And if we're "lucky" Doom 3 will be the last one... One of the consequences of id's merger with Zenimax is that the latter have no interest in sharing their tech with the outside world. Word has it that Carmack will "petition" them to release the Doom 3 source. It feels like the end of an age.
Besides generating heat, they're not too awful at media encoding and Photoshop filters. Anything with a relatively low propensity for branching or interrupting the mouth-watering 31 stage pipeline will perform with some facility. Intel's aggressive marketing / evangelism also yielded a lot of applications well-optimized for the Pentium 4, and even now the Pentium D is frequently listed as a minimum CPU in new PC games. The support for SSE1-3 and x86-64 also buys it some time from a practical use perspective. That said, I sold off my Pentium D + Intel D945PSN combo a while back and used the proceeds to pick up an Athlon II X2 with a free motherboard at my local Micro Center. I can't reasonably use it as a Hackintosh, but hardware virtualization, a massive performance gain, and the loss of a small space heater in Texas summer heat were worth the switch.
As far as the Core 2 designs go, this is generally true. Unless a profound level of rearchitecting occurred behind the scenes when I wasn't looking, a Core 2 Quad is basically just two Core 2 Duos housed in the same chip package, independently vying for access to the memory controller. Now the design's still a lot more efficient (and clock-for-clock performant) than the Pentium Ds ever were, but without oodles of memory bandwidth and very high FSB speeds the C2Q's going to be bandwidth-constrained in certain demanding scenarios. Intentionally hobbling a quadcore CPU (generally by lowering the FSB or crippling the quantity or implementation of on-die cache) to shove it into a "budget" role will make these engineering limitations all the more apparent...
It's weird, isn't it? Between the relative simplicity of Windows 98's design (i.e. fewer and simpler services running) and the long-term drift of attention toward NT 5.x by profit-driven malware authors, you're absolutely right. You still wouldn't catch me using Win98 on a connection without some kind of internet rubber separating me from the crawling chaos of maleficent worms...
Glide was a low-level rasterization library hooked deeply into 3dfx's hardware design that followed a limited subset of OpenGL calls and conventions. Applications written for Glide wouldn't run on any hardware but 3dfx's unless some level of emulation was added, a process which 3dfx vigorously campaigned against until they went belly-up. Nvidia turned a blind eye to it after buying up most of their IP, and thus there are several, variably functional emulators available today.
That's fundamentally how I feel about it. It's one of the most recent high-profile titles promised a Linux port, and there's an unspoken assumption that porting UT3 to Linux would / could encourage others to port their titles to it as well. That belief causes widespread disappointment in the failure to release... but the truth is that the game was undercooked, to put it politely. No one in their right mind is clawing out their eyes about being unable to play Unreal Tournament 3 in Linux; it's the work on the engine that matters, and the ability to design original content (or play other Unreal Engine 3 games) that's perceived as important. Yet here we sit, still screaming for something like an answer, and still with nothing to show for it.
You have to disable its auto-start capability within its options menu, or it just keeps growing back like a virulent fungus. Excising it with msconfig alone isn't enough.
Just out of curiosity, are you working with Phenom X4s, or Phenom II X4s? There's a significant and readily noticeable positive performance delta between them, especially in anything involving SIMD code (which, increasingly, means everything).
I'm not the OP, but none of my performance is wasted on virus protection because I run Slackware.:P There's a lot to be said for the marriage of form and function in Apple's products, but that doesn't change the fact that the profit margins are big 'n' fat compared to their PC counterparts. I don't doubt that OP's system is generally faster and more flexible than the Mini; the former is designed to be generally flexible, the latter plays to a more specialized market.
I think Apple sees Blu-Ray as a black hole into which money is thrown, and are staying out of that race until it's become more of a commodity item. Once that's happened, expect a product announcement with all the subdued taste of the marketing campaign for The Ten Commandments, as directed by Michael Bay...
Mind you, I'd love a new Mac Mini with built-in Blu-Ray at around $500. As for the slots all being in the back, that's just aesthetics at the expense of convenience.
Or were hit by the recession, or wanted to wait until the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD wars were over, or until prices became reasonable instead of lunging out and buying a lemon player with no future firmware updates, or wanted to wait until they bought an HDTV at a sane price point first, or were content to just snag HD rips off of P2P networks, or...
But as someone who knows the ins and outs of the law, you are qualified to defend those who do produce value from those who would exploit or stop them.
I know. It's one of those situations that's just baffling: here's a graphics chipset that was more numerous than observable atoms in the universe a decade ago, one that was regularly showing up on server motherboards until around 2006, and people couldn't find a way to swallow a few days' work and fix the damned drivers? If I had any idea how to do it, I'd have taken care of it myself, but dammit, I'm a geologist, not a software engineer.
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And if we're "lucky" Doom 3 will be the last one... One of the consequences of id's merger with Zenimax is that the latter have no interest in sharing their tech with the outside world. Word has it that Carmack will "petition" them to release the Doom 3 source. It feels like the end of an age.
I have to guess it's a heat or power issue, though you probably already know that. :P
Besides generating heat, they're not too awful at media encoding and Photoshop filters. Anything with a relatively low propensity for branching or interrupting the mouth-watering 31 stage pipeline will perform with some facility. Intel's aggressive marketing / evangelism also yielded a lot of applications well-optimized for the Pentium 4, and even now the Pentium D is frequently listed as a minimum CPU in new PC games. The support for SSE1-3 and x86-64 also buys it some time from a practical use perspective. That said, I sold off my Pentium D + Intel D945PSN combo a while back and used the proceeds to pick up an Athlon II X2 with a free motherboard at my local Micro Center. I can't reasonably use it as a Hackintosh, but hardware virtualization, a massive performance gain, and the loss of a small space heater in Texas summer heat were worth the switch.
As far as the Core 2 designs go, this is generally true. Unless a profound level of rearchitecting occurred behind the scenes when I wasn't looking, a Core 2 Quad is basically just two Core 2 Duos housed in the same chip package, independently vying for access to the memory controller. Now the design's still a lot more efficient (and clock-for-clock performant) than the Pentium Ds ever were, but without oodles of memory bandwidth and very high FSB speeds the C2Q's going to be bandwidth-constrained in certain demanding scenarios. Intentionally hobbling a quadcore CPU (generally by lowering the FSB or crippling the quantity or implementation of on-die cache) to shove it into a "budget" role will make these engineering limitations all the more apparent...
Was this an alt.tasteless post originally?
You are a beautiful and unique poo-flake. And so am I! POO BROTHERS!
It's weird, isn't it? Between the relative simplicity of Windows 98's design (i.e. fewer and simpler services running) and the long-term drift of attention toward NT 5.x by profit-driven malware authors, you're absolutely right. You still wouldn't catch me using Win98 on a connection without some kind of internet rubber separating me from the crawling chaos of maleficent worms...
I think Catacombs 3D (and its stunning EGA graphics) predated Wolf3D by a year or so. Prior to that, Hovertank 3D was probably the closest thing...
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
All of my mod points
Would belong to you.
Why would you quibble about such a beautiful thing?
Yep. A terrific example of the student becoming the teacher, and all of them riding the short bus together.
Glide was a low-level rasterization library hooked deeply into 3dfx's hardware design that followed a limited subset of OpenGL calls and conventions. Applications written for Glide wouldn't run on any hardware but 3dfx's unless some level of emulation was added, a process which 3dfx vigorously campaigned against until they went belly-up. Nvidia turned a blind eye to it after buying up most of their IP, and thus there are several, variably functional emulators available today.
That's quite a sentence. Someone give this man a prize.
That's fundamentally how I feel about it. It's one of the most recent high-profile titles promised a Linux port, and there's an unspoken assumption that porting UT3 to Linux would / could encourage others to port their titles to it as well. That belief causes widespread disappointment in the failure to release... but the truth is that the game was undercooked, to put it politely. No one in their right mind is clawing out their eyes about being unable to play Unreal Tournament 3 in Linux; it's the work on the engine that matters, and the ability to design original content (or play other Unreal Engine 3 games) that's perceived as important. Yet here we sit, still screaming for something like an answer, and still with nothing to show for it.
What a mess.
You have to disable its auto-start capability within its options menu, or it just keeps growing back like a virulent fungus. Excising it with msconfig alone isn't enough.
Just out of curiosity, are you working with Phenom X4s, or Phenom II X4s? There's a significant and readily noticeable positive performance delta between them, especially in anything involving SIMD code (which, increasingly, means everything).
I'm not the OP, but none of my performance is wasted on virus protection because I run Slackware. :P There's a lot to be said for the marriage of form and function in Apple's products, but that doesn't change the fact that the profit margins are big 'n' fat compared to their PC counterparts. I don't doubt that OP's system is generally faster and more flexible than the Mini; the former is designed to be generally flexible, the latter plays to a more specialized market.
What humorless wiener modded this troll?
I think Apple sees Blu-Ray as a black hole into which money is thrown, and are staying out of that race until it's become more of a commodity item. Once that's happened, expect a product announcement with all the subdued taste of the marketing campaign for The Ten Commandments, as directed by Michael Bay...
Mind you, I'd love a new Mac Mini with built-in Blu-Ray at around $500. As for the slots all being in the back, that's just aesthetics at the expense of convenience.
Or were hit by the recession, or wanted to wait until the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD wars were over, or until prices became reasonable instead of lunging out and buying a lemon player with no future firmware updates, or wanted to wait until they bought an HDTV at a sane price point first, or were content to just snag HD rips off of P2P networks, or...
In Discworld, that was a wonderful passage. In the right context, GlaDOS could make that utterly bone-chilling.
But as someone who knows the ins and outs of the law, you are qualified to defend those who do produce value from those who would exploit or stop them.
Whugh. The plastic-fantastic design of the original iMacs is dead and gone, but you'd never guess by looking at that screenshot.
I suspect it was a small rubbery bone tossed to Windows server admins.
I know. It's one of those situations that's just baffling: here's a graphics chipset that was more numerous than observable atoms in the universe a decade ago, one that was regularly showing up on server motherboards until around 2006, and people couldn't find a way to swallow a few days' work and fix the damned drivers? If I had any idea how to do it, I'd have taken care of it myself, but dammit, I'm a geologist, not a software engineer.