Umm, Parsec has been closed source up to just now. This is not a 'fiasco' involving open-source at all. It's a group of developers who are short on time so they allow other people to help them out.
3dfx went under because they bought STB and their fabrication plant in Mexico was only running at like 30% capacity.
And I still don't get how the reviewer at Tom's Hardware Guide came up with the comparison to the Voodoo 5 6000. Four GPU's versus one? External (As in outside your case) power connector at opposed to a molex connector? In other news, apples now look like oranges.
>>We've seen these problems previously in the designs for the GeForce3,4, made much fun of them in the case of the 3dfx Voodoo5 6000 cards, and even the latest ATI cards are requiring more power than the AGP bus can provide.
We made fun of the Voodoo 5 6000 mostly because it used four chips and was to retail at $600 when nVidia and ATi had single chip solutions at less than $250 that thoroughly beat 3dfx's dual chip Voodoo 5 5500. The power concern was a whole other matter. It didn't just use a molex connector like a harddrive, it was to use a totally seperate external (As in one that plugged into a wall outlet) power source, ahahahaha!
The problem with your idea of having a graphics processor socket is that graphics chipsets require the fastest technology available. The memory, for example, is much faster than system memory. You'd need extra memory banks on the motherboard. If you were to have the video processing resources shared with the rest of the system resources, then you'd need to spend a fortune on RAM alone. 128MB and 256MB for video processing is expensive enough, it would be awfully wasteful to use that sort of memory on OS overhead. Then you need a bus capable of handling that sort of memory bandwidth. That's what, around 20GB/sec for the GeForce FX and Radeon 9700? Something really high, whereas current motherboard busses like Hypertransport go at something like 1.6GB/sec. Then your next graphics processor would choke on bandwidth sooo badly...
So basically you'd have a console video gaming system.
I've been running nVidia drivers in Linux ever since the 1251's were first released and NEVER have I had a problem with switching as described earlier. Going from X to console takes about 2 seconds. For what it's worth, here's the hardware I was using:
2D performance in general has been noted to be somewhat sluggish. I mean, Sim City 3K must've only went 100FPS in comparison to my 200FPS in Quake 3...
Impressively paranoid, but please look at what they do before claiming it was all a farce. So far they've provided many screenshots and staked their company's reputation on Linux and Mac ports, as well as put up with the community screaming for blood on their message forum. Not to mention the beta, but I guess we'll just have to wait before we see what's going on with that.
As for saying it's a marketing strategy, that's such a load of bull... The Linux demographic is small. Very small. If anything they'd be losing money paying their developers to stay back and work on the Linux port rather than simply moving on to their next Windows release (Please let it be Shattered Steel 2). Bioware is probably just doing the port for the same reason Epic ported Unreal Tournament 2003--They like Linux and happen to have programmers willing to work on the project.
As for the mistake about Bink and Miles, I'll buy it though I wish they mentioned it was Bink and Miles before hand. Hours after they posted that update, none other than Sam Lantinga himself pointed out that at least Miles worked in Linux.
Why SATA and not Firewire? Because SATA is backwards compatible with normal ATA. Not all motherboards support firewire, and asking customers to buy add-in firewire cards in addition to a harddrive for an "older" system that doesn't have a built-in firewire controller would drive the price up.
Nono, you've got it all wrong. In Quake, you're only pretending to risk death. Playing with PSU's is the real deal, minus the rocket launchers and railguns.
Exactly! I mean, a few hundred bucks for flourinert or something is a lot of money, but relatively little compared to the cost of replacing your computer in the event of leakage. Well, I suppose it would depend on where the water was leaked, but I'd imagine the power supply blowing would be pretty devastating to the entire system.
Damn those Psilons! I remember back in MOO2 I'd always leave them alone since they'd never control more than three planets. Then all the sudden they'd turn aggressive and out fo the blue would come 60 doom stars. I've often have to resort to cloaking device and time-warp facilators to beat them if my usual fleet with billions of small lasers or a few stellar converters couldn't pull it off.
90% of the fun in a game is developing strategies of your own, not reading them out of a manual. That's the problem I have with Warcraft 3 these days--Everyone just goes to www.imbalanceexploitoftheday.com and makes cookie-cutter armies. It gets very old very quickly.
Can't mobo manufacturers use alternative bus options like HyperTransport and MuTIOL (SiS chipsets) to surpass the 133MHz 32-bit 33MHz PCI limit? Or must it all go through the PCI bus at some point? Sorry if that's a stupid question.
Sierra did indeed neglect the game almost to its death and just recently "re-released" it. In my experience and the experience of friends, the Linux version worked better than the Win32 version! You're right, there were a lot of updates. In addition to Tribes 2's bugs, my Win32-using friends all had horrible problems with Sierra's update utility crashing. Imagine how insulting that would be--You have problems with an app and try to patch it only to find that you're having more difficulty applying the patch than coping with the original problems.
I got my start in Linux using Mandrake 7. The distribution was easy for a newbie like me to set up and I wasn't doing anything too terribly advanced. Dealing with RPMs wasn't even the biggest of my worries. I was on a dial-up connection, so all the added stuff ("Crap" as many others would call it) really helped to open my eyes to the world of open source software when I wasn't free to just download whatever I felt like. After their first call for help, I subscribed to Mandrake Club for $60. It was money well spent because without Mandrake I probably would've been coerced into paying far more for the latest and greatest from Redmond. So thank you MandrakeSoft for making such an excellent distro for "people like me" to learn on.
I'm on broadband now and have since moved on to the Gentoo distribution, so Mandrake won't be getting money from me this time around. However, my mom is still trying to learn the basics of Linux. When I get a chance to see her next, I'll put Mandrake 9 on her box and see where it goes from there.
>>Hey, here's a suggestion: Why don't you read the article again? Who mentioned no binary modules?
Second sentence in the last paragraph on the first page: "This may very well break some rather expensive commercial Linux products, but that doesn't seem to bother most kernel developers."
Ok, it doesn't say "no" binary drivers. But to "break some" certainly doesn't imply full functionality and compatibility now does it?
>>Restrictions are not exclusions.
Perhaps not, but they're a pain in the ass that I believe will make Linux support less worthwhile for companies who actually have to pay people to write drivers.
>>Those patents are ridiculous - they don't provide differentiation, don't protect hardware secrets, and should be pressured into release.
By a bunch of ungreatful pissants who probably aren't doing much for anyone's bottom line anyway? Riiigghht.
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Umm, Parsec has been closed source up to just now. This is not a 'fiasco' involving open-source at all. It's a group of developers who are short on time so they allow other people to help them out.
3dfx went under because they bought STB and their fabrication plant in Mexico was only running at like 30% capacity.
And I still don't get how the reviewer at Tom's Hardware Guide came up with the comparison to the Voodoo 5 6000. Four GPU's versus one? External (As in outside your case) power connector at opposed to a molex connector? In other news, apples now look like oranges.
Agreed--Chess sucks for this sort of thing. I'd like to see a version of Warcraft 3 where the computer doesn't have to cheat in order to win.
I didn't watch the superbowl :(
And I run viral software.
Why the hell is the season in the fall and winter? I would think that an outdoor sport would be best played during the late spring through early fall.
Maybe they'll put in some units to counter those fsck'ing mass dryads and witch doctors!
>>We've seen these problems previously in the designs for the GeForce3,4, made much fun of them in the case of the 3dfx Voodoo5 6000 cards, and even the latest ATI cards are requiring more power than the AGP bus can provide.
We made fun of the Voodoo 5 6000 mostly because it used four chips and was to retail at $600 when nVidia and ATi had single chip solutions at less than $250 that thoroughly beat 3dfx's dual chip Voodoo 5 5500. The power concern was a whole other matter. It didn't just use a molex connector like a harddrive, it was to use a totally seperate external (As in one that plugged into a wall outlet) power source, ahahahaha!
The problem with your idea of having a graphics processor socket is that graphics chipsets require the fastest technology available. The memory, for example, is much faster than system memory. You'd need extra memory banks on the motherboard. If you were to have the video processing resources shared with the rest of the system resources, then you'd need to spend a fortune on RAM alone. 128MB and 256MB for video processing is expensive enough, it would be awfully wasteful to use that sort of memory on OS overhead. Then you need a bus capable of handling that sort of memory bandwidth. That's what, around 20GB/sec for the GeForce FX and Radeon 9700? Something really high, whereas current motherboard busses like Hypertransport go at something like 1.6GB/sec. Then your next graphics processor would choke on bandwidth sooo badly...
So basically you'd have a console video gaming system.
I think you found his problem. It sounds more like something is timing out rather than a problem with the driver.
I've been running nVidia drivers in Linux ever since the 1251's were first released and NEVER have I had a problem with switching as described earlier. Going from X to console takes about 2 seconds. For what it's worth, here's the hardware I was using:
Athlon T-Bird / SiS735 / 512MB DDR266 / GeForce 3 (Original)
Dual Athlon MP / AMD760MP / 1024MB DDR266 / GeForce 3 (Original)
Athlon XP / SiS745 / 512MB DDR333 / GeForce 4 Ti4600
2D performance in general has been noted to be somewhat sluggish. I mean, Sim City 3K must've only went 100FPS in comparison to my 200FPS in Quake 3...
Impressively paranoid, but please look at what they do before claiming it was all a farce. So far they've provided many screenshots and staked their company's reputation on Linux and Mac ports, as well as put up with the community screaming for blood on their message forum. Not to mention the beta, but I guess we'll just have to wait before we see what's going on with that.
As for saying it's a marketing strategy, that's such a load of bull... The Linux demographic is small. Very small. If anything they'd be losing money paying their developers to stay back and work on the Linux port rather than simply moving on to their next Windows release (Please let it be Shattered Steel 2). Bioware is probably just doing the port for the same reason Epic ported Unreal Tournament 2003--They like Linux and happen to have programmers willing to work on the project.
As for the mistake about Bink and Miles, I'll buy it though I wish they mentioned it was Bink and Miles before hand. Hours after they posted that update, none other than Sam Lantinga himself pointed out that at least Miles worked in Linux.
And to think that some people say open-source is unprofitable!
Unpopular speech is indeed protected (Pro-Nazi, racist, etc), but not fighting words (Threats, harassment, etc).
Why SATA and not Firewire? Because SATA is backwards compatible with normal ATA. Not all motherboards support firewire, and asking customers to buy add-in firewire cards in addition to a harddrive for an "older" system that doesn't have a built-in firewire controller would drive the price up.
Nono, you've got it all wrong. In Quake, you're only pretending to risk death. Playing with PSU's is the real deal, minus the rocket launchers and railguns.
>>the coolant used is not water on these though iirc it's some sort of nonconducting liquid.
I'm pretty sure that was fluorinert.
Exactly! I mean, a few hundred bucks for flourinert or something is a lot of money, but relatively little compared to the cost of replacing your computer in the event of leakage. Well, I suppose it would depend on where the water was leaked, but I'd imagine the power supply blowing would be pretty devastating to the entire system.
Slashtip #108: If you do something interesting, put your webpage on an AOL account and let them take the slasdotting :)
Damn those Psilons! I remember back in MOO2 I'd always leave them alone since they'd never control more than three planets. Then all the sudden they'd turn aggressive and out fo the blue would come 60 doom stars. I've often have to resort to cloaking device and time-warp facilators to beat them if my usual fleet with billions of small lasers or a few stellar converters couldn't pull it off.
90% of the fun in a game is developing strategies of your own, not reading them out of a manual.
That's the problem I have with Warcraft 3 these days--Everyone just goes to www.imbalanceexploitoftheday.com and makes cookie-cutter armies. It gets very old very quickly.
I was hoping NOT to have to look at another article on anime after specifically checking off anime in my preferences.
Can't mobo manufacturers use alternative bus options like HyperTransport and MuTIOL (SiS chipsets) to surpass the 133MHz 32-bit 33MHz PCI limit? Or must it all go through the PCI bus at some point? Sorry if that's a stupid question.
Sierra did indeed neglect the game almost to its death and just recently "re-released" it. In my experience and the experience of friends, the Linux version worked better than the Win32 version! You're right, there were a lot of updates. In addition to Tribes 2's bugs, my Win32-using friends all had horrible problems with Sierra's update utility crashing. Imagine how insulting that would be--You have problems with an app and try to patch it only to find that you're having more difficulty applying the patch than coping with the original problems.
Haha, how's this for hype? They have "awards" for TF2 posted already!
I got my start in Linux using Mandrake 7. The distribution was easy for a newbie like me to set up and I wasn't doing anything too terribly advanced. Dealing with RPMs wasn't even the biggest of my worries. I was on a dial-up connection, so all the added stuff ("Crap" as many others would call it) really helped to open my eyes to the world of open source software when I wasn't free to just download whatever I felt like. After their first call for help, I subscribed to Mandrake Club for $60. It was money well spent because without Mandrake I probably would've been coerced into paying far more for the latest and greatest from Redmond. So thank you MandrakeSoft for making such an excellent distro for "people like me" to learn on.
I'm on broadband now and have since moved on to the Gentoo distribution, so Mandrake won't be getting money from me this time around. However, my mom is still trying to learn the basics of Linux. When I get a chance to see her next, I'll put Mandrake 9 on her box and see where it goes from there.
Did you check to make sure the paper format was set to US Letter instead of A4?
>>Hey, here's a suggestion: Why don't you read the article again? Who mentioned no binary modules?
Second sentence in the last paragraph on the first page:
"This may very well break some rather expensive commercial Linux products, but that doesn't seem to bother most kernel developers."
Ok, it doesn't say "no" binary drivers. But to "break some" certainly doesn't imply full functionality and compatibility now does it?
>>Restrictions are not exclusions.
Perhaps not, but they're a pain in the ass that I believe will make Linux support less worthwhile for companies who actually have to pay people to write drivers.
>>Those patents are ridiculous - they don't provide differentiation, don't protect hardware secrets, and should be pressured into release.
By a bunch of ungreatful pissants who probably aren't doing much for anyone's bottom line anyway? Riiigghht.