The new thing seems to be that you can actually switch between the onboard and 'real' GPU on the fly and fast while everything is running.
The previous laptops with switchable graphics, such as my Sony Vaio which had a Geforce and an Intel chips, did have to at least reboot the graphics system (on OS X) or reboot the whole computer (Windows) in order to go to the power saving mode.
In my experience, I usually was too lazy / didn't want to close my work and kept using the good GPU all the time. The only times I'd work up the enthusiasm to actually switch over was before a flight or something where I'd know I'd not need the power.
An atmosphere is defined as roughly the pressure exerted by one kilogram of mass in Earth gravity on one cm^2. The article claims the area is also around one cm^2 large, so that means the mass would be about 3500 kg. A 2010 VW Golf weighs about 1,451kg, so this would actually be less than 3 cars.
Actually, GPUs started out doing all rendering in fixed point arithmetic, i.e. the equivalent to integers. That worked fine for rasterizing and shading for quite a while.
Then, they started doing limited-precision floating point support (with some 16-bit 'half' floats and other non-standard-conforming weirdness). Only later did they actually go on to support full IEEE floats. The current (as in, can buy them now) generation added IEEE double for both manufacturers, but of course performance is about an eighth or so of single precision.
As an addendum, the newest CUDA 2.2 (with chip of the newest generation, i.e. GT200) actually has support for reading directly from (page-locked) host memory inside of GPU kernels... something I believe ATI cards have allowed for a while.
Because his system has 4 CPU sockets (with a quadcore CPU each) and I believe the licensing for all non-Server Windows version will only let you use at most 2 CPU sockets.
is that there are substantial costs for what passes for quality. You have reviewers, you have professionals looking at submissions and you have indexing.
Sure, all of this can be replicated for free on the web. It is just that you throw out the "professional review" and the "professional indexing" and instead have "groupthink" and "concensus". I don't know whether that's not the case in areas other than Computer Science, but I can assure that in CS the people reviewing papers are the same ones writing them, and doing so for free (hence the term 'peer review', by the way). So in other words, the journals are paying neither the authors not the reviewers. Sweet deal, isn't it?
Um, I do have a Librie and Sony's format has been hacked for quite a while, which means there are a lot of tools for creating books for the Librie from plain text files or other media.
Sony itself also supplies a printer driver for Windows (and I should probably add here that there's a wrapper to use it under Linux), so you can also put PDFs on the device.
No, photon mapping is different from monte carlo ray tracing.
Photon mapping basically is tracing light particles from the light source over multiple bounces (for indirect illumination). The resulting hit points and other light data are then stored in a structure and used later on for lighting.
Path tracing in a way is like normal ray tracing, but you spawn new rays even for all kinds of reflection (that is *lots* of rays, which is why it's damn slow) and calculate the resulting color by weighting and adding the results of all the rays (recursively).
Essentially both "solve" an integral formulation for lighting known as the rendering equation, but in different ways.
> Radiosity was mentioned, and that's basically shooting millions of rays FROM the light sources first (instead of from the users eye to each pixel). But again, lots of calculations.
Actually, that would be light tracing, which is rather different from radiosity. In radiosity, the scene is divided into small surfaces (patches) of approximately the same size, then the lighting distribution by diffuse interreflection is calculated. This does not have anything to do with ray tracing (ok, you can do it stochastically with ray tracing, but the base algorithm actually solves a large system of linear equations).
Since the output of an radiosity algorithm is lighting data, it can well be used as a precalculation step for a normal scanline renderer (that would be the one you know). As a matter of fact, many games already do this for realistic lighting on the static scene.
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The new thing seems to be that you can actually switch between the onboard and 'real' GPU on the fly and fast while everything is running.
The previous laptops with switchable graphics, such as my Sony Vaio which had a Geforce and an Intel chips, did have to at least reboot the graphics system (on OS X) or reboot the whole computer (Windows) in order to go to the power saving mode.
In my experience, I usually was too lazy / didn't want to close my work and kept using the good GPU all the time. The only times I'd work up the enthusiasm to actually switch over was before a flight or something where I'd know I'd not need the power.
Are you sure?
An atmosphere is defined as roughly the pressure exerted by one kilogram of mass in Earth gravity on one cm^2. The article claims the area is also around one cm^2 large, so that means the mass would be about 3500 kg. A 2010 VW Golf weighs about 1,451kg, so this would actually be less than 3 cars.
Actually, GPUs started out doing all rendering in fixed point arithmetic, i.e. the equivalent to integers. That worked fine for rasterizing and shading for quite a while.
Then, they started doing limited-precision floating point support (with some 16-bit 'half' floats and other non-standard-conforming weirdness). Only later did they actually go on to support full IEEE floats. The current (as in, can buy them now) generation added IEEE double for both manufacturers, but of course performance is about an eighth or so of single precision.
I assume that's what the parent meant.
As an addendum, the newest CUDA 2.2 (with chip of the newest generation, i.e. GT200) actually has support for reading directly from (page-locked) host memory inside of GPU kernels... something I believe ATI cards have allowed for a while.
Because his system has 4 CPU sockets (with a quadcore CPU each) and I believe the licensing for all non-Server Windows version will only let you use at most 2 CPU sockets.
Any card that supports CUDA (i.e. anything since the 8800) should also support OpenCL.
Sure, all of this can be replicated for free on the web. It is just that you throw out the "professional review" and the "professional indexing" and instead have "groupthink" and "concensus". I don't know whether that's not the case in areas other than Computer Science, but I
can assure that in CS the people reviewing papers are the same ones writing them,
and doing so for free (hence the term 'peer review', by the way). So in other words,
the journals are paying neither the authors not the reviewers. Sweet deal, isn't it?
Um, I do have a Librie and Sony's format has been hacked for quite a while, which means there are a lot of tools for creating books for the Librie from plain text files or other media.
Sony itself also supplies a printer driver for Windows (and I should probably add here that there's a wrapper to use it under Linux), so you can also put PDFs on the device.
Check the librie group at Yahoo for more links, see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/librie/
No, photon mapping is different from monte carlo ray tracing.
Photon mapping basically is tracing light particles from the light source over multiple bounces (for indirect illumination). The resulting hit points and other light data are then stored in a structure and used later on for lighting.
Path tracing in a way is like normal ray tracing, but you spawn new rays even for all kinds of reflection (that is *lots* of rays, which is why it's damn slow) and calculate the resulting color by weighting and adding the results of all the rays (recursively).
Essentially both "solve" an integral formulation for lighting known as the rendering equation, but in different ways.
> Radiosity was mentioned, and that's basically shooting millions of rays FROM the light sources first (instead of from the users eye to each pixel). But again, lots of calculations.
Actually, that would be light tracing, which is rather different from radiosity. In radiosity, the scene is divided into small surfaces (patches) of approximately the same size, then the lighting distribution by diffuse interreflection is calculated. This does not have anything to do with ray tracing (ok, you can do it stochastically with ray tracing, but the base algorithm actually solves a large system of linear equations).
Since the output of an radiosity algorithm is lighting data, it can well be used as a precalculation step for a normal scanline renderer (that would be the one you know). As a matter of fact, many games already do this for realistic lighting on the static scene.