I didn't try to sound to elitist but it does appear that way as written. What I was trying to get at is that DVDs do look significantly worse on most HD setups. You shouldn't need a 10k+ system any midrange HDTV should show some improvement using HD sources over upconverted DVDs.
To many people buy lots of expensive HD stuff then feed ONLY upconverted (or regular) DVDs into it without at least seeing the difference real HD content makes. Since you have Dish Network HD you can pick up lots of quality entertainment that way and I can definitely see why you wouldn't bother jumping into the format war.
As far as the physical media problem. I'm probably one of the rare people who actually like having the disc. I'm usually pretty careful with my discs and I've never had one damaged on me. On the other hand I have seen drives fail in all sorts of different ways in some of my computers. While I love my current media server setup to stream low def stuff to my XBMC, I don't trust my only copy of a movie to sit on the server (yes even with RAID). I might reconsider wanting physical media when we have enough bandwidth to easily download a 50GB movie, and some service allows me to do so multiple times.
Such a service should also let me take my video over to a friend's place so we can watch it on his setup. Unfortunately, I don't see the MPAA ever allowing more than a download once model. Plus discs are still more flexible than most download services, as long as you have players that can read them.
You don't have a nice HD setup if you think an up converted DVD looks as nice as anything on Blu-ray and HD-DVD. The OTA 1080i/720p signals from any of your local TV stations look light years better, then even a nicely up converted DVD. That is assuming you've actually seen real HD content.
Several of the big broadcast networks only have a couple shows actually filmed and broadcast in HD, a lot of their content appears to be standard def stuff scaled just like your DVDs. Oddly enough where I live the PBS affiliate has the best HD programming OTA.
If you truly want to enjoy your HD setup you really should reevaluate your decision to avoid the new formats. I'd at least pick one once the war has settled down because you're missing a lot by sticking with DVDs. It's not like you need to replace all your movies with HD stuff right away, just pick up new stuff that you like in the better format. Then again once you have several of these you might realize how terrible DVDs actually look.
The answer is sort of. Ultimately they each have similar capabilities, but for the more advanced features it's just easier to do in DX10. OpenGL takes longer than Direct3d to get any set of features pushed into the base spec, so it tends to lag Direct3D revisions.
One "good" part of OpenGL is that graphics companies don't need to wait for approval to include new features. They can release access to cutting edge features using vendor specific extensions. This was really important in the early days of consumer 3d graphics, and helped spur game development.
Of course this makes programming hard as the extensions are different between vendors and may even vary between different cards in a family (usually they try to just add on). This requires developers to create completely unique rendering paths for each card they want to support to get the best speed/features. Over time though Microsoft's Direct3D caught up with OpenGL and sort of sucked up all the good extensions into their API.
Direct3D 10's advantage is that it puts out a spec and requires all cards fully implement it. Unlike previous versions of DX you can't be DX 10 compatible and leave out features. This really helps eliminate the need for separate rendering paths to make any specific feature work, and so makes development much easier.
So the short of it is they can both do the same stuff, it's just more difficult at the moment with OpenGL.
(Another interesting thing to note is that I have heard rumors that once Direct3d came out Microsoft, who also happens to sit on the OpenGL ARB, slowed down the adoption of some features into the main OpenGL spec. This left them ramping Direct3D at a faster rate.)
I'm definitely not a fan of steam/digital distribution. I hate it so much that while I was a great fan of Half-life I've never purchased HL 2 simply because of Steam. I hate being dependant on a network connection and someone else for access to games I might buy. Why should my single player game require that I log onto the 'net before I play it? What happens when I'm on my laptop, or even on my desktop but don't have 'net access and want to play some games without being able to get online?
How do I know that such a service will continue to exist as long as I want to play my games? I still go back and play my old games like Wing Commander, and Descent. Are Origin Systems and Interplay still around to authorize my play if I didn't have the disks?
Software companies and distribution systems come and go. By at least having some physical media that I can personally take care of, I can guarantee that I'll be able to play in the future. Systems such as Steam just don't allow this. You're counting on the fact that the service will still be available in 5 years, but companies come and go. You also are sort of counting that the games work on the latest systems/hardware. I actually have older systems or might duel boot an OS so I could go back and play an older game that doesn't work with XP.
How long do you think a company would support their old software/clients on a dated system? In most cases not very long. Many great games just don't work after a few years and lose support. Steam doesn't really make it that less expensive to keep patching an old game. In 5 years the best support you'll be getting for most old games is grabbing some patches off a download site. Half-life, is a rare exception to that rule.
My other big complaint is steam requires you be online to play. Sure you can play HL 2 offline, just make sure you authorized with steam first, and didn't shut it down. Steam can be a nice compliment to an online component of a game, but the hassles and restrictions it puts upon me for single player/offline gaming are not worth the hassle. If I could download and burn copies of my games that worked completely independently of the digital distribution system then I might be interested. Until then I'm not touching steam.
As you can see my concerns are very similar to yours, but rather than seeing steam as a solution I see it as just another problem. The difference is you rely on someone else have access to you games, while I trust myself to do a better job.
Actually with most states you're technically required by law to report such purchases on your income tax forms and pay a use tax, usually equal to the sales tax, for such items. Realistically most states don't bother trying to monitor this except for large business purchases.
Would I accept a DRM scheme that ONLY prevented illegal copying and other illegal uses? Sure.
But such a system could never be built. For me to buy into a DRM scheme they would have to allow me to back up any and all files as I wish. Watch, listen, or read such files on any equipment that would be capable of accessing such information if it wasn't DRMed, and not expire or limit my ability to access the data in the future.
The problem is that with any scheme is that both legal in illegal actions will likely look identical to the system. Let's use music as an example. I should be able to copy my song to my MP3 player, leave a copy on my computer, share the song over a network with other devices in my house, and burn as many CD's as I want as long as I only play one copy of the song at once. How would such a system be able to tell that in one case I'm burning a CD to use in my car, but in another I'm burning one for a friend?
Sure we could require special authentication along the line, but that would require the DRM exist in EVERY device I would want to use. This isn't acceptable as I'm not about to buy new CD players, DVD players, or other playback devices. It also seems to be an invasion of privacy as any scheme would require constant monitoring of everything I do.
So while such a system initially sounds great, implementing such a thing will probably never happen.
Actually the RSX to main system RAM didn't suck at all. In fact it's almost as fast as accessing the video memory. The bottleneck is that reads from the Cell processor to the Video RAM are orders of magnitude slower than RSX reads to the video RAM.
The solution? Have RSX write it's output to main memory if the Cell will need to read it. RSX to main memory write speeds are about the same as Cell main memory write speeds.
Seeing as how the premium PS3 supports HDCP over its HDMI connecter I don't think this is a problem at all. Plus all the first gen blu-ray titles don't enable HDCP or content protection as they wouldn't work on most of the current hi-def TV's.
So even in that case you should be able to play blu-ray movies until studios start setting the HDCP flag. Even then it will play blu-ray movies they just get downsampled to normal content (sucks I know).
I do wish the big content providers would stop being so paranoid and just make it easy for people to watch legally purchased films.
If this is really accurate to 3mph I can imagine police in the future just mailing tickets to people based on cellphone data. It's annoying enough as some places are installing cameras/radar sensors to just mail you speeding tickets.
Can you imagine if anytime you happen to go above the speedlimit in cell range you get a ticket? Everyone will be driving 5 miles under the speed limit all the time to "protect" themselves. I can also see this being used by insurance companies to increase rates on people who tend to speed.
On the plus side there might be some advantage to driving with the cell off with this technology. It might become the only way to get away with speeding. At least some people will get off the phone and pay attention while driving.
Compared to existing NICs their card actually seems to slow down performance.
If you read their white paper http://www.killernic.com/KillerNic/PDFs/KillerNic_ LLR_White_Paper.pdf/ you can see that their card can generate 20.15 MegaBytes/s of throughput. From the results in their whitepaper they come out far on top, beating NVIDIA's nForce system by almost 3x the performance.
Anandtech has an interesting comparison of ethernet performance in one of their mainboard reviews http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2696&p=11/. Anandtech's benchmark paints a totally different story. All the chipsets featured in the whitepaper are included in this review, and as you can see, they perform significantly better than Bigfoot leads you to believe. They are all able to sustain upwards of 118 MB/s of performance (divide the benchmark results by 8 for MegaBytes). While I know it's hard to directly compare benchmarks their results are so far off that I find them very suspect.
This new item is nothing more than Quantum Speaker Cables for PC Gamers.
That's because the finale of season 5 is the orginal finale of season 4. When they were renewed at the last minute they threw together the season 4 finale and moved "Sleeping in light", out to the 5th season.
What sort of crash are you getting? Kernel Panic, hard lock?
I have a Powerbook G4 and I only ever reboot it for updates. I've had uptimes of over a month with it. I did have some problems with kernel panics 6 months ago but it I figured out it was because I had NO freespace on the boot partition. Make sure you have a gigabyte or two of free space otherwise you're system will crash on some memory allocations.
Otherwise I would suspect you have some bad memory or some other hardware issue with your system.
You are correct in that, but why choose Direct X over the cross platform OpenGL? It's actually pretty simple.
DirectX supports more features out of the box. It turns out that while you can do anything with OpenGL that you can in DX many of the features are implemented as vendor specific OpenGL extensions.
For developer's this means writing multiple code paths for more than one GPU, which they do some of with DirectX but OpenGL makes this worse. Of course this isn't the whole story. OpenGL has slowly been moving many of these features into the standard but the committee nature of the OpenGL ARB can make this a slow process.
Of course Microsoft sit's on this board and probably helps keep this process as slow as possible. I have heard that when some new OpenGL features get suggested Microsoft does it's best to squash them to prevent competition with DirectX.
Hmm, my 9800 Pro is running the game great. I'm getting a consistent and smooth framerate at 1440x900. I left all the details at the default detected settings except for water reflections which I turned on.
Maybe you have some spyware or bad drivers clogging up your system.
What you people don't seem to understand is that you can take a $150 xbox and use it as a multimedia center that is quiet, fits by the TV, easily portable, has a nice looking display, and plugs into just about any TV with little effort.
Find me a computer that meets all this criteria. Sure I can get a shuttlebox and have it sit by my TV, but even with a $60 ATI or NVIDIA card its challenging to read any of the text on a standard TV (I'm not talking HDTV). Of course the shuttlebox will sound louder than the xbox while it's on, and requires a mouse/keyboard to be of much use.
The xbox unit is just much more convienent with xbmc that there is really no need for the PC. One of my roomates has a shuttlebox he previously used to play movies, games, etc on our TV. Now we only use my xbox as it works better with less hassle. As far as movie storage goes, we just have the programs we want to watched ripped and sitting on a file server in our apartment. We don't need a special media center PC for this since the xbox does a great job streaming anything we want to watch over our network.
I also don't understand what a barebones box with "extra" memory has to do with crushing the xbox? Crush it at what? Gaming performance? You don't need gigabytes of memory and a 4GHz Pentium EE to play MOVIES on a television. Also where can I find a barebones PC that fits the form factor of the xbox for less than $150? Because spending more than that means you're getting ripped off since the xbox can play the same movies for that lower cost.
The xbox can play movies better than some mid-range PC's (yes I've seen some stutter on files xbmc plays fine.) Your attack on the previous poster doesn't even respond to any of his points (except of his spelling of morons). Calling other people morons (this also goes for the previous poster) isn't productive when debating the merits of an using an xbox or PC to play movies.
Actually NVIDIA is providing chips to console manufactuers as well. They did XBOX 1 (Yeah this is going out) and they have the RSX chip which is going to be used by the PS3 (whenever that comes out).
Also as I mentioned in a previous post while they don't buy cards from other companies Intel is actually the leading graphics chip manufactuer. Just think. All those chipsets and their horrible integrated graphics just add up.
They also currently win in GPU volumes (and revenue). Intel is the largest GPU manufactuer followed by ATI, and NVIDIA in a close third. Thing is ATI and INTEL currently have greater OEM/Integrated market penetration than NVIDIA.
So while INTEL is the biggest know anyone who actually can game on one of those integrated decellerators?
If Microsoft is planning on attracting Mom Gamers they need to get WoW ported to their console. Previous to this game the only games my Mother, who is in the 40+ age group, would touch is Freecell, Spider Solitare and any other little puzzle games she could find (usually just whatever comes with Windows).
But over the summer my Mother started playing WoW on my account at the urging of my brothers. Now I have to fight with her over game time. Since I no longer live at home I find myself being kicked off WoW at all times of the day as she logs in to play her character. I think she is spending more time on the game than I or my brother's do.
She isn't the best player by far but she is slowly impoving and I don't see her stopping anytime soon. I'm quite amazed I can call and find that she has spent most of her day wandering around completing quests online. I can see the time coming when I can't play because she's on a MC raid while I'm still hoping to pick up my class set from early raid instances.
I've seen this problem before and it turned out a bad stick of ram was causing the random videocard lockups. Took me forever and a couple different cards to figure this out. Try running a memory test or pulling out and swapping DIMs to see if this improves the problem.
Bad RAM seems to cause lots of computer problems in various other components.
ATI had really, really bad hardware until the 8500 (RAGE anyone?) and crappy, crappy drivers until the 9700. When ATI bought ArtX the team that designed the gamecube they went on to use that architecture in the 9700 which was the first time ATI had anything on nVidia.
Even now ATI's driver's are their biggest weakpoint. Why does their control panel load up the.net CLI and have it consume hundred's of megabytes of virtual memory and system memory on my system? Their old control panel was fine.
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I didn't try to sound to elitist but it does appear that way as written. What I was trying to get at is that DVDs do look significantly worse on most HD setups. You shouldn't need a 10k+ system any midrange HDTV should show some improvement using HD sources over upconverted DVDs.
To many people buy lots of expensive HD stuff then feed ONLY upconverted (or regular) DVDs into it without at least seeing the difference real HD content makes. Since you have Dish Network HD you can pick up lots of quality entertainment that way and I can definitely see why you wouldn't bother jumping into the format war.
As far as the physical media problem. I'm probably one of the rare people who actually like having the disc. I'm usually pretty careful with my discs and I've never had one damaged on me. On the other hand I have seen drives fail in all sorts of different ways in some of my computers. While I love my current media server setup to stream low def stuff to my XBMC, I don't trust my only copy of a movie to sit on the server (yes even with RAID). I might reconsider wanting physical media when we have enough bandwidth to easily download a 50GB movie, and some service allows me to do so multiple times.
Such a service should also let me take my video over to a friend's place so we can watch it on his setup. Unfortunately, I don't see the MPAA ever allowing more than a download once model. Plus discs are still more flexible than most download services, as long as you have players that can read them.
You don't have a nice HD setup if you think an up converted DVD looks as nice as anything on Blu-ray and HD-DVD. The OTA 1080i/720p signals from any of your local TV stations look light years better, then even a nicely up converted DVD. That is assuming you've actually seen real HD content.
Several of the big broadcast networks only have a couple shows actually filmed and broadcast in HD, a lot of their content appears to be standard def stuff scaled just like your DVDs. Oddly enough where I live the PBS affiliate has the best HD programming OTA.
If you truly want to enjoy your HD setup you really should reevaluate your decision to avoid the new formats. I'd at least pick one once the war has settled down because you're missing a lot by sticking with DVDs. It's not like you need to replace all your movies with HD stuff right away, just pick up new stuff that you like in the better format. Then again once you have several of these you might realize how terrible DVDs actually look.
Of course if you're using C99 you don't even need to define your index variables outside your loops.
Obviously you haven't been to WI where the liquor flows plentifully and cheap.
The 360 already supports many of the DX10 features. It's basically supports an early implementation of the DX10 spec.
The answer is sort of. Ultimately they each have similar capabilities, but for the more advanced features it's just easier to do in DX10. OpenGL takes longer than Direct3d to get any set of features pushed into the base spec, so it tends to lag Direct3D revisions.
One "good" part of OpenGL is that graphics companies don't need to wait for approval to include new features. They can release access to cutting edge features using vendor specific extensions. This was really important in the early days of consumer 3d graphics, and helped spur game development.
Of course this makes programming hard as the extensions are different between vendors and may even vary between different cards in a family (usually they try to just add on). This requires developers to create completely unique rendering paths for each card they want to support to get the best speed/features. Over time though Microsoft's Direct3D caught up with OpenGL and sort of sucked up all the good extensions into their API.
Direct3D 10's advantage is that it puts out a spec and requires all cards fully implement it. Unlike previous versions of DX you can't be DX 10 compatible and leave out features. This really helps eliminate the need for separate rendering paths to make any specific feature work, and so makes development much easier.
So the short of it is they can both do the same stuff, it's just more difficult at the moment with OpenGL.
(Another interesting thing to note is that I have heard rumors that once Direct3d came out Microsoft, who also happens to sit on the OpenGL ARB, slowed down the adoption of some features into the main OpenGL spec. This left them ramping Direct3D at a faster rate.)
I'm definitely not a fan of steam/digital distribution. I hate it so much that while I was a great fan of Half-life I've never purchased HL 2 simply because of Steam. I hate being dependant on a network connection and someone else for access to games I might buy. Why should my single player game require that I log onto the 'net before I play it? What happens when I'm on my laptop, or even on my desktop but don't have 'net access and want to play some games without being able to get online?
How do I know that such a service will continue to exist as long as I want to play my games? I still go back and play my old games like Wing Commander, and Descent. Are Origin Systems and Interplay still around to authorize my play if I didn't have the disks?
Software companies and distribution systems come and go. By at least having some physical media that I can personally take care of, I can guarantee that I'll be able to play in the future. Systems such as Steam just don't allow this. You're counting on the fact that the service will still be available in 5 years, but companies come and go. You also are sort of counting that the games work on the latest systems/hardware. I actually have older systems or might duel boot an OS so I could go back and play an older game that doesn't work with XP.
How long do you think a company would support their old software/clients on a dated system? In most cases not very long. Many great games just don't work after a few years and lose support. Steam doesn't really make it that less expensive to keep patching an old game. In 5 years the best support you'll be getting for most old games is grabbing some patches off a download site. Half-life, is a rare exception to that rule.
My other big complaint is steam requires you be online to play. Sure you can play HL 2 offline, just make sure you authorized with steam first, and didn't shut it down. Steam can be a nice compliment to an online component of a game, but the hassles and restrictions it puts upon me for single player/offline gaming are not worth the hassle. If I could download and burn copies of my games that worked completely independently of the digital distribution system then I might be interested. Until then I'm not touching steam.
As you can see my concerns are very similar to yours, but rather than seeing steam as a solution I see it as just another problem. The difference is you rely on someone else have access to you games, while I trust myself to do a better job.
Actually with most states you're technically required by law to report such purchases on your income tax forms and pay a use tax, usually equal to the sales tax, for such items. Realistically most states don't bother trying to monitor this except for large business purchases.
Would I accept a DRM scheme that ONLY prevented illegal copying and other illegal uses? Sure.
But such a system could never be built. For me to buy into a DRM scheme they would have to allow me to back up any and all files as I wish. Watch, listen, or read such files on any equipment that would be capable of accessing such information if it wasn't DRMed, and not expire or limit my ability to access the data in the future.
The problem is that with any scheme is that both legal in illegal actions will likely look identical to the system. Let's use music as an example. I should be able to copy my song to my MP3 player, leave a copy on my computer, share the song over a network with other devices in my house, and burn as many CD's as I want as long as I only play one copy of the song at once. How would such a system be able to tell that in one case I'm burning a CD to use in my car, but in another I'm burning one for a friend?
Sure we could require special authentication along the line, but that would require the DRM exist in EVERY device I would want to use. This isn't acceptable as I'm not about to buy new CD players, DVD players, or other playback devices. It also seems to be an invasion of privacy as any scheme would require constant monitoring of everything I do.
So while such a system initially sounds great, implementing such a thing will probably never happen.
-Jthon
Actually the RSX to main system RAM didn't suck at all. In fact it's almost as fast as accessing the video memory. The bottleneck is that reads from the Cell processor to the Video RAM are orders of magnitude slower than RSX reads to the video RAM.
The solution? Have RSX write it's output to main memory if the Cell will need to read it. RSX to main memory write speeds are about the same as Cell main memory write speeds.
Seeing as how the premium PS3 supports HDCP over its HDMI connecter I don't think this is a problem at all. Plus all the first gen blu-ray titles don't enable HDCP or content protection as they wouldn't work on most of the current hi-def TV's.
So even in that case you should be able to play blu-ray movies until studios start setting the HDCP flag. Even then it will play blu-ray movies they just get downsampled to normal content (sucks I know).
I do wish the big content providers would stop being so paranoid and just make it easy for people to watch legally purchased films.
If this is really accurate to 3mph I can imagine police in the future just mailing tickets to people based on cellphone data. It's annoying enough as some places are installing cameras/radar sensors to just mail you speeding tickets.
Can you imagine if anytime you happen to go above the speedlimit in cell range you get a ticket? Everyone will be driving 5 miles under the speed limit all the time to "protect" themselves. I can also see this being used by insurance companies to increase rates on people who tend to speed.
On the plus side there might be some advantage to driving with the cell off with this technology. It might become the only way to get away with speeding. At least some people will get off the phone and pay attention while driving.
Compared to existing NICs their card actually seems to slow down performance.
_ LLR_White_Paper.pdf/ you can see that their card can generate 20.15 MegaBytes/s of throughput. From the results in their whitepaper they come out far on top, beating NVIDIA's nForce system by almost 3x the performance.
/ . Anandtech's benchmark paints a totally different story. All the chipsets featured in the whitepaper are included in this review, and as you can see, they perform significantly better than Bigfoot leads you to believe. They are all able to sustain upwards of 118 MB/s of performance (divide the benchmark results by 8 for MegaBytes). While I know it's hard to directly compare benchmarks their results are so far off that I find them very suspect.
If you read their white paper http://www.killernic.com/KillerNic/PDFs/KillerNic
Anandtech has an interesting comparison of ethernet performance in one of their mainboard reviews http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2696&p=11
This new item is nothing more than Quantum Speaker Cables for PC Gamers.
That's because the finale of season 5 is the orginal finale of season 4. When they were renewed at the last minute they threw together the season 4 finale and moved "Sleeping in light", out to the 5th season.
What sort of crash are you getting? Kernel Panic, hard lock?
I have a Powerbook G4 and I only ever reboot it for updates. I've had uptimes of over a month with it. I did have some problems with kernel panics 6 months ago but it I figured out it was because I had NO freespace on the boot partition. Make sure you have a gigabyte or two of free space otherwise you're system will crash on some memory allocations.
Otherwise I would suspect you have some bad memory or some other hardware issue with your system.
You are correct in that, but why choose Direct X over the cross platform OpenGL? It's actually pretty simple.
DirectX supports more features out of the box. It turns out that while you can do anything with OpenGL that you can in DX many of the features are implemented as vendor specific OpenGL extensions.
For developer's this means writing multiple code paths for more than one GPU, which they do some of with DirectX but OpenGL makes this worse. Of course this isn't the whole story. OpenGL has slowly been moving many of these features into the standard but the committee nature of the OpenGL ARB can make this a slow process.
Of course Microsoft sit's on this board and probably helps keep this process as slow as possible. I have heard that when some new OpenGL features get suggested Microsoft does it's best to squash them to prevent competition with DirectX.
The definition of species is not as simple as you seem to think. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species#Definitions_o f_species for a definition.
The article seems to have been pulled from the blog. Does anyone have the text of the article still?
Hmm, my 9800 Pro is running the game great. I'm getting a consistent and smooth framerate at 1440x900. I left all the details at the default detected settings except for water reflections which I turned on.
Maybe you have some spyware or bad drivers clogging up your system.
What you people don't seem to understand is that you can take a $150 xbox and use it as a multimedia center that is quiet, fits by the TV, easily portable, has a nice looking display, and plugs into just about any TV with little effort.
Find me a computer that meets all this criteria. Sure I can get a shuttlebox and have it sit by my TV, but even with a $60 ATI or NVIDIA card its challenging to read any of the text on a standard TV (I'm not talking HDTV). Of course the shuttlebox will sound louder than the xbox while it's on, and requires a mouse/keyboard to be of much use.
The xbox unit is just much more convienent with xbmc that there is really no need for the PC. One of my roomates has a shuttlebox he previously used to play movies, games, etc on our TV. Now we only use my xbox as it works better with less hassle. As far as movie storage goes, we just have the programs we want to watched ripped and sitting on a file server in our apartment. We don't need a special media center PC for this since the xbox does a great job streaming anything we want to watch over our network.
I also don't understand what a barebones box with "extra" memory has to do with crushing the xbox? Crush it at what? Gaming performance? You don't need gigabytes of memory and a 4GHz Pentium EE to play MOVIES on a television. Also where can I find a barebones PC that fits the form factor of the xbox for less than $150? Because spending more than that means you're getting ripped off since the xbox can play the same movies for that lower cost.
The xbox can play movies better than some mid-range PC's (yes I've seen some stutter on files xbmc plays fine.) Your attack on the previous poster doesn't even respond to any of his points (except of his spelling of morons). Calling other people morons (this also goes for the previous poster) isn't productive when debating the merits of an using an xbox or PC to play movies.
Actually NVIDIA is providing chips to console manufactuers as well. They did XBOX 1 (Yeah this is going out) and they have the RSX chip which is going to be used by the PS3 (whenever that comes out).
Also as I mentioned in a previous post while they don't buy cards from other companies Intel is actually the leading graphics chip manufactuer. Just think. All those chipsets and their horrible integrated graphics just add up.
They also currently win in GPU volumes (and revenue). Intel is the largest GPU manufactuer followed by ATI, and NVIDIA in a close third. Thing is ATI and INTEL currently have greater OEM/Integrated market penetration than NVIDIA. So while INTEL is the biggest know anyone who actually can game on one of those integrated decellerators?
If Microsoft is planning on attracting Mom Gamers they need to get WoW ported to their console. Previous to this game the only games my Mother, who is in the 40+ age group, would touch is Freecell, Spider Solitare and any other little puzzle games she could find (usually just whatever comes with Windows).
But over the summer my Mother started playing WoW on my account at the urging of my brothers. Now I have to fight with her over game time. Since I no longer live at home I find myself being kicked off WoW at all times of the day as she logs in to play her character. I think she is spending more time on the game than I or my brother's do.
She isn't the best player by far but she is slowly impoving and I don't see her stopping anytime soon. I'm quite amazed I can call and find that she has spent most of her day wandering around completing quests online. I can see the time coming when I can't play because she's on a MC raid while I'm still hoping to pick up my class set from early raid instances.
I've seen this problem before and it turned out a bad stick of ram was causing the random videocard lockups. Took me forever and a couple different cards to figure this out. Try running a memory test or pulling out and swapping DIMs to see if this improves the problem.
Bad RAM seems to cause lots of computer problems in various other components.
ATI had really, really bad hardware until the 8500 (RAGE anyone?) and crappy, crappy drivers until the 9700. When ATI bought ArtX the team that designed the gamecube they went on to use that architecture in the 9700 which was the first time ATI had anything on nVidia. Even now ATI's driver's are their biggest weakpoint. Why does their control panel load up the .net CLI and have it consume hundred's of megabytes of virtual memory and system memory on my system? Their old control panel was fine.