VRAM gets small and fast
on
Tackling AGP 8X
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The point of fast AGP is letting VRAM act less like RAM (big and slow) and more like cache (small and fast). However, games are currently programmed for the former setup, so AGP 8X won't improve performance yet, nor will cache-like VRAM.
VGs with violence always integrate it into the gameplay but VGs with nudity or sexual content make it some side bonus that isn't really part of the game.
What if there was a video game that did integrate sex into the gameplay? In Japan they've had point-and-click dating games, but what if nudity/love/sex were part of other genres?
For example, the Japanese have a comic book about a sex sport where a man and woman try to make the other person come first. What if there was a video game about that, styled after 1 on 1 fighting games? There'd be the usual selection of characters and backdrops, but instead of a damage bar there'd be a horniness bar. There'd be plenty of flashy special moves, but instead of doing damage they'd be foreplay moves that raise the other person's horniness bar. Horniness would also be represented visually by clothes falling off, blushing, trembling and heavy breathing. Instead of Mortal Kombat's "Fatalities" or Street Fighter's "Super Finishers" there'd be orgasm moves. I'd want an anime-style game company doing this because the Japanese put sex in their entertainment way better than Americans do.
I also wonder if abstract or "cartoonized" sex is better than realistic sex. Think of the arguments about realistic violence vs cartoon violence. Some say that kids will be less harmed by seeing fake, cartoon violence because perhaps if kids don't see the real thing, they won't do the real thing. Others say that kids will be less harmed by seeing realistic violence because they'll see the real consequences and fear them. I don't know the answer to that argument, but I do ask: Is fake looking sex or realistic looking sex better for kids? If that 1-on-1 sex game kept the moves but hid the crotches, would it be OK for kids of all ages?
If piracy could do damage, it should have killed books, newspapers and magazines years ago because text is the most easily copyable data. Instead, the late 1990s saw the growth of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and countless newspapers and magazines putting much of their text and images online with no strings attached except for advertizing. They didn't even complain, probably because copying helped them. Also, music is harder to copy than text, and movies are harder still.
So music and movie publishers are inherently safer than text publishers from counterfieting, yet they act more paranoid. Do they think they are entitled to something that text publishers are not? And why do they want protection from copying when copying would help them? Do they LIKE copying? It gets them attention that their music never could!
The anime captured the manga's style because the same guy made the manga and wrote/directed the anime. Norrington's a different guy using a different style. The only director who I think can do Akira's style in live action is James Cameron, who has other plans and wouldn't do it anyway because it's too similar to Terminator 2. If Norrington is mainly interested in Akira's cyberpunk/post-apocalypse style, he should have stuck with Blade or another screenplay because this way he's up against Akira's baggage and The Matrix sequels.
What Akira's anime lost was substance: it only told about 1/4 of the manga's story, and what it kept it rearranged. If he made two 3-hour movies (split conveniently before and after the apocalypse), he could get most of the manga's storyline. That way an Americanized live action version of Akira may actually feel closer to the manga than the anime version did. But does he have the guts to do that?
And even if he had the energy to make it, could he withstand the bad PR? Akira stars a loser teen who gets to act out revenge fantasies and orgies (think Columbine) and its big event is another boy who shows his fear of murder by blowing up a city (think WTC). For Norrington to get the $100M or so needed to make Akira, he'd have to remove those parts, risking ruining the plot.
Integrated graphics chips reduce the up front cost of a PC, but they steal memory bandwidth from non-graphics tasks, as opposed to graphics cards which contain their own memory bus to minimize AGP use, so dedicated graphics cards may actually improve non-graphic performance. That's how MacOS 10.2 works, so I've read.
If the lack of DRM was going to harm books, it would have happened years ago. Anyone can take a book, rip off the binding, put the pages in a self-fed scanner, use text recognition software to turn the images into text, then upload the text file into a P2P network. It only takes a few hours and almost no effort. The fact that print publishing still thrives tells me that people still value browsing through a store full of already-printed books. E-books are already inconvenient compared to printed books and free web pages (each in its own way), so DRM will kill them outright.
When will someone make an ordinary PC for the living room? How about Shuttle? That way, we'd get a box that fits in the entertainment center, is far more powerful than Xbox, and with none of the restrictions.
Why do people accept that most video games, even Mario and Pokemon, require the player to beat other characters to death or unconsciousness, but get bothered by sex appeal? DOAVB and BMXXX don't even let the player have consentual sex, they only have skimpy clothing and some stripping, and in real life stripping is nothing compared to killing. Why does everybody ignore that?
Parents, would you prefer your kid to murder someone or play doctor?
"This is something Carmack and I have been pushing 3D card makers to implement for a very long time. Basically it enables us to use far more textures than we currently can. You won't see immediate improvements with current games, because games always avoid using more textures than fit in video memory, otherwise you get into texture swapping and performance becomes totally unacceptable. Virtual texturing makes swapping performance acceptable, because only the blocks texels that are actually rendered are transferred to video memory, on demand.
Then video memory starts to look like a cache, and you can get away with less of it - typically you only need enough to hold the frame buffer, back buffer, and the blocks of texels that are rendered in the current scene, as opposed to all the textures in memory. So this should let IHV's include less video RAM without losing performance, and therefore faster RAM at less cost.
This does for rendering what virtual memory did for operating systems: it eliminates the hardcoded limitation on RAM (from the application's point of view.)"
One big problem was that the major people involved were there for the money, not the movie. The license was bought by WB and assigned to staff who were not enthusiastic or a good fit, but could be made obedient with enough money. Compare that to LotR which was started and run by a director who had to have enough enthusiasm to convince a reluctant studio and staff to commit $300M, 18 months of production and 2 years of post-production.
The Harry Potter movies are made to cash-in on a fad before it vanishes. The LotR movies are made because the director is a fan of the books.
I think they aught to put the Federation and Starfleet on the backburner and focus on other races. In particular, they should make a movie about a Klingon Opera. We've been wondering for about 20 years now what made the Klingons look human in Kirk's day.
How about Paramount makes a movie that answers that question in Picard/Sisko/Janeway's day, and answers it as a Klingon Opera? The whole movie could be subtitled with a whole new genre of music like we've never heard before. It would foreshadow future seasons in "Enterprise", yet it wouldn't give everything away because it would give the answers in the way Klingons understand; if the human audience watching the movie wants to understand the spoilers, you'll have to watch closely. As a twist, they could have Klingons playing non-Klingon parts; imagine Alexander Roshenko playing Commander Tucker, and Belana Tores playing T'Pal! But the real kicker is that it could show one of the first Daxes. They wouldn't hire Ezry to play the part because the character would be very different. They wouldn't even have to SAY it's Dax; they could show the cast mingle with the on-screen audience after the opera ends, and one of the audience would be Ezry Dax meeting the woman/man who played the part of Dax 1, talking about her memories of those events hundreds of years ago. A Klingon Opera about the past could have some very subtle references and implications, yet be great to watch for newcomers because it would be just so exotic.
Being entirely on a stage with no CGI, it would cost very little to film, yet it would be a strikingly unique Star Trek movie. It would be completely different from the other Star Trek movies, yet it would be closer to the canon than most Trek movies because it would be all about pulling disparate plot threads together.
Napster is the icon of the internet at its best. Better for Bertlesman to mercifully kill it than revive it as a pointless shell of its former self. This way, we'll remember Napster as the app that delivered the promise of the net and revealed the rotten nature of the entertainment biz. We'll remember Napster as our martyr.
Ultimately, Cell will provide a "much more interactive way of delivering content, including advertising, sports and entertainment such as video," to a wide range of Internet-ready devices.
If PS3 has anything to do with interactivity, content, advertising, sports, video or a wide range of internet-ready devices, then the client and it's "Cell" chip is almost irrelevant: It's all about the network.
How will Sony deliver content without approval from Jack and Hilary? How will Sony get network bandwidth without help from AOLTW, Sprint and Worldcom? How will Sony deliver any content without a payment-on-demand system? (No way any game publisher would trust their entire business to ads after two decades of more direct revenue.) And how will they make that payment-on-demand system work for children so PS3 can sell to someone besides the over-18 slow-adopter crowd? How about intercontinental gaming? Voice chat competing with traditional long distance? Videophoning? And what servers and network tech will they use?
These are the questions that will make or break future game consoles. Since the MPAA/RIAA won't touch client-side storage with a ten mile pole, clients of the future will be comodity boxes with a few cheap chips.
I think PS3 is going to be Sony's N64: Third time's a harm.
Paperless reading is supposed to save the environment, but how much more coal and oil will we burn to run our PCs longer? To save power, will Iowa College buy lots of LCDs? Reflective or backlit? How about OLEDs?
Another advantage is that they could require only the passages actually used in the courses. College courses today frequently assign books over 1000 pages and only use 50 to 100 of them.
So there's another gain for the university: Fewer students would go to the clinic for back problems, so there's money for a second tuition hike!
A semi-paperless campus could succeed today. Assuming that there is a lot of free (as in Gutenberg) college-course-caliber reading material on the net, a university could assign many of its books as free downloads and provide a convenient cost-of-materials printing service for those who want it. Said prints would be available in the library and used bookstore to minimize reprinting, and recyclable once worn beyond legibilty. As long as the university completely avoids DRMs and maintains a bookstore and library for the 90+% of reading material still only in print, they could start a good trend.
It's in the university's interest: going semi-paperless would save money for a big tuition hike!
Slashdot Mirror
The point of fast AGP is letting VRAM act less like RAM (big and slow) and more like cache (small and fast). However, games are currently programmed for the former setup, so AGP 8X won't improve performance yet, nor will cache-like VRAM.
And we all know what animal is the Teacher's Pet.
That's why I always tell it to the ones who already cut them off.
VGs with violence always integrate it into the gameplay but VGs with nudity or sexual content make it some side bonus that isn't really part of the game.
What if there was a video game that did integrate sex into the gameplay? In Japan they've had point-and-click dating games, but what if nudity/love/sex were part of other genres?
For example, the Japanese have a comic book about a sex sport where a man and woman try to make the other person come first. What if there was a video game about that, styled after 1 on 1 fighting games? There'd be the usual selection of characters and backdrops, but instead of a damage bar there'd be a horniness bar. There'd be plenty of flashy special moves, but instead of doing damage they'd be foreplay moves that raise the other person's horniness bar. Horniness would also be represented visually by clothes falling off, blushing, trembling and heavy breathing. Instead of Mortal Kombat's "Fatalities" or Street Fighter's "Super Finishers" there'd be orgasm moves. I'd want an anime-style game company doing this because the Japanese put sex in their entertainment way better than Americans do.
I also wonder if abstract or "cartoonized" sex is better than realistic sex. Think of the arguments about realistic violence vs cartoon violence. Some say that kids will be less harmed by seeing fake, cartoon violence because perhaps if kids don't see the real thing, they won't do the real thing. Others say that kids will be less harmed by seeing realistic violence because they'll see the real consequences and fear them. I don't know the answer to that argument, but I do ask: Is fake looking sex or realistic looking sex better for kids? If that 1-on-1 sex game kept the moves but hid the crotches, would it be OK for kids of all ages?
What about the Communist-Finnish Japanese? You don't want us buying their PlayStations and GameCubes either, right?
How long until Tengen makes an unlicensed version of Tetris for Xbox that's better than the official version?
If piracy could do damage, it should have killed books, newspapers and magazines years ago because text is the most easily copyable data. Instead, the late 1990s saw the growth of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and countless newspapers and magazines putting much of their text and images online with no strings attached except for advertizing. They didn't even complain, probably because copying helped them. Also, music is harder to copy than text, and movies are harder still.
So music and movie publishers are inherently safer than text publishers from counterfieting, yet they act more paranoid. Do they think they are entitled to something that text publishers are not? And why do they want protection from copying when copying would help them? Do they LIKE copying? It gets them attention that their music never could!
Norrington can't capture the style.
The anime captured the manga's style because the same guy made the manga and wrote/directed the anime. Norrington's a different guy using a different style. The only director who I think can do Akira's style in live action is James Cameron, who has other plans and wouldn't do it anyway because it's too similar to Terminator 2. If Norrington is mainly interested in Akira's cyberpunk/post-apocalypse style, he should have stuck with Blade or another screenplay because this way he's up against Akira's baggage and The Matrix sequels.
What Akira's anime lost was substance: it only told about 1/4 of the manga's story, and what it kept it rearranged. If he made two 3-hour movies (split conveniently before and after the apocalypse), he could get most of the manga's storyline. That way an Americanized live action version of Akira may actually feel closer to the manga than the anime version did. But does he have the guts to do that?
And even if he had the energy to make it, could he withstand the bad PR? Akira stars a loser teen who gets to act out revenge fantasies and orgies (think Columbine) and its big event is another boy who shows his fear of murder by blowing up a city (think WTC). For Norrington to get the $100M or so needed to make Akira, he'd have to remove those parts, risking ruining the plot.
Only because it was cut short when they were born. Try it outside USA where the antennas are left naturally long.
Integrated graphics chips reduce the up front cost of a PC, but they steal memory bandwidth from non-graphics tasks, as opposed to graphics cards which contain their own memory bus to minimize AGP use, so dedicated graphics cards may actually improve non-graphic performance. That's how MacOS 10.2 works, so I've read.
If the lack of DRM was going to harm books, it would have happened years ago. Anyone can take a book, rip off the binding, put the pages in a self-fed scanner, use text recognition software to turn the images into text, then upload the text file into a P2P network. It only takes a few hours and almost no effort. The fact that print publishing still thrives tells me that people still value browsing through a store full of already-printed books. E-books are already inconvenient compared to printed books and free web pages (each in its own way), so DRM will kill them outright.
When will someone make an ordinary PC for the living room? How about Shuttle? That way, we'd get a box that fits in the entertainment center, is far more powerful than Xbox, and with none of the restrictions.
They could sell it even cheaper if they used this tiny case. Why aren't they?
Why do people accept that most video games, even Mario and Pokemon, require the player to beat other characters to death or unconsciousness, but get bothered by sex appeal? DOAVB and BMXXX don't even let the player have consentual sex, they only have skimpy clothing and some stripping, and in real life stripping is nothing compared to killing. Why does everybody ignore that?
Parents, would you prefer your kid to murder someone or play doctor?
Here's what Tim Sweeney says about texture caching:
"This is something Carmack and I have been pushing 3D card makers to implement for a very long time. Basically it enables us to use far more textures than we currently can. You won't see immediate improvements with current games, because games always avoid using more textures than fit in video memory, otherwise you get into texture swapping and performance becomes totally unacceptable. Virtual texturing makes swapping performance acceptable, because only the blocks texels that are actually rendered are transferred to video memory, on demand.
Then video memory starts to look like a cache, and you can get away with less of it - typically you only need enough to hold the frame buffer, back buffer, and the blocks of texels that are rendered in the current scene, as opposed to all the textures in memory. So this should let IHV's include less video RAM without losing performance, and therefore faster RAM at less cost.
This does for rendering what virtual memory did for operating systems: it eliminates the hardcoded limitation on RAM (from the application's point of view.)"
How much could they extend the battery life by putting photovoltaic panels on top of the air powered vehicles?
One big problem was that the major people involved were there for the money, not the movie. The license was bought by WB and assigned to staff who were not enthusiastic or a good fit, but could be made obedient with enough money. Compare that to LotR which was started and run by a director who had to have enough enthusiasm to convince a reluctant studio and staff to commit $300M, 18 months of production and 2 years of post-production.
The Harry Potter movies are made to cash-in on a fad before it vanishes. The LotR movies are made because the director is a fan of the books.
I think the Ubermensch was better off as Aryan.
I think they aught to put the Federation and Starfleet on the backburner and focus on other races. In particular, they should make a movie about a Klingon Opera. We've been wondering for about 20 years now what made the Klingons look human in Kirk's day.
How about Paramount makes a movie that answers that question in Picard/Sisko/Janeway's day, and answers it as a Klingon Opera? The whole movie could be subtitled with a whole new genre of music like we've never heard before. It would foreshadow future seasons in "Enterprise", yet it wouldn't give everything away because it would give the answers in the way Klingons understand; if the human audience watching the movie wants to understand the spoilers, you'll have to watch closely. As a twist, they could have Klingons playing non-Klingon parts; imagine Alexander Roshenko playing Commander Tucker, and Belana Tores playing T'Pal! But the real kicker is that it could show one of the first Daxes. They wouldn't hire Ezry to play the part because the character would be very different. They wouldn't even have to SAY it's Dax; they could show the cast mingle with the on-screen audience after the opera ends, and one of the audience would be Ezry Dax meeting the woman/man who played the part of Dax 1, talking about her memories of those events hundreds of years ago. A Klingon Opera about the past could have some very subtle references and implications, yet be great to watch for newcomers because it would be just so exotic.
Being entirely on a stage with no CGI, it would cost very little to film, yet it would be a strikingly unique Star Trek movie. It would be completely different from the other Star Trek movies, yet it would be closer to the canon than most Trek movies because it would be all about pulling disparate plot threads together.
Napster is the icon of the internet at its best. Better for Bertlesman to mercifully kill it than revive it as a pointless shell of its former self. This way, we'll remember Napster as the app that delivered the promise of the net and revealed the rotten nature of the entertainment biz. We'll remember Napster as our martyr.
Ultimately, Cell will provide a "much more interactive way of delivering content, including advertising, sports and entertainment such as video," to a wide range of Internet-ready devices.
If PS3 has anything to do with interactivity, content, advertising, sports, video or a wide range of internet-ready devices, then the client and it's "Cell" chip is almost irrelevant: It's all about the network.
How will Sony deliver content without approval from Jack and Hilary? How will Sony get network bandwidth without help from AOLTW, Sprint and Worldcom? How will Sony deliver any content without a payment-on-demand system? (No way any game publisher would trust their entire business to ads after two decades of more direct revenue.) And how will they make that payment-on-demand system work for children so PS3 can sell to someone besides the over-18 slow-adopter crowd? How about intercontinental gaming? Voice chat competing with traditional long distance? Videophoning? And what servers and network tech will they use?
These are the questions that will make or break future game consoles. Since the MPAA/RIAA won't touch client-side storage with a ten mile pole, clients of the future will be comodity boxes with a few cheap chips.
I think PS3 is going to be Sony's N64: Third time's a harm.
Paperless reading is supposed to save the environment, but how much more coal and oil will we burn to run our PCs longer? To save power, will Iowa College buy lots of LCDs? Reflective or backlit? How about OLEDs?
Another advantage is that they could require only the passages actually used in the courses. College courses today frequently assign books over 1000 pages and only use 50 to 100 of them.
So there's another gain for the university: Fewer students would go to the clinic for back problems, so there's money for a second tuition hike!
A semi-paperless campus could succeed today. Assuming that there is a lot of free (as in Gutenberg) college-course-caliber reading material on the net, a university could assign many of its books as free downloads and provide a convenient cost-of-materials printing service for those who want it. Said prints would be available in the library and used bookstore to minimize reprinting, and recyclable once worn beyond legibilty. As long as the university completely avoids DRMs and maintains a bookstore and library for the 90+% of reading material still only in print, they could start a good trend.
It's in the university's interest: going semi-paperless would save money for a big tuition hike!
...after applying Attack of the Edit.