Companies like ATI and NVIDIA (and presumably S3) view their drivers as trade secrets. They contain 3rd-party licensed IP that can't be disclosed and 1st-party IP that they want to keep out of the hands of their competitors. This is especially true at the high-end of the consumer graphics card market, but with the introduction of unified drivers a few years ago, there is no such thing as a low-end driver for an ATI or NVIDIA card. From a business standpoint, it would be foolish for a graphics card manufacturer to open-source its drivers.
However, I do sympathize with linux users who want quality drivers for all types of graphics hardware. I doubt, though, that NVIDIA or ATI will ever release open-source drivers for linux. I think they can and should take the desktop linux market seriously and release high-quality, closed drivers, even if it affects the OSS purity of the linux operating system.
For decent article reviewing some of these issues, see this.
I agree with most of your points, but the game market of 2006 is very different than 1995. One significant difference is that the GPU market has stabilized. There are OpenGL and DirectX, and all modern cards support both. I imagine a similar thing has happened in the soundcard market, but I don't know for sure. I think it would be difficult to introduce a new expensive piece of hardware that only improved certain games in today's market. Consumers today expect that if they shell out $300 for a card, it will improve all of their games, not just a small fraction.
There is no common, open API for physics. Rather, there are several proprietary, closed APIs which offer similar functionality, but have no common specification. For instance, there are Havok, Ageia, Open Dynamics, and Newton, just to name a few. The PhysX chip from Ageia only accelerates games written with their proprietary library in the game engine. Other games written with Havok, for instance, should receive no benefit at all from the installed PPU. On the other hand, Havok and NVIDIA have a GPU-accelerated physics library, but games without Havok (or users without NVIDIA SLI systems) won't get the benefit.
On the other hand, graphics cards make sense for consumers because there are only two graphics APIs, OpenGL and DirectX, and they offer very similar functionality under the hood (but significantly different high-level APIs). So a graphics card can accelerate games written with either OpenGL or DirectX, but that's not the case with the emerging PPU field. In graphics, the APIs developed and converged on common functionality long before hardware acceleration was available at the consumer level, but I don't think the physics API situation is stable or mature enough to warrant dedicated hardware add-in cards at this time.
However, I think there are two possible scenarios that could change this.
1) Havok and Ageia could create open or closed physics API specifications and make them available to chip manufacturers, e.g. ATI and NVIDIA, which have the market penetration and manufacturing capability to make PPUs widely available. I could imagine a high-end PCIe card that had both a GPU and a PPU on-board.
2) Microsoft. Think what you will about them, but DirectX has greatly influenced the game industry and is the de-facto standard low-level API (although there are notable exceptions, such as id). Microsoft could introduce a new component of DirectX which specifies a physics API that could then be implemented in hardware.
But unless one of those things happens, I don't think proprietary PPUs are going to make a lot of sense for consumers.
I completely understand where Takahashi is coming from. Both the 360 and PS3 offer enough computational horsepower that significant improvements in core gameplay elements, such as graphics, physics, AI, audio, level size, etc., are possible (once developers figure out the new hardware and the PS3 is actually on shelves). And all Nintendo has to offer is comparatively weak hardware and a goofy controller? Are you kidding me?
I'd also like to point out that virtually every innovative console game (and boring imitator) since the NES 20 years ago has used basically the same controller design. That includes Mario, Zelda, RE:4, God of War, Katamari, Halo, Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts, Odama, Okami, etc. There have been a few good games that use gimmick controllers such as DDR and Guitar Hero, but for the most part good game design is about a lot more than "what wacky stuff can we pull off with this controller?" or "how the hell am I going to make my game work with this controller?"
I think that Takahashi's point is that Nintendo is putting huge and somewhat arbitrary constraints on their developers with the Revolution. Since the Rev can't compete with the 360 or PS3 in terms of graphics or raw horsepower, the only thing it has is the controller. Personally, I'd hate to be a developer who can't make the game I want because of a non-standard controller and sub-par hardware.
As I posted elsewhere, you could deal with the Pluto-Charon issue and the Ceres issue by requiring the object in question to contain the majority of the mass in its orbit. So since Ceres contains about 40% of the mass of the asteroid belt, it wouldn't be a planet. And since Pluto's mass is much greater than Charon's, it would be a planet and Charon would be it's primary satellite.
Of course, I have no problem with Ceres being a planet and Pluto-Charon being a double planet.
Sure, Ceres is a planet. What's wrong with that? Probably several other large asteroids meet the definition too. One could exclude asteroids by requiring the object in question to contain the majority of the mass in its orbit. Since Ceres contains about 40% of the mass in the asteroid belt, it wouldn't meet this definition. Of course, there is the question of how to define the orbit precisely.
Sell, sell, sell would be a sensible shareholder reaction.
Except that Sapphire is not a publicly traded company, so there are no shareholders to have that reaction (as far as I could tell with about 60 seconds of Googling). And besides, Sapphire was really stating that it has big growth opportunities in Turkey and Asia. Could be good for the company long-term.
$13 billion sounds like a lot, until you consider that the Pentagon has a FY 2005 budget of $401.7 billion, which is 30.9 times greater than the NASA budget (and doesn't include the cost of the Iraq war). I personally believe that NASA's budget should be tripled or quadrupled. They should also streamline management to get better work done more efficiently. Space science is one of the few branches of science that is so prohibitively expensive and technically challenging that a concerted national effort.
They didn't finish the race! Out of 23 competitors, 5 finished the race. If anything, they should've focused a bit more on Team Gray and TerraMax, who did finish the race (though TerraMax was disqualified due to time).
People that play these love to kill. Even casual users love to play these sorts of games from time to time. And first person shooters, and lets be blunt here, is mostly about murder.
I usually don't respond to blatant trolls, but I can't let this horseshit slide. First, I love to play FPS and 3PS, yet I don't love to kill. I have never killed anything higher up the foodchain than a fish in real life, certainly not a person or even a warm-blooded organism. In fact, I'm repulsed by actual killing and violence in the real world. But perhaps you meant in-game killing. In the games I play (see list below) the killing is secondary to the mission, which is usually survival against hopeless odds or eliminating some threat to society. What I do love about these games is the idea that I have to survive against impossible odds or that humanity's survival depends on me and my actions. It just so happens that heavy weapons are usually involved, but would anyone really want to play a game where you're a scientist trying to find a cure in the lab for a deadly plague?
Second, most FPSs are not mostly about murder. According to the dictionary murder is "the unlawful killing of one human by another, especially with premeditated malice." Shooting demons from hell, enemy soldiers, mercenaries, trigens, clone troopers, Combine soldiers, zombies, monsters, aliens, or robots is not murder. (Obviously some games do involve simulated murder, e.g. GTA, Hitman, etc., but they're not FPSs. Minor quibble.)
I have no doubt that many players do like certain games simply because they're violent, but you should avoid making blanket statements and assumptions about the motivation of players or the content of games, especially when your statements are demonstrably false.
I play: FEAR Far Cry Half-Life 2 Doom 3 AvP 2 Painkiller Resident Evil * Darkwatch
Well, there's already been one parallel processing success story - the GPU. Granted, the GPU provides a more restrictive programming environment and memory model than the Cell, but with the right training and the right tools, it is possible to write code that effectively exploits parallelism.
Let's also not lose sight of the big picture with regard to the Cell: the 8 parallel vector processors are coupled with a single CPU core derived from the PowerPC chip. So the overarching structure of the Cell isn't all that different conceptually from a typical CPU-GPU setup in most PCs today.
The five years of decline shows no sign of ever recovering.
Maybe not to previous levels, but see:
Painkiller Far Cry Doom 3 Half-Life 2 Rome: Total War Age of Empires 3 F.E.A.R.
And those are just the games I've purchased in the last 18 months. I'm not really worried about the PC games industry. It was due for a little downsizing, and it happened. There are essentially 3 game types that just play better on the PC: FPS, RTS, and MMORPG. (There used to also be flight sims, but that genre seems to have atrophied). I just can't see any of those genres working as well on consoles as on PC.
Let's also not forget that the installed base of PCs is in the 500 million range worldwide and growing. That's quite a potential market.
The driver-level compiler for GLSL and Cg is identical in NVIDIA cards. In fact, the little-publicized OpenGL extenstion GL_EXT_Cg_shader allows the programmer to use shaders written in Cg through the GLSL API without having to use the Cg runtime library. The point is that Cg and GLSL are extremely similar in syntax and structure. There are a few differences, but if you know one shading language, you basically know them all.
his movies would still suck even if they weren't based on videogames.
So true. But I think his movies suck more prominently because they have a built-in audience: gamers. If his movies weren't based on games, then absolutely no one would ever see them and there would be no flogging of Boll in forums across the internet. (Which, of course, is way more fun than actually sitting through his movies.)
I can't believe we still know so little about how the brain works actually
I'm a PhD student in neuroscience, so let me comment. The human brain has around 100,000,000,000 neurons and 1,000,000,000,000,000 individual synapses (rough estimates, no one knows for sure). That makes the brain by far the most complicated structure in the known universe. Furthermore, techniques for studying the brain have only existed for around 80 years. So the apparent lack of real progress in neuroscience is understandable, given the complexity of the problem. Also, we do know more than you might think, but we still have a very incomplete picture of how the brain works, partially due to the lack of robust experimental techniques, as you point out.
I would have thought there would have been far more interest into researching how the brain functions.
Well, I was at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington DC in November, and there were around 28,000 neuroscientists in attendance. Judging by the number of people from my department who did not attend, I'd say that represents 5-10% of the total neuroscience research community in this country. I'd challenge you to find another research field with that much active research.
But seriously, experiments like this will ultimately lead to a more inhuman society... There should be an international law/treaty against it, like we have for certain biological weapons or nukes.
Why?
First, I'm not sure how implanted sensory or neural augmentation differs in any significant way from contact lenses, pacemakers, hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, or for that matter, airplanes, space ships, submarines, vaccines, or virtually any other technology. Technology, by definition, allows humans to overcome inherent biological limitations, by working more efficiently or precisely, or by working in adverse environments. Obviously war is made more efficient and lethal by technology, but so is medicine, communication, economics, and transportation. But we don't outlaw all medical research because biological weapons exist, or aeronautics research because warplanes exist.
Second, looking at current events I'd argue that international treaties banning this type of technology would probably be unenforceable. Rogue states and superpowers could easily and willfully circumvent any treaty, given the right political motivation. Besides, we are decades if not centuries away from any practical technology pertaining to cybernetic augmentation, despite what you may have seen in Ghost in the Shell.
WHAT?
The political bullshit was the whole damn novel! He took a political commentary and made it into an episode of 90210 in space, with some nudity and explosions thrown in to keep up the Verhoeven image.
Couldn't read any more after that.
You missed the point here, buddy. The point is that Verhoeven knows how to direct bloody, violent sci-fi action. As in "imagine Starship Troopers without all the politics". You'd be left with silly dialogue, B-grade acting, but a violent, dark, atmospheric movie. In other words, what Doom should be.
"The entire video game industry's history thus far has been an aberration," Koster told the audience. "It has been a mutant monster only made possible by unconnected computers. People always play games together. All of you learned to play games with each other. When you were kids, you played tag, tea parties, cops and robbers, what have you. The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal."
I think I prefer single player in a lot of instances. Single player allows you to get immersed in a cohesive story, where everything happens within a world with its own logic, rules, atmosphere, etc. While multiplayer certainly has its place, it makes me shudder to think that I could play through a game like Half-Life 2 while Combine soldiers blurt out things like "im teh 1337!!!111! ur pwned111!!!11" every two seconds. It would totally destroy the experience. I want to be able to play through a game without stupid distractions like that ruining the feel of the story.
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However, I do sympathize with linux users who want quality drivers for all types of graphics hardware. I doubt, though, that NVIDIA or ATI will ever release open-source drivers for linux. I think they can and should take the desktop linux market seriously and release high-quality, closed drivers, even if it affects the OSS purity of the linux operating system.
For decent article reviewing some of these issues, see this.
I agree with most of your points, but the game market of 2006 is very different than 1995. One significant difference is that the GPU market has stabilized. There are OpenGL and DirectX, and all modern cards support both. I imagine a similar thing has happened in the soundcard market, but I don't know for sure. I think it would be difficult to introduce a new expensive piece of hardware that only improved certain games in today's market. Consumers today expect that if they shell out $300 for a card, it will improve all of their games, not just a small fraction.
True, my mistake.
On the other hand, graphics cards make sense for consumers because there are only two graphics APIs, OpenGL and DirectX, and they offer very similar functionality under the hood (but significantly different high-level APIs). So a graphics card can accelerate games written with either OpenGL or DirectX, but that's not the case with the emerging PPU field. In graphics, the APIs developed and converged on common functionality long before hardware acceleration was available at the consumer level, but I don't think the physics API situation is stable or mature enough to warrant dedicated hardware add-in cards at this time.
However, I think there are two possible scenarios that could change this.
1) Havok and Ageia could create open or closed physics API specifications and make them available to chip manufacturers, e.g. ATI and NVIDIA, which have the market penetration and manufacturing capability to make PPUs widely available. I could imagine a high-end PCIe card that had both a GPU and a PPU on-board.
2) Microsoft. Think what you will about them, but DirectX has greatly influenced the game industry and is the de-facto standard low-level API (although there are notable exceptions, such as id). Microsoft could introduce a new component of DirectX which specifies a physics API that could then be implemented in hardware.
But unless one of those things happens, I don't think proprietary PPUs are going to make a lot of sense for consumers.
Vivi
Vvii
Wii
??
Yeah, that and Uwe Boll.
I'd also like to point out that virtually every innovative console game (and boring imitator) since the NES 20 years ago has used basically the same controller design. That includes Mario, Zelda, RE:4, God of War, Katamari, Halo, Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts, Odama, Okami, etc. There have been a few good games that use gimmick controllers such as DDR and Guitar Hero, but for the most part good game design is about a lot more than "what wacky stuff can we pull off with this controller?" or "how the hell am I going to make my game work with this controller?"
I think that Takahashi's point is that Nintendo is putting huge and somewhat arbitrary constraints on their developers with the Revolution. Since the Rev can't compete with the 360 or PS3 in terms of graphics or raw horsepower, the only thing it has is the controller. Personally, I'd hate to be a developer who can't make the game I want because of a non-standard controller and sub-par hardware.
FYI - It's spelled "Jurassic".
Of course, I have no problem with Ceres being a planet and Pluto-Charon being a double planet.
Sure, Ceres is a planet. What's wrong with that? Probably several other large asteroids meet the definition too. One could exclude asteroids by requiring the object in question to contain the majority of the mass in its orbit. Since Ceres contains about 40% of the mass in the asteroid belt, it wouldn't meet this definition. Of course, there is the question of how to define the orbit precisely.
Except that Sapphire is not a publicly traded company, so there are no shareholders to have that reaction (as far as I could tell with about 60 seconds of Googling). And besides, Sapphire was really stating that it has big growth opportunities in Turkey and Asia. Could be good for the company long-term.
$13 billion sounds like a lot, until you consider that the Pentagon has a FY 2005 budget of $401.7 billion, which is 30.9 times greater than the NASA budget (and doesn't include the cost of the Iraq war). I personally believe that NASA's budget should be tripled or quadrupled. They should also streamline management to get better work done more efficiently. Space science is one of the few branches of science that is so prohibitively expensive and technically challenging that a concerted national effort.
They didn't finish the race! Out of 23 competitors, 5 finished the race. If anything, they should've focused a bit more on Team Gray and TerraMax, who did finish the race (though TerraMax was disqualified due to time).
I usually don't respond to blatant trolls, but I can't let this horseshit slide. First, I love to play FPS and 3PS, yet I don't love to kill. I have never killed anything higher up the foodchain than a fish in real life, certainly not a person or even a warm-blooded organism. In fact, I'm repulsed by actual killing and violence in the real world. But perhaps you meant in-game killing. In the games I play (see list below) the killing is secondary to the mission, which is usually survival against hopeless odds or eliminating some threat to society. What I do love about these games is the idea that I have to survive against impossible odds or that humanity's survival depends on me and my actions. It just so happens that heavy weapons are usually involved, but would anyone really want to play a game where you're a scientist trying to find a cure in the lab for a deadly plague?
Second, most FPSs are not mostly about murder. According to the dictionary murder is "the unlawful killing of one human by another, especially with premeditated malice." Shooting demons from hell, enemy soldiers, mercenaries, trigens, clone troopers, Combine soldiers, zombies, monsters, aliens, or robots is not murder. (Obviously some games do involve simulated murder, e.g. GTA, Hitman, etc., but they're not FPSs. Minor quibble.)
I have no doubt that many players do like certain games simply because they're violent, but you should avoid making blanket statements and assumptions about the motivation of players or the content of games, especially when your statements are demonstrably false.
I play:
FEAR
Far Cry
Half-Life 2
Doom 3
AvP 2
Painkiller
Resident Evil *
Darkwatch
Not to mention a shitty speller.
I did. It's called Guitar Hero.
Let's also not lose sight of the big picture with regard to the Cell: the 8 parallel vector processors are coupled with a single CPU core derived from the PowerPC chip. So the overarching structure of the Cell isn't all that different conceptually from a typical CPU-GPU setup in most PCs today.
Maybe not to previous levels, but see:
Painkiller
Far Cry
Doom 3
Half-Life 2
Rome: Total War
Age of Empires 3
F.E.A.R.
And those are just the games I've purchased in the last 18 months. I'm not really worried about the PC games industry. It was due for a little downsizing, and it happened. There are essentially 3 game types that just play better on the PC: FPS, RTS, and MMORPG. (There used to also be flight sims, but that genre seems to have atrophied). I just can't see any of those genres working as well on consoles as on PC.
Let's also not forget that the installed base of PCs is in the 500 million range worldwide and growing. That's quite a potential market.
The driver-level compiler for GLSL and Cg is identical in NVIDIA cards. In fact, the little-publicized OpenGL extenstion GL_EXT_Cg_shader allows the programmer to use shaders written in Cg through the GLSL API without having to use the Cg runtime library. The point is that Cg and GLSL are extremely similar in syntax and structure. There are a few differences, but if you know one shading language, you basically know them all.
There was no blood or tits, but the heavy metal was the main reason I got Guitar Hero.
/Just sayin'
So true. But I think his movies suck more prominently because they have a built-in audience: gamers. If his movies weren't based on games, then absolutely no one would ever see them and there would be no flogging of Boll in forums across the internet. (Which, of course, is way more fun than actually sitting through his movies.)
I'm a PhD student in neuroscience, so let me comment. The human brain has around 100,000,000,000 neurons and 1,000,000,000,000,000 individual synapses (rough estimates, no one knows for sure). That makes the brain by far the most complicated structure in the known universe. Furthermore, techniques for studying the brain have only existed for around 80 years. So the apparent lack of real progress in neuroscience is understandable, given the complexity of the problem. Also, we do know more than you might think, but we still have a very incomplete picture of how the brain works, partially due to the lack of robust experimental techniques, as you point out.
I would have thought there would have been far more interest into researching how the brain functions.
Well, I was at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington DC in November, and there were around 28,000 neuroscientists in attendance. Judging by the number of people from my department who did not attend, I'd say that represents 5-10% of the total neuroscience research community in this country. I'd challenge you to find another research field with that much active research.
Why?
First, I'm not sure how implanted sensory or neural augmentation differs in any significant way from contact lenses, pacemakers, hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, or for that matter, airplanes, space ships, submarines, vaccines, or virtually any other technology. Technology, by definition, allows humans to overcome inherent biological limitations, by working more efficiently or precisely, or by working in adverse environments. Obviously war is made more efficient and lethal by technology, but so is medicine, communication, economics, and transportation. But we don't outlaw all medical research because biological weapons exist, or aeronautics research because warplanes exist.
Second, looking at current events I'd argue that international treaties banning this type of technology would probably be unenforceable. Rogue states and superpowers could easily and willfully circumvent any treaty, given the right political motivation. Besides, we are decades if not centuries away from any practical technology pertaining to cybernetic augmentation, despite what you may have seen in Ghost in the Shell.
You missed the point here, buddy. The point is that Verhoeven knows how to direct bloody, violent sci-fi action. As in "imagine Starship Troopers without all the politics". You'd be left with silly dialogue, B-grade acting, but a violent, dark, atmospheric movie. In other words, what Doom should be.
"The entire video game industry's history thus far has been an aberration," Koster told the audience. "It has been a mutant monster only made possible by unconnected computers. People always play games together. All of you learned to play games with each other. When you were kids, you played tag, tea parties, cops and robbers, what have you. The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal."
I think I prefer single player in a lot of instances. Single player allows you to get immersed in a cohesive story, where everything happens within a world with its own logic, rules, atmosphere, etc. While multiplayer certainly has its place, it makes me shudder to think that I could play through a game like Half-Life 2 while Combine soldiers blurt out things like "im teh 1337!!!111! ur pwned111!!!11" every two seconds. It would totally destroy the experience. I want to be able to play through a game without stupid distractions like that ruining the feel of the story.