GG, Warcraft came out the year before C&C. Dune 2 came out 3 years after Herzog Zwei, and 2 years before WarCraft. WarCraft 2 came out the same year as C&C.
WarCraft was also the first RTS game to have hand-to-hand combat, multiplayer, and a random map generator. WarCraft 2 was the first to have naval units and persistent fog of war.
Dune 2 brought RTS to the PC and pretty much set the groundwork for everything to come, but the C&C series really didn't push the limits of the framework until much later, whereas the WC games pushed the genre forward with features that, although they may seem like obvious improvements, are standards in the genre today.
In some ways, the XBox contract is what put nVidia behind in the PC 3D graphics market. ATI's been in that market a lot longer, and bought their way into the console market with the GameCube. On the other hand, nVidia's eroded ATI's dominance in the OEM PC market, even getting into Apple's computers (where ATI had 100% of the market for quite a while). The only place nVidia's really having problems is with their high-end 3D chips, and they should be able to concentrate more on that if they aren't getting jerked around by Microsoft for a few years.
For consumers commodity hardware often is the cheaper way to go. However, for a console manufacturer, you're often dealing with the same hardware (or hardware with the same functionality) for a significant time period. Eventually people don't want to make that hardware any more, and there's a markup just to keep someone producing 2 or 3-year old hardware (especially hard drives, CPUs, GPUs). When was the last time you could find a 700MHz Intel CPU fairly easily? How long will it be before the low-end GeForce 4 cards are the same price as any given GeForce 3 or GeForce 2 card? The prices can only go down so much before the company that makes those products can't make any money by producing them, and if they're no longer mass-producing them, they're going to charge you for the cost of keeping a production line dedicated to the old product.
If you produce the hardware in house, you can utilize technology advances to reduce cost of making the same part, rather than increasing speed or making new parts (which is what drives commodity hardware costs down, and eventually drives hardware out of the market). Furthermore, you can reduce the complexity of your system.
I have a Tekken 3 T-shirt that I got with a pre-order, which was too small the day I got it (I never really understood why they gave out shirts that wouldn't fit any of the guys that were there to pick up their pre-orders). Oh well, my gf wears a lot of my old shirts at night, but I still don't think I want to see a picture of Kazuya on her.
having unlimited bandwidth means that you could afford to send to the clients every single position for every actor (including orientation etc.) and moveable object instead of having to rely excessively on client-side compensation and prediction.
and then the aimbots and see-through-wall hacks become even more effective, as they can track every single player in the screen at all times.
Most client-side compensation and prediction is latency compensation anyway.
So far there have been no serious security compromises on the US DAOC servers, mostly just the occasional dupe item bug, player radar, or 'speed hack', which are almost always dealt with quickly
I'm amazed they have problems with speed hacks after these were so well publicized in fps games (Half-Life, Quake 3, and other Quake-based games, UT managed to escape it due to player location synchronization and speed limitation being built into the server before the hacks even started). Radar and occasional dupe-item bugs are going to be problems for some time, but speed hacks, especially extreme cases, can be easily stopped.
Or were you just watching Fox News's "Fair and Balanced" coverage of the trial
No, I read the report on the Chicago Sun Times website (the first link that popped up when I searched for it), because I generally ignore all of this type of BS. Of course, somewhere along the lines I read enough to realize that the judge didn't dismiss the suit, just didn't allow them to stop the book from shipping with the saying on the cover. Similar to the way another judge didn't stop Lindows.com from shipping LindowsOS.
MS has lost to "Lindows" and Fox just lost to "Fair and Balanced".
The Microsoft vs. Lindows.com jury trial doesn't even start until December 1st of this year. I fail to see how MS has lost if the trial hasn't even started yet.
Then again, calling Fox' decision to stop the suit (including their wonderful quote: 'It's time to return Al Franken to the obscurity that he's normally accustomed to') a loss is rather interesting, as well.
Jedi Knight 2 IIRC is optimized for dual processors for the multiplayer games (which makes a LOT of sense),
This makes sense if you're hosting and playing on the same machine, but otherwise I don't see the reasoning for it. For the most part, the processing done in Quake-based games (as JK2 is iirc) is the same in a single player game as a multiplayer game, except that in most multiplayer games you aren't running the server process on your own computer (in single player you spawn a server that runs the single player routines and doesn't utilize the network).
and UT2003 for the Mac will run sound routines on the other processor.
This might make sense if you're using it to run background sounds or you're just triggering the sounds on a thread run on a seperate processor. I fail to see how this helps much, though, unless you don't have good sound hardware to begin with (hmm, I wonder what sound API they're using in UT for the Mac and Linux ports). Of course, UT (and UT2k3 I would assume, though I haven't looked at a lot of UT2k3 benchmarks) does tend to be more CPU-limited than most games, so maybe every little bit helps.
Firstly, games like Quake 3 are processor-limited -- graphics cards are so fast nowadays that the processor is the limiter on the fps. But that's less important, because we're talking pretty much unnoticable improvements.
Quake 3 is not processor-limited. Take a look at various benchmarks showing different graphics cards on the same CPU, and different CPUs running the same graphics cards. The difference between CPUs once you get to about 2x the recommended CPU MHz for Quake 3 is very minimal. The difference between graphics cards is huge. This is why Apple's Q3 numbers for the G5 running an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro are very similar to everyone else's numbers for a P4 running the same card on Q3 (~330-340). There are CPU-limited games out there (UT comes to mind), but Q3 is not one of them.
More important are the areas of AI and physics.
Running complex physical simulations (ragdoll effects, rigid body dynamics, cloth and hair simulation) absolutely punishes the CPU's of today's computers -- and those are all effects that really, really connect you to the game you're playing, really anchor you in the 'reality' of the game moment. The more complex those get, the more immersion you can have. Can you imagine if that field of grass in your friggin mmorpg wasn't just a bunch of sprites with random 'sway' characteristics, but were individual strands using 'hair' physics, and responding to generated wind dynamics?
This is why those fields are the ones being promised for the next iteration of many game franchises, including Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. CPU utilization in games is so low today compared to the specs of the machines you can buy it's almost insane. You used to have a very expensive computer to play the latest graphics-intensive games all the time, now you just have to worry about the graphics card. Even Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 are supposed to run on fairly low-spec machines compared to what's available today (and Doom 3 isn't even supposed to be available this year).
And probably most immediately, AI.
This hasn't shown up -- yet. But games like Half-Life, and ESPECIALLY the new Deus Ex 2 and (hell yes!) Thief 3 games that will be coming out in a year or so. The ai in those games need to be scanning the area with their field of vision, doing visibility checks (on a PER AI basis), many times per second, in order to be realistic. Moreover, that cone of vision should be moving (ideally synched with his eyes -- dynamic animation = more processing requirements). And the visibility checks for smart AI in the future (possibly within a couple years) will include things like pattern recognition, where the AI's vision is actually crudely 'rendered' to memory many times per second, with pattern-recognition applied. ('Wait, did that chunk of shadow just move? I should be the only one here . ..').
Some level of vision-based response can already be faked pretty well without the massive overhead that you're looking at. What's more important at this point for many games (especially Thief 3 and DE2) is sound and communication. If I set off a grenade in a room, that sound's most likely going to travel a good distance, and the AI should run towards or away from that sound accordingly. Additionally, if one AI spots or hears me and there are 2 or 3 others nearby, he should alert them so that they either come at me with reasonable group AI or they cover him. Not to mention the things that some game developers/designers like to describe years before their game is released but never manage to actually do like 'you snipe someone from a rooftop and the shell drops to the street below, where someone hears it, comes over and sees the shell, then looks up and sees you, and starts firing (or running away)'.
This is all coming, it's all conjecture -- but I'm just saying, faster processors are going to be a serious advantage in the days when GPU speeds start to slow their fantastic rate of growth, or the complexity and difficulty of creating games w
Actually, I think Windows has the bias here as it was designed from scratch for x86 hardware.
Sorry, the first version of Windows NT was running on a non-x86 RISC architecture (don't remember if it was 68k or Alpha). The ability to port NT quickly to other platforms is part of why the Intel 64-bit CPUs were supported fairly quickly by Win2k, and why NT4 supported Alpha and PPC processors for quite a while (though those versions were eventually phased out due to lack of sales/interest).
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/eval ua tion/news/fromms/kanoarchitect.asp (interview with two of the original developers of the NT kernel)
"We tested ourselves by not doing the x86 version first. We did the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) stuff first. It would have been so easy to drop the RISC support; everyone in the company wanted to. But the only way to achieve portability is to develop for more than one platform at a time. It cost us a lot to keep portability alive, but we did, and that has made it easy for us to respond to things like Merced," he says, referring to the 64-bit chip from Intel.
"We tried to create a system that had a good, solid design, as opposed to one that would run optimally on hardware of the time," Cutler explains. "When we started, we were working on 386/20's. At the time that was a big, honking machine. Since our design had to be portable, we didn't allow people to optimize code in assembly language, which is hardware specific. This was hard for the Microsoft mentality at the time. Everyone wanted to optimize code in assembler."
The original vision kept the operating system nimble. "We didn't embed operating-system semantics into the kernel," Cutler explains. "So when we switched from OS/2 to Windows, we didn't take a major hit. If we had built OS/2 threading or signals into the kernel, we would have been in trouble. Instead we built the OS in layers and created subsystems to handle OS/2, Windows, and POSIX."
It wasn't until the 90s that PCs began to dominate the game industry, and even today PC owners have to wait for ports from dedicated game platforms!
It may not have been until the 90s, but the current game publishers and developers have a strong tendency to develop for the largest possible market first. A few developers that are used to and can justify multi-platform development will do it simultaneously, or port quickly afterwards, but these are still very few.
As for the dedicated game platforms (commonly refered to as consoles), this is exactly why I slowed down my purchases of graphics cards after the GeForce 2 and instead bought a console when I would have bought a card. I now have a GeForce 4 (having skipped the GF3 cards and all of the GF2 upgrades), a Dreamcast, PS2, XBox, and GameCube. I can now play all but.01% of games (those made only for Mac OS and non-Intel platforms, since most *nix games will run on *BSD or Linux which can be installed on my Intel box for no monetary cost) on one of 5 systems. Oh, and most of the games I play on consoles just don't tend to translate well to PCs anyway (because they're designed for gamepads and/or multiplayer-on-one-screen).
Now, as far why the PC became the dominant gaming platform (outside of consoles) that it is today: it all came down to a handful of games that pushed the hardcore gaming crowd to the PC. My father owned an Apple IIgs, but bought a 4x86 after he saw Wolfenstein3D and Doom (and it helped that the company he worked for was moving to Wintel and MS Word/Excel, though he's rarely done work at home). Not to mention that since that time both the Windows/x86 PC and gaming have become even bigger businesses than they were in the early 90s, and the two industries grew together.
If multiplatform or alternative platform gaming continue to grow, then we'll probably see more multiplatform games, but for now there are only two things that can really cause a shift in which platform (of computers) gets the most games: one (or a handful of) major must-have game(s) coming out on one alternative platform, or some other catalyst causing a shift to another platform in terms of market share. This is the same reason that console market share is so important to so many gamers: the platform with the largest audience gets the games. Of course, as multi-console development and PCconsole ports become more common, it may also become more common to see developers trying to get games out on multiple PC platforms, too.
Expect their SPECs to rise as they get better compilers for the Mac.
Good for them. They should wait and compare to the existing SPEC numbers. If GCC on x86 gets 200 less on a SPEC benchmark than the Intel compiler, then it's quite obvious that GCC needs work.
Still, that doesn't explain their Q3 scores, either, or most of their other benchmarks. Then again, the only benchmarks they give decent information on is the SPEC benchmarks, and that's because it's required in order for them to even publish the numbers. How does a P4 3.0 GHz running an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro suddenly get 275fps when Apple benchmarks it and 333fps when Sharky Extreme benchmarks it? Why is a video card benchmark even being used to say anything about a CPU (since Q3 scores change very little as CPU speeds increase, but change a great deal as video cards become more powerful)?
I think the point was that the benchmarks already released of the P4s Apple is using are lower than the benchmarks found elsewhere of those P4 processors.
It's strange when Apple releases a SPEC benchmark of a P4 that's about 200 below average, and a Q3 benchmark of a P4 that's about 60fps below average.
I agree that dual CPUs provide little benefit to games, perhaps if Apple standardised on two processors developers might take advantage of them?
It's not that developers don't want to take advantage of them, it's that it takes a very large amount of work to get a very moderate boost (or any boost at all, initial work on using dual CPUs for Quake 2/3 slowed the game down) from most games. Oh, and then there's the fact that most games get most of their measured performance from the video card's capabilities, rather than the CPU.
The Q3 benchmarks Apple posted for the 3GHz P4 don't match up with benchmarks posted elsewhere. In fact, the first Q3 benchmark I found of a P4 using a Radeon 9800 Pro was at 333 fps, 4 less than the G5 benchmark (as opposed to the 275 posted by Apple for the P4).
Now, some types of games may benefit more from enhancements to use dual-CPUs, but most graphics-intensive games are waiting on the frame rendering, and in order to get any real benefit from a dual-CPU setup when you're waiting on the video card is to do as much as possible to limit the cost of moving threads and data between CPUs.
The real benefit is when you're running multiple applications, so you can dedicate one processor to the game and one processor to the rest of your applications, and hopefully minimize the performance hit from multi-tasking.
and usually it will wait for the other threads to finish before continuing.
Very few games take advantage of multiple CPUs. It takes a lot of work to get a modest advantage from a dual-CPU system when developing a game. Take a look at Carmack's.plan files from the time when he was developing Q3 to see how SMP came out in the first tries with the Q2 code base (hint: he actually slowed the game down by using both processors).
Subscription rates are detailed at http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/accounts/YourAc coun t_Subscription.htm
They were announced about a month or so ago (maybe longer).
They're also increasing the cost of the starter kit and bundling MechAssault (or reducing the price of MechAssault to $20 and bundling it with Live, depending on how you look at it) in mid-October.
It's also important to note that 50+ is another percentage in the statistics listed in the article. In other words, it's roughly 18-49 rather than 18-80.
Still, it's more important to marketing and developers to know what percentage of gamers are women, than what percentage of women are gamers. If only 21% of your possible market is boys 6-17, then you want to open your game to the 18+ and/or female markets as well to get as much of the market as possible at least interested in your game, if not buying it. If you ignore the women 18+ market entirely, you're ignoring a large percentage of your market.
It doesn't matter that there are more women over 18 than boys 6-17. It doesn't even matter that boys 6-17 are 3x more likely than women over 18 to play games. What matters is that 1 in 4 people that play games are women over 18, which means that 1 out of every 4 people that might see your game on the shelf and consider buying it for themselves is probably a woman over 18.
That being said, without the information on what questions were asked, we have no idea if they're even playing games that you would buy off the shelf. I know a good number of women that play free internet games (or play games free on the internet that they could buy online, but don't). I'm not trying to say that this is the case for all women that play games, just that I'd like to see more information on what the poll was really asking, rather than just the statistics.
But the free long distance and conference call abilities of Live Now will definitly outweigh the cost of XBL, once it gets released.
I get those features with my cell phone...
$50/year is not much if I find myself with a handful of games I want to play, but I'm not starting a subscription until I have those games in my hand. Adapters, on the other hand, cost nothing to keep around, just the initial cost, and so the numbers may be much higher than the actual use of them. Of course, I'm sure there are people out there that subscribed to Live and haven't used it, but that's probably fewer (as a percentage) than bought an online adapter for another console and haven't used it.
XBL got a good start, but its ability to draw in new subscribers just doesn't seem to be there; at least until Halo 2 comes out.
Live is dependant on games being released that really drive people to subscribe. On the other hand, the PS2 adapter, while relying on the games to some extent, doesn't need as much justification because there's no subscription involved in the adapter itself. Individual games might have subscriptions, but the adapter itself has no penalty for buying early (unlike Live, which you might pay $50 for the first year and then not use it, and have to decide whether or not to renew at the end of the year).
I don't own a single game for any console that has online capability, as far as I know, so I haven't bought into any of the online setups. That being said, I plan on buying the online adapters for my PS2 and GC, because there's always a possibility that Ill pick up a game with online functionality and decide to use it. Live, on the other hand, I won't buy until I have a number of games I want to play online to justify the subscription costs. Recurring fees just don't sit well with me.
Re:They aren't so worried about $5 synthetics
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Diamonds & the RIAA
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Because people keep them in their family, because they're too damned expensive, or people form emotional attachments to the rocks (because they tend to be given for emotional reasons).
Also, there's the simple fact that although people are getting more and more trusting of Ebay and the like, they still don't trust people selling diamonds outside of the commercial sellers, because most people don't know how to tell a fake diamond from a real one (even something that isn't a good 'fake' like a lab-created stone) without paying someone to look at it.
Last I checked, not only did the cost of producing CDs go down, but the cost of CDs not only decreased for a short time, but has increased in the last few years.
In fact, in 1992-1996 the average price of a CD dropped $5 (from $15 to $10), because of a price war between major retailers (Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, etc), and sales increased by 371 million units. Then, from 1996 to 2001, sales increased by 100 million units as prices increased (back to ~$15 again, though it may be higher at this point, as many CDs sell for $16-18). That's where the recent price-fixing lawsuits came in, as the record labels introduced Minimum Advertised Pricing to stop the price wars that reduced the price per CD (and increased the number of CDs sold to more than double the numbers from before the price wars). It can also be noted that 2001, the year that the RIAA started going after Napster, was also the year of the largest decline in CD sales, and the largest increase in CD prices, during that period. The RIAA blamed it on Napster, though CD sales increased the year before, while Napster was still fully functional (and prices were held steady).
Of course, the RIAA will point to a number of other factors, including the fact that the acts they spend the most money on no longer bring in as much in sales as they did in the past (especially the early 90's, when bands the labels spent relatively little money on suddenly hit really big, for instance Megadeth sold more copies of one album (Countdown to Extinction, #2 on the charts for some time behind Metallica's self-titled album) than Britney Spears has sold of all her albums and singles combined). The fact that many of these bands had previously been on non-RIAA labels also means that many listeners may have decided to listen to other bands from those labels, which would mean that the RIAA probably no longer tracks those sales (or at least no longer releases them as sales).
The cost to produce a CD has decreased by approximately $1 per unit just on manufacturing costs in the last 10 years. Instead of dropping the price $1, they increased the price $5 after the stores dropped the prices to increase sales. Now, of course, Wal-Mart is the #1 music retailer in the country by a large margin, and there are no price wars. Oh, and the music industry is still throwing money at people that can't sell as many records as were sold in the past, despite the fact that there are fewer acts getting played on the radio (which the RIAA pays for) and more CDs actually being sold.
Re:The names may change, but
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Diamonds & the RIAA
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· Score: 2, Interesting
heh, my girlfriend likes emeralds, and not the lab-created ones. If you haven't checked lately, emeralds tend to be more expensive (and it's sometimes harder to find good jewelery containing them) than diamonds. That being said, she couldn't actually tell the difference between a lab-created and natural emerald unless someone told her, except that she believes that certain characteristics only exist in lab-created emeralds (and she's wrong).
Slashdot Mirror
Warcraft -> C&C, Dune2
GG, Warcraft came out the year before C&C. Dune 2 came out 3 years after Herzog Zwei, and 2 years before WarCraft. WarCraft 2 came out the same year as C&C.
WarCraft was also the first RTS game to have hand-to-hand combat, multiplayer, and a random map generator. WarCraft 2 was the first to have naval units and persistent fog of war.
Dune 2 brought RTS to the PC and pretty much set the groundwork for everything to come, but the C&C series really didn't push the limits of the framework until much later, whereas the WC games pushed the genre forward with features that, although they may seem like obvious improvements, are standards in the genre today.
In some ways, the XBox contract is what put nVidia behind in the PC 3D graphics market. ATI's been in that market a lot longer, and bought their way into the console market with the GameCube. On the other hand, nVidia's eroded ATI's dominance in the OEM PC market, even getting into Apple's computers (where ATI had 100% of the market for quite a while). The only place nVidia's really having problems is with their high-end 3D chips, and they should be able to concentrate more on that if they aren't getting jerked around by Microsoft for a few years.
For consumers commodity hardware often is the cheaper way to go. However, for a console manufacturer, you're often dealing with the same hardware (or hardware with the same functionality) for a significant time period. Eventually people don't want to make that hardware any more, and there's a markup just to keep someone producing 2 or 3-year old hardware (especially hard drives, CPUs, GPUs). When was the last time you could find a 700MHz Intel CPU fairly easily? How long will it be before the low-end GeForce 4 cards are the same price as any given GeForce 3 or GeForce 2 card? The prices can only go down so much before the company that makes those products can't make any money by producing them, and if they're no longer mass-producing them, they're going to charge you for the cost of keeping a production line dedicated to the old product.
If you produce the hardware in house, you can utilize technology advances to reduce cost of making the same part, rather than increasing speed or making new parts (which is what drives commodity hardware costs down, and eventually drives hardware out of the market). Furthermore, you can reduce the complexity of your system.
It's been out for XBox for a while.
The only thing he got wrong was saying PS2 instead of GC.
I have a Tekken 3 T-shirt that I got with a pre-order, which was too small the day I got it (I never really understood why they gave out shirts that wouldn't fit any of the guys that were there to pick up their pre-orders). Oh well, my gf wears a lot of my old shirts at night, but I still don't think I want to see a picture of Kazuya on her.
having unlimited bandwidth means that you could afford to send to the clients every single position for every actor (including orientation etc.) and moveable object instead of having to rely excessively on client-side compensation and prediction.
and then the aimbots and see-through-wall hacks become even more effective, as they can track every single player in the screen at all times.
Most client-side compensation and prediction is latency compensation anyway.
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, Washington 98052-6399
At least that's the address in their books.
So far there have been no serious security compromises on the US DAOC servers, mostly just the occasional dupe item bug, player radar, or 'speed hack', which are almost always dealt with quickly
I'm amazed they have problems with speed hacks after these were so well publicized in fps games (Half-Life, Quake 3, and other Quake-based games, UT managed to escape it due to player location synchronization and speed limitation being built into the server before the hacks even started). Radar and occasional dupe-item bugs are going to be problems for some time, but speed hacks, especially extreme cases, can be easily stopped.
Or were you just watching Fox News's "Fair and Balanced" coverage of the trial
No, I read the report on the Chicago Sun Times website (the first link that popped up when I searched for it), because I generally ignore all of this type of BS. Of course, somewhere along the lines I read enough to realize that the judge didn't dismiss the suit, just didn't allow them to stop the book from shipping with the saying on the cover. Similar to the way another judge didn't stop Lindows.com from shipping LindowsOS.
MS has lost to "Lindows" and Fox just lost to "Fair and Balanced".
The Microsoft vs. Lindows.com jury trial doesn't even start until December 1st of this year. I fail to see how MS has lost if the trial hasn't even started yet.
Then again, calling Fox' decision to stop the suit (including their wonderful quote: 'It's time to return Al Franken to the obscurity that he's normally accustomed to') a loss is rather interesting, as well.
Jedi Knight 2 IIRC is optimized for dual processors for the multiplayer games (which makes a LOT of sense),
This makes sense if you're hosting and playing on the same machine, but otherwise I don't see the reasoning for it. For the most part, the processing done in Quake-based games (as JK2 is iirc) is the same in a single player game as a multiplayer game, except that in most multiplayer games you aren't running the server process on your own computer (in single player you spawn a server that runs the single player routines and doesn't utilize the network).
and UT2003 for the Mac will run sound routines on the other processor.
This might make sense if you're using it to run background sounds or you're just triggering the sounds on a thread run on a seperate processor. I fail to see how this helps much, though, unless you don't have good sound hardware to begin with (hmm, I wonder what sound API they're using in UT for the Mac and Linux ports). Of course, UT (and UT2k3 I would assume, though I haven't looked at a lot of UT2k3 benchmarks) does tend to be more CPU-limited than most games, so maybe every little bit helps.
Firstly, games like Quake 3 are processor-limited -- graphics cards are so fast nowadays that the processor is the limiter on the fps. But that's less important, because we're talking pretty much unnoticable improvements.
.').
Quake 3 is not processor-limited. Take a look at various benchmarks showing different graphics cards on the same CPU, and different CPUs running the same graphics cards. The difference between CPUs once you get to about 2x the recommended CPU MHz for Quake 3 is very minimal. The difference between graphics cards is huge. This is why Apple's Q3 numbers for the G5 running an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro are very similar to everyone else's numbers for a P4 running the same card on Q3 (~330-340). There are CPU-limited games out there (UT comes to mind), but Q3 is not one of them.
More important are the areas of AI and physics.
Running complex physical simulations (ragdoll effects, rigid body dynamics, cloth and hair simulation) absolutely punishes the CPU's of today's computers -- and those are all effects that really, really connect you to the game you're playing, really anchor you in the 'reality' of the game moment. The more complex those get, the more immersion you can have. Can you imagine if that field of grass in your friggin mmorpg wasn't just a bunch of sprites with random 'sway' characteristics, but were individual strands using 'hair' physics, and responding to generated wind dynamics?
This is why those fields are the ones being promised for the next iteration of many game franchises, including Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. CPU utilization in games is so low today compared to the specs of the machines you can buy it's almost insane. You used to have a very expensive computer to play the latest graphics-intensive games all the time, now you just have to worry about the graphics card. Even Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 are supposed to run on fairly low-spec machines compared to what's available today (and Doom 3 isn't even supposed to be available this year).
And probably most immediately, AI.
This hasn't shown up -- yet. But games like Half-Life, and ESPECIALLY the new Deus Ex 2 and (hell yes!) Thief 3 games that will be coming out in a year or so. The ai in those games need to be scanning the area with their field of vision, doing visibility checks (on a PER AI basis), many times per second, in order to be realistic. Moreover, that cone of vision should be moving (ideally synched with his eyes -- dynamic animation = more processing requirements). And the visibility checks for smart AI in the future (possibly within a couple years) will include things like pattern recognition, where the AI's vision is actually crudely 'rendered' to memory many times per second, with pattern-recognition applied. ('Wait, did that chunk of shadow just move? I should be the only one here . .
Some level of vision-based response can already be faked pretty well without the massive overhead that you're looking at. What's more important at this point for many games (especially Thief 3 and DE2) is sound and communication. If I set off a grenade in a room, that sound's most likely going to travel a good distance, and the AI should run towards or away from that sound accordingly. Additionally, if one AI spots or hears me and there are 2 or 3 others nearby, he should alert them so that they either come at me with reasonable group AI or they cover him. Not to mention the things that some game developers/designers like to describe years before their game is released but never manage to actually do like 'you snipe someone from a rooftop and the shell drops to the street below, where someone hears it, comes over and sees the shell, then looks up and sees you, and starts firing (or running away)'.
This is all coming, it's all conjecture -- but I'm just saying, faster processors are going to be a serious advantage in the days when GPU speeds start to slow their fantastic rate of growth, or the complexity and difficulty of creating games w
Actually, I think Windows has the bias here as it was designed from scratch for x86 hardware.
l ua tion/news/fromms/kanoarchitect.asp
Sorry, the first version of Windows NT was running on a non-x86 RISC architecture (don't remember if it was 68k or Alpha). The ability to port NT quickly to other platforms is part of why the Intel 64-bit CPUs were supported fairly quickly by Win2k, and why NT4 supported Alpha and PPC processors for quite a while (though those versions were eventually phased out due to lack of sales/interest).
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/eva
(interview with two of the original developers of the NT kernel)
"We tested ourselves by not doing the x86 version first. We did the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) stuff first. It would have been so easy to drop the RISC support; everyone in the company wanted to. But the only way to achieve portability is to develop for more than one platform at a time. It cost us a lot to keep portability alive, but we did, and that has made it easy for us to respond to things like Merced," he says, referring to the 64-bit chip from Intel.
"We tried to create a system that had a good, solid design, as opposed to one that would run optimally on hardware of the time," Cutler explains. "When we started, we were working on 386/20's. At the time that was a big, honking machine. Since our design had to be portable, we didn't allow people to optimize code in assembly language, which is hardware specific. This was hard for the Microsoft mentality at the time. Everyone wanted to optimize code in assembler."
The original vision kept the operating system nimble. "We didn't embed operating-system semantics into the kernel," Cutler explains. "So when we switched from OS/2 to Windows, we didn't take a major hit. If we had built OS/2 threading or signals into the kernel, we would have been in trouble. Instead we built the OS in layers and created subsystems to handle OS/2, Windows, and POSIX."
It wasn't until the 90s that PCs began to dominate the game industry, and even today PC owners have to wait for ports from dedicated game platforms!
.01% of games (those made only for Mac OS and non-Intel platforms, since most *nix games will run on *BSD or Linux which can be installed on my Intel box for no monetary cost) on one of 5 systems. Oh, and most of the games I play on consoles just don't tend to translate well to PCs anyway (because they're designed for gamepads and/or multiplayer-on-one-screen).
It may not have been until the 90s, but the current game publishers and developers have a strong tendency to develop for the largest possible market first. A few developers that are used to and can justify multi-platform development will do it simultaneously, or port quickly afterwards, but these are still very few.
As for the dedicated game platforms (commonly refered to as consoles), this is exactly why I slowed down my purchases of graphics cards after the GeForce 2 and instead bought a console when I would have bought a card. I now have a GeForce 4 (having skipped the GF3 cards and all of the GF2 upgrades), a Dreamcast, PS2, XBox, and GameCube. I can now play all but
Now, as far why the PC became the dominant gaming platform (outside of consoles) that it is today: it all came down to a handful of games that pushed the hardcore gaming crowd to the PC. My father owned an Apple IIgs, but bought a 4x86 after he saw Wolfenstein3D and Doom (and it helped that the company he worked for was moving to Wintel and MS Word/Excel, though he's rarely done work at home). Not to mention that since that time both the Windows/x86 PC and gaming have become even bigger businesses than they were in the early 90s, and the two industries grew together.
If multiplatform or alternative platform gaming continue to grow, then we'll probably see more multiplatform games, but for now there are only two things that can really cause a shift in which platform (of computers) gets the most games: one (or a handful of) major must-have game(s) coming out on one alternative platform, or some other catalyst causing a shift to another platform in terms of market share. This is the same reason that console market share is so important to so many gamers: the platform with the largest audience gets the games. Of course, as multi-console development and PCconsole ports become more common, it may also become more common to see developers trying to get games out on multiple PC platforms, too.
Expect their SPECs to rise as they get better compilers for the Mac.
Good for them. They should wait and compare to the existing SPEC numbers. If GCC on x86 gets 200 less on a SPEC benchmark than the Intel compiler, then it's quite obvious that GCC needs work.
Still, that doesn't explain their Q3 scores, either, or most of their other benchmarks. Then again, the only benchmarks they give decent information on is the SPEC benchmarks, and that's because it's required in order for them to even publish the numbers. How does a P4 3.0 GHz running an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro suddenly get 275fps when Apple benchmarks it and 333fps when Sharky Extreme benchmarks it? Why is a video card benchmark even being used to say anything about a CPU (since Q3 scores change very little as CPU speeds increase, but change a great deal as video cards become more powerful)?
I think the point was that the benchmarks already released of the P4s Apple is using are lower than the benchmarks found elsewhere of those P4 processors.
It's strange when Apple releases a SPEC benchmark of a P4 that's about 200 below average, and a Q3 benchmark of a P4 that's about 60fps below average.
I agree that dual CPUs provide little benefit to games, perhaps if Apple standardised on two processors developers might take advantage of them?
It's not that developers don't want to take advantage of them, it's that it takes a very large amount of work to get a very moderate boost (or any boost at all, initial work on using dual CPUs for Quake 2/3 slowed the game down) from most games. Oh, and then there's the fact that most games get most of their measured performance from the video card's capabilities, rather than the CPU.
The Q3 benchmarks Apple posted for the 3GHz P4 don't match up with benchmarks posted elsewhere. In fact, the first Q3 benchmark I found of a P4 using a Radeon 9800 Pro was at 333 fps, 4 less than the G5 benchmark (as opposed to the 275 posted by Apple for the P4).
Now, some types of games may benefit more from enhancements to use dual-CPUs, but most graphics-intensive games are waiting on the frame rendering, and in order to get any real benefit from a dual-CPU setup when you're waiting on the video card is to do as much as possible to limit the cost of moving threads and data between CPUs.
The real benefit is when you're running multiple applications, so you can dedicate one processor to the game and one processor to the rest of your applications, and hopefully minimize the performance hit from multi-tasking.
and usually it will wait for the other threads to finish before continuing.
.plan files from the time when he was developing Q3 to see how SMP came out in the first tries with the Q2 code base (hint: he actually slowed the game down by using both processors).
Very few games take advantage of multiple CPUs. It takes a lot of work to get a modest advantage from a dual-CPU system when developing a game. Take a look at Carmack's
Subscription rates are detailed atc coun t_Subscription.htm
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/accounts/YourA
They were announced about a month or so ago (maybe longer).
They're also increasing the cost of the starter kit and bundling MechAssault (or reducing the price of MechAssault to $20 and bundling it with Live, depending on how you look at it) in mid-October.
It's also important to note that 50+ is another percentage in the statistics listed in the article. In other words, it's roughly 18-49 rather than 18-80.
Still, it's more important to marketing and developers to know what percentage of gamers are women, than what percentage of women are gamers. If only 21% of your possible market is boys 6-17, then you want to open your game to the 18+ and/or female markets as well to get as much of the market as possible at least interested in your game, if not buying it. If you ignore the women 18+ market entirely, you're ignoring a large percentage of your market.
It doesn't matter that there are more women over 18 than boys 6-17. It doesn't even matter that boys 6-17 are 3x more likely than women over 18 to play games. What matters is that 1 in 4 people that play games are women over 18, which means that 1 out of every 4 people that might see your game on the shelf and consider buying it for themselves is probably a woman over 18.
That being said, without the information on what questions were asked, we have no idea if they're even playing games that you would buy off the shelf. I know a good number of women that play free internet games (or play games free on the internet that they could buy online, but don't). I'm not trying to say that this is the case for all women that play games, just that I'd like to see more information on what the poll was really asking, rather than just the statistics.
But the free long distance and conference call abilities of Live Now will definitly outweigh the cost of XBL, once it gets released.
I get those features with my cell phone...
$50/year is not much if I find myself with a handful of games I want to play, but I'm not starting a subscription until I have those games in my hand. Adapters, on the other hand, cost nothing to keep around, just the initial cost, and so the numbers may be much higher than the actual use of them. Of course, I'm sure there are people out there that subscribed to Live and haven't used it, but that's probably fewer (as a percentage) than bought an online adapter for another console and haven't used it.
XBL got a good start, but its ability to draw in new subscribers just doesn't seem to be there; at least until Halo 2 comes out.
Live is dependant on games being released that really drive people to subscribe. On the other hand, the PS2 adapter, while relying on the games to some extent, doesn't need as much justification because there's no subscription involved in the adapter itself. Individual games might have subscriptions, but the adapter itself has no penalty for buying early (unlike Live, which you might pay $50 for the first year and then not use it, and have to decide whether or not to renew at the end of the year).
I don't own a single game for any console that has online capability, as far as I know, so I haven't bought into any of the online setups. That being said, I plan on buying the online adapters for my PS2 and GC, because there's always a possibility that Ill pick up a game with online functionality and decide to use it. Live, on the other hand, I won't buy until I have a number of games I want to play online to justify the subscription costs. Recurring fees just don't sit well with me.
Because people keep them in their family, because they're too damned expensive, or people form emotional attachments to the rocks (because they tend to be given for emotional reasons).
Also, there's the simple fact that although people are getting more and more trusting of Ebay and the like, they still don't trust people selling diamonds outside of the commercial sellers, because most people don't know how to tell a fake diamond from a real one (even something that isn't a good 'fake' like a lab-created stone) without paying someone to look at it.
Last I checked, not only did the cost of producing CDs go down, but the cost of CDs not only decreased for a short time, but has increased in the last few years.
In fact, in 1992-1996 the average price of a CD dropped $5 (from $15 to $10), because of a price war between major retailers (Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, etc), and sales increased by 371 million units. Then, from 1996 to 2001, sales increased by 100 million units as prices increased (back to ~$15 again, though it may be higher at this point, as many CDs sell for $16-18). That's where the recent price-fixing lawsuits came in, as the record labels introduced Minimum Advertised Pricing to stop the price wars that reduced the price per CD (and increased the number of CDs sold to more than double the numbers from before the price wars). It can also be noted that 2001, the year that the RIAA started going after Napster, was also the year of the largest decline in CD sales, and the largest increase in CD prices, during that period. The RIAA blamed it on Napster, though CD sales increased the year before, while Napster was still fully functional (and prices were held steady).
Of course, the RIAA will point to a number of other factors, including the fact that the acts they spend the most money on no longer bring in as much in sales as they did in the past (especially the early 90's, when bands the labels spent relatively little money on suddenly hit really big, for instance Megadeth sold more copies of one album (Countdown to Extinction, #2 on the charts for some time behind Metallica's self-titled album) than Britney Spears has sold of all her albums and singles combined). The fact that many of these bands had previously been on non-RIAA labels also means that many listeners may have decided to listen to other bands from those labels, which would mean that the RIAA probably no longer tracks those sales (or at least no longer releases them as sales).
The cost to produce a CD has decreased by approximately $1 per unit just on manufacturing costs in the last 10 years. Instead of dropping the price $1, they increased the price $5 after the stores dropped the prices to increase sales. Now, of course, Wal-Mart is the #1 music retailer in the country by a large margin, and there are no price wars. Oh, and the music industry is still throwing money at people that can't sell as many records as were sold in the past, despite the fact that there are fewer acts getting played on the radio (which the RIAA pays for) and more CDs actually being sold.
heh, my girlfriend likes emeralds, and not the lab-created ones. If you haven't checked lately, emeralds tend to be more expensive (and it's sometimes harder to find good jewelery containing them) than diamonds. That being said, she couldn't actually tell the difference between a lab-created and natural emerald unless someone told her, except that she believes that certain characteristics only exist in lab-created emeralds (and she's wrong).