No -- actually testing under the heaviest load is the best way to measure performance. The card that has a good framerate at the heaviest loads will be able to handle the lighter with ease. Who cares if you can get 500FPS when there's nothing on screen if you can only get 20 under load. I'd frankly rather a consistent 60FPS across the whole game rather than that kind of swinginess. For that reason, it's similar to benchmark based on glxgears -- so geometrically simple, there's nearly nothing for the GPU to do.
Gabe Newell seems to have something personal against NVIDIA -- he went absolutely batshit towards NVIDIA, as if it was a personal assault that the GeForce FX 5900 didn't run HL2 well. And yeah, the GeForce FX architecture totally sucks with the source engine. The X800 Platinum is the best at running it, but not by the margin ATI is claiming.
Not to say that given the chance, NVIDIA wouldn't post absurdly inflated numbers. I still personally favor NVIDIA, mostly because thier Linux drivers are of such high quality. And although ATI's Win32 drivers have improved greatly over the past 2 years, in my experience, they aren't quite up to the level of NVIDIA's. Maybe another year and they'll get there. My biggest beef is the lack of support for older products -- the new Catalyst drivers are good, but drivers for the original Radeon and All-in-Wonders suck. NVIDIA's detonator drivers support everything they've ever made, other than the craptastic Riva128 ZX. I'm still using my trusty old TNT2 -- plays a mean game of Quake3 under Linux.
I think you're missing the point -- the Libs and the Greens want ALL of the votes counted to bolster thier numbers a tad. Voting for a third party is only a truly wasted vote if you use an absentee ballot, which won't be counted at all, thus not give to the party total.
That's why I said "decent". I'm talking mid-range or better -- component units from Denon, Sony, Pioneer, Yamaha, etc.
Basically, I use a fairly high-end pre-amp/processor with excellent DACs and SPDIF inputs. Thus, the only thing that matters to me in the CD player is build quality and SPDIF out. I have an inexpensive (was about $150 5 years back) 5-disc Yamaha CD player that's built like a tank.
AAC has a lossless mode, but the default is NOT lossless. I'm good friends with a Dolby engineer that worked for the company while they developed AAC. One internal thing that they didn't want to let out is that AAC is better in every way than Dolby Digital AC3.
Besides, for good lossless, we have Ogg FLAC.
As far as the frame jitter issue goes, any decent CD player that has a 16-frame buffer (a whole whopping 256 bytes -- could be cache on the D/A chip) could effectively eliminate jitter. Period. In modern CD-players, it's not an issue, regardless of what your friendly neighborhood audio store will say. Same with "greening" cd's. It's psuedoscience that sounds feasible, but in reality is a load of crap.
Ogg Vorbis also sounds better at a given bitrate for most stuff. The poster may be doing it to either minimize bandwidth or maximize quality.
A number of games have been using Vorbis for quite a while because it allows them high quality with excellent compression. The only lossy CODEC that holds up to it is AAC, which I believe ties with Vorbis in recent blind listening tests. AAC is VERY proprietary, so Vorbis is the obvious choice.
I think the key problem isn't that we don't think the media is lying, I think we really don't care very much. Apathy scares me far more than ignorance. The problem is most people don't value freedom as much as they should. We're also very selfish, and the strong spirit of rugged individuality has been stripped of the men in this country through political correctness. A revolution won't happen, because we're far less likely to give our lives than we once were.
Why woud we want "fairly moderate" justices in the supreme court? Do you think moderates will strike down PATRIOT and DMCA? Nope.
Frankly, I want some strong judges that will strike down laws an rulings on thier constitutional merit or lack therof. All the laws you've listed would be struck down by a strict constitutionalist, as would Roe v. Wade, Induce, federal and state weapons restrictions, the current atrocity that is "campaign finance reform", the social security act, etc.
The left and the right both abuse and ignore the constitution, and claim the other is doing the same. The right wants to ban porn, the left wants to ban hate speech. The left wants to take our guns away, the right wants to take away fair use. All of these are against the letter and the spirit of the US constitution.
I would disagree that people are basically the same. Culture affects an awful lot. And though France claims to be for Liberty, they are even more socialist than we are.
Hopefully within my life time we'll again a president who's a real man, and actually cares about Liberty, and understands that meddling in the lives of his constituents is a bad thing (whether that be taxation, suppression of speech, telling us we can't own things that might hurt us, etc.)
They are certainly free to state an opinion. But we are just as free not to care.
European values are not my own. I value Liberty, strong families, life, and honor. So I'm voting for Peroutka.
From my looking outward, the EU looks like a bunch of selfish, hedonistic socialists who's general philosophy meanders somewhere between systematic whining and nihilism.
Mod me as flaimbait if you must, but keep in mind, this is no worse than what the opposition is saying about us.
...how seriously people take Slashdot. This story is silly. It's kinda funny. The whole "Football Fans For Truth" site is hilarious -- it has by far the funniest, stupidest pictures of Kerry. I'm sure all of us have equally dumb pictures of ourselves.
I'm also pretty sure that this kind of campaign is doing less damage to the Kerry campaign than the campaigning of the Socialist party.
Not sure I'd still keep the GPU core on board for the server boards, though. I'd rather give them a bigger cache instead. (Although, from a cost point of view keeping the same CPU for both does have a major advantage.)
Depends greatly on what you are doing... if you're planning on rendering, the GPU core could be useful (particularly if it was a DX9-class programmable pipe). nVidia has found a way to leverage thier GPU muscle for non-realtime final-render stuff. Why not this? You're still doing a TON of vector math. Thats why I'd seperate the vector core from the pixel fill core; it could more easilly be addressed for general-purpose computing.
I like your idea, but I'd still have a "south bridge". There's no point to implementing stuff like ATA controller and ethernet in the CPU. The only stuff that should be is stuff that is performance sensitive.
I think this is part of the future of multi-core designs. Use a simple RISC-ish architecture (like ARM) for the main CPU, add another core that just does vector operations/FPU stuff, and another that has your pixel pipelines. If you are doing DVI-A/I or VGA out, you'd have to have part of the DAC off-chip for signal quality reasons. But if you were going pure DVI-D, you could even include a TMDS transmitter.
The Kyro architecture might work; it's quite simple. I'd go with something more similar to the PS2 design -- a CPU, 2 vector processors, and a pixel fill processor with a hign-bandwidth connection to the vector units. I'd do it with just one vector processor though, as this isn't going to be a killer-GPU system for games. Make all of the cores simple, fab them using 90nm SOI, and clock them as high as you can and maintain reliability.
So basically, a graphics card with an ARM-9 core added to the GPU (as most GPU's are not turing-complete), and a southbridge to handle ethernet, SATA, and USB.
Hell -- here's one idea to take it even farther: give it two power sources: ATX power connector and PCI-Express. That's right -- make it a PCI Express card that can run in a blade server, OR run independently. This kind of design as a blade server, as it will have reasonable vector processing capabilities, could also find use in a render farm.
Via already puts the CPU package on the mobo; it saves PCB space and power leakage. We're not going for a powerful system; just a cheap one.
Fair enough about your statement with the RAM chips, although if bought in big enough batches, stuff like PC2100 DDR is already absurdly cheap and isn't fluctuating too much.
And yes, you do save on the connectors. If the volume is high enough, you can design a southbridge that doesn't have the legacy support. Or, you could go the route that nVidia went with the nForce3 -- no southbridge. Just one chipset with everything integrated. With no legacy stuff, that just means you need an ethernet MAC, and audio CODEC, IDE (or better, SATA -- fewer traces), video, memory controller, USB and FSB. That's it -- it can be a pretty small and cheap chip. Use PCI express for everything -- you only need like 16 rails -- 8 for the video, 2 for the SATA and 6 for the gigabit NIC. Or better yet -- no PCI type bus -- just have everything tightly integrated with local like nVidia does thier ethernet, and offer open-source drivers.
The board could also be small with no legacy stuff -- smaller than ITX form factor.
We could do this today with no problem. The key is economy of scale. The Via EPIA platforms would be ideal, but they are too damn expensive.
Honestly, if some inexpensive Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer wanted to, they could do a 1ghz C3 EPIA platform, and really cut it down. One IDE channel. No floppy, serial, parallel, or PS/2 ports. Kill IrDA support. Basically, give it only the following:
1x VGA 1x IDE 4x USB 1x audio line out
The CPU and RAM chips could be soldered onto the board. Bundle it with a cheap mass-market OEM hard drive, a case with a 40W power brick, and you've got a PC.
Rather than VIA, one could use Transmeta Crusoe or AMD Geode. This could be done for $100, but the margins would be razor-thin. Hell, I'd pay $100 for one of these sans hard drive with a smaller power supply -- I'm a big fan of LTSP.
I actually find GIMP far easier to use than PS, but it's lacking features. It's fast, clean, and straight-forward. The menu layout could be a bit better, but that's about it.
Most people state Photoshop is easier to use because they've used it since they were in diapers. I'm just a programmer myself, and occasionally have to do photo-retouching, color correction, image scaling, etc. for web stuff. I used Photoshop first, but never became particularly good at it. I'm much better and quicker using the GIMP.
Not only is it too slow, but it's harder to get to work. It's fine and dandy using SDL to setup everything and encapsulate your OpenGL environment in a neat and platform-independant way, but don't use SDL to blit on top of OpwnGL. I tried this for my senior project, and it was nearly the death of me.
So in other words, because it could negatively impact the candidate you like, you think it's OK for the state of Arizona to spend $2 million in violation of its constitution?
What about the candidate I like? I like Badnarik more than the other two. Regaurdless of the differences you cite in economic policy, it means big government. Bush is for big government. Kerry is for big government. Badnarik is not. Let him speak.
I see... so if an oppresive government and a shady organization covers up all evidence except for a handful of testimonies from eyewitness who escaped, we should just ignore it rather than trying to bring light to a problem...
I'm sorry, but the horrific testimony I recieved was enough to move me, and it is not inconsistent with the Chinese government treats its people.
Yes, the plain evidence is thin. But personally hearing a Chinese couple who immigrated to the US speak of her experience was what really got me.
And even without the forced abortion, the fact that they support abortion is bad enough. The UN political agenda includes making abortion on demand legal in all nations.
No, that is fair. It's what the UNFPA is. They ENFORCE the one-woman, one-child rule to the point of FORCING abortion on a women who gets pregnant after having a child.
That's what the fund is billed as, but the organization in question agressively pushes abortion on demand.
Also, most forms of chemical birth control are abortifacients, which cause the induce abortion in early stages of pregnancy. No one who is truly pro-life would support such things. And the pro-life moniker implies more than just anti-abortion. At its purest, it implies being against abortion, euthenasia, embrionic stem-cell research, cloning, and a myriad of other dignity of life oriented issues.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're talking about the XUL platform. It's a toolkit/platform, not an engine -- there's a BIG difference.
No -- actually testing under the heaviest load is the best way to measure performance. The card that has a good framerate at the heaviest loads will be able to handle the lighter with ease. Who cares if you can get 500FPS when there's nothing on screen if you can only get 20 under load. I'd frankly rather a consistent 60FPS across the whole game rather than that kind of swinginess. For that reason, it's similar to benchmark based on glxgears -- so geometrically simple, there's nearly nothing for the GPU to do.
Gabe Newell seems to have something personal against NVIDIA -- he went absolutely batshit towards NVIDIA, as if it was a personal assault that the GeForce FX 5900 didn't run HL2 well. And yeah, the GeForce FX architecture totally sucks with the source engine. The X800 Platinum is the best at running it, but not by the margin ATI is claiming.
Not to say that given the chance, NVIDIA wouldn't post absurdly inflated numbers. I still personally favor NVIDIA, mostly because thier Linux drivers are of such high quality. And although ATI's Win32 drivers have improved greatly over the past 2 years, in my experience, they aren't quite up to the level of NVIDIA's. Maybe another year and they'll get there. My biggest beef is the lack of support for older products -- the new Catalyst drivers are good, but drivers for the original Radeon and All-in-Wonders suck. NVIDIA's detonator drivers support everything they've ever made, other than the craptastic Riva128 ZX. I'm still using my trusty old TNT2 -- plays a mean game of Quake3 under Linux.
Why is it that people like you take something that was obviously a joke way to seriously?
I think you're missing the point -- the Libs and the Greens want ALL of the votes counted to bolster thier numbers a tad. Voting for a third party is only a truly wasted vote if you use an absentee ballot, which won't be counted at all, thus not give to the party total.
Um... spending that money on the campaign actually employs people...
That's why I said "decent". I'm talking mid-range or better -- component units from Denon, Sony, Pioneer, Yamaha, etc.
Basically, I use a fairly high-end pre-amp/processor with excellent DACs and SPDIF inputs. Thus, the only thing that matters to me in the CD player is build quality and SPDIF out. I have an inexpensive (was about $150 5 years back) 5-disc Yamaha CD player that's built like a tank.
AAC has a lossless mode, but the default is NOT lossless. I'm good friends with a Dolby engineer that worked for the company while they developed AAC. One internal thing that they didn't want to let out is that AAC is better in every way than Dolby Digital AC3.
Besides, for good lossless, we have Ogg FLAC.
As far as the frame jitter issue goes, any decent CD player that has a 16-frame buffer (a whole whopping 256 bytes -- could be cache on the D/A chip) could effectively eliminate jitter. Period. In modern CD-players, it's not an issue, regardless of what your friendly neighborhood audio store will say. Same with "greening" cd's. It's psuedoscience that sounds feasible, but in reality is a load of crap.
Ogg Vorbis also sounds better at a given bitrate for most stuff. The poster may be doing it to either minimize bandwidth or maximize quality.
A number of games have been using Vorbis for quite a while because it allows them high quality with excellent compression. The only lossy CODEC that holds up to it is AAC, which I believe ties with Vorbis in recent blind listening tests. AAC is VERY proprietary, so Vorbis is the obvious choice.
I think the key problem isn't that we don't think the media is lying, I think we really don't care very much. Apathy scares me far more than ignorance. The problem is most people don't value freedom as much as they should. We're also very selfish, and the strong spirit of rugged individuality has been stripped of the men in this country through political correctness. A revolution won't happen, because we're far less likely to give our lives than we once were.
Why woud we want "fairly moderate" justices in the supreme court? Do you think moderates will strike down PATRIOT and DMCA? Nope.
Frankly, I want some strong judges that will strike down laws an rulings on thier constitutional merit or lack therof. All the laws you've listed would be struck down by a strict constitutionalist, as would Roe v. Wade, Induce, federal and state weapons restrictions, the current atrocity that is "campaign finance reform", the social security act, etc.
The left and the right both abuse and ignore the constitution, and claim the other is doing the same. The right wants to ban porn, the left wants to ban hate speech. The left wants to take our guns away, the right wants to take away fair use. All of these are against the letter and the spirit of the US constitution.
I would disagree that people are basically the same. Culture affects an awful lot. And though France claims to be for Liberty, they are even more socialist than we are.
Hopefully within my life time we'll again a president who's a real man, and actually cares about Liberty, and understands that meddling in the lives of his constituents is a bad thing (whether that be taxation, suppression of speech, telling us we can't own things that might hurt us, etc.)
I think, however, we are in agreement.
They are certainly free to state an opinion. But we are just as free not to care.
European values are not my own. I value Liberty, strong families, life, and honor. So I'm voting for Peroutka.
From my looking outward, the EU looks like a bunch of selfish, hedonistic socialists who's general philosophy meanders somewhere between systematic whining and nihilism.
Mod me as flaimbait if you must, but keep in mind, this is no worse than what the opposition is saying about us.
...how seriously people take Slashdot. This story is silly. It's kinda funny. The whole "Football Fans For Truth" site is hilarious -- it has by far the funniest, stupidest pictures of Kerry. I'm sure all of us have equally dumb pictures of ourselves.
I'm also pretty sure that this kind of campaign is doing less damage to the Kerry campaign than the campaigning of the Socialist party.
Not sure I'd still keep the GPU core on board for the server boards, though. I'd rather give them a bigger cache instead. (Although, from a cost point of view keeping the same CPU for both does have a major advantage.)
Depends greatly on what you are doing... if you're planning on rendering, the GPU core could be useful (particularly if it was a DX9-class programmable pipe). nVidia has found a way to leverage thier GPU muscle for non-realtime final-render stuff. Why not this? You're still doing a TON of vector math. Thats why I'd seperate the vector core from the pixel fill core; it could more easilly be addressed for general-purpose computing.
I like your idea, but I'd still have a "south bridge". There's no point to implementing stuff like ATA controller and ethernet in the CPU. The only stuff that should be is stuff that is performance sensitive.
I think this is part of the future of multi-core designs. Use a simple RISC-ish architecture (like ARM) for the main CPU, add another core that just does vector operations/FPU stuff, and another that has your pixel pipelines. If you are doing DVI-A/I or VGA out, you'd have to have part of the DAC off-chip for signal quality reasons. But if you were going pure DVI-D, you could even include a TMDS transmitter.
The Kyro architecture might work; it's quite simple. I'd go with something more similar to the PS2 design -- a CPU, 2 vector processors, and a pixel fill processor with a hign-bandwidth connection to the vector units. I'd do it with just one vector processor though, as this isn't going to be a killer-GPU system for games. Make all of the cores simple, fab them using 90nm SOI, and clock them as high as you can and maintain reliability.
So basically, a graphics card with an ARM-9 core added to the GPU (as most GPU's are not turing-complete), and a southbridge to handle ethernet, SATA, and USB.
Hell -- here's one idea to take it even farther: give it two power sources: ATX power connector and PCI-Express. That's right -- make it a PCI Express card that can run in a blade server, OR run independently. This kind of design as a blade server, as it will have reasonable vector processing capabilities, could also find use in a render farm.
Via already puts the CPU package on the mobo; it saves PCB space and power leakage. We're not going for a powerful system; just a cheap one.
Fair enough about your statement with the RAM chips, although if bought in big enough batches, stuff like PC2100 DDR is already absurdly cheap and isn't fluctuating too much.
And yes, you do save on the connectors. If the volume is high enough, you can design a southbridge that doesn't have the legacy support. Or, you could go the route that nVidia went with the nForce3 -- no southbridge. Just one chipset with everything integrated. With no legacy stuff, that just means you need an ethernet MAC, and audio CODEC, IDE (or better, SATA -- fewer traces), video, memory controller, USB and FSB. That's it -- it can be a pretty small and cheap chip. Use PCI express for everything -- you only need like 16 rails -- 8 for the video, 2 for the SATA and 6 for the gigabit NIC. Or better yet -- no PCI type bus -- just have everything tightly integrated with local like nVidia does thier ethernet, and offer open-source drivers.
The board could also be small with no legacy stuff -- smaller than ITX form factor.
We could do this today with no problem. The key is economy of scale. The Via EPIA platforms would be ideal, but they are too damn expensive.
Honestly, if some inexpensive Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer wanted to, they could do a 1ghz C3 EPIA platform, and really cut it down. One IDE channel. No floppy, serial, parallel, or PS/2 ports. Kill IrDA support. Basically, give it only the following:
1x VGA
1x IDE
4x USB
1x audio line out
The CPU and RAM chips could be soldered onto the board. Bundle it with a cheap mass-market OEM hard drive, a case with a 40W power brick, and you've got a PC.
Rather than VIA, one could use Transmeta Crusoe or AMD Geode. This could be done for $100, but the margins would be razor-thin. Hell, I'd pay $100 for one of these sans hard drive with a smaller power supply -- I'm a big fan of LTSP.
I actually find GIMP far easier to use than PS, but it's lacking features. It's fast, clean, and straight-forward. The menu layout could be a bit better, but that's about it.
Most people state Photoshop is easier to use because they've used it since they were in diapers. I'm just a programmer myself, and occasionally have to do photo-retouching, color correction, image scaling, etc. for web stuff. I used Photoshop first, but never became particularly good at it. I'm much better and quicker using the GIMP.
Not only is it too slow, but it's harder to get to work. It's fine and dandy using SDL to setup everything and encapsulate your OpenGL environment in a neat and platform-independant way, but don't use SDL to blit on top of OpwnGL. I tried this for my senior project, and it was nearly the death of me.
So in other words, because it could negatively impact the candidate you like, you think it's OK for the state of Arizona to spend $2 million in violation of its constitution?
What about the candidate I like? I like Badnarik more than the other two. Regaurdless of the differences you cite in economic policy, it means big government. Bush is for big government. Kerry is for big government. Badnarik is not. Let him speak.
The secondary plan you described is called the Free State Project. Read up.
I see... so if an oppresive government and a shady organization covers up all evidence except for a handful of testimonies from eyewitness who escaped, we should just ignore it rather than trying to bring light to a problem...
I'm sorry, but the horrific testimony I recieved was enough to move me, and it is not inconsistent with the Chinese government treats its people.
Yes, the plain evidence is thin. But personally hearing a Chinese couple who immigrated to the US speak of her experience was what really got me.
And even without the forced abortion, the fact that they support abortion is bad enough. The UN political agenda includes making abortion on demand legal in all nations.
No, that is fair. It's what the UNFPA is. They ENFORCE the one-woman, one-child rule to the point of FORCING abortion on a women who gets pregnant after having a child.
That's what the fund is billed as, but the organization in question agressively pushes abortion on demand.
Also, most forms of chemical birth control are abortifacients, which cause the induce abortion in early stages of pregnancy. No one who is truly pro-life would support such things. And the pro-life moniker implies more than just anti-abortion. At its purest, it implies being against abortion, euthenasia, embrionic stem-cell research, cloning, and a myriad of other dignity of life oriented issues.