I basiacally agree with you, however I think individual's "spirit of the rules" vary to much. In other sports* the rules of sportsmanship are well defined. I personally thought rocket jumping was now a legitimate strategy(it's been around since Quake I), but by reading posts to this article it sounds like many people still consider this cheating. Sportsmanship has always been tricky in online games.
* Damn, it's depressing when we talk of FPS as sports...
Wouldn't higher capacity mean shorter load times? At least when comparing the same game on DVD vs Blu-Ray. Usually when data density goes up so does throughput, at least that generally holds true for HDs.
1080i/p and 720i/p have similar interface bandwith requirements because they are designed to use HDMI. That has absolutly nothing to do with interlacing or computed fps.
You are completely wrong about progressive display not affecting performance - it is double the pixels
Where did you pick this up?
Both 480i and 480p push a 720x480 image to the screen. Interlaced video pushes the odd lines of a frame and then the even lines where progressive pushes one full frame at a time. I would LOVE for you to explain how a 720x480 image can have half as many pixels when interlaced. I'm guessing most PS2 games don't support 480p because there is little reason(few HDTVs) and it adds another item to be tested.
Who is LocalH?
Your extensive article explains jack. It even says the front buffer will resides in main memory which would be wasting a small chuk of precious memory bandwith and a lot of time. Besides the fact that for 4xFSAA you still have to compute 4 times as many pixels...
I think the XBox360 will take about the same performance hit as computers for 4xFSAA.
I have to assume this works just like NeXT's fat binaries did - so a developer would have to go explicitly turn off PowerPC code generation and ship an Intel-only binary on-purpose. Just because he's developing/testing on Intel doesn't mean he's not generating PowerPC code as well - NeXT was expert with cross-compiling.
This statement seems to undermine your argument that every developer needs an Intel based Mac... Apple has supposedly made it simple to make FAT binaries with XCode based projects. A lot of apps can't/won't use XCode for various reasons and will likely have problems supporting both architechtures. Letting a lot of low budget programmers have at it with beta development tools sounds like the perfect way to fuck up a smooth transition to FAT binaries.
By WWDC 2006 Steve will be calling the PPC-only developers 'slackers' just like he did to the OS9-only developers.
I think you are VERY wrong here. This isn't like an OS upgrade where existing users are willing to just buy a upgrade. It's unlikely there will be a reverse Rosetta(let X86 apps run on PowerPC) so letting developers make X86-only apps to soon could destroy Apple's existing customer base. Apple must support it's existing PowerPC machines for several more years and that means forcing Mac developers to support them to.
I know Rosetta is supposed to run at 60%, but a 40% speed boost is remarkable for most applications and they're going to sell it.
How many shareware apps need much CPU power? Most that do are using Quicktime which will be running natively. It will probably be a month after the Intel Macs are released before we see most XCode based apps using FAT binaries. Apple has a lot to gain by not letting developers ditch the PowerPC platform to quickly. Anything Apple can do to make this a slow and orderly transition will be a good thing.
Ah, but nothing Microsoft has put out about XNA says jack about this discrepency. If you are developing a game for the XBox360 and Windows in parallel I'm sure XNA will work well. If you have already developed your game for Windows without giving any thought to the XBox360's hardware limitations then it's going to be a giant pain in the ass to port to the XBox360, it may be easier to port to the PS3.
Its very likely that Apple doesn't want every shareware developer to have the Intel machines. If Apple gets Rosetta working well enough the transition from PowerPC to Intel will be almost painless, however for clients with a large investment in PowerPC machines it could be quite painful. If every new revision of every little piece of software is Intel only then you are going to have a LOT of pissed off Mac users. In my opinion Apple is very wise to manage this transition for developers with an iron fist until they are ready to ditch their PowerPC users.
Any profit Apple would see from selling $999 computers to their already higher end developers would be immaterial. The slightly high cost is so that this system doesn't get abused. Besides, VS.NET goes for $800 to $2500 from Microsoft's website without any hardware.
You use them when you want to apply one operation to a set of values very quickly, you can think of them as bulk data CPUs. They are very fast at recalculating 3D coordinates, antialiasing images, and lots of other stuff.
You are correct, DirectX was over looked by the majority of XBox developers. I think this is because most console games are developed with game engines and frameworks that have already been ported to each console. However, many of the XBox exclusive titles are ports from Windows; i.e. Counter Strike, Star Wars KotoR, Star Wars Republic Commando, and even Halo.
While DX/D3D had little impact on most of the games released for the XBox, it probably did have a large impact on exclusive titles. Exclusive titles are one of the main reasons to buy one console over the other.
The PSP's CPU architechture is VERY close the the PS2's, but the PS3 is a whole nother beast. The PS2 has 2 VPUs with 32 128-bit(4x32bit) floating point registers and 16 integer registers with 16KB of Data Memory. The main CPU is MIPs based. The PS3 uses the new CELL CPU which is PowerPC based, the CELL will use 7 SPEs that each have 128 128bit registers and each has 256KB SRAM.
The PS3's SPEs will be used very sililarly to the PS2's SPUs(dot-products, etc) although they are much much bigger, there are a lot more of them, and they are a LOT faster. The CELL CPU was developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM and is slated to be put into TVs, PVRs, etc. It is very good at compression/decrompression, showed it off decoding 48 MPEG2 streams with power to spare.
So the answer to your question is; not yet. Sony will put a CELL CPU in many of their electronics, but not until it is cheaper.
Yes, that was the point I was trying to make. Since this article says DirectX has been basically thrown out the window when designing the XBox360's GPU it will alienate a lot of the game developers that were drawn to the original XBox. Ports of Windows games will also need to rework all their SSE optimizations to altivec and make sure their code is big endian safe for the PowerPC CPUs.
I have never written a game for the original XBox but I know you can't rely on DirectX8 completely for 3D. The XBox's 3D API is just strongly based on DirectX8. To utilize the XBox's console properties(like truly shared RAM) you have to use some extra libraries that Microsoft included in the XDK.
Honestly, I thought this was a slap at Microsoft. In the article they admit that the GPU is not compatable with DirectX. The original XBox's DirectX implementation was a bit funky but basically it was DirectX8 and developers bitched about that. The XBox360's Shaders(and who knows what else) aren't DirectX9 compliant, and it sounds like their is no hope for it Being DirectX Next compliant. If developers are going to have to rework a lot of complex code for the XBox360 I think this will turn off many game developers who see the XBox as a console that's cheap to port.
I believe by "Marketplace losers" the grandparent was talking about finances. I'm not sure how much M$ has lost in the XBox venture but it's well over a billion dollars now. Microsoft's XBox division has been able to post a loss every quarter except for the one quarter when Halo2 was released.
the Home Entertainment division is in the crosshairs of the MS bean counters and they are itching to pull the trigger and put a quick end to the mess.
This is very likely, hoever if Sony is serious about shipping the PS3 HardDrive with Linux then M$ may see it as a signifigant enough threat to pump another couple billion dollars into their XBox division. Even Microsoft has to draw a line somewhere though.
I predict that if the XBox 360 doesn't post a profit within 2 years it will get nixed. Hmmm, that sounds a lot like what happened with the dreamcast...
TFA didn't explain this, but it depends on what you mean by "success".
The XBox division of Microsoft has lost over a billion dollars and the only quarter they posted a profit was when Halo2 was released. If either Sony or Nintendo where operating like this then they would be shutting their doors, however when you have the INCREDIBLY lucrative Windows and Office monopolies you can afford to spend a couple billion to establish yourself. Competition is good, but I hope Microsoft don't drive the real companies out of business.
I could only see this as "cool" if you didn't own a computer and did own a USB WMA MP3 Player. Buying real CDs is still probably the best option for purchasing music, they have no vendor lockins, no lossy compression, and are easily converted to a file for any player.
Most of the games that I REALLY wanted to change the music for on the XBox didn't support custom soundtracks.
Burnout 3 - supports custom soundtracks, but had decent music
Prince of Persia Warrior Within - Horrible soundtrack and doesn't support custom soundtrack
You are correct, it doesn't look like their is an autoinstaller. I was thinking of the cross-compile ability of the pro version(the standard can only compile for the platform it's running on).
The Linux Standard version is free but you still have to buy Windows/OSX standard versions seperately at $100 a pop.
Yep,
it's $100 for the "standard edition" and $400 for the "professional edition". For what I would use this for I doubt I would care $300 worth about the pro features(sql plugin, better debugger, good autoinstaller).
I played with the RealBasic demo back in OS8, but I haven't tried it in recent history.
The grandparent is correct. MD2 is an incredibly popular format for simple 3D games because it is very well documented and simple to implement.
Blender doesn't seem to be the best low polygon count modeler, but having good MD2 import/export would be VERY useful. The current MD2 importer/exporter script seems to have lots of problems(I've never gotten it working).
Wow, I've been noticing some out of place posts on Slashdot for a couple days now but this one just proves Slashdot has a serious problem.
I'm sure you didn't mean to but your post ended up showing up as the first post in an Article about CMT. What's really wierd is that it showed up after a bunch of other posts...
You are somewhat correct, 720p can run at 60fps, as well as 30fps and 24fps. These fps ratings are for the interface to the monitor/tv, kind of like the refresh rate on a CRT, they have no bearing on the computed fps. The bandwidth you were computing is for the connecting interface, resolution does impact computed fps.
MS isn't kidding when they say all Xbox360 games must support a minimum of 720p (which is incidentally more performance-needing than 1080i in most cases) - the console is designed for that.
What? 1080i has over twice as many pixels as 720p. Interlacing is just a matter of pushing the pixels in a different order and 1080i needs AA just as badly as 720p does. What are you talking about?
Most games support 480p because it's relatively simple. Standard Def TV is analog 480i and the only difference between 480i and 480p is that 480i is interlaced. 480i and 480p are putting out the same number of pixels/sec at the same resolution so you don't have many issues switching between the two. I don't see any reason for this to change in the next 2 years. Making your game look worse on 90% of the screens out there so that the other 10% get a sharper picture doesn't make sense. HDTV penetration need to be higher before developers will support 720p and higher.
Microsoft has been saying 4xAA will be "free" at 720p because of the 10MB of eDRAM. I don't know how they are making this work unless they are planning on having everything running in 16bit color; each frame of 720p@32bits eats over 3.5MB. I think this is all marketing bull.
No I don't consider $200+ video cards mid-range, my idea of mid-range is $150ish to $100ish.
30fps average stinks! That means your low fps during complex scenes is around 10fps.
I'm also going to have to disagree with you about Doom3 on the XBox. It's playable but looks really crappy.
Microsoft has been saying 4xAA will be "free" at 720p because of the 10MB of eDRAM. I don't know how they are making this work unless they are planning on having everything running in 16bit color; each frame of 720p@32bits eats over 3.5MB. I think this whole thing is marketing bull. From what I've heard Sony has backed off about mandating any HD except 480i.
Standard TV is analog 480i. There isn't any reason Nintendo couldn't release another version of the Revolution that supports HD in a couple years, although all current games would be 480i.
Only supporting the status quo now makes sense for Ninteno, besides being cheaper it's also practical. Sony supporting HD does make sense, they are including a drive which will hopefully make HD DVDs a reality.
actually 720p has over 17% more pixels than 1024x768. To turn on all effects in Doom3 in current mid-range cards and still have decent FPS you do generally have to turn the resolution down to at least 800x600, SD TV is basically 720x480(480i).
I doubt we will be seeing many games that support anything but 480p/480i because of speed issues and many more that just don't want to have to make the extra graphics and do the extra testing for a higher resolution version. Supporting anything higher than 480p on games is going to be a lot of extra work for developers and until HDTVs have a much higher penetration I don't see them bothering.
are 480p games a good enough reason to buy an HDTV? Probably not...
However if Sony successfully gets 1080p Blue-Ray HD movies on shelves I can see buying a HDTV.
Slashdot Mirror
I basiacally agree with you, however I think individual's "spirit of the rules" vary to much. In other sports* the rules of sportsmanship are well defined. I personally thought rocket jumping was now a legitimate strategy(it's been around since Quake I), but by reading posts to this article it sounds like many people still consider this cheating. Sportsmanship has always been tricky in online games.
* Damn, it's depressing when we talk of FPS as sports...
No one is going to use the HD-DVD format in a game console; the PS3 is using Bluray and the Revolution and 360 are sticking with standard DVDs.
Your point is still valid although I don't see how it relates to the parent.
Wouldn't higher capacity mean shorter load times? At least when comparing the same game on DVD vs Blu-Ray. Usually when data density goes up so does throughput, at least that generally holds true for HDs.
I realized who LocalH is, your sister post.
1080i/p and 720i/p have similar interface bandwith requirements because they are designed to use HDMI. That has absolutly nothing to do with interlacing or computed fps.
You are completely wrong about progressive display not affecting performance - it is double the pixels
Where did you pick this up?
Both 480i and 480p push a 720x480 image to the screen. Interlaced video pushes the odd lines of a frame and then the even lines where progressive pushes one full frame at a time. I would LOVE for you to explain how a 720x480 image can have half as many pixels when interlaced. I'm guessing most PS2 games don't support 480p because there is little reason(few HDTVs) and it adds another item to be tested.
Who is LocalH?
Your extensive article explains jack. It even says the front buffer will resides in main memory which would be wasting a small chuk of precious memory bandwith and a lot of time. Besides the fact that for 4xFSAA you still have to compute 4 times as many pixels...
I think the XBox360 will take about the same performance hit as computers for 4xFSAA.
I have to assume this works just like NeXT's fat binaries did - so a developer would have to go explicitly turn off PowerPC code generation and ship an Intel-only binary on-purpose. Just because he's developing/testing on Intel doesn't mean he's not generating PowerPC code as well - NeXT was expert with cross-compiling.
This statement seems to undermine your argument that every developer needs an Intel based Mac... Apple has supposedly made it simple to make FAT binaries with XCode based projects. A lot of apps can't/won't use XCode for various reasons and will likely have problems supporting both architechtures. Letting a lot of low budget programmers have at it with beta development tools sounds like the perfect way to fuck up a smooth transition to FAT binaries.
By WWDC 2006 Steve will be calling the PPC-only developers 'slackers' just like he did to the OS9-only developers.
I think you are VERY wrong here. This isn't like an OS upgrade where existing users are willing to just buy a upgrade. It's unlikely there will be a reverse Rosetta(let X86 apps run on PowerPC) so letting developers make X86-only apps to soon could destroy Apple's existing customer base. Apple must support it's existing PowerPC machines for several more years and that means forcing Mac developers to support them to.
I know Rosetta is supposed to run at 60%, but a 40% speed boost is remarkable for most applications and they're going to sell it.
How many shareware apps need much CPU power? Most that do are using Quicktime which will be running natively. It will probably be a month after the Intel Macs are released before we see most XCode based apps using FAT binaries. Apple has a lot to gain by not letting developers ditch the PowerPC platform to quickly. Anything Apple can do to make this a slow and orderly transition will be a good thing.
Ah, but nothing Microsoft has put out about XNA says jack about this discrepency. If you are developing a game for the XBox360 and Windows in parallel I'm sure XNA will work well. If you have already developed your game for Windows without giving any thought to the XBox360's hardware limitations then it's going to be a giant pain in the ass to port to the XBox360, it may be easier to port to the PS3.
Its very likely that Apple doesn't want every shareware developer to have the Intel machines. If Apple gets Rosetta working well enough the transition from PowerPC to Intel will be almost painless, however for clients with a large investment in PowerPC machines it could be quite painful. If every new revision of every little piece of software is Intel only then you are going to have a LOT of pissed off Mac users. In my opinion Apple is very wise to manage this transition for developers with an iron fist until they are ready to ditch their PowerPC users.
Any profit Apple would see from selling $999 computers to their already higher end developers would be immaterial. The slightly high cost is so that this system doesn't get abused. Besides, VS.NET goes for $800 to $2500 from Microsoft's website without any hardware.
Doing vector proccesses of course...
You use them when you want to apply one operation to a set of values very quickly, you can think of them as bulk data CPUs. They are very fast at recalculating 3D coordinates, antialiasing images, and lots of other stuff.
You are correct, DirectX was over looked by the majority of XBox developers. I think this is because most console games are developed with game engines and frameworks that have already been ported to each console. However, many of the XBox exclusive titles are ports from Windows; i.e. Counter Strike, Star Wars KotoR, Star Wars Republic Commando, and even Halo.
While DX/D3D had little impact on most of the games released for the XBox, it probably did have a large impact on exclusive titles. Exclusive titles are one of the main reasons to buy one console over the other.
The PSP's CPU architechture is VERY close the the PS2's, but the PS3 is a whole nother beast. The PS2 has 2 VPUs with 32 128-bit(4x32bit) floating point registers and 16 integer registers with 16KB of Data Memory. The main CPU is MIPs based. The PS3 uses the new CELL CPU which is PowerPC based, the CELL will use 7 SPEs that each have 128 128bit registers and each has 256KB SRAM.
The PS3's SPEs will be used very sililarly to the PS2's SPUs(dot-products, etc) although they are much much bigger, there are a lot more of them, and they are a LOT faster. The CELL CPU was developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM and is slated to be put into TVs, PVRs, etc. It is very good at compression/decrompression, showed it off decoding 48 MPEG2 streams with power to spare.
So the answer to your question is; not yet. Sony will put a CELL CPU in many of their electronics, but not until it is cheaper.
Yes, that was the point I was trying to make. Since this article says DirectX has been basically thrown out the window when designing the XBox360's GPU it will alienate a lot of the game developers that were drawn to the original XBox. Ports of Windows games will also need to rework all their SSE optimizations to altivec and make sure their code is big endian safe for the PowerPC CPUs.
I have never written a game for the original XBox but I know you can't rely on DirectX8 completely for 3D. The XBox's 3D API is just strongly based on DirectX8. To utilize the XBox's console properties(like truly shared RAM) you have to use some extra libraries that Microsoft included in the XDK.
Honestly, I thought this was a slap at Microsoft. In the article they admit that the GPU is not compatable with DirectX. The original XBox's DirectX implementation was a bit funky but basically it was DirectX8 and developers bitched about that. The XBox360's Shaders(and who knows what else) aren't DirectX9 compliant, and it sounds like their is no hope for it Being DirectX Next compliant. If developers are going to have to rework a lot of complex code for the XBox360 I think this will turn off many game developers who see the XBox as a console that's cheap to port.
I believe by "Marketplace losers" the grandparent was talking about finances. I'm not sure how much M$ has lost in the XBox venture but it's well over a billion dollars now. Microsoft's XBox division has been able to post a loss every quarter except for the one quarter when Halo2 was released.
Xbox Back to Losses
the Home Entertainment division is in the crosshairs of the MS bean counters and they are itching to pull the trigger and put a quick end to the mess.
This is very likely, hoever if Sony is serious about shipping the PS3 HardDrive with Linux then M$ may see it as a signifigant enough threat to pump another couple billion dollars into their XBox division. Even Microsoft has to draw a line somewhere though.
I predict that if the XBox 360 doesn't post a profit within 2 years it will get nixed. Hmmm, that sounds a lot like what happened with the dreamcast...
TFA didn't explain this, but it depends on what you mean by "success".
The XBox division of Microsoft has lost over a billion dollars and the only quarter they posted a profit was when Halo2 was released. If either Sony or Nintendo where operating like this then they would be shutting their doors, however when you have the INCREDIBLY lucrative Windows and Office monopolies you can afford to spend a couple billion to establish yourself. Competition is good, but I hope Microsoft don't drive the real companies out of business.
Most of the games that I REALLY wanted to change the music for on the XBox didn't support custom soundtracks.
You are correct, it doesn't look like their is an autoinstaller. I was thinking of the cross-compile ability of the pro version(the standard can only compile for the platform it's running on).
The Linux Standard version is free but you still have to buy Windows/OSX standard versions seperately at $100 a pop.
Yep,
it's $100 for the "standard edition" and $400 for the "professional edition". For what I would use this for I doubt I would care $300 worth about the pro features(sql plugin, better debugger, good autoinstaller).
I played with the RealBasic demo back in OS8, but I haven't tried it in recent history.
The grandparent is correct. MD2 is an incredibly popular format for simple 3D games because it is very well documented and simple to implement.
Blender doesn't seem to be the best low polygon count modeler, but having good MD2 import/export would be VERY useful. The current MD2 importer/exporter script seems to have lots of problems(I've never gotten it working).
Mod parent troll
Wow, I've been noticing some out of place posts on Slashdot for a couple days now but this one just proves Slashdot has a serious problem.
I'm sure you didn't mean to but your post ended up showing up as the first post in an Article about CMT. What's really wierd is that it showed up after a bunch of other posts...
You are somewhat correct, 720p can run at 60fps, as well as 30fps and 24fps. These fps ratings are for the interface to the monitor/tv, kind of like the refresh rate on a CRT, they have no bearing on the computed fps. The bandwidth you were computing is for the connecting interface, resolution does impact computed fps.
This is exactly the same as with computers.
MS isn't kidding when they say all Xbox360 games must support a minimum of 720p (which is incidentally more performance-needing than 1080i in most cases) - the console is designed for that.
What? 1080i has over twice as many pixels as 720p. Interlacing is just a matter of pushing the pixels in a different order and 1080i needs AA just as badly as 720p does. What are you talking about?
Most games support 480p because it's relatively simple. Standard Def TV is analog 480i and the only difference between 480i and 480p is that 480i is interlaced. 480i and 480p are putting out the same number of pixels/sec at the same resolution so you don't have many issues switching between the two. I don't see any reason for this to change in the next 2 years. Making your game look worse on 90% of the screens out there so that the other 10% get a sharper picture doesn't make sense. HDTV penetration need to be higher before developers will support 720p and higher.
Microsoft has been saying 4xAA will be "free" at 720p because of the 10MB of eDRAM. I don't know how they are making this work unless they are planning on having everything running in 16bit color; each frame of 720p@32bits eats over 3.5MB. I think this is all marketing bull.
No I don't consider $200+ video cards mid-range, my idea of mid-range is $150ish to $100ish.
30fps average stinks! That means your low fps during complex scenes is around 10fps.
I'm also going to have to disagree with you about Doom3 on the XBox. It's playable but looks really crappy.
Microsoft has been saying 4xAA will be "free" at 720p because of the 10MB of eDRAM. I don't know how they are making this work unless they are planning on having everything running in 16bit color; each frame of 720p@32bits eats over 3.5MB. I think this whole thing is marketing bull. From what I've heard Sony has backed off about mandating any HD except 480i.
Standard TV is analog 480i. There isn't any reason Nintendo couldn't release another version of the Revolution that supports HD in a couple years, although all current games would be 480i.
Only supporting the status quo now makes sense for Ninteno, besides being cheaper it's also practical. Sony supporting HD does make sense, they are including a drive which will hopefully make HD DVDs a reality.
actually 720p has over 17% more pixels than 1024x768. To turn on all effects in Doom3 in current mid-range cards and still have decent FPS you do generally have to turn the resolution down to at least 800x600, SD TV is basically 720x480(480i).
I doubt we will be seeing many games that support anything but 480p/480i because of speed issues and many more that just don't want to have to make the extra graphics and do the extra testing for a higher resolution version. Supporting anything higher than 480p on games is going to be a lot of extra work for developers and until HDTVs have a much higher penetration I don't see them bothering.
are 480p games a good enough reason to buy an HDTV? Probably not...
However if Sony successfully gets 1080p Blue-Ray HD movies on shelves I can see buying a HDTV.