It may be the end of the road for general-purpose CPUs, but the door is wide open for more specific hardware solutions. For example, no one questions that having custom texture mapping hardware is The Right Thing. You'd need a 10GHz CPU with its own power supply to do what a GeForce 2 does.
In the past, the prevailing opinion was that custom hardware was a bad thing. Remember Wirth's Lilith? And Lisp machines? But this is changing, especially as CPUs continue to run hotter and get more and more complex. Ericsson uses a functional, concurrent language for some of its development--cutting edge stuff. Because CPU manufacturers continue to ignore power consumption and heat generation (you do not want a two pound heat sink in embedded systems), they designed their own processor to run their language. This is no big deal any more: you can use an FPGA. What did they find? They got a 30x performance increase over high-end Ultra SPARCs, they cut power consumption by over 90%, and the custom processor solution is cheaper to manufacture in quantity. This is going to become more and more common. The "Look! I got a 12% increase by buying an $800 CPU that uses 20% more power than the last one" incremental frame of mind is coming to a close. Why nickel and dime the increases when there are HUGE leaps to be made with currently available technology?
It ain't now, that's for sure. I have a p4-2Ghz, 512 megs of PC800 and a ge4 ti4600, and I can still only get about 15 fps in Balmor within the Morrowind game at 1600x1200 (with all eye candy features turned up high).
Running at 1600x1200 means your're fill-rate dependent. It has nothing to do with your CPU.
And most PC games, as much as fanboys don't want to admit it, are sloppily coded. You look at some of amazing stuff being done on relatively low-end consoles, and it's mind-blowing. Then you look at what's being done on high-end, much more powerful PCs and you often see a lot of bloated crap. On the PC it's not uncommon for levels to take a minute or more to load, whereas you see sub 10 second times all the time on consoles, even though consoles don't come with hard drives.
Most artwork is designed by ripping off snippets of other works. Ever heard of a literary allusion? Instead of ripping off, some call it standing on the shoulders of giants.
Oh, come now, that's just a silly self-justification.
Re:Neat yes, but innovation on demand?
on
The Indie Game Jam
·
· Score: 2
What's so wrong nowadays with being proud to have simply made something of quality, even if it's not some earth shattering revelation.
Yes, true. The trouble is that most game developers set out from day one to write a game "like popular game X." So they follow all the cliches that are laid out before them, and they write a game effectively by the numbers. And that's exactly what people hate in music: bands that are obviously trying to sound like some other band. But when it comes to games, people just accept this--even game critics--and revel in the cliches.
The courts had stolen the soul. And rap music is poorer for it.
That's just bizarre. So rap is completely dependent on sampling the music of other artists? That's like piecing together a book based on snippets of other books.
Console manufacturers typically subsidize the cost of the console anywhere from 20-50%, so that it is affordable.
Oh, come on, that's a standard line. Sony and Nintendo don't do this. They sell consoles (wholesale) for roughly what it costs for them to make them. They're not selling them at a huge loss.
I agree in sentiment, but not about the Neo-Geo. When it was released, its library of games was the most uinspired and derivative available. Tired of having played a hundred beat-em-ups on the NES and Genesis? Well, get a Neo-Geo and play some more uninspired rehashes of them. History has been kind to the Neo-Geo because, well, people tend to forget history.
The reason there aren't many games like R-Type any more is the same reason there aren't many games like Pac-Man any more. The genere was so overdone that it burned itself to a crisp. It didn't need to be that way of course, but developers spent too much time pandering to the cliches of the genre, so every game tended to have that Techno-Organic Look (tm), and involve the same kind of powerups and bosses and so on. Bleah. (I'll admit that much of your feeling about these games depends on your background. Even by 1991, there were more R-Type style shooters for the Genesis than anyone could possibly stand. And it took years for those kind of games to finally hit it big on the PC, with creatively stillborn entries like Raptor and Tyrian. But PC owners who shunned consoles thought they were the greatest games ever.)
I mean I understand that the graphics market right now is hotter than the 1980s arms race, with companies trying to one-up each other constantly...
That describes the market a few years ago, but no more. These days, with GeForce 2 MXs being dirt cheap and no one having performance issues with them, no one--except neurotic geeks--gives any thought to updating their video cards.
But can somebody tell me if there are products currently on the market that take full advantage of the *current* crop of video cards?
The answer is an emphatic "no." I'm a game developer, and we were focusing on the Voodoo 2 as the low end until very recently. And the Voodoo 2 is still a much more powerful card than people realize, providing you work *with* it and don't just ask it to render 50,000 polygons per frame. I don't think we ever got to the bottom of the performance available in that card, and we certainly, certainly, never got anywhere near what you can really do with later cards, like the original GeForce. All of the fancy stuff you can do with the GeForce 3--mostly based around vertex shaders--is not backward compatible with 90% of the market, so we never touched it.
Fanboys don't want to hear that their cards aren't being pushed anywhere near the limits. The are much happier to have poorly written games that have high polygon counts and bad art, because then they can justify the money they spent on a new computer and/or video card.
Re:How long til we see THIS Slashdot article?
on
3DLabs Launching New GPU
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Really, these things are getting massively more complicated than your ordinary P4 or Athlon.
Not really, though. They have simple units, then they put a whole bunch of them on there. They don't need nonsense like branch prediction and register renaming and all that. But they certainly are complicated in their own way.
The specs were great, but the actual implementation and drivers, well, sucked hard.
Actually, the Permedia was a nice card for it's time. The OpenGL drivers were better than anything else out there (remember, this was back when the Voodoo 1 was king of the hill, and the OpenGL drivers were perpetually beta and you couldn't run in a window anyway).
For many years we were told that SCSI is superior to IDE.
This is completely irrelevant unless you have an application which is tremendously hard drive bound, and you've done benchmarking to determine which type of drive or specific model of drive will work best for your purposes. Otherwise this is just the typical, meaningless fretting that some geeks have made a hobby of, such as buying a new, expensive video card so they can get 327fps in Quake instead of 270.
It really amazing how many software project managers that don't fully understand what regression testing is all about.
Not in important fields like telecom. In those fields you live and die by testing, and you can be held accountable for bugs found in your code. If there are too many, you might be in for it.
What's shocking to me is that almost no open source authors or advocates give a hoot about automated testing of any kind. The only free software I've found with a test suite is gcc. As much as I hate to say it, there's a good chance that the relative inexperience of most open source authors is a factor here.
The games industry is now being driven by hardware, not ideas. The consoles just get faster so the games just get prettier. No real innovation at all.
When you say "now," that makes me think you're of the "Games were so much better back when [some system from the mid to late 1990s] came out" mindset. But games have been driven by hardware as long as I can remember. Google searches will turn up big hardware debates in rec.games.video from 1990 about the TurboGrafx-16 vs. the Sega Genesis. And for many people PC gaming has always been about hardware, which is why people are willing to buy $400 video cards, complain that consoles are too expensive, and suffer through endless bleeding edge driver updates.
Okay, let's clarify things. Yes, libraries give copyrighted works away free, so does radio, blah, blah, blah. And that's great. Libraries and radio don't cut into book or music sales and they're wonderful resources. But that's not how the Angry Young 3/_33+ see it. Their take is that the companies that distribute music and books are evil and should be taken out of the picture. So when they argue about sharing being okay, there's a stronger agenda behind it: that copyrights should be abolished. The attitude of "entertain me for free" is a a hard view to get people to agree with.
Re:The main thing I think the article misses ...
on
The Next Generation
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
... is that when this stuff arrives, it will seem like No Big Deal.
And there's a high, high, probability that this is all just like robot housecleaners and flying cars and all that other nonsense from seventy years ago that never came to pass. Kurzweil may have been brilliant at some point in his life, but he's been indulging in pointless fantasizing and rambling, most of which has no basis in reality. I mean, yeah, it's easy to say that in fifty years we could dump someone's brain to a computer, but that ignores the fact no one has the remotest understanding about how the mind actually works. All of the writings in the field are vague at best, like Chemistry textbooks from the 17th century, back before there was even enough knowledge to call the field "Chemistry."
Microsoft needs to help the developers. Give them free dev kits. Give them free support. If you built it, they will come.
Sorry, that wouldn't help. They'd just attract a lot of people writing Mario Kart clones and such. Developing big name console titles is a very expensive business. The typical game costs 4-5 million ($US) to develop. You're not going to say "Yeah! Xbox!" just because you get a free dev kit. That the Sony kits originally cost $20,000 is irrelevant when you're looking at blowing five million dollars.
The end result is that you've consumed more energy in recycling the good than producing a new good
You're one of those people who like to be contrary just for the sake of being contrary, even if it means being flamingly wrong. Recycling of aluminum, for example, was started by aluminum companies, because it takes much, much less power to recycle aluminum than to process raw bauxite. Ditto for glass, paper, and scrap metal recycling. Plastics are a different story, in that they're harder to recycle and the result is much lower grade. That's why you see contrivances such as recycled soda bottle pullovers and park benches. But to say across the board that recycling uses more engergy than to create new goods from scratch? No. That has never been remotely true.
Certainly, reducing and reusing are still much more important. And most people don't want to hear anything about them, especially fanatical computer purchasers ("I absolutely need a new PC, because my 1.2GHz machine only gets 126fps in Quake III").
I never really thought of John Carmac as being a bad coder, thanks for the info. That quake 3 engine must really suck. I guess the developers at Raven are just plum stupid and got suckered like tons of other game developers.
Your're missing the point, Mr. Sarcastic. The Quake 3 engine is just the core rendering (and networking) engine. You can make it fast or slow depending on what you do with it. And, as no one outside of the game industry ever seems to realize, 90% of the code in a game has nothing to do with rendering.
Go look at some of those same benchmarks, particularly for newer games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The GF2MX400 64M barely runs the game adequately at 1024x768. And that's just average frame rate - what kills you are the spikes where the framerate drops through the floor.
And in all likelihood this is just because of crappy coding. Look at games like Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PlayStation 2. They're pushing more polys than the average PC game, with what's already an outdated graphics system and a 300MHz processor with 8K--yes, EIGHT kilobytes--of data cache. On the PC the developers get the latest graphics cards and high end machines, then grudgingly give a little thought at the end of the project toward making it run on something sane.
Odds are that you'll see Return to Castle Wolfenstein ported to a console like the PS2 or Game Cube and it will run faster than it does on the PC and require a factor of four less memory.
A GeForce 2 MX is still a real beast, BTW. It's better than what's in a PS2 in many ways. But while the PS2 coders are going nuts with that hardware, people are sneering down their noses at the GeForce 2 MX. That's a laughable situation. 3D has gotten so fast in recent years that no one knows what to do with it. In all honesty, even the power of Voodoo 2 era cards is rarely, rarely maxed out. Developers just write some half-assed OpenGL or Direct3D renderer and then blame the graphics card, not even looking at their code and realizing that it takes hundreds or thousands of cycles to process a single triangle--or even a vertex--on the CPU side.
Oh, I should have warned fanboys up front to cover their eyes before reading this, so their little worlds aren't shattered.
Sigh. The response to stories like this is why I've stopped reading Slashdot for the most part. I used to read it every day, and now I go for months at a time without even looking at the front page.
Yes, there is a security problem in IE. Yes, there have been many such problems in the past. There have also been security problems with browsers for Linux. The discussion goes like this:
Linux Newbie: Microsoft should be put out of business! They don't care about security! There are hundreds of security holes in Windows and Internet Explorer!
Level-headed Computer User: But there have been security holes in Linux and software for Linux.
Linux Newbie: But Linux is a more secure operating system! You can't do as much damage under Linux because of file permissions and other security measures.
Level-headed Computer User: But we're talking about exploits. By definition an exploit is something that you were never supposed to be able to do in the first place.
Linux Newbie: Down with Microsoft! Bill Gates sucks!
Slashdot Mirror
It may be the end of the road for general-purpose CPUs, but the door is wide open for more specific hardware solutions. For example, no one questions that having custom texture mapping hardware is The Right Thing. You'd need a 10GHz CPU with its own power supply to do what a GeForce 2 does.
In the past, the prevailing opinion was that custom hardware was a bad thing. Remember Wirth's Lilith? And Lisp machines? But this is changing, especially as CPUs continue to run hotter and get more and more complex. Ericsson uses a functional, concurrent language for some of its development--cutting edge stuff. Because CPU manufacturers continue to ignore power consumption and heat generation (you do not want a two pound heat sink in embedded systems), they designed their own processor to run their language. This is no big deal any more: you can use an FPGA. What did they find? They got a 30x performance increase over high-end Ultra SPARCs, they cut power consumption by over 90%, and the custom processor solution is cheaper to manufacture in quantity. This is going to become more and more common. The "Look! I got a 12% increase by buying an $800 CPU that uses 20% more power than the last one" incremental frame of mind is coming to a close. Why nickel and dime the increases when there are HUGE leaps to be made with currently available technology?
It ain't now, that's for sure. I have a p4-2Ghz, 512 megs of PC800 and a ge4 ti4600, and I can still only get about 15 fps in Balmor within the Morrowind game at 1600x1200 (with all eye candy features turned up high).
Running at 1600x1200 means your're fill-rate dependent. It has nothing to do with your CPU.
And most PC games, as much as fanboys don't want to admit it, are sloppily coded. You look at some of amazing stuff being done on relatively low-end consoles, and it's mind-blowing. Then you look at what's being done on high-end, much more powerful PCs and you often see a lot of bloated crap. On the PC it's not uncommon for levels to take a minute or more to load, whereas you see sub 10 second times all the time on consoles, even though consoles don't come with hard drives.
Most artwork is designed by ripping off snippets of other works. Ever heard of a literary allusion?
Instead of ripping off, some call it standing on the shoulders of giants.
Oh, come now, that's just a silly self-justification.
What's so wrong nowadays with being proud to have simply made something of quality, even if it's not some earth shattering revelation.
Yes, true. The trouble is that most game developers set out from day one to write a game "like popular game X." So they follow all the cliches that are laid out before them, and they write a game effectively by the numbers. And that's exactly what people hate in music: bands that are obviously trying to sound like some other band. But when it comes to games, people just accept this--even game critics--and revel in the cliches.
The courts had stolen the soul. And rap music is poorer for it.
That's just bizarre. So rap is completely dependent on sampling the music of other artists? That's like piecing together a book based on snippets of other books.
Too bad i just bought a Playstation 2 yesterday
Why "too bad"? Yeah, the Xbox has cooler tech, but your options for games a pretty limited. The drought is pretty scary.
I really liked Stun Runner. The starter's voice was sexy.
Atari Games was a different company than Atari Corp. They had no relation at all.
Console manufacturers typically subsidize the cost of the console anywhere from 20-50%, so that it is affordable.
Oh, come on, that's a standard line. Sony and Nintendo don't do this. They sell consoles (wholesale) for roughly what it costs for them to make them. They're not selling them at a huge loss.
I agree in sentiment, but not about the Neo-Geo. When it was released, its library of games was the most uinspired and derivative available. Tired of having played a hundred beat-em-ups on the NES and Genesis? Well, get a Neo-Geo and play some more uninspired rehashes of them. History has been kind to the Neo-Geo because, well, people tend to forget history.
The reason there aren't many games like R-Type any more is the same reason there aren't many games like Pac-Man any more. The genere was so overdone that it burned itself to a crisp. It didn't need to be that way of course, but developers spent too much time pandering to the cliches of the genre, so every game tended to have that Techno-Organic Look (tm), and involve the same kind of powerups and bosses and so on. Bleah. (I'll admit that much of your feeling about these games depends on your background. Even by 1991, there were more R-Type style shooters for the Genesis than anyone could possibly stand. And it took years for those kind of games to finally hit it big on the PC, with creatively stillborn entries like Raptor and Tyrian. But PC owners who shunned consoles thought they were the greatest games ever.)
Heck, it was even called "Relax"! Here's a link to an old preview from an 1984 8-bit home computer magazine
I mean I understand that the graphics market right now is hotter than the 1980s arms race, with companies trying to one-up each other constantly...
That describes the market a few years ago, but no more. These days, with GeForce 2 MXs being dirt cheap and no one having performance issues with them, no one--except neurotic geeks--gives any thought to updating their video cards.
But can somebody tell me if there are products currently on the market that take full advantage of the *current* crop of video cards?
The answer is an emphatic "no." I'm a game developer, and we were focusing on the Voodoo 2 as the low end until very recently. And the Voodoo 2 is still a much more powerful card than people realize, providing you work *with* it and don't just ask it to render 50,000 polygons per frame. I don't think we ever got to the bottom of the performance available in that card, and we certainly, certainly, never got anywhere near what you can really do with later cards, like the original GeForce. All of the fancy stuff you can do with the GeForce 3--mostly based around vertex shaders--is not backward compatible with 90% of the market, so we never touched it.
Fanboys don't want to hear that their cards aren't being pushed anywhere near the limits. The are much happier to have poorly written games that have high polygon counts and bad art, because then they can justify the money they spent on a new computer and/or video card.
Really, these things are getting massively more complicated than your ordinary P4 or Athlon.
Not really, though. They have simple units, then they put a whole bunch of them on there. They don't need nonsense like branch prediction and register renaming and all that. But they certainly are complicated in their own way.
The specs were great, but the actual implementation and drivers, well, sucked hard.
Actually, the Permedia was a nice card for it's time. The OpenGL drivers were better than anything else out there (remember, this was back when the Voodoo 1 was king of the hill, and the OpenGL drivers were perpetually beta and you couldn't run in a window anyway).
For many years we were told that SCSI is superior to IDE.
This is completely irrelevant unless you have an application which is tremendously hard drive bound, and you've done benchmarking to determine which type of drive or specific model of drive will work best for your purposes. Otherwise this is just the typical, meaningless fretting that some geeks have made a hobby of, such as buying a new, expensive video card so they can get 327fps in Quake instead of 270.
It really amazing how many software project managers that don't fully understand what regression testing is all about.
Not in important fields like telecom. In those fields you live and die by testing, and you can be held accountable for bugs found in your code. If there are too many, you might be in for it.
What's shocking to me is that almost no open source authors or advocates give a hoot about automated testing of any kind. The only free software I've found with a test suite is gcc. As much as I hate to say it, there's a good chance that the relative inexperience of most open source authors is a factor here.
The games industry is now being driven by hardware, not ideas. The consoles just get faster so the games just get prettier. No real innovation at all.
When you say "now," that makes me think you're of the "Games were so much better back when [some system from the mid to late 1990s] came out" mindset. But games have been driven by hardware as long as I can remember. Google searches will turn up big hardware debates in rec.games.video from 1990 about the TurboGrafx-16 vs. the Sega Genesis. And for many people PC gaming has always been about hardware, which is why people are willing to buy $400 video cards, complain that consoles are too expensive, and suffer through endless bleeding edge driver updates.
Okay, let's clarify things. Yes, libraries give copyrighted works away free, so does radio, blah, blah, blah. And that's great. Libraries and radio don't cut into book or music sales and they're wonderful resources. But that's not how the Angry Young 3/_33+ see it. Their take is that the companies that distribute music and books are evil and should be taken out of the picture. So when they argue about sharing being okay, there's a stronger agenda behind it: that copyrights should be abolished. The attitude of "entertain me for free" is a a hard view to get people to agree with.
... is that when this stuff arrives, it will seem like No Big Deal.
And there's a high, high, probability that this is all just like robot housecleaners and flying cars and all that other nonsense from seventy years ago that never came to pass. Kurzweil may have been brilliant at some point in his life, but he's been indulging in pointless fantasizing and rambling, most of which has no basis in reality. I mean, yeah, it's easy to say that in fifty years we could dump someone's brain to a computer, but that ignores the fact no one has the remotest understanding about how the mind actually works. All of the writings in the field are vague at best, like Chemistry textbooks from the 17th century, back before there was even enough knowledge to call the field "Chemistry."
Microsoft needs to help the developers. Give them free dev kits. Give them free support. If you built it, they will come.
Sorry, that wouldn't help. They'd just attract a lot of people writing Mario Kart clones and such. Developing big name console titles is a very expensive business. The typical game costs 4-5 million ($US) to develop. You're not going to say "Yeah! Xbox!" just because you get a free dev kit. That the Sony kits originally cost $20,000 is irrelevant when you're looking at blowing five million dollars.
Residential waste is a small fraction of the garbage produced anyhow
Well then why even bother to reduce or reuse? Who cares! All those giant landfill outside of major cities are irrelevant!
The end result is that you've consumed more energy in recycling the good than producing a new good
You're one of those people who like to be contrary just for the sake of being contrary, even if it means being flamingly wrong. Recycling of aluminum, for example, was started by aluminum companies, because it takes much, much less power to recycle aluminum than to process raw bauxite. Ditto for glass, paper, and scrap metal recycling. Plastics are a different story, in that they're harder to recycle and the result is much lower grade. That's why you see contrivances such as recycled soda bottle pullovers and park benches. But to say across the board that recycling uses more engergy than to create new goods from scratch? No. That has never been remotely true.
Certainly, reducing and reusing are still much more important. And most people don't want to hear anything about them, especially fanatical computer purchasers ("I absolutely need a new PC, because my 1.2GHz machine only gets 126fps in Quake III").
Does anyone remember, back in the early 1990s, going through the agony of trying to get XFree to run on a Linux box?
Last time I dipped into Linux, in 1999, this was still the case.
I never really thought of John Carmac as being a bad coder, thanks for the info. That quake 3 engine must really suck. I guess the developers at Raven are just plum stupid and got suckered like tons of other game developers.
Your're missing the point, Mr. Sarcastic. The Quake 3 engine is just the core rendering (and networking) engine. You can make it fast or slow depending on what you do with it. And, as no one outside of the game industry ever seems to realize, 90% of the code in a game has nothing to do with rendering.
Go look at some of those same benchmarks, particularly for newer games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The GF2MX400 64M barely runs the game adequately at 1024x768. And that's just average frame rate - what kills you are the spikes where the framerate drops through the floor.
And in all likelihood this is just because of crappy coding. Look at games like Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PlayStation 2. They're pushing more polys than the average PC game, with what's already an outdated graphics system and a 300MHz processor with 8K--yes, EIGHT kilobytes--of data cache. On the PC the developers get the latest graphics cards and high end machines, then grudgingly give a little thought at the end of the project toward making it run on something sane.
Odds are that you'll see Return to Castle Wolfenstein ported to a console like the PS2 or Game Cube and it will run faster than it does on the PC and require a factor of four less memory.
A GeForce 2 MX is still a real beast, BTW. It's better than what's in a PS2 in many ways. But while the PS2 coders are going nuts with that hardware, people are sneering down their noses at the GeForce 2 MX. That's a laughable situation. 3D has gotten so fast in recent years that no one knows what to do with it. In all honesty, even the power of Voodoo 2 era cards is rarely, rarely maxed out. Developers just write some half-assed OpenGL or Direct3D renderer and then blame the graphics card, not even looking at their code and realizing that it takes hundreds or thousands of cycles to process a single triangle--or even a vertex--on the CPU side.
Oh, I should have warned fanboys up front to cover their eyes before reading this, so their little worlds aren't shattered.
Sigh. The response to stories like this is why I've stopped reading Slashdot for the most part. I used to read it every day, and now I go for months at a time without even looking at the front page.
Yes, there is a security problem in IE. Yes, there have been many such problems in the past. There have also been security problems with browsers for Linux. The discussion goes like this:
Linux Newbie: Microsoft should be put out of business! They don't care about security! There are hundreds of security holes in Windows and Internet Explorer!
Level-headed Computer User: But there have been security holes in Linux and software for Linux.
Linux Newbie: But Linux is a more secure operating system! You can't do as much damage under Linux because of file permissions and other security measures.
Level-headed Computer User: But we're talking about exploits. By definition an exploit is something that you were never supposed to be able to do in the first place.
Linux Newbie: Down with Microsoft! Bill Gates sucks!