Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
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· Score: 1
Most VGA cables cannot take the frequencies required to transmit a HD signal cleanly so you get pretty nasty ghosting.
Untrue - I saw a lot of 1600*1200 CRTs with crystal clear reception from the late '90s until a few years ago. A lot of cheap VGA cables are poorly shielded, particularly the "thin" form factor cables. This was a problem I ran into just a few months ago, where very faint ghosting could be seen after text on my HTPC's output to our HDTV. When I was given a Radeon 3850 with dual DVI outputs, I bought a new DVI-A --> VGA cable, and the ghosting completely disappeared.
I won't put on airs: the gameplay mechanics in the run 'n' gun action games of my childhood aren't brainmelting. Success in games like the NES Mega Man titles, Contra, and Gunstar Heroes wasn't predicated on all that much besides fast reflexes and pattern recognition. They aren't high art, but what I'd love to see is a game with that spirit of gameplay that was fall-down funny, or - dare I suggest it? - had a story line worth pursuing, with dialogue choices and some forking plot points that led you in different directions, and to different endings. If it's not emotionally engaging, at least make the plot intrigues byzantine and surreal.
Or at least take more modern games off of rails and put secrets in them again. My kingdom for a modern action-centric FPS that has some hallways and paths which don't serve a purpose or function immediately related to the plot and goings-on at hand.
There was the Apple Bandai Pippin, but that horse has been dead so long - and the gawkers so long departed - that it's just a fertile spot with grass growing where the animal fell.
I'm not pushing for revolution. The possibility of justice and a relatively clear glimpse into what's really going on in circles of power would be its own reward. Who said anything about making the streets run red with the blood of the oppressors, anyway?
Note that's 640x480x16-bit color; the latter resolution in 16 glorious colors was the original top-end of the VGA specification, if my memory rings true.
There are non-trivial ways new hardware could improve the experience on existing HDTVs. Very few games can consistently output to 1080p on the current generation of hardware. It could also be interesting to see what improvements can be leveraged for 720p - maybe 2x antialiasing guaranteed for 1080p, and 4x (or higher?) at 720p. Bumped-up levels of anisotropic filtering at all resolutions would be a big, noticeable across-the-board change. Texture resolution is also still an issue for certain titles, though >512 MB total system RAM would go a long way toward fixing that. That doesn't even go into 3D HDTVs, though I know little about them because my level of interest is low.
That said, we're certainly a long way from the NES' 256x240, 16 colors onscreen / 56 color palette output, or even the 640x480x16 the Voodoo Graphics board could manage on its flagship titles.
Quite right. As Steve Max noted in the grandparent it can take time for new X server support to manifest in Nvidia's drivers for older products; however, adding that support is a non-trivial undertaking, and I daresay that most systems running pre-GeForce 6 hardware probably enjoy relatively stable and conservative Linux configurations. While that's still a nettling inconvenience for some, I'll take it over the relatively uneven and sometimes slipshod support available for other manufacturer's cards in Linux. Matrox's policy of squeaking out one Linux driver update for its Parhelia cards per year is demonstrably worse, as is the state of support for countless 3D cards by manufacturers other than Nvidia and ATI/AMD. Memory fails, but I'm not 100% sure the Voodoo5's on-card SLI was ever fully realized in the open drivers.:-\
* Lest anyone think I'm taking a big ol' dump on open 3D drivers - I'm not! I'll take a functional open driver over a roughly equivalent closed one any day of the week, but the stars just don't align for my day-to-day use. If it works for you, go for it.
There are also supported drivers for all of these products for AMD64 Linux. It's no substitute for an open source driver - I support nouveau - but declaring that they leave their old cards unsupported is patently false. They're still one of the only games in town for CUDA and GPU computing. And, as someone who has a house full of systems running Nvidia graphics cards, Nvidia has treated me very well.
From what I remember reading, cats have poor pattern recognition skills, but an extremely strong visual-adrenal response. However, lest we imagine that cats are hopelessly stupid and coast solely on hormones, they are also capable of modulating the tone of their purring to manipulate humans. Anecdotes don't count for much, but I can say that one of my cats is smart enough to push doors open, and that she plays "fetch" with me (I'll toss a toy, she'll run to get it, plays with it for a moment, then brings it back and drops it within 6" of me to do it all again).
I'm within my rights to call the habit which gave my father emphysema a filthy one. Friends of mine smoke, and I don't kick up much of a fuss when they do, but this is a forum where my opinion can be shared.
It's akin to wading in filth when you haven't had any shots. Paranoia is probably a more appropriate response - on a system with IE6 installed, the only places I visit are Windows Update and Mozilla, to download Firefox. Doing anything else is basically throwing a malware fiesta, and advertising your computer as a buffet..
The last time I tried Virtualbox, hardware virtualization was necessary to make more than one CPU available to a hosted OS. I don't know if that's changed.
Outside of using PearPC, your best bet might be snagging one of the last released G4 Mac Minis. They aren't terribly expensive, and deploying it hopefully wouldn't make too many waves.
S3 had nothing to do with it. Intel bought Real3D, took the entirely competent architecture of the Starfighter, and pulled a stupid trick by forcing it to fetch out to AGP memory for texture storage, leaving the user with a large framebuffer and excruciatingly slow texture swapping over the bus. PCI versions of the card obviously couldn't do this, and were frequently better performers because this was properly compensated for in the drivers.
Subsequent integrated video chips continued along this shambling path, occasionally receiving updates - multitexturing here, S3TC support there, before receiving a minor overhaul somewhere around the i865G, which was allegedly DirectX 7-capable, but too slow to take advantage of most of that featureset. The i915 through GMA 3100 were native DirectX 9 parts, but pokey and prone to driver glitches; the x3100* onward are different DirectX 10+ parts, and then there's Sandy Bridge's integrated video which finally might not cause whimpering pain to all who behold it in operation. I'm STILL not confident in its OpenGL driver for anything besides desktop compositing.
* Yes, there's a huge friggin' gap between the 3100 and x3100, to the point that you could argue they aren't the same chip in any meaningful way. Alarmingly, this is actually less confusing than the naming schemes for their CPUs now...
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Becky, down in accounting. She's only 4' 11" and 95 pounds.
Happy? Hell, we were grateful!
Save that bit about death and taxes. Prove me wrong, people - I'd love to find release from one or the other!
Look at the signatories on this page, and tell me with a straight face that none of them have held public office.
Perhaps not, but joining a domain might be...
Most VGA cables cannot take the frequencies required to transmit a HD signal cleanly so you get pretty nasty ghosting.
Untrue - I saw a lot of 1600*1200 CRTs with crystal clear reception from the late '90s until a few years ago. A lot of cheap VGA cables are poorly shielded, particularly the "thin" form factor cables. This was a problem I ran into just a few months ago, where very faint ghosting could be seen after text on my HTPC's output to our HDTV. When I was given a Radeon 3850 with dual DVI outputs, I bought a new DVI-A --> VGA cable, and the ghosting completely disappeared.
I won't put on airs: the gameplay mechanics in the run 'n' gun action games of my childhood aren't brainmelting. Success in games like the NES Mega Man titles, Contra, and Gunstar Heroes wasn't predicated on all that much besides fast reflexes and pattern recognition. They aren't high art, but what I'd love to see is a game with that spirit of gameplay that was fall-down funny, or - dare I suggest it? - had a story line worth pursuing, with dialogue choices and some forking plot points that led you in different directions, and to different endings. If it's not emotionally engaging, at least make the plot intrigues byzantine and surreal.
Or at least take more modern games off of rails and put secrets in them again. My kingdom for a modern action-centric FPS that has some hallways and paths which don't serve a purpose or function immediately related to the plot and goings-on at hand.
There was the Apple Bandai Pippin, but that horse has been dead so long - and the gawkers so long departed - that it's just a fertile spot with grass growing where the animal fell.
I'm not pushing for revolution. The possibility of justice and a relatively clear glimpse into what's really going on in circles of power would be its own reward. Who said anything about making the streets run red with the blood of the oppressors, anyway?
Note that's 640x480x16-bit color; the latter resolution in 16 glorious colors was the original top-end of the VGA specification, if my memory rings true.
There are non-trivial ways new hardware could improve the experience on existing HDTVs. Very few games can consistently output to 1080p on the current generation of hardware. It could also be interesting to see what improvements can be leveraged for 720p - maybe 2x antialiasing guaranteed for 1080p, and 4x (or higher?) at 720p. Bumped-up levels of anisotropic filtering at all resolutions would be a big, noticeable across-the-board change. Texture resolution is also still an issue for certain titles, though >512 MB total system RAM would go a long way toward fixing that. That doesn't even go into 3D HDTVs, though I know little about them because my level of interest is low.
That said, we're certainly a long way from the NES' 256x240, 16 colors onscreen / 56 color palette output, or even the 640x480x16 the Voodoo Graphics board could manage on its flagship titles.
Quite right. As Steve Max noted in the grandparent it can take time for new X server support to manifest in Nvidia's drivers for older products; however, adding that support is a non-trivial undertaking, and I daresay that most systems running pre-GeForce 6 hardware probably enjoy relatively stable and conservative Linux configurations. While that's still a nettling inconvenience for some, I'll take it over the relatively uneven and sometimes slipshod support available for other manufacturer's cards in Linux. Matrox's policy of squeaking out one Linux driver update for its Parhelia cards per year is demonstrably worse, as is the state of support for countless 3D cards by manufacturers other than Nvidia and ATI/AMD. Memory fails, but I'm not 100% sure the Voodoo5's on-card SLI was ever fully realized in the open drivers. :-\
* Lest anyone think I'm taking a big ol' dump on open 3D drivers - I'm not! I'll take a functional open driver over a roughly equivalent closed one any day of the week, but the stars just don't align for my day-to-day use. If it works for you, go for it.
I'll grant that the situation's always sucked for non-x86 platforms, but Nvidia's done a remarkable job of supporting their older hardware in Linux.
Drivers for GeForce FX Cards, Updated 10/18/2010
Drivers for GeForce2-4 Cards, Updated 11/16/2010
Drivers for the Riva 128 (?!) through GeForce256, Updated 08/04/2010
There are also supported drivers for all of these products for AMD64 Linux. It's no substitute for an open source driver - I support nouveau - but declaring that they leave their old cards unsupported is patently false. They're still one of the only games in town for CUDA and GPU computing. And, as someone who has a house full of systems running Nvidia graphics cards, Nvidia has treated me very well.
From what I remember reading, cats have poor pattern recognition skills, but an extremely strong visual-adrenal response. However, lest we imagine that cats are hopelessly stupid and coast solely on hormones, they are also capable of modulating the tone of their purring to manipulate humans. Anecdotes don't count for much, but I can say that one of my cats is smart enough to push doors open, and that she plays "fetch" with me (I'll toss a toy, she'll run to get it, plays with it for a moment, then brings it back and drops it within 6" of me to do it all again).
As love is more complicated than statistical analysis, that depends very heavily on your first girl.
Caffeine. Friday. Headache. All impair my ability to perceive humor.
I'm within my rights to call the habit which gave my father emphysema a filthy one. Friends of mine smoke, and I don't kick up much of a fuss when they do, but this is a forum where my opinion can be shared.
Don't self-flagellate. Just walk away. It's easier than ever. :)
It's akin to wading in filth when you haven't had any shots. Paranoia is probably a more appropriate response - on a system with IE6 installed, the only places I visit are Windows Update and Mozilla, to download Firefox. Doing anything else is basically throwing a malware fiesta, and advertising your computer as a buffet..
That, or the filthy habit catches up with you.
The last time I tried Virtualbox, hardware virtualization was necessary to make more than one CPU available to a hosted OS. I don't know if that's changed.
Outside of using PearPC, your best bet might be snagging one of the last released G4 Mac Minis. They aren't terribly expensive, and deploying it hopefully wouldn't make too many waves.
For everyday desktop usage, that may be true. I'd wager that the Radeon is non-trivially better for DirectX Video Acceleration.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that they were reasonable people. :)
S3 had nothing to do with it. Intel bought Real3D, took the entirely competent architecture of the Starfighter, and pulled a stupid trick by forcing it to fetch out to AGP memory for texture storage, leaving the user with a large framebuffer and excruciatingly slow texture swapping over the bus. PCI versions of the card obviously couldn't do this, and were frequently better performers because this was properly compensated for in the drivers.
Subsequent integrated video chips continued along this shambling path, occasionally receiving updates - multitexturing here, S3TC support there, before receiving a minor overhaul somewhere around the i865G, which was allegedly DirectX 7-capable, but too slow to take advantage of most of that featureset. The i915 through GMA 3100 were native DirectX 9 parts, but pokey and prone to driver glitches; the x3100* onward are different DirectX 10+ parts, and then there's Sandy Bridge's integrated video which finally might not cause whimpering pain to all who behold it in operation. I'm STILL not confident in its OpenGL driver for anything besides desktop compositing.
* Yes, there's a huge friggin' gap between the 3100 and x3100, to the point that you could argue they aren't the same chip in any meaningful way. Alarmingly, this is actually less confusing than the naming schemes for their CPUs now...