Vsync forces the framerate to some fraction of the refresh rate. Sure, for most of the time, your video card might be able to keep up and provide a steady 90fps. Unfortunately, because vsync locks frames to the refresh rate of the monitor, the framerate degrades drasticaly (in whole-number ratios) once you drop below the sync rate.
What happens if you hit a rougher portion of the game, and your average framerate (the framerate the card CAN draw with vsync disabled) drops to 60fps? Your card, locked to the 90 hz sync rate, alternates between 45fps (1/2) and 90fps (1/1). This creates an annoying jumpy lag effect that you can feel, because it's either 45fps or 90fps. You can imagine this gets even worse as the framerates get lower.
Alternatively, if you leave vsync disabled, it will remain smooth, and all you will see if an occasional vertical tearing artifact.
And yes at, the same bit rate AAC sounds better than MP3.
That's just not true anymore. See the latest Multiformat 128k Listening Tests, Itunes AAC at 128k is tied with Lame V5 (VBR with a target of 128k).
You see, most AAC and Vorbis proponents fail to notice that MANY of the same aural modeling optimizations that are integrated into modern codecs are just as easily integrated into mp3 codecs. Lame is a standing tribute to this fact, and is a clear reminder to the industry that mp3 is nowhere near dead.
It is true that by default Itunes rips to aac and Windows Media Player rips to wma, and this does make inroads for those formats. In the long run, however, this will do nothing to take down mp3.
The reason is, people who don't know much about ripping and sharing (and thus don't rip in mp3) typically don't care enough to share their music. These are the kind of people who are either too uninformed or too stupid to understand the process of ripping and sharing...all they know is if they put the CD in the system, Itunes puts it in their library. In fact, taking that "next step" to actively sharing your music is made even harder now that Apple holds your hand, because if you want to break free of the limitations imposed on you by Itunes, you have to hack the hell out of things.
In the long run, the ability to share music with reasonable quality and bitrates is what wins the format war. Since mp3 is supported by every device out there, and is recognized as the "most sharable" format by most of those who bother to share their music, it has already won.
Small gains? Have you completely forgotten how much better the 3dfx Voodoo made games look? It was like night and day. That's why 3d accelerators became mass-market products.
Sure, the improved image quality of Voodoo Graphics abd the Rendition Verite were amazing, but they also cost $200-300 (just like this NIC).
I personally waited until I could pick up a Rendition card for around $100 before I jumped on the 3D bandwagon. So did most people. The 3D generation didn't really take off until 1998, when you could pick up powerful cards like the Savage 3D and TNT for around $150 or less, and mainstream low-end cards like the i740 and the Riva 128 hit the $50-100 range.
So sure, you could think of this technology as paving the way for cheaper, more mass-market solutions...execpt for one thing:
People cant *SEE* the difference their NIC makes. Moreover, on moern machines with modern onboard NICs, the difference isn't as drastic. Without these "nigh and day" differences, none aside from the truely hardcore will shell out the initial cash to get things moving.
Yes, I've made posts about this before. The Dual-Independent Bus (DIB) architecture introduced by Intel has only solved the 4-core issue. With Covertown expected to clock in with a miserly 1066 MHz FSB, I expect performance to improve %50 or less when moving from 4->8 cores. 16 cores is still a pipe dream.
Meanwhile, AMD is preparing to launch the K8L. Not only will it feature many of the performance improvements seen in Core2, it will also feature a shared L3 cache and, most importantly, a 4th hypertransport link.
Now, the 4th hypertransport link doesn't sound like much, until you consider: with 3 hypertransport links, even AMD's 4-socket configurations have been a bit limited (you have to sacrifice single-hop latency between processors because they have to connect to external I/O). 8-socket systems were even worse, with several hops between processors.
The additional hypertransport link on K8L means optimal configuration for 4-socket (16 core) systems. The 4 16-bit hypertransport links on K8L can also be split into 8 8-bit interconnects, allowing for single-hop memory access on 8-socket (32 core) systems. Read this preview on Real World Tech for more information.
If anyone wants to know why Dell is going gung-ho on AMD, it's because they know K8L will completely rip Intel apart in the server arena (where Dell makes most their money).
I'm using an Audigy 2 (which I bought before Creative became evil)
Creative has been evil since they bought Ensoniq in 1998.
How Creative killed Ensoniq:
Creative bought Ensoniq because they themselves couldn't come up with a PCI sound solution with DOS compatibility. Ensoniq HAD come up with an excellent DOS-compatible chipset (the Audio PCI) and driver, and Creative reached out and snatched it.
Creative took the current and next generation of products Ensoniq was slated to release, and sold them as the Soundblaster PCI 64 (same as the old Ensoniq AudioPCI) and 128. They renamed a cut-down version of the chipset to Ensoniq AudioPCI and relegated it to the bargain bin. They then applied the compatibility features of the Ensoniq line to their work-in-progress, the Live!
How Creative killed Aureal:
Shortly after the purchase of Ensoniq, Creative released EAX to compete with A3D. They paid through the nose to get major titles like Half-Life to include support.
Hey, I'll bet you didn't know: unlike A3D, EAX 1.0 was a mostly software solution (and it sure sounded like it). Creative released drivers for my old Ensoniq AudioPCI which "upgraded" it to a Soundblaster PCI 64, and gave it EAX support! All this without having to buy one of those overpriced Soundblaster Live! cards. The point of this was to overnight give them a huge installed base for EAX, and to sell the gaming industry on it. The funny thing? A year later, once it was certain that Aureal would lose to the Creative juggernaut, Creative pulled the EAX drivers for all but the Live! series and pretended that you had to have Live! to have EAX. They can hide it all they want, but I didn't imagine myself playing Half-Life with EAX turned on.
Um you've never been allowed to make a real decision for yourself until you near 18. Of course, kids aren't making good decisions, we don't allow them to make any real choices that affect their life.
Some of my early (life-defining) decisions that I can remember:
After a couple years of little league (t-ball, then baseball), bored stiff in right field, I asked my mom if I could stop going. She let me stop going, so long as I tried out some other league sport. I found out about bowling leagues through a friend, and I had tons of fun with that. I made lots of friends in the leagues, and got to go to all sorts of places for tournaments - more fun than staring into space in right field.
I had an opportunity to skip the 4th grade (I'm not THAT smart, just got a better start than most of the country hicks in my school district). I seriously considered it. After talking it over with my mom, I decided that it would be better for me in the long-run if I didn't skip the grade. The decision was left up to me.
Round 6th grade I decided to join the band. In jr. high I decided to join the tennis team and basktball team. I didn't have to (and frankly I ended up sucking at the tennis and basketball), but I did it. My time spent with music has really shaped my life, and my failures at basketball and tennis only made me seek out other sports (that I might otherwise have passed on).
Some of my later choices, prior to age 18:
I decided to get a job at 16 because my family was poor. Sure, my family suggested that I do it, but the final decision was mine.
In fact, I started learning that you had to give up a lot of things when you were poor. As a teenager I was torn because now I *WANTED* more than ever, but I was smart enough to know that everything had a cost. I decided not to spend my money on driver's ed, a car and car insurance because I just couldn't justify it. Instead, I saved that cash for college (but was forced to wait until I was 18 to get my license). Had I not had that level of restraint, I would have had owed a lot more in loans when I got out of college.
If kids these days aren't allowed to make real decisions for themselves, that's really sad. If that's how you were brought up, I really feel sorry for you. The saddest thing: parents are completely to blame for this. My mother never just "took care of things" that were important; if there was any choice at all in the matter, she would ask me.
There is a part of me that thinks that we need to completely revisit the idea of child labor and give students/kids a choice at K-2 to either go through the normal school course or go through a child labor course that keeps them busy, gives them employable skills, teaches them the min to pass as a productive citizen, and to pound it into their heads that if future options for advancement will be cut off through that route.
There is a reason we have developed such convoluted teaching methods, where kids are spoon-fed basics and are gradually allowed decisions in the process.
Kids can't make decisions like you want at age 5. They don't have that kind of abstract and forward-thinking capability until age 10-12. Ever have a kid try to save money at age 5? They can't. You think 5-year olds playing little-league have event the slightest concept of a "season" or "championship"? They can barely think beyond the current game (or have you forgotten your own childhood so easily?). Kids don't want to think about their future, they want to decide between fingerpainting or nap time.
Once you reach age 10-12, you start to get some heftier responsibilities. In the later parts of elementary school and then jr. high, you get (long-term) choices: You can join clubs like the band or service organizations. You can run for class offices. You start to get choices in your electives.
Once you reach high school, you have enough experience making choices for yourself, so they give you even more. Now, in many schools, you have to decide between a vo-tech (vocational) or college-prep path. One cuts out the cruft and gets you in the workforce (part time) at age 16, and leaves you fully-qualified for your line of work at age 18. The other gives you more time to decide what to do with yourself, costs you more time and cash, but gives you a much higher potential earning level if you have SOME inkling of what you want to do.
And you want kids to make this decision at K2? Are you NUTS? Most kids are uncomfortable making the decision between vo-tech and college-prep when they enter high school, and that's after the system has already purposefully forced them to make long-term decisions for themselves.
There's a reason kids are told what to do, with the simple reason "Its for your own good"...because it IS for their own good. By the time kids are capable of making decisions, basic schooling has given them the knowledge and cultural literacy to take things into context and ATTEMPT to make the right decision.
I'm sure Sony is scraping at anything they can to reduce power.
Anyone recall how much of a heat problem the Xbox 360 has? While it's not blazing hot, the unit does get quite toasty and requires a beefy fan to keep both GPU and CPU happy. The lowest reported power usage I've sen on the net is 136w, almost double that of the Xbox!
Now look at the PS3:
RSX = the same hardware (256MB GDDR3, 16/24/24 pipes, 50w) as a 7900 GT. With the stated clock speeds (higher than a 7900 GT), and the rwequired increase in voltage, that puts power usage at about 60-65w.
CELL = 8 cores with estimated power requirements of about 4w each (that estimate is probebly too low for the PPE, but may be a smidge high for the SPEs, so it evens out). That's at least 32w just for CELL (more if they can't mass-produce Cell for 1.1v).
Now add in the the system board (256MB ram, bridges and chipsets, other components) for an additional 30-40w, and suddenly the PS3 (125-145w total) is looking as hot as the Xbox 360.
In addition to the same power issues as the Xbox 360, the PS3 also has the lovely problem of getting losses from the powersupply out of the case (%15 of total power is reasonable for a cheap 12v-only supply). This brings the total power dissapated by the PS3 case to 140-160w! That's more than most mainstream PCs!
So, it's no surprise to me that Sony may be tweaking the clock speeds. Despite estimates showing operation above 4 GHz, Cell has been throttled back to a reasonable 3.2 GHz to reduce voltage and frequency. RSX is next on the chopping block. Why not reduce the speed, if you can also reduce the supply voltage? That could cut the power usage of RSX down to as low as 50w.
I'm saying purely from a "geekiness" standpoint that I'd like to download and mess around with this engine. It looks like fun. It is painfully obvious that, aside from the bump maps and real-time lighting, the game actually looks worse...but that's understandable.
The lighting has actualy served to highlight the small amount of polygons in the player model (750, to be exact). The good thing is, as people have been stating all through this thread: processing requirements for raytracing go up with the log of the polygons. So, upping this model to 7500 polygons (more than used in Doom 3 models) would only double the processing requirements, which shows a bright future for rayracing.
Look at it this way: ten years ago, real-time raytracing was a pipe dream. Right now it is very much a reality on high-end hardware, albeit with reduced features and benefits. In another ten years, I will be surprised if raytracing is too difficult for mainstream hardware.
Yes, but this isn't 2002 anymore, and the Athlon XP 1800+ (1533 MHz) is no longer even considered "powerful." While a cluster of 20 Athlon XP 1800+ systems may have been daunting then, we are quickly approaching the day when you will see that kind of power on a single chip.
Take for consideration, the fact that current top-end Athlon 64 processors clock in at 2.8 GHz (1.83 times faster). These Athlon 64 processors also perform typically %40 faster clock-for-clock than their 266 MHz DDR bus 256k cache Athlon XP counterparts, thanks to the larger cache, on-die memory controller and improved cache bandwidth. Then, keep in mind that you can get this 2.8 GHz processor in a dual-core, and that's some serious power.
1.83 * 1.4 * 2 = 5 times faster than an Athlon XP 1800+. With a dual-Opteron or 4x4 setup, you'd be halfway there (10x the speed of an Athlon XP 1800+). Quad core K8Ls will make bridging that gap even easier, with their beefier floating-point thoroughput.
I can't draw direct parallels on the Intel side, but I'll wager that even in raytracing the Core 2 Duo is as fast if not faster clock-for-clock as an Athlon 64 X2.
I'd be really pissed off if they never released this engine. I think it looks pretty cool, and you can truely run it in real-time (5-10fps, instead of 20-30fps) on processors that are out right now.
Intel bought up Real3D years ago after fielding the i740 in 1998. They then proceeded to sit on the technology while every other graphics maker developed more impressive improvements and optimizations with each generation.
During this time, Intel has sat on their hands. For example, even though the GMA 900/950 had impressive specs, it was plagued by bad performance decisions (intended to cut costs). The chipset contained 4 hardware pixel shaders, but vertext shaders and T&L were done in hardware. Additionally, Intel declined to offer OpenGL support, instead performing OpenGL acceleration through a Direct3D wrapper (like Windows Vista plans to do).
You must also not forget that, while Intel sat on their laurels, video card manufacturers came up with all soorts of hardware and software optimizations to stay on-top. It was the lack of such optimizations that ultimately killed 'big release' cards like the Savage 2000 and the Matrox Parhelia, both cards with beefy hardware specs. Rewaly, how can you expect anything less from Intel?
While X3000 on G865 looks impressive on-paper, the reality is it performs worse than the GMA 950. How can anyone respect a hardware chipset that performs WORSE than a software solution with half the pipes? While it is true that we won't see the TOP performance of X3000 until DirectX 10 is released, it is pretty telling that in fixed mode the device can't even pull off a win over the GMA 950.
* Do keep im mind that both the ATI and Nvidia's current embedded solutions kick the crap out of GMA 950, and they do so with only two pipelines!
The reality is that Intel sucks at graphics, and they always have. The i740 would have been a mediocre seller, had not Intel sold the chipset for nothing (you could pick up 8MB i740 video boards for 40 bucks back in summer 1998). I wasn't honestly expecting the world, but this is really disappointing.
For the near-term, Intel may improve performance with the G865 once DirectX 10 is released, but I'm not holding my breath. Over the long term, well, that's up to Intel. I hear they recently picked up some old 3dlabs engineers who jumped ship from Creative Labs. So long as Intel doesn't squander them like they did with Real3D, they'll have a future in performance graphics, but that's 3 years down the road at the very least.
Nvidia started using the "XT" monkier (6800 XT) after ATI used it for years.
ATI started using the "GT" monkier (x800 GT, x1900 GT), and even extended the monkier to "GTO" after the incredible success of Nvidia's 6600 and 6800 GT.
They've been doing this sort of thing for years.
And while ATI looks like they ripped off the "950" name with the x1950 XTX, this one again cuts both ways:
ATI was the first to use "50" increments in their product naming. Witness the Radeon 9250 and 9550, which were released a few years back and still sell today. Later, they released the x850 series, and now they've released the x1650 and the x1950.
Since the release of the GeForce 4 series, all Nvidia product numbers have been divisible by 100. The GeForce 7950 GX2 is the first and only exception to this rule, and is obviously inspired by ATI's recent naming schemes.
Gravity is (relatively) constant. Gravity is the reason the water cycle works.
Sunlight is the sole energy source for the water cycle. Water is heated, and rises as water vapor, creating potential energy. That potential energy is released as rain, then rivers and streams.
I bought a 19" Iiyama Visionmaster Pro 454 two years ago. The resolution of this high-bandwidth monitor is impeccable: there is no visible noise at 1280x960 @ 85 Hz (what I normally run at for browsing, mailing and coding), and there is low but acceptable noise at 1600x1200 @ 85 Hz (what I run at for photo editing).
I could have bought an LCD, but didn't (my monitor cost the same as high-end 17" LCDs at the time). With LCDs, even the high-end models require you to compromise. If you want excellent color reproduction, you have to go with an MVA panel and put up with terrible (as high as 50ms!) response times. If you want excellent response times, you have to get a TN-film panel with overdrive and live with the washed-out colors plus the overdrive artifacts. In either case, you will pay through the nose for a panel which only looks good at one resolution. Talk about compromises!
Whenever I get around to replacing my CRT SDTV, I will avoid LCD for the same reasons. If HDTV didn't have MULTIPLE standards (1080i/p, 720p, 480p), I could put up with a fixed-resolution TV, but the current mixed bag makes LCD useless. Not that I'm in any hurry to buy an HDTV; I refuse to buy one until HALF the programming I watch is available in HD. So far, I'd put that number at 10%. Hopefully by the time Im in the market, OLED and LCoS will be more mature.
And TFB if you have something on vinyl which never came out, or in the case of my ELO Out Of The Blue double-LP, was clipped when making the abbreviated CD version.
As a "recent" ELO fan, I only own the CDs. Your comment made me curious: how much is cut from the CD version? I've looked at the tracks on the LP and CD version, and they look identical. Even the track durations are just about the same.
For simple things, sure, a touchscreen works wonders. Kiosks and self-contained systems (such as medical equipment) would be complicated without them.
But for any other general-purpose computer, the touchscreen lost out long ago. There were a number of touchscreen monitors for sale in the 90s, all the way to today, but they never made inroads over the mouse. The problem is two-fold:
1. people don't like raising their arms to horizontal and manipulating a screen while seated. It is an unnatural position. See, normally when you're STANDING and your arms are horizontal, you are using your entire body as a pivot point. Watch a painter at-work: they move more than just their upper-body, and this makes the work feel "easier" because the loads are distributed to more muscles. When you sit at a touchscreen, you have to use just the upper-body to move and keep your hands horizontal, causing you to wear out faster.
2. touchscreens are inherently large with low-resolution, like all monitors. What this means is you end up moving your finger a lot further than you should have to, because your shoulder-arm-wrist-hand-finger is capable of much higher reolution than the screen (typical mouse resolution is 600 dpi, typical screen resolution is 100 dpi). The end result is more strain than you should have to endure.
In fact, the modern touchpad on laptops is proof that these two issues make touchscreens unusable:
* touchpads are MUCH higher resolution than their respective screens, yet they are as usable as mice or trackballs.
* touchpads are at the horizontal position, a much more natural position for your hands while seated.
Leave the touchscreens to their niches: self-contained, rugged computers, and kiosks. For seated computing, the mouse is a better extension of the human hand than a touchscreen will ever be.
Wasn't the point to take the guesswork out of PCs?
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Phantom Goes Software Only
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The Phantom console was intended to make PC gaming easy - it has one set of specs, and was configured from the factory. Combine that with downloadable games, and it was suppoed to be the easiest gaming PC you could imagine.
Now, as an add-on to existing PCs, Phantom becomes a gaming service. No more pre-defined, pre-configured hardware and software...no, they'll have to download the latest video, audio and network drivers, OpenAL and DirectX installs, and then patch and tweak the game to get it "just right."
Not that I'm dissing the PC, I love gaming on the PC, but it does require some knowledge to get certain games running.
Now Phantom is just one of many download gaming services. How, exactly, do they expect to sell enough gaming subscriptions to pay back the millions of dollars they owe creditors, when they're swimming in a pool already filled with big players? Three years ago when the Phantom was announced, the idea of an online PC game delivery service was novel, but now that they've sat on the idea, the world has left them in the dust.
Not like I ever expected anything solid to come out of Phantom. Nice to see them match my expectations.
Now not allowing anything else onto the plane sort of stumped me. It does allow simple observation that that person is not carrying anything *in their hands*, but there are other, errr cavities, where material could be carried.
The not allowing *anything* on the plane was a TSA directive. For all other flights (not US-bound), passengers were allowed to buy things in the duty-free shops beyond the security checkpoint and bring them on the plane (except for liquids).
TSA totally freaked out, and wouldn't even let me take on a magazine I purchased (even though I had the receipt). They also went hardcore on security, doing a background check on every passenger while we waited on the tarmac for two hours. The funny thing: even though we were searched both by BAA and TSA agents, with a zero-tolerance policy for electronics, some still got by. When I stepped off the plane in the US, a few passengers whipped out their cellphones (you can guess where they hid them). So much for high-security.
BAA and TSA handled this crisis as well as they could, considering the circumstances...but if they keep this up for long, the long-haul airline industry will lose tons of money. Business travelers who have to deal with long security lines, delayed fligths, plus have to trust their luggage to the hold will think twice about face-to-face meetings. Vacationers who can't bring their mp3 players and gameboy for long international flights will reconsider their destination.
I know I'm not going to fly again anytime soon, I went through two days of hell just to get my ass home.
Hard drives used to be huge. As you can see from the article, they used to be as big as a refridgerator.
Back in the days of the PC/AT, hard drives had slimmed down to a "petite" 5.25 inches wide. Hard disks were "full-height," which was the height of two modern 5.25" bays (hence the term "half-height" used to describe modern 5.25" drives).
Over time, hard drives slimmed down to a single 5.25" slot (half-height), then down to the same size as that used by the 3.5" floppy.
Today, many less-expensive desktop drives are actually 2.5" drives in a 3.5" package, because it is cheaper to just produce one smaller platter and use it for both notebook and desktop drives. I am uncertain, however, if we will ever make a complete transition from 3.5" to 2.5" hard drives - at this point, I think we will see a transition to solid-state storage before we see the complete phasing-out of 3.5" drives.
Why did things slim down?
1. It's harder to spin a 5.25" size platter at higher speeds. Access times and maximum data rates depend on spindle speed. 2. It's MUCH more expensive to make larger platters, in much the same way that it's much more expensive to create larger chips. The larger they are, the more exact the process required, and the more chance of defect.
I have a terrible feeling that I'm wrong, but will anyone be able to correct me?
Sure.
RSX: You could put a more powerful GPU into a PC and get better performance numbers, so why count GPU performance power? Also, you cannot do 64-bit floating-point math with ANY GPU at the moment, and has non-IEEE-standard accuracy, so remove it from the equation.
Each SPE can do 25.6 Gflop/s theoretical (180 Gflop/s for all 7), but only for 32-bit (non IEEE-standard) values. For 64-bit accuracy, tests have shown the thoroughput is only about 1/10 the normal speed, or about 18 Gflop/s for all 7 SPEs.
Theoretically, you could get that kind of throughput from a Core2Duo processor:
(2x64-bit operations per 128-bit SSE pipeline) x (2 128-bit SSE pipes per processor) x (2 processors per die) x (approximately 2.6 GHz clock speed) = 20.8 Gflop/s for 64-bit values.
This, of course, makes Cell even less spactacular. As always happenns, Sony announces some "incredible" new processor, but in the three years it taskes them to build it, work out the bugs and ramp up the yields, the x86 world quietly releases something just as good. In another year, a computer using one of these Core2Duo 2.6 GHz chips will be quite affordable, once the quad-core wars start.
Technically, it's supposed to be about a 9600 or so in performance, overall. I see about HALF that performance on this chip under Linux- under Windows, it seems to perform about the same level.
Well, that's exactly what you SHOULD be seeing. The Radeon Xpress 200 is exactly half as powerful as the 9600.
Maybe if you did some research, you would waste less time whining about your non-existant problems. That embedded video chipset is exactly as fast as it should be.
Exactly right. The demo was released before the game (don't see that as often today).
That's the first and last time Diakatana was on ANY computer I've ever owned. I will never forget that experience.
* 5 minutes into the game:
"So, it's dark, there's this wall here, looks like I'm sneaking in through some watery areas. Rain, meh.
* 10 minutes into the game:
"Wow, I'm being attacked by frogs and mosquitos. Frogs and mosquitoes...."
* 15 minutes into the game:
"Wow, more frogs and mosquitoes. And not the cool, radioactive, mutated frogs and mosquitoes...no, these are boring-old mosquitoes. And the size is getting on my nerves, ebcause they're just as annoying to try to hit as REAL mosquitoes"
* 20 minutes into the game:
* Now uninstalling John Romero's Mosquito Simulator 2000 *
The reason you had to toss your old powersupply is because it probably didn't have enough output on the 12v line. Since the introduction of the Athlon XP, motherboard makers have been moving from +5v to +12v to supply the processor with power. Video cards have also moved to depending more and more on the +12v line.
Go ahead, take a look at the specs. I'll bet your old 300w powersupply couldn't top more than 10A on the +12v line, but most 300w powersupplies sold today hit the 15A mark for +12v. You could easily run your current system on a modern 300w powersupply, but you can't use your old one because the DESIGN INTENT (+5v over +12v) is obsolete.
I guarantee if you put a watt-meter on your system it would be using less than 200w under full-load, even after conversion losses. You just THINK your system needs a mammoth 410w because your old powersupply was outdated.
To run a 7900GT alone requires a minimum of 21A on the 12v rail, and in SLI you'll need at least 28A on the 12v rail minimum (this is just to run the video card without having it auto clock down for lack of power).
I love it when people take RECOMENDATIONS out of context, and suddenly start calling them REQUIREMENTS.
"MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS" are nothing of the sort. They are not the minimum requirements for the device to work, they are simply a VERY general "minimum" value with lots of play built-in.
For example, Nvidia lists the "minimum" for a single 7900 GT as a 350w powersupply with 20A on the 12v line. This is a RECOMMENDATION.
Reality: The 7900 GT uses about 50w at full load, which is actually pretty low for the performance level (major reason I bought mine). That's around 4A load, 2A idle, if you were paying attention.
The fact of the matter is, Nvidia has to WAY overestimate your power needs because they have no fucking clue what the rest of your system eats up. In fact, even with these GENEROUS recommendations, it is possible to build a system that has so much crap in it that even a 350w powersupply can't power that plus a 7900 GT...but this is extremely rare.
Fact: midrange PCs, even with a (single) fancy video card, use around 150w or less at full load. The amount of power used can differe hugely from system-to-system, depending on how many drives you have, how many video cards and processors you have, and who makes them.
For example, my upper-midrange system: a 3800+ X2 and a 7900 GT, one hard disk and two optical drives, stll uses a little under 150w under full load, and uses a small fraction of that under idle. Don't be confused by the manufacturer's specs: they have to be written for the same stupid people who plug PCIe cards into AGP slots. Otherwise, Nvidia's partners would constantly get calls from people whose PCs wouldn't turn on after the card was installed. It doesn't mean you can't build a QUIET and POWERFUL PC.
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Vsync DOES kill your "room."
Vsync forces the framerate to some fraction of the refresh rate. Sure, for most of the time, your video card might be able to keep up and provide a steady 90fps. Unfortunately, because vsync locks frames to the refresh rate of the monitor, the framerate degrades drasticaly (in whole-number ratios) once you drop below the sync rate.
What happens if you hit a rougher portion of the game, and your average framerate (the framerate the card CAN draw with vsync disabled) drops to 60fps? Your card, locked to the 90 hz sync rate, alternates between 45fps (1/2) and 90fps (1/1). This creates an annoying jumpy lag effect that you can feel, because it's either 45fps or 90fps. You can imagine this gets even worse as the framerates get lower.
Alternatively, if you leave vsync disabled, it will remain smooth, and all you will see if an occasional vertical tearing artifact.
And yes at, the same bit rate AAC sounds better than MP3.
That's just not true anymore. See the latest Multiformat 128k Listening Tests, Itunes AAC at 128k is tied with Lame V5 (VBR with a target of 128k).
You see, most AAC and Vorbis proponents fail to notice that MANY of the same aural modeling optimizations that are integrated into modern codecs are just as easily integrated into mp3 codecs. Lame is a standing tribute to this fact, and is a clear reminder to the industry that mp3 is nowhere near dead.
It is true that by default Itunes rips to aac and Windows Media Player rips to wma, and this does make inroads for those formats. In the long run, however, this will do nothing to take down mp3.
The reason is, people who don't know much about ripping and sharing (and thus don't rip in mp3) typically don't care enough to share their music. These are the kind of people who are either too uninformed or too stupid to understand the process of ripping and sharing...all they know is if they put the CD in the system, Itunes puts it in their library. In fact, taking that "next step" to actively sharing your music is made even harder now that Apple holds your hand, because if you want to break free of the limitations imposed on you by Itunes, you have to hack the hell out of things.
In the long run, the ability to share music with reasonable quality and bitrates is what wins the format war. Since mp3 is supported by every device out there, and is recognized as the "most sharable" format by most of those who bother to share their music, it has already won.
Small gains? Have you completely forgotten how much better the 3dfx Voodoo made games look? It was like night and day. That's why 3d accelerators became mass-market products.
Sure, the improved image quality of Voodoo Graphics abd the Rendition Verite were amazing, but they also cost $200-300 (just like this NIC).
I personally waited until I could pick up a Rendition card for around $100 before I jumped on the 3D bandwagon. So did most people. The 3D generation didn't really take off until 1998, when you could pick up powerful cards like the Savage 3D and TNT for around $150 or less, and mainstream low-end cards like the i740 and the Riva 128 hit the $50-100 range.
So sure, you could think of this technology as paving the way for cheaper, more mass-market solutions...execpt for one thing:
People cant *SEE* the difference their NIC makes. Moreover, on moern machines with modern onboard NICs, the difference isn't as drastic. Without these "nigh and day" differences, none aside from the truely hardcore will shell out the initial cash to get things moving.
Yes, I've made posts about this before. The Dual-Independent Bus (DIB) architecture introduced by Intel has only solved the 4-core issue. With Covertown expected to clock in with a miserly 1066 MHz FSB, I expect performance to improve %50 or less when moving from 4->8 cores. 16 cores is still a pipe dream.
Meanwhile, AMD is preparing to launch the K8L. Not only will it feature many of the performance improvements seen in Core2, it will also feature a shared L3 cache and, most importantly, a 4th hypertransport link.
Now, the 4th hypertransport link doesn't sound like much, until you consider: with 3 hypertransport links, even AMD's 4-socket configurations have been a bit limited (you have to sacrifice single-hop latency between processors because they have to connect to external I/O). 8-socket systems were even worse, with several hops between processors.
The additional hypertransport link on K8L means optimal configuration for 4-socket (16 core) systems. The 4 16-bit hypertransport links on K8L can also be split into 8 8-bit interconnects, allowing for single-hop memory access on 8-socket (32 core) systems. Read this preview on Real World Tech for more information.
If anyone wants to know why Dell is going gung-ho on AMD, it's because they know K8L will completely rip Intel apart in the server arena (where Dell makes most their money).
I'm using an Audigy 2 (which I bought before Creative became evil)
Creative has been evil since they bought Ensoniq in 1998.
How Creative killed Ensoniq:
Creative bought Ensoniq because they themselves couldn't come up with a PCI sound solution with DOS compatibility. Ensoniq HAD come up with an excellent DOS-compatible chipset (the Audio PCI) and driver, and Creative reached out and snatched it.
Creative took the current and next generation of products Ensoniq was slated to release, and sold them as the Soundblaster PCI 64 (same as the old Ensoniq AudioPCI) and 128. They renamed a cut-down version of the chipset to Ensoniq AudioPCI and relegated it to the bargain bin. They then applied the compatibility features of the Ensoniq line to their work-in-progress, the Live!
How Creative killed Aureal:
Shortly after the purchase of Ensoniq, Creative released EAX to compete with A3D. They paid through the nose to get major titles like Half-Life to include support.
Hey, I'll bet you didn't know: unlike A3D, EAX 1.0 was a mostly software solution (and it sure sounded like it). Creative released drivers for my old Ensoniq AudioPCI which "upgraded" it to a Soundblaster PCI 64, and gave it EAX support! All this without having to buy one of those overpriced Soundblaster Live! cards. The point of this was to overnight give them a huge installed base for EAX, and to sell the gaming industry on it. The funny thing? A year later, once it was certain that Aureal would lose to the Creative juggernaut, Creative pulled the EAX drivers for all but the Live! series and pretended that you had to have Live! to have EAX. They can hide it all they want, but I didn't imagine myself playing Half-Life with EAX turned on.
Um you've never been allowed to make a real decision for yourself until you near 18. Of course, kids aren't making good decisions, we don't allow them to make any real choices that affect their life.
Some of my early (life-defining) decisions that I can remember:
After a couple years of little league (t-ball, then baseball), bored stiff in right field, I asked my mom if I could stop going. She let me stop going, so long as I tried out some other league sport. I found out about bowling leagues through a friend, and I had tons of fun with that. I made lots of friends in the leagues, and got to go to all sorts of places for tournaments - more fun than staring into space in right field.
I had an opportunity to skip the 4th grade (I'm not THAT smart, just got a better start than most of the country hicks in my school district). I seriously considered it. After talking it over with my mom, I decided that it would be better for me in the long-run if I didn't skip the grade. The decision was left up to me.
Round 6th grade I decided to join the band. In jr. high I decided to join the tennis team and basktball team. I didn't have to (and frankly I ended up sucking at the tennis and basketball), but I did it. My time spent with music has really shaped my life, and my failures at basketball and tennis only made me seek out other sports (that I might otherwise have passed on).
Some of my later choices, prior to age 18:
I decided to get a job at 16 because my family was poor. Sure, my family suggested that I do it, but the final decision was mine.
In fact, I started learning that you had to give up a lot of things when you were poor. As a teenager I was torn because now I *WANTED* more than ever, but I was smart enough to know that everything had a cost. I decided not to spend my money on driver's ed, a car and car insurance because I just couldn't justify it. Instead, I saved that cash for college (but was forced to wait until I was 18 to get my license). Had I not had that level of restraint, I would have had owed a lot more in loans when I got out of college.
If kids these days aren't allowed to make real decisions for themselves, that's really sad. If that's how you were brought up, I really feel sorry for you. The saddest thing: parents are completely to blame for this. My mother never just "took care of things" that were important; if there was any choice at all in the matter, she would ask me.
There is a part of me that thinks that we need to completely revisit the idea of child labor and give students/kids a choice at K-2 to either go through the normal school course or go through a child labor course that keeps them busy, gives them employable skills, teaches them the min to pass as a productive citizen, and to pound it into their heads that if future options for advancement will be cut off through that route.
There is a reason we have developed such convoluted teaching methods, where kids are spoon-fed basics and are gradually allowed decisions in the process.
Kids can't make decisions like you want at age 5. They don't have that kind of abstract and forward-thinking capability until age 10-12. Ever have a kid try to save money at age 5? They can't. You think 5-year olds playing little-league have event the slightest concept of a "season" or "championship"? They can barely think beyond the current game (or have you forgotten your own childhood so easily?). Kids don't want to think about their future, they want to decide between fingerpainting or nap time.
Once you reach age 10-12, you start to get some heftier responsibilities. In the later parts of elementary school and then jr. high, you get (long-term) choices: You can join clubs like the band or service organizations. You can run for class offices. You start to get choices in your electives.
Once you reach high school, you have enough experience making choices for yourself, so they give you even more. Now, in many schools, you have to decide between a vo-tech (vocational) or college-prep path. One cuts out the cruft and gets you in the workforce (part time) at age 16, and leaves you fully-qualified for your line of work at age 18. The other gives you more time to decide what to do with yourself, costs you more time and cash, but gives you a much higher potential earning level if you have SOME inkling of what you want to do.
And you want kids to make this decision at K2? Are you NUTS? Most kids are uncomfortable making the decision between vo-tech and college-prep when they enter high school, and that's after the system has already purposefully forced them to make long-term decisions for themselves.
There's a reason kids are told what to do, with the simple reason "Its for your own good"...because it IS for their own good. By the time kids are capable of making decisions, basic schooling has given them the knowledge and cultural literacy to take things into context and ATTEMPT to make the right decision.
I'm sure Sony is scraping at anything they can to reduce power.
Anyone recall how much of a heat problem the Xbox 360 has? While it's not blazing hot, the unit does get quite toasty and requires a beefy fan to keep both GPU and CPU happy. The lowest reported power usage I've sen on the net is 136w, almost double that of the Xbox!
Now look at the PS3:
RSX = the same hardware (256MB GDDR3, 16/24/24 pipes, 50w) as a 7900 GT. With the stated clock speeds (higher than a 7900 GT), and the rwequired increase in voltage, that puts power usage at about 60-65w.
CELL = 8 cores with estimated power requirements of about 4w each (that estimate is probebly too low for the PPE, but may be a smidge high for the SPEs, so it evens out). That's at least 32w just for CELL (more if they can't mass-produce Cell for 1.1v).
Now add in the the system board (256MB ram, bridges and chipsets, other components) for an additional 30-40w, and suddenly the PS3 (125-145w total) is looking as hot as the Xbox 360.
In addition to the same power issues as the Xbox 360, the PS3 also has the lovely problem of getting losses from the powersupply out of the case (%15 of total power is reasonable for a cheap 12v-only supply). This brings the total power dissapated by the PS3 case to 140-160w! That's more than most mainstream PCs!
So, it's no surprise to me that Sony may be tweaking the clock speeds. Despite estimates showing operation above 4 GHz, Cell has been throttled back to a reasonable 3.2 GHz to reduce voltage and frequency. RSX is next on the chopping block. Why not reduce the speed, if you can also reduce the supply voltage? That could cut the power usage of RSX down to as low as 50w.
I'm saying purely from a "geekiness" standpoint that I'd like to download and mess around with this engine. It looks like fun. It is painfully obvious that, aside from the bump maps and real-time lighting, the game actually looks worse...but that's understandable.
The lighting has actualy served to highlight the small amount of polygons in the player model (750, to be exact). The good thing is, as people have been stating all through this thread: processing requirements for raytracing go up with the log of the polygons. So, upping this model to 7500 polygons (more than used in Doom 3 models) would only double the processing requirements, which shows a bright future for rayracing.
Look at it this way: ten years ago, real-time raytracing was a pipe dream. Right now it is very much a reality on high-end hardware, albeit with reduced features and benefits. In another ten years, I will be surprised if raytracing is too difficult for mainstream hardware.
Yes, but this isn't 2002 anymore, and the Athlon XP 1800+ (1533 MHz) is no longer even considered "powerful." While a cluster of 20 Athlon XP 1800+ systems may have been daunting then, we are quickly approaching the day when you will see that kind of power on a single chip.
Take for consideration, the fact that current top-end Athlon 64 processors clock in at 2.8 GHz (1.83 times faster). These Athlon 64 processors also perform typically %40 faster clock-for-clock than their 266 MHz DDR bus 256k cache Athlon XP counterparts, thanks to the larger cache, on-die memory controller and improved cache bandwidth. Then, keep in mind that you can get this 2.8 GHz processor in a dual-core, and that's some serious power.
1.83 * 1.4 * 2 = 5 times faster than an Athlon XP 1800+. With a dual-Opteron or 4x4 setup, you'd be halfway there (10x the speed of an Athlon XP 1800+). Quad core K8Ls will make bridging that gap even easier, with their beefier floating-point thoroughput.
I can't draw direct parallels on the Intel side, but I'll wager that even in raytracing the Core 2 Duo is as fast if not faster clock-for-clock as an Athlon 64 X2.
I'd be really pissed off if they never released this engine. I think it looks pretty cool, and you can truely run it in real-time (5-10fps, instead of 20-30fps) on processors that are out right now.
but vertext shaders and T&L were done in software.
Intel bought up Real3D years ago after fielding the i740 in 1998. They then proceeded to sit on the technology while every other graphics maker developed more impressive improvements and optimizations with each generation.
During this time, Intel has sat on their hands. For example, even though the GMA 900/950 had impressive specs, it was plagued by bad performance decisions (intended to cut costs). The chipset contained 4 hardware pixel shaders, but vertext shaders and T&L were done in hardware. Additionally, Intel declined to offer OpenGL support, instead performing OpenGL acceleration through a Direct3D wrapper (like Windows Vista plans to do).
You must also not forget that, while Intel sat on their laurels, video card manufacturers came up with all soorts of hardware and software optimizations to stay on-top. It was the lack of such optimizations that ultimately killed 'big release' cards like the Savage 2000 and the Matrox Parhelia, both cards with beefy hardware specs. Rewaly, how can you expect anything less from Intel?
While X3000 on G865 looks impressive on-paper, the reality is it performs worse than the GMA 950. How can anyone respect a hardware chipset that performs WORSE than a software solution with half the pipes? While it is true that we won't see the TOP performance of X3000 until DirectX 10 is released, it is pretty telling that in fixed mode the device can't even pull off a win over the GMA 950.
* Do keep im mind that both the ATI and Nvidia's current embedded solutions kick the crap out of GMA 950, and they do so with only two pipelines!
The reality is that Intel sucks at graphics, and they always have. The i740 would have been a mediocre seller, had not Intel sold the chipset for nothing (you could pick up 8MB i740 video boards for 40 bucks back in summer 1998). I wasn't honestly expecting the world, but this is really disappointing.
For the near-term, Intel may improve performance with the G865 once DirectX 10 is released, but I'm not holding my breath. Over the long term, well, that's up to Intel. I hear they recently picked up some old 3dlabs engineers who jumped ship from Creative Labs. So long as Intel doesn't squander them like they did with Real3D, they'll have a future in performance graphics, but that's 3 years down the road at the very least.
Nvidia started using the "XT" monkier (6800 XT) after ATI used it for years.
ATI started using the "GT" monkier (x800 GT, x1900 GT), and even extended the monkier to "GTO" after the incredible success of Nvidia's 6600 and 6800 GT.
They've been doing this sort of thing for years.
And while ATI looks like they ripped off the "950" name with the x1950 XTX, this one again cuts both ways:
ATI was the first to use "50" increments in their product naming. Witness the Radeon 9250 and 9550, which were released a few years back and still sell today. Later, they released the x850 series, and now they've released the x1650 and the x1950.
Since the release of the GeForce 4 series, all Nvidia product numbers have been divisible by 100. The GeForce 7950 GX2 is the first and only exception to this rule, and is obviously inspired by ATI's recent naming schemes.
Gravity is (relatively) constant. Gravity is the reason the water cycle works.
Sunlight is the sole energy source for the water cycle. Water is heated, and rises as water vapor, creating potential energy. That potential energy is released as rain, then rivers and streams.
Exactly my point.
I bought a 19" Iiyama Visionmaster Pro 454 two years ago. The resolution of this high-bandwidth monitor is impeccable: there is no visible noise at 1280x960 @ 85 Hz (what I normally run at for browsing, mailing and coding), and there is low but acceptable noise at 1600x1200 @ 85 Hz (what I run at for photo editing).
I could have bought an LCD, but didn't (my monitor cost the same as high-end 17" LCDs at the time). With LCDs, even the high-end models require you to compromise. If you want excellent color reproduction, you have to go with an MVA panel and put up with terrible (as high as 50ms!) response times. If you want excellent response times, you have to get a TN-film panel with overdrive and live with the washed-out colors plus the overdrive artifacts. In either case, you will pay through the nose for a panel which only looks good at one resolution. Talk about compromises!
Whenever I get around to replacing my CRT SDTV, I will avoid LCD for the same reasons. If HDTV didn't have MULTIPLE standards (1080i/p, 720p, 480p), I could put up with a fixed-resolution TV, but the current mixed bag makes LCD useless. Not that I'm in any hurry to buy an HDTV; I refuse to buy one until HALF the programming I watch is available in HD. So far, I'd put that number at 10%. Hopefully by the time Im in the market, OLED and LCoS will be more mature.
And TFB if you have something on vinyl which never came out, or in the case of my ELO Out Of The Blue double-LP, was clipped when making the abbreviated CD version.
As a "recent" ELO fan, I only own the CDs. Your comment made me curious: how much is cut from the CD version? I've looked at the tracks on the LP and CD version, and they look identical. Even the track durations are just about the same.
What am I missing?
For simple things, sure, a touchscreen works wonders. Kiosks and self-contained systems (such as medical equipment) would be complicated without them.
But for any other general-purpose computer, the touchscreen lost out long ago. There were a number of touchscreen monitors for sale in the 90s, all the way to today, but they never made inroads over the mouse. The problem is two-fold:
1. people don't like raising their arms to horizontal and manipulating a screen while seated. It is an unnatural position. See, normally when you're STANDING and your arms are horizontal, you are using your entire body as a pivot point. Watch a painter at-work: they move more than just their upper-body, and this makes the work feel "easier" because the loads are distributed to more muscles. When you sit at a touchscreen, you have to use just the upper-body to move and keep your hands horizontal, causing you to wear out faster.
2. touchscreens are inherently large with low-resolution, like all monitors. What this means is you end up moving your finger a lot further than you should have to, because your shoulder-arm-wrist-hand-finger is capable of much higher reolution than the screen (typical mouse resolution is 600 dpi, typical screen resolution is 100 dpi). The end result is more strain than you should have to endure.
In fact, the modern touchpad on laptops is proof that these two issues make touchscreens unusable:
* touchpads are MUCH higher resolution than their respective screens, yet they are as usable as mice or trackballs.
* touchpads are at the horizontal position, a much more natural position for your hands while seated.
Leave the touchscreens to their niches: self-contained, rugged computers, and kiosks. For seated computing, the mouse is a better extension of the human hand than a touchscreen will ever be.
The Phantom console was intended to make PC gaming easy - it has one set of specs, and was configured from the factory. Combine that with downloadable games, and it was suppoed to be the easiest gaming PC you could imagine.
Now, as an add-on to existing PCs, Phantom becomes a gaming service. No more pre-defined, pre-configured hardware and software...no, they'll have to download the latest video, audio and network drivers, OpenAL and DirectX installs, and then patch and tweak the game to get it "just right."
Not that I'm dissing the PC, I love gaming on the PC, but it does require some knowledge to get certain games running.
Now Phantom is just one of many download gaming services. How, exactly, do they expect to sell enough gaming subscriptions to pay back the millions of dollars they owe creditors, when they're swimming in a pool already filled with big players? Three years ago when the Phantom was announced, the idea of an online PC game delivery service was novel, but now that they've sat on the idea, the world has left them in the dust.
Not like I ever expected anything solid to come out of Phantom. Nice to see them match my expectations.
Now not allowing anything else onto the plane sort of stumped me. It does allow simple observation that that person is not carrying anything *in their hands*, but there are other, errr cavities, where material could be carried.
The not allowing *anything* on the plane was a TSA directive. For all other flights (not US-bound), passengers were allowed to buy things in the duty-free shops beyond the security checkpoint and bring them on the plane (except for liquids).
TSA totally freaked out, and wouldn't even let me take on a magazine I purchased (even though I had the receipt). They also went hardcore on security, doing a background check on every passenger while we waited on the tarmac for two hours. The funny thing: even though we were searched both by BAA and TSA agents, with a zero-tolerance policy for electronics, some still got by. When I stepped off the plane in the US, a few passengers whipped out their cellphones (you can guess where they hid them). So much for high-security.
BAA and TSA handled this crisis as well as they could, considering the circumstances...but if they keep this up for long, the long-haul airline industry will lose tons of money. Business travelers who have to deal with long security lines, delayed fligths, plus have to trust their luggage to the hold will think twice about face-to-face meetings. Vacationers who can't bring their mp3 players and gameboy for long international flights will reconsider their destination.
I know I'm not going to fly again anytime soon, I went through two days of hell just to get my ass home.
Hard drives used to be huge. As you can see from the article, they used to be as big as a refridgerator.
Back in the days of the PC/AT, hard drives had slimmed down to a "petite" 5.25 inches wide. Hard disks were "full-height," which was the height of two modern 5.25" bays (hence the term "half-height" used to describe modern 5.25" drives).
Over time, hard drives slimmed down to a single 5.25" slot (half-height), then down to the same size as that used by the 3.5" floppy.
Today, many less-expensive desktop drives are actually 2.5" drives in a 3.5" package, because it is cheaper to just produce one smaller platter and use it for both notebook and desktop drives. I am uncertain, however, if we will ever make a complete transition from 3.5" to 2.5" hard drives - at this point, I think we will see a transition to solid-state storage before we see the complete phasing-out of 3.5" drives.
Why did things slim down?
1. It's harder to spin a 5.25" size platter at higher speeds. Access times and maximum data rates depend on spindle speed.
2. It's MUCH more expensive to make larger platters, in much the same way that it's much more expensive to create larger chips. The larger they are, the more exact the process required, and the more chance of defect.
I have a terrible feeling that I'm wrong, but will anyone be able to correct me?
Sure.
RSX: You could put a more powerful GPU into a PC and get better performance numbers, so why count GPU performance power? Also, you cannot do 64-bit floating-point math with ANY GPU at the moment, and has non-IEEE-standard accuracy, so remove it from the equation.
Each SPE can do 25.6 Gflop/s theoretical (180 Gflop/s for all 7), but only for 32-bit (non IEEE-standard) values. For 64-bit accuracy, tests have shown the thoroughput is only about 1/10 the normal speed, or about 18 Gflop/s for all 7 SPEs.
Theoretically, you could get that kind of throughput from a Core2Duo processor:
(2x64-bit operations per 128-bit SSE pipeline) x (2 128-bit SSE pipes per processor) x (2 processors per die) x (approximately 2.6 GHz clock speed) = 20.8 Gflop/s for 64-bit values.
This, of course, makes Cell even less spactacular. As always happenns, Sony announces some "incredible" new processor, but in the three years it taskes them to build it, work out the bugs and ramp up the yields, the x86 world quietly releases something just as good. In another year, a computer using one of these Core2Duo 2.6 GHz chips will be quite affordable, once the quad-core wars start.
Technically, it's supposed to be about a 9600 or so in performance, overall. I see about HALF that performance on this chip under Linux- under Windows, it seems to perform about the same level.
Well, that's exactly what you SHOULD be seeing. The Radeon Xpress 200 is exactly half as powerful as the 9600.
9600: 4 pipelines, 2 vertex units, 325 MHz core speed.
Xpress 200: 2 pipelines, 1 (limited) vertex unit, 333 MHz core speed.
Maybe if you did some research, you would waste less time whining about your non-existant problems. That embedded video chipset is exactly as fast as it should be.
Exactly right. The demo was released before the game (don't see that as often today).
That's the first and last time Diakatana was on ANY computer I've ever owned. I will never forget that experience.
* 5 minutes into the game:
"So, it's dark, there's this wall here, looks like I'm sneaking in through some watery areas. Rain, meh.
* 10 minutes into the game:
"Wow, I'm being attacked by frogs and mosquitos. Frogs and mosquitoes...."
* 15 minutes into the game:
"Wow, more frogs and mosquitoes. And not the cool, radioactive, mutated frogs and mosquitoes...no, these are boring-old mosquitoes. And the size is getting on my nerves, ebcause they're just as annoying to try to hit as REAL mosquitoes"
* 20 minutes into the game:
* Now uninstalling John Romero's Mosquito Simulator 2000 *
The reason you had to toss your old powersupply is because it probably didn't have enough output on the 12v line. Since the introduction of the Athlon XP, motherboard makers have been moving from +5v to +12v to supply the processor with power. Video cards have also moved to depending more and more on the +12v line.
Go ahead, take a look at the specs. I'll bet your old 300w powersupply couldn't top more than 10A on the +12v line, but most 300w powersupplies sold today hit the 15A mark for +12v. You could easily run your current system on a modern 300w powersupply, but you can't use your old one because the DESIGN INTENT (+5v over +12v) is obsolete.
I guarantee if you put a watt-meter on your system it would be using less than 200w under full-load, even after conversion losses. You just THINK your system needs a mammoth 410w because your old powersupply was outdated.
To run a 7900GT alone requires a minimum of 21A on the 12v rail, and in SLI you'll need at least 28A on the 12v rail minimum (this is just to run the video card without having it auto clock down for lack of power).
I love it when people take RECOMENDATIONS out of context, and suddenly start calling them REQUIREMENTS.
"MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS" are nothing of the sort. They are not the minimum requirements for the device to work, they are simply a VERY general "minimum" value with lots of play built-in.
For example, Nvidia lists the "minimum" for a single 7900 GT as a 350w powersupply with 20A on the 12v line. This is a RECOMMENDATION.
Reality: The 7900 GT uses about 50w at full load, which is actually pretty low for the performance level (major reason I bought mine). That's around 4A load, 2A idle, if you were paying attention.
The fact of the matter is, Nvidia has to WAY overestimate your power needs because they have no fucking clue what the rest of your system eats up. In fact, even with these GENEROUS recommendations, it is possible to build a system that has so much crap in it that even a 350w powersupply can't power that plus a 7900 GT...but this is extremely rare.
Fact: midrange PCs, even with a (single) fancy video card, use around 150w or less at full load. The amount of power used can differe hugely from system-to-system, depending on how many drives you have, how many video cards and processors you have, and who makes them.
For example, my upper-midrange system: a 3800+ X2 and a 7900 GT, one hard disk and two optical drives, stll uses a little under 150w under full load, and uses a small fraction of that under idle. Don't be confused by the manufacturer's specs: they have to be written for the same stupid people who plug PCIe cards into AGP slots. Otherwise, Nvidia's partners would constantly get calls from people whose PCs wouldn't turn on after the card was installed. It doesn't mean you can't build a QUIET and POWERFUL PC.