sometimes they get a "thank you" and the problems get fixed, but more often there is resistance and hostility. Now this is pure speculation, devil's advocate if you will, but what if the hacker had already tried to contact eBay and was rebuffed, or perhaps he (or his client) was the victim of fraud as a result of eBay's poor security and this was retaliation.
Sometimes, when someone doesn't listen to your kind advice, you have to make them listen.
Archeological dig finds dirt Scuba diver finds water and this just in, Shocking report: Cancel will kill you
Yeah, I.T. sucks. We were the fastest growing market, and now we're the fastest dying market. Easy come, easy go. All of my friends have found more money and job security in more traditional careers and trades, so all us genius computer guys (who suck at anything else) are stuck in our underpaid overstressed jobs.
The magic of open-source software is that any idiot with a text editor can go in and change it.
If someone's so darn concerned about the information in $_SERVER, then they should just grep the source and rip out the offending code.
And if they don't know how, then they should shut the hell up about $_SERVER. In the end, it's really not a huge deal, nothing an attacker couldn't figure out on their own in about ten seconds with readily available scripts.
Of course, this news comes just after I've replaced my ATI and AMD with a screamin' fast Intel and NVidia rig.
I agree that releasing specs is a step in the right direction, but all of their products are kinda bland right now, and they lost their price advantage over the summer when Intel went apeshit with deep price cuts, and that's before even considering that current Intel chips can be overclocked to ridiculous heights with little effort.
The Linux distros have always been good to low-end hardware, but there's something absolutely erotic about running it on an overclocked quad-core beast with a really beefy video card. Linux lets you max out the power in ways that Windows can't even conceptualize, and Compiz Fusion beats the tar out of Aero Glass.
One can only hope that AMD's bone will entice competitors to follow suit.
He paid for it from earnings made from selling online game items he won.
So he's just one of those thousands of annoying twits who spam the MMOs with "fast, cheap gold" and other game-spoiling ventures. I'm sure he's passionate, alright... but not passionate about the games, it's the money he's after.
... in an idle loop, with no operating system, on a cool April morning, while hopping on one leg.
SIMD is great except nobody uses it for anything but graphics. It's just very difficult for a general-purpose compiler to efficiently optimize for such things. In most cases, your CPU is stuck in an I/O loop, waiting for data to arrive so it can speed through a long chain of redundant ops. Let's face it: it takes more init code to run a one-line perl script, than it did ten years ago to run a full-blown system process.
I don't expect support from Nintendo, but I do expect them to not destroy the console.
Voiding the warranty just means they won't help me if/when I break it. It doesn't mean they have a right to send a kill signal over the wire and brick my legally-acquired equipment, just because I took a screwdriver to it.
When's the last time someone from Ford showed up to blow up your car, because you installed an aftermarket stereo ?
Either you don't live in an apartment building, or you don't own a satellite dish. There is no such thing as a "renter's market" when we have things called "overpopulation" and "overimmigration". I dunno, maybe you live in a boring town nobody wants to move to, but where I live things are quite the opposite.
Law or no law, it's very difficult to get your dish installed in a north-facing apartment. Nobody will let you mount your dish on the roof or sides, and the larger apartment complexes actually get kickbacks from the cable company. What, you thought your landlord gave everyone "free" cable just out of the kindness of his crusty old heart ? No, he adds $60 to the rent bill, pays about half that to the cable co with his group discount, and in most jurisdictions he even gets a tax deduction on the remaining half.
Anti-competitive tactics by the telecoms... say it ain't so!:P
Not so fast there buddy... it's not just about the bus, latency plays a role too. If you want to see unaccelerated 2D performance, just fire up Linux and Xorg with the plain VESA driver. It's usable, but you can definitely feel the weight of the software blitter when you drag things around and realize the window's lagging behind your mouse pointer by a few tenths of a second or more.
Bus speeds have improved significantly over the years, but so has the data traffic imposed on them. Hey, if you want to run in 640x480 4-bit, knock yourself out. My current desktop resolution chews up around 92 times more memory than decade-old VGA, which means it needs to blit stuff at least 92 times faster for me to not notice any slowdown. Here's a hint: PCIe ain't 92 times faster than PCI or even ISA.
That's what they've been telling us ever since the Mystique came and went. The truth is, I've worked on many of their cards and I don't see the difference AT ALL. In fact, I see problems with the Matrox gear that I don't see with my "low-quality 2D" NVidia boards; problems like weird noisy pixels (animated!), imprecise rectangle blits - drag a window around and it jumps back and forth around the mouse pointer like Parkinson's disease, oh and I shouldn't forget the best glitch of all: even their best "2D" card can't drive a 27" or 30" LCD... you have to step up to the sad sad Parhelia to get anything above 1920x1200.
It's 2007, any idiot with an FPGA can design a fast RAMDAC and rectangle accelerator. Matrox has dozens of products in its lineup, the only differences between them all are the number and type of connectors, and the multiplier applied to the price. What I don't understand is why did Number Nine die and Matrox survive ?
Slashdot Mirror
Your guess is just about right.
I've recently optimized my home power consumption, after my last PC upgrade caused the breakers to blow repeatedly. Here's the breakdown of my various PCs:
Pentium Pro 200mhz (firewall/router) : 40w (no difference under load)
AMD Athlon X2 3800+, underclocked to 950mhz (file server) : 100w idle, 120w load (with 8 hard drives)
Dell 22" entry-level LCD : 45w in-use, 1w standby
Viewsonic 19" CRT : 40w in-use, 1w standby (surprising!)
And finally, my new baby. An Intel Quad-core Q6600 oc'ed to 4ghz, with water cooling, Geforce 8800GTS and a crapload of hard drives. I call her Scorch. She goes to S3 sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity, otherwise I'd be tacking an extra $40-50 onto my hydro bill every month.
Idle: 350w. 100% CPU load: 550w. Everything loaded: 750+w.
I have no idea why it needs 350w to sit idle, when the X2 it replaced sips on a third of that. Sure, the water rig eats up about 50w, but that leaves 300w just to power a board, cpu and video card. I've heard the Geforce 8800 eats about 80 to 100w doing nothing, which is really pathetic! I think the manufacturers should put more effort into conserving energy. I'm fine with it chewing over half a kilowatt under load, because it's getting the work done in a quarter of the time it used to take, but after the work is done, it should go back to a low power draw.
I contemplated setting up another PC, just for the common, light daily tasks like surfing and email... maybe a laptop or Mac Mini. Ideally I would want my main rig to scale from low power to high power according to demand. CPU throttling does too little, if I don't need the full 4.0ghz, then dropping to 2.7ghz is probably still overkill. I think the throttling should be able to drop down all the way to 1x multiplier (450mhz in my case), which would be plenty for what I'm doing right now: posting on Slashdot. I know there are bullshit manufacturing excuses as to why this isn't possible, but ideally if a 45w machine from ten years ago can handle the current task, then I would expect the latest technology to scale down to 45w (or less) to do that exact same task. Today's power supplies are more efficient, CPUs are supposedly more efficient (on paper), and this machine has more Ram than the old one has disk space. Screw SuperFetch, I could netboot this thing diskless in a heartbeat, so what's wrong with the industry and where do they think they're going ? Will my next PC need a dedicated 30amp circuit to print a Word document ? wtf!
How is this new ? Macs have been doing something very similar to this for years. The average 15-year-old Linux weenie could hack this up over a weekend.
More importantly: what does this mean for data security ? File security is implemented at the OS level, so if this brainless "pre-boot" feature bypasses the OS, the only thing a would-be attacker needs to do is power-cycle the machine and they get full access to your rig. It frees them from the incriminating chore of actually stealing the hard drive out of the box.
I'd be happy if OS makers could provide a quick and easy "recovery console" kind of environment, without having to resort to a boot dis(c/k). Just something to let me un-screw Windows or recompile a broken Linux kernel. I'm really liking the new Asus boards with a small solid-state Linux distro built-in, but it seems like this would be an easy thing to build right into the OS.
Then you get rid of the patent system, and the so-called "inventors", if they're too puny to start their own business, well they can do what people used to do, which is meet with the established companies and try to sell your invention.
The way the system works right now, someone can mail in an application without ever doing anything tangible, sit on an idea for 20 years and wait for the right victim to come along, then sue them for way too much money thanks to the wonderfully broken legal system we have. Those same quacks would have gotten a fraction of the payout had then been honest from the beginning and sold/licensed their idea. The patent system just gives them too much power.
That's a great idea, but how are we going to spin the use of hard drives as military weapons ?
This country's real quick at making stuff happen when it involves war efforts, and real slow at everything else.
You, like many others before you, are confusing BIOS with what was once called "CMOS Setup".
:)
The BIOS is essentially a set of low-level device drivers for the motherboard and basic peripherals (keyboard, display). Overclockers don't care about it, as long as it works.
The "CMOS Setup", or more appropriately System Setup, is an interface to configure the motherboard's features. The fancier ones offer many tweaking options, some even have a minimal Linux OS like the Asus P5K3 Deluxe (extremely handy for pre-boot stuff - or web/media browsing). Overclockers love big feature-rich control panel on their board as they allow them to tweak their system to further heights, and offer added functionality like built-in flashing (from a USB key or hard drive) and "smart" overclocking which is like the opposite of Intel Speedstep
Just like the USA and many other nations, things get weird and stupid the closer we get to elections. It's all just one huge pissing match between overgrown suit-wearing preschoolers.
This won't accomplish anything useful, but it does garner lots of attention and sets up an opportunity for some political leader to "be a hero". It's all just a game
Uber uncrackable image doctoring script:
1. Select a rectangle around your face
2. Fill with black
3. ????
4. PERVERT!!!!!!!
For everything else, there's unsharp mask. You'd be surprised the kind of things you can "enhance" from a chunky low-resolution image.
They should market this as the "Logitech Personal Jesus".
Hey, wait... if I wear this helmet, will I be flushed with visions of indulgence, wisdom and vengeance ? I mean, it works for any religion, right ?
What if you're a true atheist, does the helmet make you feel empty and bored ?
Why don't they just end the world as we know it and release the orgasm helmet once and for all ?
Yes, I'll say it again. The venue industry is killing show business!
:P
Tickets cost an arm and a leg, with an extra 20-25% tacked on for "venue fees". Concessions misplace the decimal period in their prices. And the ticket scarcity bullshit... seriously, if so many people want to see these shows, then book more shows! Build mega concert halls if that can alleviate the issue, there's no reason why we should all stuff into a tiny hockey arena with terrible seats to see live music.
The longer this goes on, the further the show-going experience will get distanced from the actual show, and much like CD sales, the fans will stop consuming. Who will the RIAA blame when people don't go to concerts anymore ? The Internet ?
The problem with ERP (software), like any other big-money big-market app, is that every single commercial ERP solution is a steaming pile of shit. Massive development teams of varying (lack of) skill, textbook project management that meets deadlines at the expense of code quality, sales and training staff that earn way more than the developers, but most importantly the absolute ignorance of clients who buy into these systems without even knowning what they want out of it.
I've been involved in ERP systems big and small, and the one thing that's constant about them is they do very little and cost very much. How hard is it, really, in 2007 to manage a few lists of assets, costs and schedules ? It often takes more people to install and maintain the app, than it did for humans to do all the work on paper before the ERP got implemented. The prime difference is that once the app is launched, you give all your PHBs a login and they can run zillions of misinterpreted reports at whim. You don't gain efficiency, you gain the illusion thereof.
Of course, the logical next step is to make it into a game. Log File Centipede!!!!1!11
Curiously, I spent a good half-minute staring at the animation. For a busy site this could actually be really useful, to watch a slashdotting as it unfolds in real-time, and to a skilled sysadmin it could offer the kind of timely info required to properly tune the server to survive the bursts.
I'm not going to start watching this thing 8 hours a day (though some drones would), but it definitely does have limited uses that aren't currently matched by other analysis tools.
Me three!
In fact I'm avoiding every form of physical media, because in this day and age we shouldn't even need a disc at all. We have networking technology that can ferry movies, music and anything other digital data in real-time, anywhere on the globe. There is no good reason why North America can't have hyperfast internet access. To hell with these greedy telecoms!
I don't have Blu-Ray, nor HD-DVD, and I play all my movies on a media center PC. I've been doing this for years now, it's not the "way of the future", it should be the way of today. The main thing holding us back is the financial interest of a petty group of media tyrants and their senator friends.
I get out plenty... in fact I'm still buzzed from last night's drinking as I type this at 10:30 in the morning.
The fact remains that every year brings more and more power to the desktop, and I choose to root for whomever's winning the race. I would be very impressed and proud if NVidia were to follow suit and release dev specs for their graphics hardware, because right now that's where my money is. Next year when I upgrade again, if ATI is on top, I'll switch back. My point is: I don't want to have to choose between performance or Linux compatibility... there's no reason why we can't all have both!
That's funny, because I was just contemplating replacing my 320mb with a 640 because I can make this card chug pretty hard in certain recent games. Mind you, I like my 16x AA+AF so I'm probably taxing it harder than the more reasonable folks out there, but there is definitely a point to having more video ram.
:) Same diff.
We've had 256mb cards for a few years now for "normal" resolutions like 1024x768 and 1280x1024... but that's not hardcore anymore. Hardcore is SLI GTX'es (or HD2900s) driving a 30" Dell at 2560x1600. We now have games that have the rendering chops to look awesome at that rez, whereas the old stuff would be showing its blocky flaws and jumping polys.
Some folks blow $5k on a plasma tv, I prefer to blow mine on a killer PC
Anyone who's ever submitted such "well-intended" reports, sometimes they get a "thank you" and the problems get fixed, but more often there is resistance and hostility. Now this is pure speculation, devil's advocate if you will, but what if the hacker had already tried to contact eBay and was rebuffed, or perhaps he (or his client) was the victim of fraud as a result of eBay's poor security and this was retaliation.
Sometimes, when someone doesn't listen to your kind advice, you have to make them listen.
In other news:
Archeological dig finds dirt
Scuba diver finds water
and this just in, Shocking report: Cancel will kill you
Yeah, I.T. sucks. We were the fastest growing market, and now we're the fastest dying market. Easy come, easy go. All of my friends have found more money and job security in more traditional careers and trades, so all us genius computer guys (who suck at anything else) are stuck in our underpaid overstressed jobs.
Even my drunk neighbour knows that
The magic of open-source software is that any idiot with a text editor can go in and change it.
If someone's so darn concerned about the information in $_SERVER, then they should just grep the source and rip out the offending code.
And if they don't know how, then they should shut the hell up about $_SERVER. In the end, it's really not a huge deal, nothing an attacker couldn't figure out on their own in about ten seconds with readily available scripts.
Of course, this news comes just after I've replaced my ATI and AMD with a screamin' fast Intel and NVidia rig.
I agree that releasing specs is a step in the right direction, but all of their products are kinda bland right now, and they lost their price advantage over the summer when Intel went apeshit with deep price cuts, and that's before even considering that current Intel chips can be overclocked to ridiculous heights with little effort.
The Linux distros have always been good to low-end hardware, but there's something absolutely erotic about running it on an overclocked quad-core beast with a really beefy video card. Linux lets you max out the power in ways that Windows can't even conceptualize, and Compiz Fusion beats the tar out of Aero Glass.
One can only hope that AMD's bone will entice competitors to follow suit.
He paid for it from earnings made from selling online game items he won.
So he's just one of those thousands of annoying twits who spam the MMOs with "fast, cheap gold" and other game-spoiling ventures. I'm sure he's passionate, alright... but not passionate about the games, it's the money he's after.
Man, that's really young to be so corrupt!
... in an idle loop, with no operating system, on a cool April morning, while hopping on one leg.
SIMD is great except nobody uses it for anything but graphics. It's just very difficult for a general-purpose compiler to efficiently optimize for such things. In most cases, your CPU is stuck in an I/O loop, waiting for data to arrive so it can speed through a long chain of redundant ops. Let's face it: it takes more init code to run a one-line perl script, than it did ten years ago to run a full-blown system process.
I don't expect support from Nintendo, but I do expect them to not destroy the console.
Voiding the warranty just means they won't help me if/when I break it. It doesn't mean they have a right to send a kill signal over the wire and brick my legally-acquired equipment, just because I took a screwdriver to it.
When's the last time someone from Ford showed up to blow up your car, because you installed an aftermarket stereo ?
Either you don't live in an apartment building, or you don't own a satellite dish. There is no such thing as a "renter's market" when we have things called "overpopulation" and "overimmigration". I dunno, maybe you live in a boring town nobody wants to move to, but where I live things are quite the opposite.
:P
Law or no law, it's very difficult to get your dish installed in a north-facing apartment. Nobody will let you mount your dish on the roof or sides, and the larger apartment complexes actually get kickbacks from the cable company. What, you thought your landlord gave everyone "free" cable just out of the kindness of his crusty old heart ? No, he adds $60 to the rent bill, pays about half that to the cable co with his group discount, and in most jurisdictions he even gets a tax deduction on the remaining half.
Anti-competitive tactics by the telecoms... say it ain't so!
Not so fast there buddy... it's not just about the bus, latency plays a role too. If you want to see unaccelerated 2D performance, just fire up Linux and Xorg with the plain VESA driver. It's usable, but you can definitely feel the weight of the software blitter when you drag things around and realize the window's lagging behind your mouse pointer by a few tenths of a second or more.
Bus speeds have improved significantly over the years, but so has the data traffic imposed on them. Hey, if you want to run in 640x480 4-bit, knock yourself out. My current desktop resolution chews up around 92 times more memory than decade-old VGA, which means it needs to blit stuff at least 92 times faster for me to not notice any slowdown. Here's a hint: PCIe ain't 92 times faster than PCI or even ISA.
That's what they've been telling us ever since the Mystique came and went. The truth is, I've worked on many of their cards and I don't see the difference AT ALL. In fact, I see problems with the Matrox gear that I don't see with my "low-quality 2D" NVidia boards; problems like weird noisy pixels (animated!), imprecise rectangle blits - drag a window around and it jumps back and forth around the mouse pointer like Parkinson's disease, oh and I shouldn't forget the best glitch of all: even their best "2D" card can't drive a 27" or 30" LCD... you have to step up to the sad sad Parhelia to get anything above 1920x1200.
It's 2007, any idiot with an FPGA can design a fast RAMDAC and rectangle accelerator. Matrox has dozens of products in its lineup, the only differences between them all are the number and type of connectors, and the multiplier applied to the price. What I don't understand is why did Number Nine die and Matrox survive ?
Replace "American" with any other identifier and most people will have a puzzled look on their faces.
Seriously, does anyone have a beef with Denmark ? Didn't think so. NEXT!