You think that's bad, wait until you realize that this means that books written outside the US will be banned inside the US because the represent patent infringement.
The US is going to start banning books
I wonder how they're going to dispose of confiscated books, hmm? Perhaps burning them would be an efficient and effective way to destroy them.
Yes, of course, the US must confiscate and burn all banned books! Because this is what capitalistic democracies do to protect their citizens.
How many rights does a democracy have to curtail or eliminate before it ceases to be a democracy?
Think I'm overreacting? Then think of all the rediculous things that software patents have allowed and then apply that to BOOKS.
I was referring to the enormous bundles that many stores are forcing on us. As in, the stores that don't sell the core or premium packages, but ONLY sell their bundles.
The only xbox 360 hardware for sale at Gamestop is currently priced at 1999.99$. Yes, two thousand dollars. That's the only one that isn't listed as sold out. Well, unless you count the $4499.68 bundle that comes with the plasma screen TV.
Yes, Microsoft's actual forced bundle is not that high compared to those(Though, price it in Canadian dollars and you're talking $600 or more for the harddrive version).
I'm just trying to point out how rediculous all this forced bundling is. My ideal launch would include the premium 360 (The hard-drive model for $399 US) as the only option, priced at $299. A consumer would then be able to purchase as many games as they want to go with it. Don't forget that the 360 is more than just a game console, it also has extensive media capabilities. Considering that the core xbox 360 costs the same as the Linksys Windows Media Extender does (did at launch, $300), and does a lot more, it IS possible that somebody would want to purchase it without any games.
Waiting is a bad idea. The longer you wait, the longer the chance Microsoft has to change the internals to be less moddable. By default, the earliest models are going to be the most moddable.
$399 for the console plus Microsoft requires it be bundled with two games (Let's say $100), that's $500 for the non-crippled version, and $400 for the crippled (sans-harddrive) version.
That's a lot of money for a console. Now, if I go to Ye Olde Videogame Shoppe, I'm going to see a new XBOX bundled with 2 games for $179. I'm going to see a 360 with 2 games for $600. Does the 360 really offer me three times the value? I really doubt it.
"each console must leave the store with at *least* two games each."
In other words they are FORCING the $700+ bundles that stores like GameStop are trying to force on customers, except Microsoft is ensuring that EVERY retailer in the country does this so that consumers have no choice. Nice.
The solution is to buy memory that comes with a lifetime MANUFACTURER warranty. Kingston (Think Kingston Value Ram and Kingston HyperX) memory comes with a lifetime warranty, and you deal directly with the RAM manufacturer, not the vendor/store.
I had a SODIMM in my laptop test as faulty, so I gave Kingston a call. It wasn't much trouble to get replaced, they didn't care about when I purchased it, and they even cross-shipped me a replacement. Much more reliable than a small computer store that might not be around tommorow.
Really? The guy I knew kicked my ass at Age of Empires 2 every time. He seemed pretty high-functioning. I quote the wikipedia article: In pursuit of these interests, the person with Asperger's often manifests extremely sophisticated reason, an almost obsessive focus, and eidetic memory. Hans Asperger called his young patients "little professors" because he thought his thirteen-year-old patients had as comprehensive and nuanced an understanding of their field of interest as university professors. One thing to keep in mind is that Asperger's is one of the mildest forms of autism, and doesn't mean people can't be high-functioning autistics. Many are.
On the other hand, the Wikipedia article claims as a fact that a bunch of people have Asperger's (like Bill Gates) when in fact there exists only speculation that these people MIGHT have Asperger's.
Anyhow, I must admit that I've been somewhat skeptical about Bram myself. Self diagnosis is a tricky thing. But from descriptions in interviews of how he's behaved, he has SOME sort of condition.
I went to high school with somebody who has Asperger's, he was obsessed with gaming and it was almost impossible to get him to stop. Of course that was just one of the things. He had other obsessions. At the lunch table if you took his lunch box and moved it to the other side of the table he'd go crazy trying to get it back; like he had lost all self control and his only goal in life was to get that lunchbox back. Even if it was empty.
Not everybody with the same condition is exactly the same.
Since Apple offers television shows, music videos, and other copyrighted content, I assume they must have support for some DRM.
I don't think this program is likely to be targetted. By transferring direct from Tivo to iPod the content industry can't claim that this is helping piracy, because the content can't be distributed. Yes, I'm sure there is a way to capture it in transit, but lots of other programs can do that much easier. This is not aiding in DISTRIBUTING the content, so I see no problems.
Exactly. Do some math. I need a task done, and it is going to take 1 million CPU hours. Maybe I need to render a movie or something. I need it all done in 1 month.
Well, I could pay Sun a million dollars for ~1400 CPUs for a month, or I could spend about a million dollars and get 350 dual-processor dual-core Opterons, use them for a month, and then sell them at pretty close to retail, bringing my costs to way under a million dollars.
Or you can keep them and use them for more projects.
Either way, Sun's solution isn't really cheaper than a company doing it yourself. It's more expensive than buying the hardware yourself and paying some people to set it up. This is why when small companies need to render EFX for a movie, they buy up a lot of hardware, use it to make the movie, and then sell it off again. It's cheaper that way. They did this for Riddick.
No, he did so because he focuses on a problem to solve at the expense of other things. He didn't intend to turn BitTorrent into a business, and only founded the company because his father kept bugging him about it. He has Asbergers, a form of Autism, and it's an obsession with solving a problem that leads him to do what he does, not business sense.
He didn't sit down and said "Hey, I have this great idea for content distribution that I think I can make money from."
He's said this numerous times in various interviews.
You're missing my point. Somebody made a one character change in the preferences dialog of a program to default to a different drive letter. Now they're saving on an external drive. Why is this special? Lots of people do this for lots of things, it is the entire point of external drives. External drives are VERY old news, as is saving to them.
People have been saving general files to the iPod since it came out years ago. I don't see anything newsworthy here.
The iPod can be mounted via USB just like any other external drive. So why is changing the program from saving to drive C by default to drive F anything special?
Well, it was ORIGINALLY targetted at GeForce (Original) cards, I guess you mean targetted at GeForce 3 cards when it was released?
The DX7-capability (not that he used DX, but it gives a good measuring stick) paths were actually needed. Remember that the GeForce 4 MX cards were still DX7 like the original GeForce. They had no pixel/vertex shaders. So that DX7 path was needed for cards that were very popular when D3 actually came OUT.
See, D3 was very scalable. It ran well on DX7 cards and still looked good. It also ran well on and took advantage of DX8 and DX9 cards. Halo PC, it would seem, from what I've heard here, was targetted mainly at DX7 cards, with DX8/9 thrown in as a bonus. And it ran horribly on the DX8/9 hardware compared to similar quality engines.
So because the game was targetted at DX7 cards, they only did the minimum effort to port the shaders for DX8 cards? Considering Halo's heavy use of shaders and the fact that DX8+ cards controlled the market by 2003 that seems like a pretty stupid thing to do.
I would have thought they'd target DX8+ cards and THEN worry about running without shaders.
It could be argued that by the time the PC port of Halo rolled around (What was it, a year later? More) GPUs had surpassed the XBOX. Halo PC came out 2 years after Halo XBOX. It came out in 2003 for PC. IIRC the XBOX's GPU was somewhere between a GeForce 3 and a GeForce 4. DirectX 8 in any event.
The Radeon 9700 came out a year before Halo PC came out. By the time Halo PC was out, the Radeon 9800 series was on the market. Either way, the 9700/9800 are a lot more powerful in every respect than the XBOX's GPU. At the time I had a Radeon 9700 Pro, and I'd bought mine right as the 9700 was being replaced.
Anyhow, that's sort of off-topic. If higher-resolution versions of the detail textures existed, then the problem doesn't change. If they didn't exist, well, as I understand it you would use a small number of detail textures to create a large number of in-game textures, so there would possibly not be that much work compared to redoing all the textures.
I'd be wary though. We all saw how when Halo was ported to PC, despite having videocards that were twice as powerful as what the XBOX had, and CPU that were twice as fast, the PC port still chugged. Most people seem to agree that that was simply due to a lack of optimization for the new platform (As in, they did as direct a port as possible with as little effort as possible).
I looked it up, this is indeed what is going on, but I got a bit more info. Apparently it does this between the two closest values it can display. So if it wants to display a brightness of 129, the closest values to that in 6-bit land are something like 32 and 33 (Going from 0-255 to 0-64). So the display would alternate between 32 and 33 rapidly, presumable spending a bit more time on 32 since the exact value it wants is closer to 37.4.
So the 3ms time is gray-to-gray. IIRC that is changing from 50% to 0% back to 50%, a total change of %100 brightness. Here we want only to go from 32 to 33 and back, a total change of 3%. Because this is such a small change, the LCD should be able to make the change in much less than 3ms. So in theory according to my possibly flawed logic the LCD should be capable of alternating between the two colours in something like 0.1ms.
This is 10000hz, and flicker-free is considered 72hz, so I think we're pretty safe from flicker. Regardless if my math is correct or not it is stated on Tom's that the LCD screen alternates much faster than the response time between the two closest colours.
Even at the old 16ms displays they would have been more than fast enough to do this.
Better anti-aliasing isn't pie-in-the-sky for the XBOX-360. It's a given.
First of all, it's not a matter of "better", Halo 1/2 didn't have ANY. As for it being a pie-in-the-sky idea, the 360 was designed from the ground up to run FSAA on every single game. The GPU has specific on-chip cache to accelerate anti-aliasing. So turning on AA in the backwards-compatibility patch is a no-brainer.
As for higher-res textures, it's not such a crazy idea. As I understand it developers often produce media at higher resolution than the final in-game res, and then scale it down. So the media probably already exists, meaning it's not a major monetary investment to produce it. The problem is of course, as mentioned, distribution. Selling a high-def content pack isn't out of the question. Throwing it online could work, but we are talking about a fair chunk of data here. A few gigs most likely. Certainly possible, Valve has proven that by pushing multi-gigabyte games through STEAM, but it might not be practical on a console like it is on a PC.
Something else to keep in mind is that the 360 ships with an overpriced 20GB drive, so there isn't exactly a lot of room there. Before you point out that it is a notebook drive, you must understand that it is overpriced even for a notebook drive. For $100 US, I expect an 60GB 4200RPM notebook drive, considering that such drives cost about $90 US at marked-up retail. Anyhow, if you throw a few gigs onto that drive, right off the bat you're eating up a pretty hefty chunk of the drive for one single game.
They easily filled up the 10,000 seats for the first one in the Hollywood Bowl. The problem would seem to be that they didn't research into their target cities well enough and just picked cities based on location.
It depends. As I understand it, LCDs with 6-bits-per-channel (18-bit color) simulate 24-bit colour by alternating pixels between values so the user sees the intended colour. (Think of it as dithering across time rather than space) It would be interesting to see some sort of quantitative measurement of how good a job this does of simulating a 24-bit panel.
Another interesting question is if a 3ms LCD (Or 5ms, or whatever this is) that has an 18-bit panel is any better at this simulation than the first 18-bit panels (at 16ms or 20ms or something) were. The lower latency panels will switch between the colours more sharply, whereas the higher latency panels will change more smoothly. Does this create a better or worse accuracy in the simulation?
Yeah, HL1 was OpenGL and Quake 1. See my other comments for that and Quake 3 (and similar).
It is important to keep in mind, though, that Unreal Engine is a Direct3D engine. It contains an unsupported beta OpenGL renderer, but considering few people if any use it, it's not worth mentioning. Unless you mean the Linux port that relies on that renderer, but I've already put forth my opinion on why Linux gaming shouldn't enter into the discussion (Yes, it would be nice to get better support for it, but it is unimportant in terms of marketshare and willingness to purchase games).
It looks likely that Oblivion will be a Direct3D game on the PC, though. It is portable, yes, so will use OpenGL where it needs to, but if they're doing both an 360 and PC port, it makes sense to use the same interface for both platforms. Less work since they're so similar.
Actually HL1 never defaulted to Direct3D. When it came out, software mode was the default, and OpenGL was the suggested 3D accelerated model. Direct 3D was only included because OpenGL support wasn't as good back then as it was now; it was a fallback, albeit one that ran much slower and with stuff missing.
I did forget it, though, yes, as I pointed out in another one of my replies. However since it is of the era of DX6 capable cards, no optimization made to modern graphics cards is going to mean anything. The game maxed out at its hardcoded cap of 100FPS years ago on hardware many generations past. Developer mode does indeed unlock that, but causes other problems, making it useless for serious gameplay.
The same could be said of the Quake 3 engine, which is indeed another engine I neglected. I was only thinking of modern engines, and Quake 3 is a few generations out of date; even the newer Q3-based games run fine on much older hardware and aren't likely to benefit from OpenGL tweaks. CoD 2 is out using a new renderer, though CoD is still popular today. It's just not a new enough engine for performance improvements to mean much.
CoR is indeed a good one that I missed. It doesn't have anywhere close to the capabilities of the Doom 3 engine (It does not use per-pixel lighting, it simply uses bumpmaps, stencil shadows, specular highlights, etc, only part of what made D3 what it was). It lacks multiplayer support, so in the long run isn't really that important. As in, it won't get the same kind of time commitment that Doom 3/Quake 4 multiplayer and mods might.
I really should have written my original statement as recent or current-gen games rather than just "games". Sloppy of me.
Professional applications are best suited to professional graphics cards, not gaming graphics cards. Professional cards use different drivers for good reason. So they are totally irrelevant in this discussion.
And note that I said major games. Cegeda is a niche product at best, and don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. ATI has a dedicated Linux driver team anyhow, so it is up to that team to put the effort into porting these optimizations to the Linux drivers.
I should point out that I missed one other major OpenGL game; Half-Life 1. Luckily it doesn't really matter in this context, since cards have been able to run that game at its hard-coded FPS cap (100FPS) for several generations; any OpenGL optimizations would be redundant at this point.
So as far as fairly recent games that would benefit from such optimizations, I think D3/Q4 is just about it. One could argue that some of the Q3 licenced games are recent enough, but IIRC some of them don't even use OpenGL, and they all run pretty well on even outdated hardware.
It boils down to if the tweak is applied only to Quake 4/Doom 3, or OpenGL apps in general.
The thing is that it is hard to tell without somebody who has both the beta driver and one of the new cards who can actually fire up some other OpenGL games. The difference in that case may be academic, since there are few (if any) major games that use OpenGL other than Q4/D3.
The way I see it, they've had performance issues with OpenGL games, and it would seem, as far as most people are concerned, that they've fixed them. It doesn't matter that it doesn't apply to Direct3D games; they had a weakness in their product and they've improved upon it. They already had the performance lead in similar-generation products in many Direct3D titles, so they're just trying to fix up the ones where they are at a disadvantage.
The 7800 still has other advantages over the X800 XT in my mind; it is a single-slot card for one thing, while the X1800 XT is a two-slot card. I'm pretty dissappointed in ATI for that one.
Slashdot Mirror
You think that's bad, wait until you realize that this means that books written outside the US will be banned inside the US because the represent patent infringement.
The US is going to start banning books
I wonder how they're going to dispose of confiscated books, hmm? Perhaps burning them would be an efficient and effective way to destroy them.
Yes, of course, the US must confiscate and burn all banned books! Because this is what capitalistic democracies do to protect their citizens.
How many rights does a democracy have to curtail or eliminate before it ceases to be a democracy?
Think I'm overreacting? Then think of all the rediculous things that software patents have allowed and then apply that to BOOKS.
I was referring to the enormous bundles that many stores are forcing on us. As in, the stores that don't sell the core or premium packages, but ONLY sell their bundles.
The only xbox 360 hardware for sale at Gamestop is currently priced at 1999.99$. Yes, two thousand dollars. That's the only one that isn't listed as sold out. Well, unless you count the $4499.68 bundle that comes with the plasma screen TV.
Yes, Microsoft's actual forced bundle is not that high compared to those(Though, price it in Canadian dollars and you're talking $600 or more for the harddrive version).
I'm just trying to point out how rediculous all this forced bundling is. My ideal launch would include the premium 360 (The hard-drive model for $399 US) as the only option, priced at $299. A consumer would then be able to purchase as many games as they want to go with it. Don't forget that the 360 is more than just a game console, it also has extensive media capabilities. Considering that the core xbox 360 costs the same as the Linksys Windows Media Extender does (did at launch, $300), and does a lot more, it IS possible that somebody would want to purchase it without any games.
What does it matter if it removes the whole thing when you can't use it? Sony's download website for the removal tool REQUIRES INTERNET EXPLORER .
If you use Firefox or Opera, you cannot remove the rootkit from your Windows box. Sorry.
The site, BTW, requires IE because it installs an ActiveX component that checks for the rootkit before allowing you to download the uninstaller.
Waiting is a bad idea. The longer you wait, the longer the chance Microsoft has to change the internals to be less moddable. By default, the earliest models are going to be the most moddable.
$399 for the console plus Microsoft requires it be bundled with two games (Let's say $100), that's $500 for the non-crippled version, and $400 for the crippled (sans-harddrive) version.
That's a lot of money for a console. Now, if I go to Ye Olde Videogame Shoppe, I'm going to see a new XBOX bundled with 2 games for $179. I'm going to see a 360 with 2 games for $600. Does the 360 really offer me three times the value? I really doubt it.
"each console must leave the store with at *least* two games each."
In other words they are FORCING the $700+ bundles that stores like GameStop are trying to force on customers, except Microsoft is ensuring that EVERY retailer in the country does this so that consumers have no choice. Nice.
The solution is to buy memory that comes with a lifetime MANUFACTURER warranty. Kingston (Think Kingston Value Ram and Kingston HyperX) memory comes with a lifetime warranty, and you deal directly with the RAM manufacturer, not the vendor/store.
I had a SODIMM in my laptop test as faulty, so I gave Kingston a call. It wasn't much trouble to get replaced, they didn't care about when I purchased it, and they even cross-shipped me a replacement. Much more reliable than a small computer store that might not be around tommorow.
Really? The guy I knew kicked my ass at Age of Empires 2 every time. He seemed pretty high-functioning. I quote the wikipedia article: In pursuit of these interests, the person with Asperger's often manifests extremely sophisticated reason, an almost obsessive focus, and eidetic memory. Hans Asperger called his young patients "little professors" because he thought his thirteen-year-old patients had as comprehensive and nuanced an understanding of their field of interest as university professors. One thing to keep in mind is that Asperger's is one of the mildest forms of autism, and doesn't mean people can't be high-functioning autistics. Many are.
On the other hand, the Wikipedia article claims as a fact that a bunch of people have Asperger's (like Bill Gates) when in fact there exists only speculation that these people MIGHT have Asperger's.
Anyhow, I must admit that I've been somewhat skeptical about Bram myself. Self diagnosis is a tricky thing. But from descriptions in interviews of how he's behaved, he has SOME sort of condition.
I went to high school with somebody who has Asperger's, he was obsessed with gaming and it was almost impossible to get him to stop. Of course that was just one of the things. He had other obsessions. At the lunch table if you took his lunch box and moved it to the other side of the table he'd go crazy trying to get it back; like he had lost all self control and his only goal in life was to get that lunchbox back. Even if it was empty.
Not everybody with the same condition is exactly the same.
Since Apple offers television shows, music videos, and other copyrighted content, I assume they must have support for some DRM.
I don't think this program is likely to be targetted. By transferring direct from Tivo to iPod the content industry can't claim that this is helping piracy, because the content can't be distributed. Yes, I'm sure there is a way to capture it in transit, but lots of other programs can do that much easier. This is not aiding in DISTRIBUTING the content, so I see no problems.
Exactly. Do some math. I need a task done, and it is going to take 1 million CPU hours. Maybe I need to render a movie or something. I need it all done in 1 month.
Well, I could pay Sun a million dollars for ~1400 CPUs for a month, or I could spend about a million dollars and get 350 dual-processor dual-core Opterons, use them for a month, and then sell them at pretty close to retail, bringing my costs to way under a million dollars.
Or you can keep them and use them for more projects.
Either way, Sun's solution isn't really cheaper than a company doing it yourself. It's more expensive than buying the hardware yourself and paying some people to set it up. This is why when small companies need to render EFX for a movie, they buy up a lot of hardware, use it to make the movie, and then sell it off again. It's cheaper that way. They did this for Riddick.
No, he did so because he focuses on a problem to solve at the expense of other things. He didn't intend to turn BitTorrent into a business, and only founded the company because his father kept bugging him about it. He has Asbergers, a form of Autism, and it's an obsession with solving a problem that leads him to do what he does, not business sense.
He didn't sit down and said "Hey, I have this great idea for content distribution that I think I can make money from."
He's said this numerous times in various interviews.
You're missing my point. Somebody made a one character change in the preferences dialog of a program to default to a different drive letter. Now they're saving on an external drive. Why is this special? Lots of people do this for lots of things, it is the entire point of external drives. External drives are VERY old news, as is saving to them.
People have been saving general files to the iPod since it came out years ago. I don't see anything newsworthy here.
The iPod can be mounted via USB just like any other external drive. So why is changing the program from saving to drive C by default to drive F anything special?
Well, it was ORIGINALLY targetted at GeForce (Original) cards, I guess you mean targetted at GeForce 3 cards when it was released?
The DX7-capability (not that he used DX, but it gives a good measuring stick) paths were actually needed. Remember that the GeForce 4 MX cards were still DX7 like the original GeForce. They had no pixel/vertex shaders. So that DX7 path was needed for cards that were very popular when D3 actually came OUT.
See, D3 was very scalable. It ran well on DX7 cards and still looked good. It also ran well on and took advantage of DX8 and DX9 cards. Halo PC, it would seem, from what I've heard here, was targetted mainly at DX7 cards, with DX8/9 thrown in as a bonus. And it ran horribly on the DX8/9 hardware compared to similar quality engines.
So because the game was targetted at DX7 cards, they only did the minimum effort to port the shaders for DX8 cards? Considering Halo's heavy use of shaders and the fact that DX8+ cards controlled the market by 2003 that seems like a pretty stupid thing to do.
I would have thought they'd target DX8+ cards and THEN worry about running without shaders.
It could be argued that by the time the PC port of Halo rolled around (What was it, a year later? More) GPUs had surpassed the XBOX. Halo PC came out 2 years after Halo XBOX. It came out in 2003 for PC. IIRC the XBOX's GPU was somewhere between a GeForce 3 and a GeForce 4. DirectX 8 in any event.
The Radeon 9700 came out a year before Halo PC came out. By the time Halo PC was out, the Radeon 9800 series was on the market. Either way, the 9700/9800 are a lot more powerful in every respect than the XBOX's GPU. At the time I had a Radeon 9700 Pro, and I'd bought mine right as the 9700 was being replaced.
Anyhow, that's sort of off-topic. If higher-resolution versions of the detail textures existed, then the problem doesn't change. If they didn't exist, well, as I understand it you would use a small number of detail textures to create a large number of in-game textures, so there would possibly not be that much work compared to redoing all the textures.
I'd be wary though. We all saw how when Halo was ported to PC, despite having videocards that were twice as powerful as what the XBOX had, and CPU that were twice as fast, the PC port still chugged. Most people seem to agree that that was simply due to a lack of optimization for the new platform (As in, they did as direct a port as possible with as little effort as possible).
I looked it up, this is indeed what is going on, but I got a bit more info. Apparently it does this between the two closest values it can display. So if it wants to display a brightness of 129, the closest values to that in 6-bit land are something like 32 and 33 (Going from 0-255 to 0-64). So the display would alternate between 32 and 33 rapidly, presumable spending a bit more time on 32 since the exact value it wants is closer to 37.4.
So the 3ms time is gray-to-gray. IIRC that is changing from 50% to 0% back to 50%, a total change of %100 brightness. Here we want only to go from 32 to 33 and back, a total change of 3%. Because this is such a small change, the LCD should be able to make the change in much less than 3ms. So in theory according to my possibly flawed logic the LCD should be capable of alternating between the two colours in something like 0.1ms.
This is 10000hz, and flicker-free is considered 72hz, so I think we're pretty safe from flicker. Regardless if my math is correct or not it is stated on Tom's that the LCD screen alternates much faster than the response time between the two closest colours.
Even at the old 16ms displays they would have been more than fast enough to do this.
Better anti-aliasing isn't pie-in-the-sky for the XBOX-360. It's a given.
First of all, it's not a matter of "better", Halo 1/2 didn't have ANY. As for it being a pie-in-the-sky idea, the 360 was designed from the ground up to run FSAA on every single game. The GPU has specific on-chip cache to accelerate anti-aliasing. So turning on AA in the backwards-compatibility patch is a no-brainer.
As for higher-res textures, it's not such a crazy idea. As I understand it developers often produce media at higher resolution than the final in-game res, and then scale it down. So the media probably already exists, meaning it's not a major monetary investment to produce it. The problem is of course, as mentioned, distribution. Selling a high-def content pack isn't out of the question. Throwing it online could work, but we are talking about a fair chunk of data here. A few gigs most likely. Certainly possible, Valve has proven that by pushing multi-gigabyte games through STEAM, but it might not be practical on a console like it is on a PC.
Something else to keep in mind is that the 360 ships with an overpriced 20GB drive, so there isn't exactly a lot of room there. Before you point out that it is a notebook drive, you must understand that it is overpriced even for a notebook drive. For $100 US, I expect an 60GB 4200RPM notebook drive, considering that such drives cost about $90 US at marked-up retail. Anyhow, if you throw a few gigs onto that drive, right off the bat you're eating up a pretty hefty chunk of the drive for one single game.
They easily filled up the 10,000 seats for the first one in the Hollywood Bowl. The problem would seem to be that they didn't research into their target cities well enough and just picked cities based on location.
It depends. As I understand it, LCDs with 6-bits-per-channel (18-bit color) simulate 24-bit colour by alternating pixels between values so the user sees the intended colour. (Think of it as dithering across time rather than space) It would be interesting to see some sort of quantitative measurement of how good a job this does of simulating a 24-bit panel.
Another interesting question is if a 3ms LCD (Or 5ms, or whatever this is) that has an 18-bit panel is any better at this simulation than the first 18-bit panels (at 16ms or 20ms or something) were. The lower latency panels will switch between the colours more sharply, whereas the higher latency panels will change more smoothly. Does this create a better or worse accuracy in the simulation?
Yeah, HL1 was OpenGL and Quake 1. See my other comments for that and Quake 3 (and similar).
It is important to keep in mind, though, that Unreal Engine is a Direct3D engine. It contains an unsupported beta OpenGL renderer, but considering few people if any use it, it's not worth mentioning. Unless you mean the Linux port that relies on that renderer, but I've already put forth my opinion on why Linux gaming shouldn't enter into the discussion (Yes, it would be nice to get better support for it, but it is unimportant in terms of marketshare and willingness to purchase games).
It looks likely that Oblivion will be a Direct3D game on the PC, though. It is portable, yes, so will use OpenGL where it needs to, but if they're doing both an 360 and PC port, it makes sense to use the same interface for both platforms. Less work since they're so similar.
Actually HL1 never defaulted to Direct3D. When it came out, software mode was the default, and OpenGL was the suggested 3D accelerated model. Direct 3D was only included because OpenGL support wasn't as good back then as it was now; it was a fallback, albeit one that ran much slower and with stuff missing.
I did forget it, though, yes, as I pointed out in another one of my replies. However since it is of the era of DX6 capable cards, no optimization made to modern graphics cards is going to mean anything. The game maxed out at its hardcoded cap of 100FPS years ago on hardware many generations past. Developer mode does indeed unlock that, but causes other problems, making it useless for serious gameplay.
The same could be said of the Quake 3 engine, which is indeed another engine I neglected. I was only thinking of modern engines, and Quake 3 is a few generations out of date; even the newer Q3-based games run fine on much older hardware and aren't likely to benefit from OpenGL tweaks. CoD 2 is out using a new renderer, though CoD is still popular today. It's just not a new enough engine for performance improvements to mean much.
CoR is indeed a good one that I missed. It doesn't have anywhere close to the capabilities of the Doom 3 engine (It does not use per-pixel lighting, it simply uses bumpmaps, stencil shadows, specular highlights, etc, only part of what made D3 what it was). It lacks multiplayer support, so in the long run isn't really that important. As in, it won't get the same kind of time commitment that Doom 3/Quake 4 multiplayer and mods might.
I really should have written my original statement as recent or current-gen games rather than just "games". Sloppy of me.
Professional applications are best suited to professional graphics cards, not gaming graphics cards. Professional cards use different drivers for good reason. So they are totally irrelevant in this discussion.
And note that I said major games. Cegeda is a niche product at best, and don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. ATI has a dedicated Linux driver team anyhow, so it is up to that team to put the effort into porting these optimizations to the Linux drivers.
I should point out that I missed one other major OpenGL game; Half-Life 1. Luckily it doesn't really matter in this context, since cards have been able to run that game at its hard-coded FPS cap (100FPS) for several generations; any OpenGL optimizations would be redundant at this point.
So as far as fairly recent games that would benefit from such optimizations, I think D3/Q4 is just about it. One could argue that some of the Q3 licenced games are recent enough, but IIRC some of them don't even use OpenGL, and they all run pretty well on even outdated hardware.
It boils down to if the tweak is applied only to Quake 4/Doom 3, or OpenGL apps in general.
The thing is that it is hard to tell without somebody who has both the beta driver and one of the new cards who can actually fire up some other OpenGL games. The difference in that case may be academic, since there are few (if any) major games that use OpenGL other than Q4/D3.
The way I see it, they've had performance issues with OpenGL games, and it would seem, as far as most people are concerned, that they've fixed them. It doesn't matter that it doesn't apply to Direct3D games; they had a weakness in their product and they've improved upon it. They already had the performance lead in similar-generation products in many Direct3D titles, so they're just trying to fix up the ones where they are at a disadvantage.
The 7800 still has other advantages over the X800 XT in my mind; it is a single-slot card for one thing, while the X1800 XT is a two-slot card. I'm pretty dissappointed in ATI for that one.