Yes... ray tracing will indeed win in the long run. This is because the performance is almost independent of primitive (triangle) count.
As a matter of fact... currently, ray tracing really complex models is already faster than rasterizing them. Few hundred million or more triangles or so can be done faster with RT.
This is why their choice for content baffles me: They should NOT be using doom datasets for this, they should be using hundreds of millions of polygons in their dataset. That is where RT is shining.
Rasterizing is O(N) in nr of triangles. Ray tracing is better than O(logN), approaching O(1) even.
Understanding a code base that is large and new to you is a challenge. Especially if it is crappy architecture.
What I do is use Doxygen to map out the code base. Once mapped, you can use your browser to get the basic layout and workings of the project in matter of minutes.
Google Doxygen, and install it (install graphviz/dot first). Then play with it. You will be glad you did.
Especially the dependency graphs are a life saver: use them to identify and weed out header file dependencies, and you can orders of magnitude faster build times as well.
Apple can afford to bring out iPad3 with a CPU that is not much faster than the current one. What they can not afford, is stalling GPU performance.
If rumours are correct, and iPad3 will have a retina display, it will need a lot more shader performance to fill that screen with 3 million pixels. As it is now, it is hard enough to get 60fps on non retina displays with moderately complex OpenGL ES2 shaders.
Remember that the Netherlands has a tiny area. This means that pretty much everyone lives close to the Belgium or German border. Dutch taxes on fuel are currently already extremely high. But that high tax rate is easily avoided by filling up at the border.
>I can't even huck a frisbee and have it wind up where I want it to be...
That is because once thrown, you have lost all control over the frisbee. The spacecraft, however, can be steered continuously.
Accuracy over a distance becomes quite irrelevant once you can navigate and steer.
What would be impressive in this case, is of course that the steering was probably done autonomously, as the communication lag would hamper steering from earth.
I don't think they made the terms-of-payment very attractive to the would be informant. They want identification, arrest and conviction. Yeah, right! Those kind of rewards never pay out. If I could finger someone, I would not trust to see it through to conviction and get the money. Especially if the perpetrator is in China or Russia. Do you think it would ever lead to conviction in that case, even if the culprit is known? Microsoft should be a lot more bold here, and award to 250K for the identification. Or maybe even split it up: 100K for identification, 100K for arrest and 100K for conviction.
I think that is pretty much the main example of in-game-transactions gone bad: WAGON OF SMURFBERRIES$99.99 To make it worse, they are consumable as well, so you can end up paying for them many times.
Ugh... I am a developer too, and I do use in-app-purchase in a free game. But there is only 1 in-app-purchase and it is non-consumable: you buy it once, and it unlocks all premium levels.
They are doing it wrong: you need to lock up the information, so you can get religious status (Scientology). I wonder what court ever decided it was OK for LR Hubbard's crap to get religious status?
Well... running on many platforms sounds nicer than it actually is. You tend to end up with an app that is tailored to the lowest common denominator of the platforms. If you want to shine, you will want to go native.
My guess is that some of that boost is coming from the thriving mobile industry. A good chunk of those new students are secretly thinking of making the next angry birds.
This just means that your app has no worth to the 90+% of people.
If that is true, the pirates would not be bothered to finish the levels, and show up on the online leader boards. The fact that they show up on the leader boards means that they were entertained enough to finish the levels.
Like 'mini me' I can attest to rampant piracy of cheap iOS apps. One of my games is $1.99 and saw up to 96% pirates.
How did I know? I had 45 sales of the app, yet 1100+ names on my leader boards. Even if every game got installed on 3 devices, I would have seen 135 names on the leader boards, not 1100.
Piracy is NOT a result of pricing. The entire article is sheer b*ll sh*t.
Google: Within minutes of becoming aware, we identified and removed the malicious applications.
But from the comments in the blog post, we can read that: This is where the problem is. You became aware because someone had a contact inside Google who alerted to right people. According to one of the developers of the hijacked applications, he had tried for almost a week to get in contact with someone through the normal channels to correct the situation. I am sorry if I sounds harsh, but Google are a master of data processing, and surely you should be able to pick up a distress call from a developer within hours instead of a week.
I saw a documentary of a guy using lasers and plasma. The neat thing was that the engine, the laser, stayed on the ground, and kept shooting pulses at a metal cup. The result plasma pushed the cup higher and higher. He demonstrated it and it worked! Sure it was a small cup and the height was maybe 20m but the prinicple worked! Leave the heavy engine on the ground or in a low orbit, and you save the energy of having to launch it.
Don't underestimate m$ pricing. E.g. see what a ethernet cable costs in Europe. That is 30 euros, mister! And for the Americans: that is 35 US dollar, for an ethernet cable. Damn! That is a profit margin of at least 10000 percent.
The cassini/huygens mission launched at 1997. However, in 2000 it became apparent that the Italians who were doing cassini-huygens comms, forgot to account for the doppler effect. This debacle would cut the comms time to only 10% of planned communication time. NASA and ESA seem to remain silent about this foul up since then. Read more about it at http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/4/4137/1.htm l
The reason why nvidia's PCIe cards are slow, is that, unlike ATI, nvidia doesnt do native PCIe. They simply convert their AGP chips to a PCIe interface.
They should drop the legacy shit, and design a proper modern card.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes... ray tracing will indeed win in the long run.
This is because the performance is almost independent of primitive (triangle) count.
As a matter of fact... currently, ray tracing really complex models is already faster than rasterizing them.
Few hundred million or more triangles or so can be done faster with RT.
This is why their choice for content baffles me:
They should NOT be using doom datasets for this, they should be using hundreds of millions of polygons in their dataset.
That is where RT is shining.
Rasterizing is O(N) in nr of triangles.
Ray tracing is better than O(logN), approaching O(1) even.
Bram
Understanding a code base that is large and new to you is a challenge.
Especially if it is crappy architecture.
What I do is use Doxygen to map out the code base.
Once mapped, you can use your browser to get the basic layout and workings of the project in matter of minutes.
Google Doxygen, and install it (install graphviz/dot first).
Then play with it.
You will be glad you did.
Especially the dependency graphs are a life saver:
use them to identify and weed out header file dependencies, and you can orders of magnitude faster build times as well.
Bram
Apple can afford to bring out iPad3 with a CPU that is not much faster than the current one.
What they can not afford, is stalling GPU performance.
If rumours are correct, and iPad3 will have a retina display, it will need a lot more shader performance to fill that screen with 3 million pixels. As it is now, it is hard enough to get 60fps on non retina displays with moderately complex OpenGL ES2 shaders.
Remember that the Netherlands has a tiny area.
This means that pretty much everyone lives close to the Belgium or German border.
Dutch taxes on fuel are currently already extremely high.
But that high tax rate is easily avoided by filling up at the border.
>I can't even huck a frisbee and have it wind up where I want it to be...
That is because once thrown, you have lost all control over the frisbee.
The spacecraft, however, can be steered continuously.
Accuracy over a distance becomes quite irrelevant once you can navigate and steer.
What would be impressive in this case, is of course that the steering was probably done autonomously, as the communication lag would hamper steering from earth.
Bram
I don't think they made the terms-of-payment very attractive to the would be informant.
They want identification, arrest and conviction. Yeah, right! Those kind of rewards never pay out.
If I could finger someone, I would not trust to see it through to conviction and get the money.
Especially if the perpetrator is in China or Russia.
Do you think it would ever lead to conviction in that case, even if the culprit is known?
Microsoft should be a lot more bold here, and award to 250K for the identification.
Or maybe even split it up: 100K for identification, 100K for arrest and 100K for conviction.
smurfberries anyone?
I think that is pretty much the main example of in-game-transactions gone bad:
WAGON OF SMURFBERRIES$99.99
To make it worse, they are consumable as well, so you can end up paying for them many times.
Ugh...
I am a developer too, and I do use in-app-purchase in a free game.
But there is only 1 in-app-purchase and it is non-consumable: you buy it once, and it unlocks all premium levels.
They are doing it wrong: you need to lock up the information, so you can get religious status (Scientology).
I wonder what court ever decided it was OK for LR Hubbard's crap to get religious status?
Well... running on many platforms sounds nicer than it actually is.
You tend to end up with an app that is tailored to the lowest common denominator of the platforms.
If you want to shine, you will want to go native.
My guess is that some of that boost is coming from the thriving mobile industry.
A good chunk of those new students are secretly thinking of making the next angry birds.
This just means that your app has no worth to the 90+% of people.
If that is true, the pirates would not be bothered to finish the levels, and show up on the online leader boards.
The fact that they show up on the leader boards means that they were entertained enough to finish the levels.
Your 'no worth' argument is bogus.
Like 'mini me' I can attest to rampant piracy of cheap iOS apps.
One of my games is $1.99 and saw up to 96% pirates.
How did I know?
I had 45 sales of the app, yet 1100+ names on my leader boards.
Even if every game got installed on 3 devices, I would have seen 135 names on the leader boards, not 1100.
Piracy is NOT a result of pricing. The entire article is sheer b*ll sh*t.
Bram
Google:
Within minutes of becoming aware, we identified and removed the malicious applications.
But from the comments in the blog post, we can read that:
This is where the problem is. You became aware because someone had a contact inside Google who alerted to right people.
According to one of the developers of the hijacked applications, he had tried for almost a week to get in contact with someone through the normal channels to correct the situation.
I am sorry if I sounds harsh, but Google are a master of data processing, and surely you should be able to pick up a distress call from a developer within hours instead of a week.
I saw a documentary of a guy using lasers and plasma.
The neat thing was that the engine, the laser, stayed on the ground, and kept shooting pulses at a metal cup. The result plasma pushed the cup higher and higher. He demonstrated it and it worked! Sure it was a small cup and the height was maybe 20m but the prinicple worked! Leave the heavy engine on the ground or in a low orbit, and you save the energy of having to launch it.
Maybe take one more step: allow robots to own assets, and have them pay taxes? That way you do not have to go after the programmers.
Every droid his/her own bank account.... That would be interesting. (hers will probably be bigger than his)
Red dead redemption in SW skin will do very well.
What about RF interference?
If the case is not metal, you will be polluting the spectrum.
None the less, pretty cool stuff!
Tried watching on iPad but could not do so.
Don't underestimate m$ pricing. E.g. see what a
ethernet cable
costs in Europe. That is 30 euros, mister!
And for the Americans: that is 35 US dollar, for an ethernet cable.
Damn! That is a profit margin of at least 10000 percent.
Bram
The french subtitles remind me of the pirate
"pre release" of Halo II.
They use less, especially if your screen is
black. Making the pixels white will use power.
LCDs are back-lit, and this light is on, regardless
wether your pixels are black or white.
here's a follow up press release:. html
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/041230/305038_1
i wonder what "xbox creator" exaclty means here.
The cassini/huygens mission launched at 1997.m l
However, in 2000 it became apparent that the
Italians who were doing cassini-huygens comms,
forgot to account for the doppler effect.
This debacle would cut the comms time to only
10% of planned communication time. NASA and ESA
seem to remain silent about this foul up since
then. Read more about it at
http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/4/4137/1.ht
Huh...
We all know, that it's GNU's Linux, not
Red Hat's Linux.
The reason why nvidia's PCIe cards are slow, is
that, unlike ATI, nvidia doesnt do native PCIe.
They simply convert their AGP chips to a PCIe
interface.
They should drop the legacy shit, and design a
proper modern card.