Actually most PCs can outdo a G3 laptop. The CPUs are just a hair slower, but the have RagePro graphics chipsets with 8 megs of SGRAM. I a recall the extra 4 meg makes a lot of differance in games.
Actually the PIIs on the Notebooks are faster for games and most other apps, (ones that don't need a lot of cache) than a stock PII becuase they have a 256K fullspeed internal cache. They are a couple of % faster than a standard PII unless you are data serving.
BeOS outperforms Linux at everything except web-serving. The GUI launches apps faster, the applications can blit to the screen faster(600fps in a Boot magazine test.) It outperforms Linux in terms of latency for Audio. BDirectWindow outperforms DirectDraw of drawing to the screen, and DirectDraw outperforms the X commands for drawing to the screen. Also Windows outperforms Linux in 3D, and 2D graphics. Windows OpenGL is usually faster that Linux Open GL, and DirectDraw can do draw operations a lot faster than X. Also Windows benefits from having sound accelerated in hardware. Secondly, BeOS will fit better with new hardware, not becuase of support, but at some point, the ability of the OS to move data around at high speed will help performance of newer hardware. MPEG 2 decompression and effects, Digital video capture, audio capture with multiple tracks, etc. Third, GUIs may not sell computers, but they make the easier to use. Linux does not have a GUI that can do every thing the CLI can. Windows does, and BeOS does (for all purposes except scripting, etc.) Fourth. It would be a waste for Be to aim at the low end market. In higher end hardware Be outperforms Windows. Isn't the whole reason the Linux movement exists (in a lot of minds) is to give a better (in most respects) alterative to Windows? Well Be is a better home OS that Linux or Windows, so why should it aim at the low end market?
DirectX's downfall would suck for gamers everywhere. Direct3D made 3D card more prevelent at a time when the only APIs were Glide and OpenGL. Glide cards were fairly expensive, even at 1.5 years old they cost $150. The 2 month old Voodoo 3 2000 now cost $100. D3d helped bring down prices. As of now, it support some of the cooler effects such as texture compression. Besides Direct3D is not the only DirectX API. Their are APIs that accelerate input, 3D sound APIs, etc. Besides there is nothing that CAN make DirectX fall. OpenGL, ha, it is still a small player in the game market, and the difference in power between it and D3D is getting smaller and smaller. (Its at about 20-30% now.) Glide is already dead, being limited to one company.
Re:What makes SGI great graphics machines...
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NVIDIA and SGI Align
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Actually shared memory architecture, (the SGIs trick for moving stuff at high speeds) does didly for 3D. Becuase the graphics card needs very fast access to video memory, the fact that video memory is in RAM hurts performance. An SGI is half the speed of an Intergraph GX1 with Wildcat 4000 gfx card in the Awadvs-02 test. Face it, it IS the graphics card
The IP stack might be okay, but the graphics card choice would be limited to lets see, A voodoo3, or a voodoo 3 or mabye a Voodoo^3 With the 3 up in the air like that?
I'm not trying to be a anti-linux troll or anything, but if Amiga looked at Be and QNX, how could they possibly choose Linux. Nothing against the OS but the multimedia performance in a word sucks. Running two instances of the Forsaken main.avi video gives xanim a heart attack with the first instance starting to stutter. It doesn't have 3D sound or any of that cools stuff, and has X for graphics and we all know that X could never handle even a simple game like Diablo. I though Amiga was supposed to be a media powerhouse.
For those who question my performance claims, here is my config on that video test. main.avi is a 218KB/s AVI, I'm running KDE 1.1.1, XFree 3.3.3.1 on a RivaTNT using nVidias new drivers on a 400MHz Celeron. When I start up the second instance of the AVI, the first one starts skipping. With 4 instances the first one is at 1 fps. Under Windows I can run 5 instances with no dropped frames.
What makes them better is than the other supposedly better systems is that they are a desktop OS. They have a good, consistant GUI, they have great multimedia performance, a new architechture that will let it fit newer hardware better, and a great API that makes programming for it easier. None of the competing OSs have this. Mac has media, but otherwise performance sucks. Linux media performance is under that of Windows, plus it does not have a consistant GUI, OS/2 is being aimed at the server market, and the other systems are Unixes and share the same problems as Linux. The only one left is Amiga, yea right.
Actually dropping HURD into a debian system will probably not work, becuase there is more Linux in Debian than just the kernel. The filesystem for one thing. In addition any linux distro wil always be like to other distros. Thus Debian Linux will always be closer to Redhat Linux than it is to HURD. HURD uses servers and a microkernel, and a much more updated design. The differnce between Debian and RedHat are only in installation, management and package tools. Remeber a lot of people consider Unix and operating system, and the different ones as flavors of Unix. Linux is a flavor of Unix. By their reasoning, the stucture is like this
UNIX Linux HURD Solaris AIX IRIX Redhat Debian, etc.
Since you mention Visual Basic I assume you count Windows programmers as REAL programmers. No learning widget sets is not what real programmers do, it is only what Unix programmers do. Windows does not use complex widget sets. There are a small number of controls and such, but beyond that, there is none of the stuff that comes with Unix environments.
I do think he was joking. Its not as if you can do anything in RedHat without dropping down to the command line anyway! And the guy under me, I refuse to use a name such as X11R6 simply because of the excessive amounts of time spent between numbers and shift capitalized letters. If anything whats holding Linux back in the market is the lack of cool names. KDE, GNOME, X, FVWM, what is all that. We need cool names like NUKE, and RADIOACTIVELY COOL DESKTOP, and etc. (For mentally imparied, I was being sarcastic above. I shouldn't have to say it, but it seems some people don't get along with sarcasm too well.)
NT does not use the WDM, WDM started with Win98 and all drivers written specifically for 98 will also work on NT with the exeption of video drivers. Most vendors though will probably chose to optimize their drivers specifically for W2k though.
wow up an whole hour without the/. linux fanatics jumping on his case! Well flames away. Seriously though, I have to agree with you to a certain extent that W2K is better than Unix in some areas. I do however disagree that Solaris has less features than W2K. Plus the fact that the x86 version should not be taken as representative of Solaris in general.
tsk. tsk A slashdot reader so out of date? It was at least a month ago that MS said that the next consumer version of windows would be called millenium and based on 9x code. Notice that NT5 WS is called W2K professional and that there is no W2K consumer. And actually W2K should be a great upgrade of home machines. By then I will have a K7 (hopefully) and I can run all the cool OpenGL and media stuff without having my machine crash every few minutes.
One major problem with these is none of them have hw accelerated video chips. The Tecra seems to have a Rage Pro, but Linux only support TNT and V2/3 for HW acceleration. I doubt anyone buying one of these things anyway would want to load windows, even if it was for quake.
No I was talking about the fact that Apple refused to disclose information about the G3 systems, (Bios, system chipsets,etc) So that Neither the LinuxPPC or the BeOS people were able to make the system work. The linuxPPC people have recently reverse engineered it, but Be refuses to reverse engineer anything.
I remember that Apple refused to give specs to the G3 to the BeOS and Linux people, making it so that the LinuxPPC people had to reverse engineer the system. And now they are putting their name under the banner of Open Source. As I remember they still haven't disclosed the specs.
Actually switching to Power PC would not be a good idea. Have you ever looked at the FP performance of a PPC? They are much slower than x86. Why is Athlon kicking PIII ass? becuase of the FP performance. Additionally, BeOS on the PPC is being abandoned. PPC chips actually cost about as much as intel chips, and Mac computers overall are much more expensive than a comprable x86. And one question, if they PPC runs so damn cool and low power, why don't they clock them higher? 400MHz compared to the 600MHz K7. Take into account the weak floating point, the fastest PPC is the same as a 300-350MHz x86!
Most of what you say is right, but I have a few points. If you are switching platforms you do want compatibility with older applications until enough new ones come out. Thus switching to Alpha would not be the same as swithing to Merced. If you switch to Merced then you are in on McKinly which should really be fast (up to 8 execution units) So with Athlon you can't run EPIC stuff, and with Alpha you can't run EPIC OR x86, with Merced you can run both.
Not really, many OEMS pay higher prices to incorperate the latest CPU, (which traditionally has a huge price jack up, even for a 500 compared to a 550) since the K7 is a lot faster than a PIII, retailer will have no problem putting K7s in their computers. The customer just incurs a higher cost. Even then an extra $200 maximum is worth the extra performance.
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Actually most PCs can outdo a G3 laptop. The CPUs are just a hair slower, but the have RagePro graphics chipsets with 8 megs of SGRAM. I a recall the extra 4 meg makes a lot of differance in games.
Actually the PIIs on the Notebooks are faster for games and most other apps, (ones that don't need a lot of cache) than a stock PII becuase they have a 256K fullspeed internal cache. They are a couple of % faster than a standard PII unless you are data serving.
In addition it uses bash, and a lot of the commands are recompiled GNU utlities.
BeOS outperforms Linux at everything except web-serving. The GUI launches apps faster, the applications can blit to the screen faster(600fps in a Boot magazine test.) It outperforms Linux in terms of latency for Audio. BDirectWindow outperforms DirectDraw of drawing to the screen, and DirectDraw outperforms the X commands for drawing to the screen. Also Windows outperforms Linux in 3D, and 2D graphics. Windows OpenGL is usually faster that Linux Open GL, and DirectDraw can do draw operations a lot faster than X. Also Windows benefits from having sound accelerated in hardware. Secondly, BeOS will fit better with new hardware, not becuase of support, but at some point, the ability of the OS to move data around at high speed will help performance of newer hardware. MPEG 2 decompression and effects, Digital video capture, audio capture with multiple tracks, etc. Third, GUIs may not sell computers, but they make the easier to use. Linux does not have a GUI that can do every thing the CLI can. Windows does, and BeOS does (for all purposes except scripting, etc.) Fourth. It would be a waste for Be to aim at the low end market. In higher end hardware Be outperforms Windows. Isn't the whole reason the Linux movement exists (in a lot of minds) is to give a better (in most respects) alterative to Windows? Well Be is a better home OS that Linux or Windows, so why should it aim at the low end market?
DirectX's downfall would suck for gamers everywhere. Direct3D made 3D card more prevelent at a time when the only APIs were Glide and OpenGL. Glide cards were fairly expensive, even at 1.5 years old they cost $150. The 2 month old Voodoo 3 2000 now cost $100. D3d helped bring down prices. As of now, it support some of the cooler effects such as texture compression. Besides Direct3D is not the only DirectX API. Their are APIs that accelerate input, 3D sound APIs, etc. Besides there is nothing that CAN make DirectX fall. OpenGL, ha, it is still a small player in the game market, and the difference in power between it and D3D is getting smaller and smaller. (Its at about 20-30% now.) Glide is already dead, being limited to one company.
Actually shared memory architecture, (the SGIs trick for moving stuff at high speeds) does didly for 3D. Becuase the graphics card needs very fast access to video memory, the fact that video memory is in RAM hurts performance. An SGI is half the speed of an Intergraph GX1 with Wildcat 4000 gfx card in the Awadvs-02 test. Face it, it IS the graphics card
The IP stack might be okay, but the graphics card choice would be limited to lets see, A voodoo3, or a voodoo 3 or mabye a Voodoo^3 With the 3 up in the air like that?
I'm not trying to be a anti-linux troll or anything, but if Amiga looked at Be and QNX, how could they possibly choose Linux. Nothing against the OS but the multimedia performance in a word sucks. Running two instances of the Forsaken main.avi video gives xanim a heart attack with the first instance starting to stutter. It doesn't have 3D sound or any of that cools stuff, and has X for graphics and we all know that X could never handle even a simple game like Diablo.
I though Amiga was supposed to be a media powerhouse.
For those who question my performance claims, here is my config on that video test.
main.avi is a 218KB/s AVI, I'm running KDE 1.1.1, XFree 3.3.3.1 on a RivaTNT using nVidias new drivers on a 400MHz Celeron. When I start up the second instance of the AVI, the first one starts skipping. With 4 instances the first one is at 1 fps. Under Windows I can run 5 instances with no dropped frames.
Do we need ANYTHING more on TOP of X. When will be the day I hear the words INSTEAD of X?
What makes them better is than the other supposedly better systems is that they are a desktop OS. They have a good, consistant GUI, they have great multimedia performance, a new architechture that will let it fit newer hardware better, and a great API that makes programming for it easier. None of the competing OSs have this. Mac has media, but otherwise performance sucks. Linux media performance is under that of Windows, plus it does not have a consistant GUI, OS/2 is being aimed at the server market, and the other systems are Unixes and share the same problems as Linux. The only one left is Amiga, yea right.
Actually dropping HURD into a debian system will probably not work, becuase there is more Linux in Debian than just the kernel. The filesystem for one thing. In addition any linux distro wil always be like to other distros. Thus Debian Linux will always be closer to Redhat Linux than it is to HURD. HURD uses servers and a microkernel, and a much more updated design. The differnce between Debian and RedHat are only in installation, management and package tools. Remeber a lot of people consider Unix and operating system, and the different ones as flavors of Unix. Linux is a flavor of Unix. By their reasoning, the stucture is like this
UNIX
Linux HURD Solaris AIX IRIX
Redhat Debian, etc.
Since you mention Visual Basic I assume you count Windows programmers as REAL programmers. No learning widget sets is not what real programmers do, it is only what Unix programmers do. Windows does not use complex widget sets. There are a small number of controls and such, but beyond that, there is none of the stuff that comes with Unix environments.
I do think he was joking. Its not as if you can do anything in RedHat without dropping down to the command line anyway! And the guy under me, I refuse to use a name such as X11R6 simply because of the excessive amounts of time spent between numbers and shift capitalized letters. If anything whats holding Linux back in the market is the lack of cool names. KDE, GNOME, X, FVWM, what is all that. We need cool names like NUKE, and RADIOACTIVELY COOL DESKTOP, and etc.
(For mentally imparied, I was being sarcastic above. I shouldn't have to say it, but it seems some people don't get along with sarcasm too well.)
Actually the Rage PRO is the fastest 3D card for laptops. And 3D carded laptops are under $3000 for ones like the WinbookXL.
NT does not use the WDM, WDM started with Win98 and all drivers written specifically for 98 will also work on NT with the exeption of video drivers. Most vendors though will probably chose to optimize their drivers specifically for W2k though.
But on the flip side IDC is unfair to NT becuase most people buy it installed.
wow up an whole hour without the /. linux fanatics jumping on his case! Well flames away. Seriously though, I have to agree with you to a certain extent that W2K is better than Unix in some areas. I do however disagree that Solaris has less features than W2K. Plus the fact that the x86 version should not be taken as representative of Solaris in general.
tsk. tsk A slashdot reader so out of date? It was at least a month ago that MS said that the next consumer version of windows would be called millenium and based on 9x code. Notice that NT5 WS is called W2K professional and that there is no W2K consumer. And actually W2K should be a great upgrade of home machines. By then I will have a K7 (hopefully) and I can run all the cool OpenGL and media stuff without having my machine crash every few minutes.
One major problem with these is none of them have hw accelerated video chips. The Tecra seems to have a Rage Pro, but Linux only support TNT and V2/3 for HW acceleration. I doubt anyone buying one of these things anyway would want to load windows, even if it was for quake.
I think a better machine to base the high end one would be any laptop with a 8MB Rage Pro. Imagine Q3A on a laptop!
No I was talking about the fact that Apple refused to disclose information about the G3 systems, (Bios, system chipsets,etc) So that Neither the LinuxPPC or the BeOS people were able to make the system work. The linuxPPC people have recently reverse engineered it, but Be refuses to reverse engineer anything.
I remember that Apple refused to give specs to the G3 to the BeOS and Linux people, making it so that the LinuxPPC people had to reverse engineer the system. And now they are putting their name under the banner of Open Source. As I remember they still haven't disclosed the specs.
Actually switching to Power PC would not be a good idea. Have you ever looked at the FP performance of a PPC? They are much slower than x86. Why is Athlon kicking PIII ass? becuase of the FP performance. Additionally, BeOS on the PPC is being abandoned. PPC chips actually cost about as much as intel chips, and Mac computers overall are much more expensive than a comprable x86. And one question, if they PPC runs so damn cool and low power, why don't they clock them higher? 400MHz compared to the 600MHz K7. Take into account the weak floating point, the fastest PPC is the same as a 300-350MHz x86!
Most of what you say is right, but I have a few points. If you are switching platforms you do want compatibility with older applications until enough new ones come out. Thus switching to Alpha would not be the same as swithing to Merced. If you switch to Merced then you are in on McKinly which should really be fast (up to 8 execution units) So with Athlon you can't run EPIC stuff, and with Alpha you can't run EPIC OR x86, with Merced you can run both.
Not really, many OEMS pay higher prices to incorperate the latest CPU, (which traditionally has a huge price jack up, even for a 500 compared to a 550) since the K7 is a lot faster than a PIII, retailer will have no problem putting K7s in their computers. The customer just incurs a higher cost. Even then an extra $200 maximum is worth the extra performance.