IIRC, most everything that ever gets implemented in DirectX has the features enabled out-of-the-graphics-driver for OpenGL. It's my impression that DirectX tends to lag behind the actual capability of the hardware due to the collaboration between manufacturers and microsoft.
Of course, it's all moot. Hardly anything uses OpenGL nowadays.:(
I think this is actually a pretty neat idea, if it ever got implemented. It would rely on having the graphics API handle calls differently perhaps, by 'asking' the driver what it should do. (IANAGraphicsProgrammer)
You (the user) would want to be able to 'order' which effects get thrown away first, and whether effects are either always on (never throw away), able to be thrown away, or never on. Some of this functionality we're getting already, with FSAA, and to some extent anisotropic/trilinear filtering. The only issue is games wanting to do it on their own or not ever asking the drivers.
As a side note: wasn't DirectX supposed to fix this?;)
Which is why some games do this. Serious Sam comes to mind as having preset scripts included with the game that it auto-loads on first running of the game with a graphics card. It's not 'smart', in the sense that the developers had to create these on their own, but the base functionality is there. It loads what they felt was an optimal setup for graphics cards at the time (running from TNT's to Geforce2 and various ATI, Voodoo, Matrox, etc. hardware).
The user could then change settings based on what they liked, plus save/load scripts (just like the ones that were preloaded before), or load a preset. The extreme graphics detail script took care of hardware that wasn't out yet.
The game also had some pretty powerful LOD variables for models and such, that the user could edit by hand, if you knew what you were doing.
Yes, except Doom3 is supposedly designed to be run just fine with most settings of detail enabled on a system around a gigahertz processor paired with a geforce3 video card. It would be playable on the original geforce256, with low detail settings.
So ID isn't even an exception, they just know what they're doing to make it playable on practically anything on the market now, and a good bit of old hardware as well.
2) The anti-Mhz myth. That Mhz don't mean anything. This is just FALSE. When you compare a single architecture (meaning one kind of one brand of processor) mhz give a VERY good idea of how performance will scale. If something gets X on a processor at 500mhz, you can with confidence say it will get nearly 2*X with the same kind of processor at 1000mhz. That doesn't mean it's the be-all, end-all benchmark, just a useful (and truthful) was of evaluating chip performance within a line.
Though I think you know you're generalizing, there's more to a computer than just the processor. I don't expect my games to run at twice the framerate if I upgrade solely my processor to a 3.6ghz from 1.8. My graphics card and possibly memory speed wouldn't be able to keep up. Plus you get messiness with bus speeds and cache sizes, which can put other limits on the speed at which the processor can actually process things. (this is all, of course, why many benchmarks are done with the latest and greatest of other hardware to show as well as possible what would happen if the processor were the limiting factor in the system)
PR numbers are just a bunch of crap. So far, I've never even seen any that are reliably based off of benchmarks. Even if they were, it wouldn't matter. Show me any benchmark, I'll show you how it's not relivant to things a lot of people do. Like take SPEC. It is a big industry standard benchmark. People doing scientific and engineering work place a lot of faith into it since it benchmarks what they do.
Well, I think game benchmarks scale REALLY well for many processor lines. And, many people play games. Other tests for other software (like say, 3d packages) don't seem to have the best reproductions of what people actually do in those programs, but they give a baseline to compare certain methods of computation within them for different hardware. I'm not sure if you're trying to contradict your own statement regarding SPEC and engineers/scientists.
Typically speaking though, if you look at benchmarks for a line of processors, you won't find a 2500+ beating out a 3000+, right? So the PR numbers are at least generally comparable to each other.
PR numbers improve nothing, and just confuse and BSify the situation. At least Mhz are factual numbers and have some basis in reality. From what I've seen of PR numbers, they are mainly a dream of marketing and don't apply to the real world.
If competing companies could rely on consumers understanding the REAL difference between mhz, and actual performance, AMD might not have relied on PR numbers. When the market leader has so much control over the market (the consumer can typically get only the leader's products from well-known, reputable companies, like Dell), then customers making a choice see "Well, I know Dell is great, and they use 2.5ghz Intel processors. That 1.8ghz Athlon must really suck, especially if Compaq is using them."
As it is, at least AMD processors actually DO have a basis for comparison. Through some sort of internal benchmarks (It would be nice to actually test these ourselves), they find the factor difference between the tested processor, and a 1ghz Duron. And who knows, there might be a little fluff, but at least they're consistent, right? And I haven't seen glaring 'errors' in the benchmarks I've viewed online. AMD trounces Intel's processors in the ones I pay attention to anyway, which is real world tests of games. Lower numbers seem to be better than ghz, even. Man, that must be AMAZING PR. Because we all know understating your products value is a sure-fire way to get to the top. *rolleyes*
The only thing I dislike about performance numbers is that Intel will definitely put FUD into the scheme, and it will STILL be an uncommon scheme with AMD (which doesn't change anything at all). I'd love to see them base it off of a 1.0ghz P3. You'd see the P4 1.3ghz processor listed as a model 1000. Woohoo!
I think the grandparent poster doesn't explicitly say an underlying theme of his message: For those that are considering the change from a Windows system to Linux, the 'breaking' of hardware compatibility is something that prevents him from getting full use out of the operating system in comparison to what he used to have.
It was actually something that may have affected my switch, as the first two distributions (Debian Woody and Mandrake 9.2) I tried on a year-old machine had problems during the install process, some of which prevented installation (display options, which resulted in forcing a crappy installation gui), hard drive location (Serial ATA wasn't supported, and still might not be. Took the drive off of SATA), and OS booting (usb failure during boot process).
Now, I have installed an older version of Mandrake on even older hardware, with much success. But, to an *even* newer user (I still consider myself one) problems that he never experiences with Windows with his current hardware are an extreme deterrent from using an alternative OS.
Because Windows is so prevalent in the marketplace, many hardware vendors only support it (stop me if you see where I'm getting at). This obviously leads to less compatibility out-of-the-box for alternative OS's, and more of a lock-in for Microsoft products. Which is good for Microsoft, of course.
Yes, but you know that nothing can stop the great Mozilla! Just you wait, [G]odzilla will one day be an open source OS in its own right, and will SMASH the competition.
Erm... Yeah. Browser wars, OS wars, console wars, mascot wars... it's all war. Somebody should write a game about it!
Judging from reports of the hardware in the XBox succeessor, having an IBM PPC chip of some variety and ATI hardware (which sounds extremely similar to Nintendo's plans), the XBox may or may not be backward compatible. I'd venture to say it would be very difficult to do so, agreeing with rumors of an emulation layer of some sort for old games.
Why is this? If say, the PS3 was crackable, and the GC2 wasn't, and (let's throw some imaginary predictions out here) Sony did sell 30mil PS3s vs. Nintendo selling 10mil GC2s... are you implying that because of the crackability, 20 million consumers chose the PS3 over the GC2?
How many people is "Too many people" that "depend" (sounds like they need their PS2 import/pirate games to sustain life) on those games? In the largest markets, how many people actually crack their system?
I think you're forgetting the larger features of today's video game consoles, namely the quanitity of quality games, price of hardware, and bonus features like hard drives, online gaming, and dvd playback.
Perhaps (though I doubt) a disproportionate number of slashdotters to the general public crack/hack their systems because that's what they enjoy doing, but when judging the public at large alone, I'd like to know some real figures before making generalized predictions of console sales based on the ease of which the system is cracked.
If Sony had developed a console that wasn't so horribly complicated to code for (compared to other console development), they perhaps wouldn't need to focus quite so much on interraction.
Of course Microsoft doesn't need to focus so much on the developer, as the hardware and interfaces are so much more similar to existing (PC) ones.
Sony came out first with a backing of existing titles and developers, and the best hype machine to date. I'd bet that proportionally speaking, each console has the same relative number of 'excellent' games; with so many more to choose from for the PS2, it becomes more enticing for the consumer to have the PS2 over the competition.
(Disclaimer: I owned a PS2 much later than a Gamecube, and much to my chagrin, now have around 50% more games for it than the latter. Lots of great games + greatest hits prices = sales)
I believe that Nintendo (or a third party) makes a new SNES-like digital pad for the gamecube. Looks awesome, but I've yet to get it (I probably will, for using my GCPlayer with a little more ease).
If the PSOne doesn't have the serial port, fine. Do those two-TV games work with the PS2? (newer games like GT3 suggest this would be possible)
While I agree with the majority of the parent, I take issue with the following:
Your eyes are only capable of seeing 20-25 fps. This is why you do not see fluorescent links blink on and off. For this reason you will not notice when cimema projection will increase speed from 25-60 fps.
So, tell me why I should use anything other than 60hz refresh rate on my computer, even though 75, 85, and above all feel much better on my eyes? Why does a computer game running at constant 60fps look better than the same at constant 20 or 30?
Really now, I thought this had been debunked enough times already.
The first one might not stay up, but build another one. If it doesn't, build another. By the fourth iteration or so, you'll probably be able to claim large tracts of Europa for your own.
But Spirit was only transmitting "pseudo-noise", a random series of zeroes and ones in binary code and not anything the scientists could decipher. - BBC News
Actually, it's a 3-dimensional PDF file that describes how to build a device that can beam us up to the Martian surface. Don't these scientists watch movies?
He said, she said. Regardless of the truth, the Republicans had no right to crack computers just because the potential for exploitation was there. Republican prosecutors and judges would never accept this as a defense for a cracking case, in fact they would laugh as they sent Mr. Cracker off to Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison and have done so repeatedly in similar cases. A cracker who informs his/her target of the potential exploit before using it to break into a computer is never afforded any kind of legal protection.
In fact, doesn't this give prosecutors the ability to pursue motives for blackmail/extortion? What else do we have here... premeditation... conspiracy...
I'm not aware of what is contained in the memos, but one would think that the ability to play unfair in political plots would carry weight in prosecution with regards to manipulating the flow of democracy.
Well then, if we get this technology ramped up quick enough, we can have the biggest Fourth of July celebration in Baghdad ever with our new carbon-fueled fireworks while playing badmitton on green fields as far as the eye can see!;)
Err... wait a minute, this is the DoD we're talking about. Nevermind, maybe next year?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, it's all moot. Hardly anything uses OpenGL nowadays. :(
You (the user) would want to be able to 'order' which effects get thrown away first, and whether effects are either always on (never throw away), able to be thrown away, or never on. Some of this functionality we're getting already, with FSAA, and to some extent anisotropic/trilinear filtering. The only issue is games wanting to do it on their own or not ever asking the drivers.
As a side note: wasn't DirectX supposed to fix this? ;)
The user could then change settings based on what they liked, plus save/load scripts (just like the ones that were preloaded before), or load a preset. The extreme graphics detail script took care of hardware that wasn't out yet.
The game also had some pretty powerful LOD variables for models and such, that the user could edit by hand, if you knew what you were doing.
So ID isn't even an exception, they just know what they're doing to make it playable on practically anything on the market now, and a good bit of old hardware as well.
Though I think you know you're generalizing, there's more to a computer than just the processor. I don't expect my games to run at twice the framerate if I upgrade solely my processor to a 3.6ghz from 1.8. My graphics card and possibly memory speed wouldn't be able to keep up. Plus you get messiness with bus speeds and cache sizes, which can put other limits on the speed at which the processor can actually process things. (this is all, of course, why many benchmarks are done with the latest and greatest of other hardware to show as well as possible what would happen if the processor were the limiting factor in the system)
PR numbers are just a bunch of crap. So far, I've never even seen any that are reliably based off of benchmarks. Even if they were, it wouldn't matter. Show me any benchmark, I'll show you how it's not relivant to things a lot of people do. Like take SPEC. It is a big industry standard benchmark. People doing scientific and engineering work place a lot of faith into it since it benchmarks what they do.
Well, I think game benchmarks scale REALLY well for many processor lines. And, many people play games. Other tests for other software (like say, 3d packages) don't seem to have the best reproductions of what people actually do in those programs, but they give a baseline to compare certain methods of computation within them for different hardware. I'm not sure if you're trying to contradict your own statement regarding SPEC and engineers/scientists.
Typically speaking though, if you look at benchmarks for a line of processors, you won't find a 2500+ beating out a 3000+, right? So the PR numbers are at least generally comparable to each other.
PR numbers improve nothing, and just confuse and BSify the situation. At least Mhz are factual numbers and have some basis in reality. From what I've seen of PR numbers, they are mainly a dream of marketing and don't apply to the real world.
If competing companies could rely on consumers understanding the REAL difference between mhz, and actual performance, AMD might not have relied on PR numbers. When the market leader has so much control over the market (the consumer can typically get only the leader's products from well-known, reputable companies, like Dell), then customers making a choice see "Well, I know Dell is great, and they use 2.5ghz Intel processors. That 1.8ghz Athlon must really suck, especially if Compaq is using them."
As it is, at least AMD processors actually DO have a basis for comparison. Through some sort of internal benchmarks (It would be nice to actually test these ourselves), they find the factor difference between the tested processor, and a 1ghz Duron. And who knows, there might be a little fluff, but at least they're consistent, right? And I haven't seen glaring 'errors' in the benchmarks I've viewed online. AMD trounces Intel's processors in the ones I pay attention to anyway, which is real world tests of games. Lower numbers seem to be better than ghz, even. Man, that must be AMAZING PR. Because we all know understating your products value is a sure-fire way to get to the top. *rolleyes*
The only thing I dislike about performance numbers is that Intel will definitely put FUD into the scheme, and it will STILL be an uncommon scheme with AMD (which doesn't change anything at all). I'd love to see them base it off of a 1.0ghz P3. You'd see the P4 1.3ghz processor listed as a model 1000. Woohoo!
*rants and raves*
DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!
Good job, MS!
[/rant] Is imagining Ballmer OK too? :D
I think the grandparent poster doesn't explicitly say an underlying theme of his message: For those that are considering the change from a Windows system to Linux, the 'breaking' of hardware compatibility is something that prevents him from getting full use out of the operating system in comparison to what he used to have.
It was actually something that may have affected my switch, as the first two distributions (Debian Woody and Mandrake 9.2) I tried on a year-old machine had problems during the install process, some of which prevented installation (display options, which resulted in forcing a crappy installation gui), hard drive location (Serial ATA wasn't supported, and still might not be. Took the drive off of SATA), and OS booting (usb failure during boot process).
Now, I have installed an older version of Mandrake on even older hardware, with much success. But, to an *even* newer user (I still consider myself one) problems that he never experiences with Windows with his current hardware are an extreme deterrent from using an alternative OS.
Because Windows is so prevalent in the marketplace, many hardware vendors only support it (stop me if you see where I'm getting at). This obviously leads to less compatibility out-of-the-box for alternative OS's, and more of a lock-in for Microsoft products. Which is good for Microsoft, of course.
Yes, but you know that nothing can stop the great Mozilla! Just you wait, [G]odzilla will one day be an open source OS in its own right, and will SMASH the competition.
Erm... Yeah. Browser wars, OS wars, console wars, mascot wars... it's all war. Somebody should write a game about it!
Judging from reports of the hardware in the XBox succeessor, having an IBM PPC chip of some variety and ATI hardware (which sounds extremely similar to Nintendo's plans), the XBox may or may not be backward compatible. I'd venture to say it would be very difficult to do so, agreeing with rumors of an emulation layer of some sort for old games.
Why is this? If say, the PS3 was crackable, and the GC2 wasn't, and (let's throw some imaginary predictions out here) Sony did sell 30mil PS3s vs. Nintendo selling 10mil GC2s... are you implying that because of the crackability, 20 million consumers chose the PS3 over the GC2?
How many people is "Too many people" that "depend" (sounds like they need their PS2 import/pirate games to sustain life) on those games? In the largest markets, how many people actually crack their system?
I think you're forgetting the larger features of today's video game consoles, namely the quanitity of quality games, price of hardware, and bonus features like hard drives, online gaming, and dvd playback.
Perhaps (though I doubt) a disproportionate number of slashdotters to the general public crack/hack their systems because that's what they enjoy doing, but when judging the public at large alone, I'd like to know some real figures before making generalized predictions of console sales based on the ease of which the system is cracked.
Well, that's what happens when the console approaches the threshold of users that ever wanted one and have the means to get one.
If Sony had developed a console that wasn't so horribly complicated to code for (compared to other console development), they perhaps wouldn't need to focus quite so much on interraction. Of course Microsoft doesn't need to focus so much on the developer, as the hardware and interfaces are so much more similar to existing (PC) ones. Sony came out first with a backing of existing titles and developers, and the best hype machine to date. I'd bet that proportionally speaking, each console has the same relative number of 'excellent' games; with so many more to choose from for the PS2, it becomes more enticing for the consumer to have the PS2 over the competition. (Disclaimer: I owned a PS2 much later than a Gamecube, and much to my chagrin, now have around 50% more games for it than the latter. Lots of great games + greatest hits prices = sales)
I believe that Nintendo (or a third party) makes a new SNES-like digital pad for the gamecube. Looks awesome, but I've yet to get it (I probably will, for using my GCPlayer with a little more ease).
If the PSOne doesn't have the serial port, fine. Do those two-TV games work with the PS2? (newer games like GT3 suggest this would be possible)
So, tell me why I should use anything other than 60hz refresh rate on my computer, even though 75, 85, and above all feel much better on my eyes? Why does a computer game running at constant 60fps look better than the same at constant 20 or 30?
Really now, I thought this had been debunked enough times already.
The first one might not stay up, but build another one. If it doesn't, build another. By the fourth iteration or so, you'll probably be able to claim large tracts of Europa for your own.
Actually, it's a 3-dimensional PDF file that describes how to build a device that can beam us up to the Martian surface. Don't these scientists watch movies?
In fact, doesn't this give prosecutors the ability to pursue motives for blackmail/extortion? What else do we have here... premeditation... conspiracy...
I'm not aware of what is contained in the memos, but one would think that the ability to play unfair in political plots would carry weight in prosecution with regards to manipulating the flow of democracy.
Well then, if we get this technology ramped up quick enough, we can have the biggest Fourth of July celebration in Baghdad ever with our new carbon-fueled fireworks while playing badmitton on green fields as far as the eye can see! ;)
Err... wait a minute, this is the DoD we're talking about. Nevermind, maybe next year?