There is a quick and easy way of fixing this. Most Distro's that aren't based on a brand-spankin new kernel (most) will fail to install any RPM's because RPM checks the CPU-ID first. You will have to re-compile either the kernel on your install media or RPM to auto-select 0x686. (It goes into compatability mode - 0x?86)
If you want to modify your Kernel, you can add a quick IF statement in the setup.c code to detect if the CPUID is a P4, then just set it back to a 0x686. You obviously won't get optimized code for a P4, but it works to install RPMS, and who cares because there is no optimized code yet anyway. (Atleast that i know of)
You can also mess with your RPM code to auto-set the package type, but I prefer the above.
Cheers
Hopefully this should allow 3dfx to take a more agressive stance on supporting OpenGL. Up till now, their ICD has been surprisingly poor, only supporting what they have to in order for a few games to work. Hopefully this is a good indication of better support and a full ICD.
With 3dfx cross-platform stance (Mac, Linux, Windows) OpenGL is the only real solution.
There are a number of technical hurdles, some of which I really can't see being overcome on the current hardware in order for a MMRPG to actually be feasable. The primary one is no place to store the game data.
What will you do with all the updates? I doubt it is practical to download all the new patches to RAM, in the case of the PS2 or DC. Unfortunately, I don't think patches will ever go away. The nature of a MMRPG is to be constantly changing, and next generation MMRPG's will have much more dynamic features. XBox will probably be the first to be able to run MMRPG's, just due to it's close relationship (both in hardware and software) to a PC.
All the current MMRPG's rely heavily on patches for new content, balance changes, and general bugfixes. I doubt this will change.
Ge-Force2 is a totally different case than CPU's. The Ge-force2 is almost *totally* bandwidth bound in most cases, so that 20-30% increase you are seeing is probably the maximum a CPU will ever see.
This is obvious if you look at benchmarks. Crank up the core clock on a Ge-force2 and you get little to no improvement. Crank up the memory clock and you get measureable improvement.
For CPU's dropping in a 1Gig compared to a 800 gives you a noticable improvement. So obviously CPU's aren't bandwidth bound nearly as badly as the Geforces are, so they won't see that high of a performance increase.
You also forgot about the Commander Keen games John made. Those were the first games that used timers to control the speed at which the games run. Prior to that, if you were to run, say Joust on a 1g PC, it would be *completely* unplayable. But fire up Commander Keen, and it runs just as it should -- a major improvement.
Also the reason everyone is talking about 3D API's, and FPS and fill-rate is because, like it or not, it's the future of gaming. Even Diablo-II, probably one of the last top-tier sprite games we'll ever see, uses Direct3D to accelerate and add more realism.
It's getting to the point that a graphics card is almost as important to your over-all game playability as your CPU. Have a 1G PC and a TNT1? Don't even try playing most new games.
John Carmack talks about this because people listen. He and ID software make *the best* 3d game engines. Whether or not you like the content of the game, the engine you cannot complain about. Not to mention John sits on the advisory board to nVidia and 3DFX. If those companies are listening to him, why aren't you?
I don't think John ever claimed to talk about the plot line, or other creative items of the games he was working on. He talks about what he does for ID software, the engines.
First off, P3 and P4 should be totally seperate as far as availability goes. Until Tualitin is realeased (as I understand), the P4 will be the only chip manufactured at.13, so it will have free run over all of Intel's.13 fab's. Whether or not the P3 crunch gets worse or is alleviated doesn't matter to P4's.
Also, the reason many of you can't get those nice 1G P3's are because Intel's biggest ties are to OEM's. It is fairly easy to get a gig p3 these days from the likes of Dell. And if you actually think about it, it's not illogical. If Intel can't provide to Dell or other Tier 1 OEM's, they get a CEO and a company breathing down their necks. But if Joe's PC Hardware in East Bumble doesn't have a gig p3, it's not nearly as much of a problem.
The reason to move from AGP 4/8X to a serial interface is for timing and speed issues. AGP is a modified version of PCI with known transfer lengths, queue's, and only 2 devices. So AGP inherited the 32 Address/Data lines from PCI which are running at very fast clock rates making signal integrity issues very important. (I believe 133mhz with inverted clocks) I imagine 8X is about as fast as Intel can get AGP to go, and are moving to a serial (very few lines, but clocked much faster) for more reliable and faster performance. (Much like RAMBUS is a serial interface)
IEEE1394 not only involves royaties, but doesn't have the throughput required for AGP transfers, (AGP 4X is already faster), and would involve much more overhead because it is for multiple devices.
When in "Normal Use" I assume you mean when you are browsing web pages, working on Word, or whatnot. Not crunching PGP keys, playing a game, or SETI/distributed.
In normal use your computer is waiting for you to respond to it. Ofcourse it is going to have a lot of freetime to play with, you are slow. Face it.
P4's are a totally new architecture super-pipelined (~20)to acheive high clock rates. Stop reading Tom's Hardware, he's making you dumber.
The fastest speed path of the P3 has nothing to do with the speed path of the P4. While the P4 may be slower than the P3 clock for clock, it will be able to acheive much higher clock frequencies in subsequent releases.
Ever play Perfect Dark of Goldeneye on 64? Those are shining examples of excellent FPS games on a console. Granted when you try and play multiplayer, you're looking at probably 150x150, but TV kind of has that natural FSAA goin on so it's not so bad.
Both of those games support some interesting controller combinations as well, including some 2-controllers per player options. 2 analog joysticks can be quite hard to get used to, but it is far superior to being a keyboard jockey and maybe slightly under a mouse for control.
FPS games on consoles can be quite fun and addicting, as long as they address some of the inherent shortcomings of the systems compared to their PC brethen.
The fact that Linux is growing is excellent. Due to the fact that most of Linux's primary users are hardcore/professionals computer users, and that is not the primary growth area of the PC industry right now, it is a testament to the work going on in the Linux community to make it more accessible to the non-techno geeks. Hopefully with successive releases of KDE and GNOME, Linux can take an even larger bite of the pie.
Not to mention, most of the new bands, who get the worst treatment by the record labels, don't get these $100K per album producers. They are usually produced with a minimal amount of resources, so in the event that they don't sell well, not much is lost.
However, if they do sell well, the record companies stand to make a killing.
Finially, this has been a long time coming. Napster isn't the reason most artists are losing money. It's the fact that the vast majority of artists don't have the weight of Metallica and are forced to sign grossly unfair agreements or not to get published.
What's up with all CD's costing in the neighborhood of $15-18USD? The artist may get a fraction of a dollar per CD, and somehow the rest is justified by pressing some plastic?
Napster, in the worse case may reduce record sales slightly, (possibly even increase, but that's not the issue) but the RIAA and record labels are the mani reason small artists go hungry.
Many of Slashdots posts only focus on the abuses which can happen with a certain device, but skip over anything beneficial. Rumor has it that dogs can smell Cancer and a few other deseases before many doctors realize you have it. How about an easy non-invasive cancer detector every time you go to the doctors office?
DOS isn't a thing of the past in ME. It is still using a slightly-modified 95/98/ME kernel, just it locks out the convenience of booting to DOS.
Whether this is to make it look like a OS not built upon 16-bit roots, to hamper other OS's being installed/run, or just to provide the average user less options to corrupt his systems I don't know. Probably a combination of all 3.
At any rate, it seems to me that WinME is Win98SE-2.
BTW it isn't any more stable...
Slashdot Mirror
There is a quick and easy way of fixing this. Most Distro's that aren't based on a brand-spankin new kernel (most) will fail to install any RPM's because RPM checks the CPU-ID first. You will have to re-compile either the kernel on your install media or RPM to auto-select 0x686. (It goes into compatability mode - 0x?86)
If you want to modify your Kernel, you can add a quick IF statement in the setup.c code to detect if the CPUID is a P4, then just set it back to a 0x686. You obviously won't get optimized code for a P4, but it works to install RPMS, and who cares because there is no optimized code yet anyway. (Atleast that i know of)
You can also mess with your RPM code to auto-set the package type, but I prefer the above. Cheers
Urls:. html
http://www.nvidia.com/Home.nsf/nvidianews2.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001120/p4-20
With 3dfx cross-platform stance (Mac, Linux, Windows) OpenGL is the only real solution.
What will you do with all the updates? I doubt it is practical to download all the new patches to RAM, in the case of the PS2 or DC. Unfortunately, I don't think patches will ever go away. The nature of a MMRPG is to be constantly changing, and next generation MMRPG's will have much more dynamic features. XBox will probably be the first to be able to run MMRPG's, just due to it's close relationship (both in hardware and software) to a PC.
All the current MMRPG's rely heavily on patches for new content, balance changes, and general bugfixes. I doubt this will change.
This is obvious if you look at benchmarks. Crank up the core clock on a Ge-force2 and you get little to no improvement. Crank up the memory clock and you get measureable improvement.
For CPU's dropping in a 1Gig compared to a 800 gives you a noticable improvement. So obviously CPU's aren't bandwidth bound nearly as badly as the Geforces are, so they won't see that high of a performance increase.
Also the reason everyone is talking about 3D API's, and FPS and fill-rate is because, like it or not, it's the future of gaming. Even Diablo-II, probably one of the last top-tier sprite games we'll ever see, uses Direct3D to accelerate and add more realism.
It's getting to the point that a graphics card is almost as important to your over-all game playability as your CPU. Have a 1G PC and a TNT1? Don't even try playing most new games.
John Carmack talks about this because people listen. He and ID software make *the best* 3d game engines. Whether or not you like the content of the game, the engine you cannot complain about. Not to mention John sits on the advisory board to nVidia and 3DFX. If those companies are listening to him, why aren't you? I don't think John ever claimed to talk about the plot line, or other creative items of the games he was working on. He talks about what he does for ID software, the engines.
Also, the reason many of you can't get those nice 1G P3's are because Intel's biggest ties are to OEM's. It is fairly easy to get a gig p3 these days from the likes of Dell. And if you actually think about it, it's not illogical. If Intel can't provide to Dell or other Tier 1 OEM's, they get a CEO and a company breathing down their necks. But if Joe's PC Hardware in East Bumble doesn't have a gig p3, it's not nearly as much of a problem.
IEEE1394 not only involves royaties, but doesn't have the throughput required for AGP transfers, (AGP 4X is already faster), and would involve much more overhead because it is for multiple devices.
In normal use your computer is waiting for you to respond to it. Ofcourse it is going to have a lot of freetime to play with, you are slow. Face it.
The fastest speed path of the P3 has nothing to do with the speed path of the P4. While the P4 may be slower than the P3 clock for clock, it will be able to acheive much higher clock frequencies in subsequent releases.
Both of those games support some interesting controller combinations as well, including some 2-controllers per player options. 2 analog joysticks can be quite hard to get used to, but it is far superior to being a keyboard jockey and maybe slightly under a mouse for control. FPS games on consoles can be quite fun and addicting, as long as they address some of the inherent shortcomings of the systems compared to their PC brethen.
The fact that Linux is growing is excellent. Due to the fact that most of Linux's primary users are hardcore/professionals computer users, and that is not the primary growth area of the PC industry right now, it is a testament to the work going on in the Linux community to make it more accessible to the non-techno geeks. Hopefully with successive releases of KDE and GNOME, Linux can take an even larger bite of the pie.
However, if they do sell well, the record companies stand to make a killing.
What's up with all CD's costing in the neighborhood of $15-18USD? The artist may get a fraction of a dollar per CD, and somehow the rest is justified by pressing some plastic?
Napster, in the worse case may reduce record sales slightly, (possibly even increase, but that's not the issue) but the RIAA and record labels are the mani reason small artists go hungry.
Many of Slashdots posts only focus on the abuses which can happen with a certain device, but skip over anything beneficial. Rumor has it that dogs can smell Cancer and a few other deseases before many doctors realize you have it. How about an easy non-invasive cancer detector every time you go to the doctors office?
DOS isn't a thing of the past in ME. It is still using a slightly-modified 95/98/ME kernel, just it locks out the convenience of booting to DOS. Whether this is to make it look like a OS not built upon 16-bit roots, to hamper other OS's being installed/run, or just to provide the average user less options to corrupt his systems I don't know. Probably a combination of all 3. At any rate, it seems to me that WinME is Win98SE-2. BTW it isn't any more stable...