Right or wrong, don't SDMI have the right to secure, proven encryption? If you don't like how the format works, don't buy it. If it ends up being universal and you can't buy unprotected music, that's your problem, you have no intrinsic right to someone else's music.
Since forever. They don't break any rules of the game world, they just exploit them in unforseen ways. If they were cheating, they'd have been 'fixed' in subsequent patches, and omitted from QII and QIII.
There are good reasons multi-chip Voodoo5s will never be competitive: yet it scales, but it just doesn't scale well
From the Voodoo5 FAQ on www.3dfx.com:
4. Is the memory on the Voodoo5 boards unified or segmented? For example, on the Voodoo5 5500 AGP with two VSA-100 chips with 32MB of memory per chip, is the video memory 64MB or is it really just 32MB?
The video memory is unified, only texture data has to be repeated for each VSA-100 chip.
Gah? So if you get a 128Mb V6 and assume 4Mb framebuffer and zbuffer, it can hold 31Mb of textures? 93Mb just disappears?[makes indignant noises] I guess this is the only way they could get into the same ballpark as GeForce, but I bet the engineers had to hold their noses.
If you consider that there's 4 chips sharing the fillrate load, that equates to a single VSA chip running 800*700 at 50-60 fps. That's just not impressive for a chipset that's got a one year advantage over the GeForce.
Real-life footage usually has natural motion-blur. This goes a long way towards helping the brain merge successive frames of video into a single stream of animation. Realtime CGI on the other hand is usually temporally point-sampled, which means that fast moving objects (eg. a fast-running character's legs) tend to strobe a bit at 25-30fps or even 60fps.
For an illustration of this, try watching the action sequences in Saving Private Ryan - they have practically no motion-blur which definitely contributes towards making them jarring to watch.
Macintosh is an integration between hardware and software, and running the software on generic hardware waters down the Mac quite a bit. With that, the Mac would lose a lot of its distinction, and I don't that would have helped Apple's business any.
They could have simply stuck a dongle on their motherboards and had the OS check for it periodically. This remains a viable option - OSX on x86 would (a) enable Apple to sell cheaper Macs, and (b) be able to run win32 EXEs WINE-style.
Vector processors work on streams of floats - hundreds of floats is nothing special. That's why bandwidth is so important on these systems, one wants to be able to supply a constant stream of data in and out.
Each PS2 VU has 16Kb of embedded, single-cycle data RAM. The recommended usage is to split up the memory and quad-buffer: At any one point, the CPU is DMAing data into one portion of memory, the VU is operating on a second portion, storing the results in a third portion and the system is DMAing processed data out of fourth area. When everything's done, you rotate the buffers along 1 and repeat. Provided the VU has enough to occupy it for at least as long as it takes to DMA the data in/out, you can run a VU at full-speed indefinitely. That means real world, sustained 4 flops per clock at 150MHz is quite feasible. Does that not qualify as streaming?
A games machine's vector unit is basically a 3D engine - vectors of 3 floats, and 3x3 matrices
Yes it does process 4 floats at once. So? They can be completely independant floats, it's just processing them in parallel. Cray vector regs (IIRC) consist of 128 elements, does that mean it's only good for doing calculations in 128-dimensional space?
You also seem to be under the impression the VU is not properly programmable but it is. Each instruction does an integer/compare/branch op in parallel with the vector op.
You obviously based your post on a half-arsed knowledge of PS1, which is a million miles away from PS2 architecturally. Do a little research, find out how wrong you are and next time skip the unwarranted rudeness ok?
Well no, I wouldn't use a serial bus, I'd use the built-in firewire. Anyway, there are plenty of examples from the world of distributed computing that show how to efficiently use such a system.
350 PSX2 vector units could process 1400 floats per clock, and they run at 150MHz. That's some serious gigafloppage, and it's not even using the rather capable CPUs.
I agree that recently corporations have been quick to sue, but until they sue, I don't think that we should become negative about a company. Let's give them a chance to react first!
Umm, I don't want to sound too facist or anything but wouldn't Verant suing be quite an understandable reaction? I mean, if (eg) Steven Spielberg made a movie set in the Star Wars universe, wouldn't George Lucas be within his rights to sue?
What if they don't and instead spend the money they would have spent on lawyers improving their protocol & game so that it is worth paying for, as opposed to using the presumably free service
Why should they have to compete with someone who's standing on their shoulders?
I reckon you can hit a randomly chosen gamepad button lots faster than a randomly chosen key. On a decent gamepad (PSX, DC, N64), all the in-game buttons are under a finger or a thumb at all times.
I understand why they're doing away with the physical R2D2 models but that doesn't actor has to be entirely removed from the equation.
ILM could stick a dustbin on Kenny's head and tie his feet together, motion-capture him struggling to move and use that to animate the CGI with the authentic R2 waddle.
Nope, I still think that having an individual key that (eg) toggles the landing gear up/down and does nothing else is crap.
On a PSX joypad, you'd say that (eg) the top-left shoulder brings up a menu of infrequently used things (eject, engines on/off, landing gear up/down) which you can then select with the other buttons. Bingo, you've compressed a load of buttons into one and also made them a lot easier to find. Repeat this for the autopilot+waypoint stuff and you've tucked away half the keys of the average flight sim under two buttons.
Flight sims kind of a pathological example though. The real point is that a clean, intuitive interface doesn't imply that the game itself is simple. Complexity too often gets confused with depth of gameplay.
1) We've seen Microsoft squash competitors, but it remains to be seen if it can take down a company the size of Sony.
2) Developers may be jumping on board, but they're mostly PC developers. So X-Box gets a flood of RTSs, FPSs and other TLAs. Compare PC and console interpretations of any given genre and the console version is usually the one with massmarket appeal.
3) Everyone associates Sony with desirable, consumer hardware time that works, and Microsoft with nice but bloated office software that doesn't. If they manage to erase that, it'll be worth every penny of the $0.5b marketing spend.
---
Hello, I'm Mr. Paperclip. It looks like you're writing an hate filled anti-Microsoft rant. Would you like me to help you?
Apple will sell OSX machines because of the following, in order of importance:
- Their loyal fanbase
- The GUI
- The nice cases
Why waste resources developing stuff not on that list?
They could buy stock x86 PC's, put them in pretty-coloured cases and load them up with Linux + their nice window-manager ported onto Linux.
Apple no longer has to design and manufacture PCs from scratch, nor do they have to get their hands dirty writing a full-on OS (although it's a bit late for that). In fact, they get SGI actively working to improve *their* kernel!
Their fanbase will only care that what they're getting looks, feels and smells like an Apple machine and is considerably cheaper than normal.
Linux gets yet another major company invested in improving Linux.
Usted está no haciendo caso del existance de las herramientas tales como Babelfish. Sé esto no es una traducción perfecta pero soy seguro que usted puede entenderme OK.
Philosophy, physics, maths, medicine, theatre, democracy, well civilisation basically, was essentially invented by the ancient Greeks. I therefore submit that all the above activities should only be conducted in Greek. Entaxi, vlaka?
Point the first: 3DS was originally a DOS app, I believe.
Point the second: Cheap and generic can imply *not* prone to failure. A mass-market vendor that's shipped and supported a quadrillion units of a given PC configuration can be pretty confident that it's encountered and fixed all the problems with that configuration, and is therefore selling a solid PC. Saying that no-one can build a PC like SGI is just silly.
Slashdot Mirror
If you disagree with the concept of SDMI then you should be attacking the concept, not trying to hijack the implementation.
Right or wrong, don't SDMI have the right to secure, proven encryption? If you don't like how the format works, don't buy it. If it ends up being universal and you can't buy unprotected music, that's your problem, you have no intrinsic right to someone else's music.
Since forever. They don't break any rules of the game world, they just exploit them in unforseen ways. If they were cheating, they'd have been 'fixed' in subsequent patches, and omitted from QII and QIII.
Sig gnomes are similar to underpants gnomes; however, the sig gnomes steal signatures.
From the Voodoo5 FAQ on www.3dfx.com:
4. Is the memory on the Voodoo5 boards unified or segmented? For example, on the Voodoo5 5500 AGP with two VSA-100 chips with 32MB of memory per chip, is the video memory 64MB or is it really just 32MB?
The video memory is unified, only texture data has to be repeated for each VSA-100 chip.
Gah? So if you get a 128Mb V6 and assume 4Mb framebuffer and zbuffer, it can hold 31Mb of textures? 93Mb just disappears?[makes indignant noises] I guess this is the only way they could get into the same ballpark as GeForce, but I bet the engineers had to hold their noses.
If you consider that there's 4 chips sharing the fillrate load, that equates to a single VSA chip running 800*700 at 50-60 fps. That's just not impressive for a chipset that's got a one year advantage over the GeForce.
For an illustration of this, try watching the action sequences in Saving Private Ryan - they have practically no motion-blur which definitely contributes towards making them jarring to watch.
They could have simply stuck a dongle on their motherboards and had the OS check for it periodically. This remains a viable option - OSX on x86 would (a) enable Apple to sell cheaper Macs, and (b) be able to run win32 EXEs WINE-style.
Each PS2 VU has 16Kb of embedded, single-cycle data RAM. The recommended usage is to split up the memory and quad-buffer: At any one point, the CPU is DMAing data into one portion of memory, the VU is operating on a second portion, storing the results in a third portion and the system is DMAing processed data out of fourth area. When everything's done, you rotate the buffers along 1 and repeat. Provided the VU has enough to occupy it for at least as long as it takes to DMA the data in/out, you can run a VU at full-speed indefinitely. That means real world, sustained 4 flops per clock at 150MHz is quite feasible. Does that not qualify as streaming?
A games machine's vector unit is basically a 3D engine - vectors of 3 floats, and 3x3 matrices
Yes it does process 4 floats at once. So? They can be completely independant floats, it's just processing them in parallel. Cray vector regs (IIRC) consist of 128 elements, does that mean it's only good for doing calculations in 128-dimensional space? You also seem to be under the impression the VU is not properly programmable but it is. Each instruction does an integer/compare/branch op in parallel with the vector op.
You obviously based your post on a half-arsed knowledge of PS1, which is a million miles away from PS2 architecturally. Do a little research, find out how wrong you are and next time skip the unwarranted rudeness ok?
Please point out the factual errors in my post.
Now I'm confused. Don't they both do math on arrays of floats?
And what's with the aggression? Try talking to me like that in meatspace.
1) Please explain what a toy CPU is. Do they only do silly, frivolous operations?
2) Is PS2 still a toy when Sony sticks 16 of them in one box and sells it in direct competition with SGI machines?
Now please, go get yourself some manners.
1 * Cray = $35,000:
- 4Gb RAM
- 16 vector CPUs
175 * PSX2 = $35,000:
- 5.6Gb RAM + 700Mb embedded VRAM
- 175 CPUs
- 350 vector units
350 PSX2 vector units could process 1400 floats per clock, and they run at 150MHz. That's some serious gigafloppage, and it's not even using the rather capable CPUs.
Umm, I don't want to sound too facist or anything but wouldn't Verant suing be quite an understandable reaction? I mean, if (eg) Steven Spielberg made a movie set in the Star Wars universe, wouldn't George Lucas be within his rights to sue?
What if they don't and instead spend the money they would have spent on lawyers improving their protocol & game so that it is worth paying for, as opposed to using the presumably free service
Why should they have to compete with someone who's standing on their shoulders?
Of course, both the keyboard and gamepad pale in comparison to the most intuitive, powerful input device ever invented.
As for your comment on AI and CPU performance, you might be surprised at the small percentage of CPU time AI typically gets allocated.
I understand why they're doing away with the physical R2D2 models but that doesn't actor has to be entirely removed from the equation. ILM could stick a dustbin on Kenny's head and tie his feet together, motion-capture him struggling to move and use that to animate the CGI with the authentic R2 waddle.
Nope, I still think that having an individual key that (eg) toggles the landing gear up/down and does nothing else is crap.
On a PSX joypad, you'd say that (eg) the top-left shoulder brings up a menu of infrequently used things (eject, engines on/off, landing gear up/down) which you can then select with the other buttons. Bingo, you've compressed a load of buttons into one and also made them a lot easier to find. Repeat this for the autopilot+waypoint stuff and you've tucked away half the keys of the average flight sim under two buttons.
Flight sims kind of a pathological example though. The real point is that a clean, intuitive interface doesn't imply that the game itself is simple. Complexity too often gets confused with depth of gameplay.
Reasons:
1) We've seen Microsoft squash competitors, but it remains to be seen if it can take down a company the size of Sony.
2) Developers may be jumping on board, but they're mostly PC developers. So X-Box gets a flood of RTSs, FPSs and other TLAs. Compare PC and console interpretations of any given genre and the console version is usually the one with massmarket appeal.
3) Everyone associates Sony with desirable, consumer hardware time that works, and Microsoft with nice but bloated office software that doesn't. If they manage to erase that, it'll be worth every penny of the $0.5b marketing spend.
---
Hello, I'm Mr. Paperclip. It looks like you're writing an hate filled anti-Microsoft rant. Would you like me to help you?
I'd suggest that a game requiring 12 channels of user input to control isn't a feature, it's a design flaw.
Apple will sell OSX machines because of the following, in order of importance:
- Their loyal fanbase
- The GUI
- The nice cases
Why waste resources developing stuff not on that list?
They could buy stock x86 PC's, put them in pretty-coloured cases and load them up with Linux + their nice window-manager ported onto Linux.
Apple no longer has to design and manufacture PCs from scratch, nor do they have to get their hands dirty writing a full-on OS (although it's a bit late for that). In fact, they get SGI actively working to improve *their* kernel!
Their fanbase will only care that what they're getting looks, feels and smells like an Apple machine and is considerably cheaper than normal.
Linux gets yet another major company invested in improving Linux.
Usted está no haciendo caso del existance de las herramientas tales como Babelfish. Sé esto no es una traducción perfecta pero soy seguro que usted puede entenderme OK.
Philosophy, physics, maths, medicine, theatre, democracy, well civilisation basically, was essentially invented by the ancient Greeks. I therefore submit that all the above activities should only be conducted in Greek. Entaxi, vlaka?
Point the first: 3DS was originally a DOS app, I believe.
Point the second: Cheap and generic can imply *not* prone to failure. A mass-market vendor that's shipped and supported a quadrillion units of a given PC configuration can be pretty confident that it's encountered and fixed all the problems with that configuration, and is therefore selling a solid PC. Saying that no-one can build a PC like SGI is just silly.
Hmm, couldn't you intercept the output and splice in a frame of oh, say, a flaccid penis?