All of these sales taxes are going to kill the online sales industry. If you are in NY and were to buy from a CA based online store, you would get taxed the ridiculous CA sales tax percentage + the soon to be ridiculous NY sales tax.
THEN add in the cost of delivery.
Fuck that...
It makes buying online not worth it. However most local retail stores have a very small selection of in store goods. Usually you have to go online to find something.
I hope our blind governor is read this part of the bill before he signs this stupid bill. That or i hope he just signs the desk and misses the paper all together.
If we had our whore fucking super god eliot spitzer as gov... he would not sign this. Perhaps thats why he was ratted out.
A simple blur isnt enough. Blurring can work if you're rendering at very high resolutions.
Most games on consoles are 720p. A pre rendered animation done in CG can look incredible at 720p... while a game without anti aliasing will look rather poor.
Aliasing ruins the image. Bluring a 720p image wont take care of the aliasing and it will destroy the image all together because the amount of bluring you would need... would look quite bad.
Games generally dont run at 1080P on consoles due to performance issues. And if we can barely render them in 1080P without Anti Aliasing... then we're no where near ready for raytraced games. Anti Aliasing still needs to be addressed. It is as important, if not more, than raytracing in real time games.
All of this talk about raytracing, and we still do not have high quality anti aliased renders with existing real time rendering methods.
Games still look like shit. NONE of them can even compare to the nice anti aliased images generated by software renderers.
Anti Aliasing is all fine and dandy, but when a game looks like shit, these days its due to anti aliasing. We can do plenty of visually stunning things in realitime but no matter what you do, it still looks like a video game because the damn hardware cant render high resolution enough with high quality anti aliasing enabled.
How in the hell will raytracing solve that?:) It's just going to eat more pixel ponies for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Look at Gran Turismo on PS3. All of their PR videos have anti aliasing enabled and the game looks photoreal. However the reality is they're lying in their screenshots. The game itself does not use anti aliasing, thus making it look like a videogame. With Anti aliasing enabled, its photoreal, without, it looks like shit.
This is an old problem, which the hardware companies have addressed... they just cant deliver on performance.
But they can on raytracing? No thanks. Anti aliasing in ray tracing renderers is even slower. I dont care how accurate the reflects are, if its aliased to shit... it will never look convincing.
There is no magical physics simulation system used in films that are different than the ideas behind game physics. Yes, there are more complex physics simulations etc...
but what he seems to be talking about mostly is scene setup. What he fails to realize is that many of those films dont render full 3d scenes in a single pass. Even full 3d films, use extensive compositing techniques. Rarely is everything rendered in a single pass. The reason... we just dont have the processing power.
As processing power increases, so do the many things we can achieve, but it all requires extensive processing well beyond where we wish we were.
There is no magicial character animation process that is different between games and film production. Its the same. Granted in film we use a lot more complex rigs with complex expressions and transformations that would choke a game.
I do agree that we would benefit by improving, hell, eliminating the task of doing all of the deformations/translations etc on the cpu and then rendering on the gpu. Tieing the two together might help... if its possible.
Lots of 3d software would need to be rewritten though, and who's to say that these super 3d cpu/gpu integrated systems will serve all the needs of a 3d animation software package?
After all its the 3d animation software packages that we use to make all of this wonderful shit:)
I dont know... I think what he says is some what sound, but a ways off in the future. Its less of a reality, and more of a "where we should be... if we can do it" kind of thing.
Its a bit of a pipe dream. No gpu/cpu combo system is going to simulate light (raytracing, global illumination, color bleeding, and handle high res geometry deformations without taking a serious amount of power. Are we there yet?
No.
Its worth working towards... But we're not there yet. Games are the way they are because speed came first above all and for a very important reason. ALL of these fancy things we want in games take a lot of power. The stuff hes talking about takes even more.
iTunes works on Vista 64. It was always Apples fault, they tried to hold back 64bit windows because its in their interest to hurt vista 64.
Tim's right on about Vista. 32bit is dead, and it has been since XP64. Just because grandma doesnt know the difference, doesnt mean its not good for her.
Crysis is incredible, but show me the average PC user who can run Crysis... Thats the point.
Actually the real point is that... A game like Crysis demands hardware that most people do not have, and yes you can go out and buy it, and the consumer is satisfied, but on the business end of it, the truth is, not a whole lot of folks are actually doing that. They're not buying the high end hardware in large enough numbers to warrant the high cost of developement.
Fortunately Crysis can scale very well. But the developement time to make Crysis as lovely as it looks, costs money, and if 10% of your audience is only going to see it on "super high settings", than is it worth the extra time and MONEY to make it.
People like Tim, and the Crysis team say "you bet your ass it is"... because they love games, and they know gaming is about pushing technology, pushing the experience....
It just makes it hard to do so, when the consumer isnt really caught up with you, and you get the suits at the top who count the pennies saying "are you sure you really need to go to this extent, because we can save a lot of time and money and make MORE profit if we dont try to aim for the super high end"
Yes games scale, but scaling back is far different in developement terms than squeezing every inch of power out of a card. If you aimed for the middle ground, rather than the high end, you save a lot of time and money.
Companies like Epic etc aim for the high end, middle and low end.... but its the high end that takes the most work.
"But, as ever with Epic staff, he seems to labour under the frankly ludicrous idea that the solution is to stop home and business users who don't need an 8800 from buying anything slower."
I dont think thats it. If you take his point about integrated graphics, he's saying if you buy a pc at best buy with an integrated graphics chip, you do not have the option to install a high end graphics card.
This isnt about people buying something they dont need, but instead, buying something that limits them from buying something later that they might want or need.
If you're going to spend $800 to $1400 on a pc at bestbuy, you better be aware of what an integrated graphics chip means, and how limiting the mother board that it sits on is. It's not a performance machine, and yet you're paying a good deal of money for it. In the end you dont want to be like "oh what, you mean i cant put this 8800GTX in here?..."
I've been saying similar things for a while now as Tim. I work in the industry.
Consoles are plug and play experiences. They always have been, but the difference between a PC and a console is so blurred now. HDTV 1080P is a dam good resolution for a game. Now most consoles cant really drive games at 1080P, especially if they're going heavy on the art side of things, but over all the console has a solid base for online community, content delivery, blu-ray, communications, video chat, games with video chat in them, a standardized hardware set, blue tooth, ability to plug in mp3 players, network streaming of video and music from media servers to the console...
OH and they play games... AND you can plug keyboards and mice into them.
I mean the console has become this thing that is far more than what our old NES was. It's now a computer with a specific set of functions that is streamlined under a single interface. Want to im a friend on live? He could be playing a game made by EA, while you're playing a game made by Capcom... and its the same IM system, the same voice mail system, the same chat system... its a great unified architecture, which is really what the PC game companies probably should have tried to do on the PC through standardization. How many gamespy like programs are there. You have to run gamespy, Steam, etc etc.. how many do you have to run or have installed on a pc?
The hardware has out paced the game developement cycle. Developers dont quite know what to do or what hardware to target, as evident in this article. Tim is a gamer, a smart man and a very passionate tech guy like many of us who want to PUSH technology, rather than sit and profit on stagnation. Of course Tim wants to make profit but there will always be the artists out there such as myself that want to make the best visual and most exciting gameplay experience.
Remember, our generation (31 year olds) came out of the arcades, where we wanted the arcade experience at home, we always wanted bigger better, more graphics, more , more more more more...
That is our mentality. We're not the kind of guys that say... you know, i really sure do look forward to making a game with less graphics and less gameplay. We want to push, and drive ahead what is possible. That is the very nature of us stupid computer geeks? Star Trek anyone? To boldly go where no one has gone before? The shit is ingrained in us:)
Remember this industry basically started in the garage! I know people who to this day are still in the industry who wrote old PC games with their friends in their teens and were successful!
We want the latest tech... We want to deliver the latest tech, we want science to progress. Its a business but its also a passion. Unfortunately, gaming is just a business to most folks. Folks like Tim, Carmack and a few others (sammy! yeah you know whos writing this now;))... are into gaming and technology for the passion of it.
Passion and Business rarely go together, and often collide. Guys with a passion for aut
I love when people bring up things like this as if they havent been ever thought of before. They're difficult, and they dont work 100%.
How do you send a txt msg by just speaking to your phone, in a public setting, especially a loud and noisey one? Or how about in a quiet setting, like a movie theater during a film?
Pecking around on touch screens will always be useful for situations where you want to be discreet.
Anyways these dreams are nothing new. Interfaces will always evolve, but an evolution does not necessarily mean the phasing out of older interfaces such as the trusty keyboard and mouse.
Well said, but even today's versions of Prman raytrace. Prman has always had an external raytrace call if i'm not mistaken. Infact a lot of folks would use it to render their RIBs in Larry Gitz's old Blue Moon Render Tools. (Btw) Larry now works at Nvidia i beleive.
But anyways, today's renderman is a lot more robost in the raytrace department. Renderman is no longer the same old renderman it once was which relied heavily on the old Reyes work. Larry Gitz and others worked on redesigning renderman while at pixar and it has become for the most part a very solid raytracing renderer.
I've been doing 3d character animation for sometime, and started 3d with 3ds r3 and povray in dos years ago... You're correct. Raytracing requires the entire scene to be in memory at all times, and modern raytracers, such as mentalray do use the bucket style rendering to optimize memory use due to the fact that raytracing does take so much ram and cpu.
I mentioned this when the intel story hit slashdot. The ram and cpu demands are still greater when you raytrace. Yes there are processes that benefit greatly from raytracing and they are incredible...
But when we're talking about speed... Raytracing will always be slower and demand more ram and i dont think we're at the point of saying... "well we've done everything we could with current rendering techniques, and we have all of this left over power... why not raytrace?" We're just not there yet.
As another poster said, lets devote that processing power and ram to dynamically decimate geometry in a destructive shattering effect. Aka real time damage. Lets first get these console makers to stuff more ram in the dam consoles. 512 is not enough.
As the other poster said, there is so much more that needs processing power devoted to it, before we jump to raytracing. Cloth, Fur, Fluids, Softbody, Volumetric Fluids (gas, fire, smoke), higher shadow map resolutions, better ai, better and more complex character rigging for better geometry deformations. Cloth ripping dynamically, realtime terrain deformation effects for mud, sand, snow...
Right now developers are having a hardtime on consoles doing anything about 720p. Some are even lowering res to just below 720p, and are scaling it in output to tv to 720p.
We're not at the point where we can truely jump to raytracing. Thats not to say a game couldnt benefit from it, or that a game right now couldnt be cool using raytracing:) It could certainly give a puzzle type game a really cool visual look to it.... but you cant ask for games with Crysis like visuals to deliver the same performance on today hardware with raytracing. They barely run on todays hardware as is.
I think like renderman, we'll see 3d hardware evolve into a combination of raster and raytracing where a game could be either, and perhaps both... but it still all boils down to... what else could we be doing better with todays processing power?
I would rather see more ram and cpu go to other tasks because we're not at the point where switching to raytracing makes sense. There is so much more to be done.
Google needs to put more development time into Gtalk. (the stand alone app). The first thing they can do is add this open AIM support so i can dump trillian. Although dam it, i still use my old icq number since old friends are still on it.
At some point it might, but are we at the point where raytracing everything, doesnt set us back performance wise and visually?
Wont it always be true that raytracing is slower, uses more ram etc. Its more physically correct but the alternatives will always be faster. Which is better and more performance oriented, baking ambient occlusion, or rendering it in real time with raytracing?
Several factors come into play, samples vs prebaked map resolution. Lots of samples in ambient occlusion can have a dramatic effect on performance... now would baking the maps be better if it allows higher detailed characters, translation of higher poly characters etc...
Its all a huge balancing act. Raytracing is wonderful. I work in mentalray all the time in softimage. If we can achieve a performance level that is comparible without putting a hit on current resolutions, geometry, post special fx etc... then i'm all for it. I'm not sure we're there yet. No one is denying the benefits of raytracing, but are we at the point that we can switch without sacrificing performance and visuals. I'm not sure. I dont believe we are. Not in my experience. Thats not to say some games may not benefit from it. Some games like puzzle games and racing games where reflections are important could benefit. Gran Turismo 5 looks insane on ps3
Perhaps AT&T wanted the iPhone on Edge because they felt possible number of iphone users would cause bandwidth issues with their existing 3G network?
In other words, maybe AT&T said "look if this iphone thing is as huge as we think it will be, our 3G network is going to be hammered, but our edge network can handle the load..."
Just an idea.
I like my iPhone though. It could use a cut and paste feature. It could use other things... but in general its a very nice device. Hopefully Apple will continue to support the iphone by adding more software features rather than holding them back for each hardware revision.
The SDK should be out in the next few weeks... and that certainly is a step in the right direction. I still think Apple will control their mail and text messaging features, and the sdk wont be able to really add new txt messaging features etc... but we shall see.
Slashdot Mirror
All of these sales taxes are going to kill the online sales industry. If you are in NY and were to buy from a CA based online store, you would get taxed the ridiculous CA sales tax percentage + the soon to be ridiculous NY sales tax.
THEN add in the cost of delivery.
Fuck that...
It makes buying online not worth it. However most local retail stores have a very small selection of in store goods. Usually you have to go online to find something.
I hope our blind governor is read this part of the bill before he signs this stupid bill. That or i hope he just signs the desk and misses the paper all together.
If we had our whore fucking super god eliot spitzer as gov... he would not sign this. Perhaps thats why he was ratted out.
Ok if we want to level the playing field, why not split the current value of sales tax in ny, and apply the other half to online sales...
:)
Oh thats right, because they wont get more tax dollars.
This is about money... Perhaps NY should dump all sales tax to be competitive. NY toll booths make plenty anyways
A simple blur isnt enough. Blurring can work if you're rendering at very high resolutions.
Most games on consoles are 720p. A pre rendered animation done in CG can look incredible at 720p... while a game without anti aliasing will look rather poor.
Aliasing ruins the image. Bluring a 720p image wont take care of the aliasing and it will destroy the image all together because the amount of bluring you would need... would look quite bad.
Games generally dont run at 1080P on consoles due to performance issues. And if we can barely render them in 1080P without Anti Aliasing... then we're no where near ready for raytraced games. Anti Aliasing still needs to be addressed. It is as important, if not more, than raytracing in real time games.
All of this talk about raytracing, and we still do not have high quality anti aliased renders with existing real time rendering methods.
:) It's just going to eat more pixel ponies for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Games still look like shit. NONE of them can even compare to the nice anti aliased images generated by software renderers.
Anti Aliasing is all fine and dandy, but when a game looks like shit, these days its due to anti aliasing. We can do plenty of visually stunning things in realitime but no matter what you do, it still looks like a video game because the damn hardware cant render high resolution enough with high quality anti aliasing enabled.
How in the hell will raytracing solve that?
Look at Gran Turismo on PS3. All of their PR videos have anti aliasing enabled and the game looks photoreal. However the reality is they're lying in their screenshots. The game itself does not use anti aliasing, thus making it look like a videogame. With Anti aliasing enabled, its photoreal, without, it looks like shit.
This is an old problem, which the hardware companies have addressed... they just cant deliver on performance.
But they can on raytracing? No thanks. Anti aliasing in ray tracing renderers is even slower. I dont care how accurate the reflects are, if its aliased to shit... it will never look convincing.
Surely seagate owns a patent they're breaking right now on samsungs existing hard disk line.
I thought... "what does safari have to do with itunes?" and then i thought "well maybe its an internal component to itunes' browser"
Why the fuck would i want safari? If i wanted it, i would have dl'd it. I did once when it first came to windows, and i've hated it since.
Now apple is shoving it down people's throats?
Word to your Chinese mother you heard!
... not just gaming.
:)
There is no magical physics simulation system used in films that are different than the ideas behind game physics. Yes, there are more complex physics simulations etc...
but what he seems to be talking about mostly is scene setup. What he fails to realize is that many of those films dont render full 3d scenes in a single pass. Even full 3d films, use extensive compositing techniques. Rarely is everything rendered in a single pass. The reason... we just dont have the processing power.
As processing power increases, so do the many things we can achieve, but it all requires extensive processing well beyond where we wish we were.
There is no magicial character animation process that is different between games and film production. Its the same. Granted in film we use a lot more complex rigs with complex expressions and transformations that would choke a game.
I do agree that we would benefit by improving, hell, eliminating the task of doing all of the deformations/translations etc on the cpu and then rendering on the gpu. Tieing the two together might help... if its possible.
Lots of 3d software would need to be rewritten though, and who's to say that these super 3d cpu/gpu integrated systems will serve all the needs of a 3d animation software package?
After all its the 3d animation software packages that we use to make all of this wonderful shit
I dont know... I think what he says is some what sound, but a ways off in the future. Its less of a reality, and more of a "where we should be... if we can do it" kind of thing.
Its a bit of a pipe dream. No gpu/cpu combo system is going to simulate light (raytracing, global illumination, color bleeding, and handle high res geometry deformations without taking a serious amount of power. Are we there yet?
No.
Its worth working towards... But we're not there yet. Games are the way they are because speed came first above all and for a very important reason. ALL of these fancy things we want in games take a lot of power. The stuff hes talking about takes even more.
Its a ways off.
iTunes works on Vista 64. It was always Apples fault, they tried to hold back 64bit windows because its in their interest to hurt vista 64.
Tim's right on about Vista. 32bit is dead, and it has been since XP64. Just because grandma doesnt know the difference, doesnt mean its not good for her.
32bit is holding EVERYONE back.
Thats not quite the point.
Crysis is incredible, but show me the average PC user who can run Crysis... Thats the point.
Actually the real point is that... A game like Crysis demands hardware that most people do not have, and yes you can go out and buy it, and the consumer is satisfied, but on the business end of it, the truth is, not a whole lot of folks are actually doing that. They're not buying the high end hardware in large enough numbers to warrant the high cost of developement.
Fortunately Crysis can scale very well. But the developement time to make Crysis as lovely as it looks, costs money, and if 10% of your audience is only going to see it on "super high settings", than is it worth the extra time and MONEY to make it.
People like Tim, and the Crysis team say "you bet your ass it is"... because they love games, and they know gaming is about pushing technology, pushing the experience....
It just makes it hard to do so, when the consumer isnt really caught up with you, and you get the suits at the top who count the pennies saying "are you sure you really need to go to this extent, because we can save a lot of time and money and make MORE profit if we dont try to aim for the super high end"
Yes games scale, but scaling back is far different in developement terms than squeezing every inch of power out of a card. If you aimed for the middle ground, rather than the high end, you save a lot of time and money.
Companies like Epic etc aim for the high end, middle and low end.... but its the high end that takes the most work.
I dont think thats it. If you take his point about integrated graphics, he's saying if you buy a pc at best buy with an integrated graphics chip, you do not have the option to install a high end graphics card.
:)
;))... are into gaming and technology for the passion of it.
This isnt about people buying something they dont need, but instead, buying something that limits them from buying something later that they might want or need.
If you're going to spend $800 to $1400 on a pc at bestbuy, you better be aware of what an integrated graphics chip means, and how limiting the mother board that it sits on is. It's not a performance machine, and yet you're paying a good deal of money for it. In the end you dont want to be like "oh what, you mean i cant put this 8800GTX in here?..."
I've been saying similar things for a while now as Tim. I work in the industry.
Consoles are plug and play experiences. They always have been, but the difference between a PC and a console is so blurred now. HDTV 1080P is a dam good resolution for a game. Now most consoles cant really drive games at 1080P, especially if they're going heavy on the art side of things, but over all the console has a solid base for online community, content delivery, blu-ray, communications, video chat, games with video chat in them, a standardized hardware set, blue tooth, ability to plug in mp3 players, network streaming of video and music from media servers to the console...
OH and they play games... AND you can plug keyboards and mice into them.
I mean the console has become this thing that is far more than what our old NES was. It's now a computer with a specific set of functions that is streamlined under a single interface. Want to im a friend on live? He could be playing a game made by EA, while you're playing a game made by Capcom... and its the same IM system, the same voice mail system, the same chat system... its a great unified architecture, which is really what the PC game companies probably should have tried to do on the PC through standardization. How many gamespy like programs are there. You have to run gamespy, Steam, etc etc.. how many do you have to run or have installed on a pc?
The hardware has out paced the game developement cycle. Developers dont quite know what to do or what hardware to target, as evident in this article. Tim is a gamer, a smart man and a very passionate tech guy like many of us who want to PUSH technology, rather than sit and profit on stagnation. Of course Tim wants to make profit but there will always be the artists out there such as myself that want to make the best visual and most exciting gameplay experience.
Remember, our generation (31 year olds) came out of the arcades, where we wanted the arcade experience at home, we always wanted bigger better, more graphics, more , more more more more...
That is our mentality. We're not the kind of guys that say... you know, i really sure do look forward to making a game with less graphics and less gameplay. We want to push, and drive ahead what is possible. That is the very nature of us stupid computer geeks? Star Trek anyone? To boldly go where no one has gone before? The shit is ingrained in us
Remember this industry basically started in the garage! I know people who to this day are still in the industry who wrote old PC games with their friends in their teens and were successful!
We want the latest tech... We want to deliver the latest tech, we want science to progress. Its a business but its also a passion. Unfortunately, gaming is just a business to most folks. Folks like Tim, Carmack and a few others (sammy! yeah you know whos writing this now
Passion and Business rarely go together, and often collide. Guys with a passion for aut
I love when people bring up things like this as if they havent been ever thought of before. They're difficult, and they dont work 100%.
How do you send a txt msg by just speaking to your phone, in a public setting, especially a loud and noisey one? Or how about in a quiet setting, like a movie theater during a film?
Pecking around on touch screens will always be useful for situations where you want to be discreet.
Anyways these dreams are nothing new. Interfaces will always evolve, but an evolution does not necessarily mean the phasing out of older interfaces such as the trusty keyboard and mouse.
Well said, but even today's versions of Prman raytrace. Prman has always had an external raytrace call if i'm not mistaken. Infact a lot of folks would use it to render their RIBs in Larry Gitz's old Blue Moon Render Tools. (Btw) Larry now works at Nvidia i beleive.
:) It could certainly give a puzzle type game a really cool visual look to it.... but you cant ask for games with Crysis like visuals to deliver the same performance on today hardware with raytracing. They barely run on todays hardware as is.
But anyways, today's renderman is a lot more robost in the raytrace department. Renderman is no longer the same old renderman it once was which relied heavily on the old Reyes work. Larry Gitz and others worked on redesigning renderman while at pixar and it has become for the most part a very solid raytracing renderer.
I've been doing 3d character animation for sometime, and started 3d with 3ds r3 and povray in dos years ago... You're correct. Raytracing requires the entire scene to be in memory at all times, and modern raytracers, such as mentalray do use the bucket style rendering to optimize memory use due to the fact that raytracing does take so much ram and cpu.
I mentioned this when the intel story hit slashdot. The ram and cpu demands are still greater when you raytrace. Yes there are processes that benefit greatly from raytracing and they are incredible...
But when we're talking about speed... Raytracing will always be slower and demand more ram and i dont think we're at the point of saying... "well we've done everything we could with current rendering techniques, and we have all of this left over power... why not raytrace?" We're just not there yet.
As another poster said, lets devote that processing power and ram to dynamically decimate geometry in a destructive shattering effect. Aka real time damage. Lets first get these console makers to stuff more ram in the dam consoles. 512 is not enough.
As the other poster said, there is so much more that needs processing power devoted to it, before we jump to raytracing. Cloth, Fur, Fluids, Softbody, Volumetric Fluids (gas, fire, smoke), higher shadow map resolutions, better ai, better and more complex character rigging for better geometry deformations. Cloth ripping dynamically, realtime terrain deformation effects for mud, sand, snow...
Right now developers are having a hardtime on consoles doing anything about 720p. Some are even lowering res to just below 720p, and are scaling it in output to tv to 720p.
We're not at the point where we can truely jump to raytracing. Thats not to say a game couldnt benefit from it, or that a game right now couldnt be cool using raytracing
I think like renderman, we'll see 3d hardware evolve into a combination of raster and raytracing where a game could be either, and perhaps both... but it still all boils down to... what else could we be doing better with todays processing power?
I would rather see more ram and cpu go to other tasks because we're not at the point where switching to raytracing makes sense. There is so much more to be done.
Google needs to put more development time into Gtalk. (the stand alone app). The first thing they can do is add this open AIM support so i can dump trillian. Although dam it, i still use my old icq number since old friends are still on it.
At some point it might, but are we at the point where raytracing everything, doesnt set us back performance wise and visually?
Wont it always be true that raytracing is slower, uses more ram etc. Its more physically correct but the alternatives will always be faster. Which is better and more performance oriented, baking ambient occlusion, or rendering it in real time with raytracing?
Several factors come into play, samples vs prebaked map resolution. Lots of samples in ambient occlusion can have a dramatic effect on performance... now would baking the maps be better if it allows higher detailed characters, translation of higher poly characters etc...
Its all a huge balancing act. Raytracing is wonderful. I work in mentalray all the time in softimage. If we can achieve a performance level that is comparible without putting a hit on current resolutions, geometry, post special fx etc... then i'm all for it. I'm not sure we're there yet. No one is denying the benefits of raytracing, but are we at the point that we can switch without sacrificing performance and visuals. I'm not sure. I dont believe we are. Not in my experience. Thats not to say some games may not benefit from it. Some games like puzzle games and racing games where reflections are important could benefit. Gran Turismo 5 looks insane on ps3
Perhaps AT&T wanted the iPhone on Edge because they felt possible number of iphone users would cause bandwidth issues with their existing 3G network?
In other words, maybe AT&T said "look if this iphone thing is as huge as we think it will be, our 3G network is going to be hammered, but our edge network can handle the load..."
Just an idea.
I like my iPhone though. It could use a cut and paste feature. It could use other things... but in general its a very nice device. Hopefully Apple will continue to support the iphone by adding more software features rather than holding them back for each hardware revision.
The SDK should be out in the next few weeks... and that certainly is a step in the right direction. I still think Apple will control their mail and text messaging features, and the sdk wont be able to really add new txt messaging features etc... but we shall see.
Raytracing does not make things easier. If anything it makes things a bit harder, or at the least its a comparable work load.
Is Raytracing really needed on a tiny mobile device at say 300x400?
Everybody's first mistake was thinking Apple is any more ethical than Microsoft. They're the same beast.
Now lets hope the government steps in and says Apple cant bundle applications with OSX, and cant have secret apis that give performance advantages.
Oh and fine them for billions of dollars... and euros.
Port the Adobe suites to linux.
Translation: You need to buy or create heavily traffic sites so that you will buy more of our servers.
Why else would Sun be so concerned about this?
Comcast paid people off the street to fill up the hearing.
Nuff said.
I never quite realized it until now though. Its been happening lately and now i know what it is.
Me. Its a great phone
If the OS runs better, i could careless if another company has to update their software to run on it.
Progress has its price.