Solaris and FreeBSD don't run on workstations? Better tell Nvidia, better tell people who use it as such.
You don't really have to care about the EULA of binary drivers if you have nothing to do with them. Nouveau isn't a licensee, doesn't use VDPAU, PhysX, or anything else that is intrinsically or defacto Nvidia's property.
EULA applies to the end users agreeing to the license (see where that acronym comes from?).
It doesn't, and can't, cover other scenarios. That'd be a bit like saying that Windows' EULA doesn't permit ReactOS or wine. It doesn't have to. Third party clean room interoperability/compatibility is generally allowed, expected for software, and without a EULA to violate, DMCA and any other provisions which would give company grounds to complain, don't apply.
But, really, can you (or anyone else) say that AMD is trying completely independently of the quality of its own drivers vs. the competition? They haven't been improving and they likely understand that other people can probably do it better, by this point, assuming it's not hardware defects, like were well known with the original X*00 series and Radeon 32 series (and Nvidia had with certain 5, 8/9 [nearly entire second generation unified shader from G92 up], and MX cards).
(For what it's worth, NGOHQ was also the source of the rumor about ATI adding PhysX support themselves, along with 'Russian Hackers' publishing info on how to enable PhysX on ATI 'next week' last year.)
Wine translates the fixed function and shaders to OpenGL/GLSL/ARB shaders as necessary. Most newer games work somewhat out of the box, several run perfectly out of the box, some without requiring the closed source version of "DirectX 9 extension DLLs" ala d3dx_39.dll, which wine is also implementing.
Basically, if it runs straight DirectX 9, or most things before d3dx9_35.dll, it runs okay on wine. But implying that Starcraft is the average age of things that 'work okay on wine' certainly isn't the case. You can happily run World of Warcraft, Half Life 2, Oblivion, and many other games on it. Check the Platinum and Gold lists for some goodies: http://appdb.winehq.org/
I can happily load most any retail game released as brand new -today-, and at least get to title screen, or know exactly why it failed. Many work correctly in-game to a significant degree.
Gosh. Don't tell that to id Software, icculus, Linux Game Publishing, the former Loki Games, AND OTHERS, who were using OpenGL 1.x and 2.x to do that since at least 1998.
What, is "OpenGL3" the new buzz word that people don't understand what it actually implies?
(Also, PhysX never was, never has been, any sort of standard, nor has it been used much.)
That was always the case, and Nvidia didn't make a move. This has been the exact same case since the merger in the first place. Game developers still only rarely use PhysX as a 'GPU acceleration tool', and nor is any 'real work' often done on the GPU in the 'accelerated' codepath. Red Faction 3, used Havok. Most games, use software-only PhysX, or Havok. This isn't news, and this impacts quite literally nobody, nor is it a situation within Nvidia's control. Primary driver determines what gets done on any secondary VGA cards, if anything. No 3D acceleration = no CUDA = no PhysX.
Not allowing a specific feature because of lack of 3D acceleration on the secondary card is not 'harming the user experience', especially not of a presumably rich-er subset of the population which can afford A( dual-GPU enthusiast motherboard, B( two graphics cards, C( fully intends to dedicate an entire graphics card, nevermind the power bill, to PhysX, when all GPU PhysX does is add optional visual-only effects that can slow down your graphics card a little, but otherwise works exactly the same as the CPU only variant. Can I also point that it's on the order of 5-6 retail games that actually have "GPU hardware PhysX acceleration", and the rest either used the Aegia PPU (incompatible with Nvidia's implementation of the base engine), or are software-only in the first place?
They never supported that scenario on any OS to begin with. Even on the touted Windows 7, it just wouldn't work. The secondary video card has 3D disabled, unless you happen to have a matching card, and CrossFire/SLI as applicable.
Windows itself won't even allow you to so much as try it pre-Windows 7, either.
Effectively, you got trolled by whoever made the original post, and responded as if it made any sense, and are, in fact, effectively furthering it by making claims that were never true.
PhysX is optional-effects-only (in effect) for GPU, most games that use PhysX, only use the software (not GPU) component. PhysX, CUDA/ATI-Stream-SDK, and base 3D acceleration never worked with ATI primary/Nvidia secondary, nor with Nvidia primary/ATI secondary, when trying to get anything meaningful (besides basic 2D non-accelerated multi-monitor) to work vs the secondary card.
Equally worth noting, is that only 'new', specifically GPU-PhysX enabled games (of which there are very few) work on Nvidia cards with acceleration. This also only (generally) supports 'optional', visual only special physics effects, and not game-changing or FPS-accelerating methods.
In fact, due to the fact that it's taking shaders on your GPU to do the work, it often decreases performance compared to baseline.
The traditional PhysX games are also not supported in this manner.
Except, no. Nvidia sells reference GPU designs to third party companies that manufacture them and get to call themselves Nvidia GPUs. PhysX is a software product that runs on any CPU. They replaced the conditional hardware acceleration with a version that works on their GPUs. They don't have control over third party low level libraries (like AMD's Stream SDK), so can't integrate a proper solution without third party help. Third party help that is undesired by one or both parties, otherwise it'd happen. PhysX is not a 'user level' library. A developer makes the choice to use it. PhysX is not disabled nor degraded in the CPU case, merely 'visually enhanced' in the case of Nvidia case. 99% of developers only use it for optional visual effects, not for offloading the general physics solution, since the game has to behave the same in both cases. There's no 'tying' there, as the game works exactly the same in every CPU case, and is purely visual in the non-GPU case.
AMD was also approached about working together to make a version that also worked on their chips, according to various news reports, and they declined.
Nvidia isn't a monopoly, this isn't tying, and all of this debate is mostly over something trivial, optional, and generally won't increase FPS, UNlike the old Aegia PhysX dedicated solution, which was minor at best, and largely before commodity dual/quad core CPUs. I have a GTX 260 as my only installed card now, run with PhysX disabled, always, even for the 5-6 retail games that have PhysX 'hardware acceleration' that I never use.
This has been the case since 2008. Did anyone care or moan then? A few, but why is this 'news' now? Why are people complaining way after the fact?
Nvidia supports PhysX in the case of the 'primary' card, because PhysX uses CUDA. If you have two cards, more recently, they added the ability to disable SLI and use the second Nvidia card for CUDA/PhysX. They support Nvidia, Nvidia + Nvidia, and Nvidia + othercardthatdoesnothing.
Nvidia doesn't support Othercard + nvidia, for the sole reason that the primary card has the primary driver and effectively arbitrates what happens on other addin cards. You'd actually have to ask ATI to support and 'bless' that configuration via their drivers for Nvidia to have any chance of supporting it. Who the hell are you to decide that Nvidia has to support PhysX acceleration in that configuration, when they don't support the underlying 3D acceleration necessary (and neither does ATI) in such a configuration?
Common sense is that you don't mix ATI and Nvidia cards, because gee, the SLI/CrossFire stuff is incompatible, and no acceleration is possible for the secondary card.
This whole 'debate' over the issue is simply rabblerousing and trying to blame Nvidia for a situation that they have no unilateral control over, frankly.
Most 'consumer' level motherboards still don't have SLI/Crossfire and two PCI-E slots theoretically to support this in the first place, but nobody ever has, or has ever made effort to move toward it. Rabblerabblerabble?
The obvious solution there, would be to use something other than ATI, because they won't adaquetely support either Windows or Linux via their driver support, necessary to run any software or games with better than VGA/SVGA tops?
That's how I voted with my money, anyway, but ATI having truly awful drivers for Linux (I kept trying to get my 3870 to 'support Linux' and 'run anything' until early this year) doesn't mean that they support open source out of altruism, but because they want someone else to do it for them since they apparently can't pay people enough to do it for them correctly in-house.
There are also Nouveau open source drivers out there for Nvidia cards. They work for some people, on some cards. If you expect 'open source' drivers to work any time soon, for reasonable purposes, you're probably also not donating money to the projects to encourage the developers to work any faster, and -will- be waiting a while.
Isn't "the open source graphics card" out there, going to be better for open source, and better for 2D in the end (its primary focus), besides?
Bullet Physics http://www.bulletphysics.com/wordpress/ claims to, and ohmigod, has support for Nvidia CUDA acceleration(just like PhysX). That ATI and other card makers have not yet provided an API that an open source and competing (#3 behind Havok) product finds desirable, is not Nvidia's fault either.
Personally, I'd take a 21" Trinitron CRT (would prefer 19" or 17") for free, and pay shipping. LCD is 'nice' and crisp, but the ghosting and tearing issues prevalent on almost any LCD made or sold make me long for the days when I didn't have to use a compositor (or buy a $250 or $1400 '120hz' LCD) merely to avoid tearing.
Nvidia has beta/developer OpenCL drivers out. I can't find any download location for AMD's reported OpenCL drivers, despite mention of them everywhere, not even on developer.amd.com. It seems like AMD's backing the wrong pony, and being a bit disingenuous to boot. Par for the course?
It seems like they're officially 'taking a swipe' for the fact that Nvidia wasn't paying Bullet Physics devs to add OpenCL first, even though Bullet supported Nvidia all along.
Also hilariously worth noting, the Bullet physics website (quoted by parent) has absolutely no mention of this "push" by AMD at the time of writing.
Let's take a gander at NewEgg, shall we? There's a socket AM3 Athlon X2 "240" 2.8Ghz with VT for $60, socket 775 Intel E5300 2.6Ghz with VT for $69. Basically the same specs overall. $10 might as well be a wash on two near-identical spec CPUs, assuming they perform about the same (and most people won't notice a 200mhz difference, especially since performance metric is often grossly misrepresented by hertz, since what matters is work per cycle, as further limited by internal and external efficiency).
Traditionally, Core 2s beat the stuffing out of higher end X2s, no idea if that's still the case, though. The general rule of thumb also used to be (rather simply) E6xxx or up, it has VT. E5xxx or below, no VT. E5300 does have VT, though. That's about as 'complicated' as "non-Semprons have VT". Is "AMD X2 7550" somehow less complex a model designation compared to "Intel E6600"? That's more than a bit silly.
Honestly, if you aren't researching your CPUs carefully, though, it's probably a bad idea for you to be picking (and presumably assembling) your own parts together into a machine.
My custom built Intel gaming/compiling machine (quad core, Q6600 2.4ghz base, about $750 including Radeon 3870; not counting the GTX 260 that replaced it due to basic shortcomings, from early 2008), is very happy compared to AMD offerings. More than double the performance-per-watt compared to the Phenom 9850 Black that was available at the time (pre-overclock). Also, please don't count "GPU RAM" as part of the "total RAM". It's not correct.
It's great if your customers are happy (though should probably scrutinize some of the prices more carefully), but that doesn't mean any of what you've stated is necessarily correct. People actually pay money for a 'fart app' on the Apple Store. People are not so good with money on the curve.
Nvidia has third party open source nouveau drivers in progress, and natively supports Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris/OpenSolaris with their official, continuously maintained drivers. AMD barely supports Linux, the open source drivers are significantly worse off, and you can check Phoronix for people repeatedly asking "do these Catalyst drivers FINALLY unbreak AMD graphics??".
The same way they chose it before, considering that Nvidia has always disabled it running alongside an ATI card, and this isn't news by any stretch?
Why on Earth would someone pick ATI as primary card, with a beefy-enough Nvidia card as secondary, on a motherboard that supports two PCI-E x16 slots, presumably with either SLI or CrossFire enabled? MBs with two x16 PCI-E slots are, as far as I'm aware, still not mainstream/budget gamer.
Why would someone with such a strange combination even care? You can't run them with 3D acceleration together (which is what PhysX uses), so there's never been any incentive to run ATI and Nvidia cards together, rather than ATI-ATI or Nvidia-Nvidia.
Reportedly, and in empirical testing, using Nvidia adapter as primary always entitles you to PhysX, so the supposed market you're talking about (ATI primary, Nvidia secondary, two PCI-E slots) is very limited, and has never been of benefit to gaming purposes.
More recent versions of FreeBSD (starting with about 5.0, of course) dramatically improved desktop interactivity with the option of using SCHED_ULE (now the default).
If you know old (in that case, ancient; pre-2000) FreeBSD, but know new Ubuntu, of course you're going to be biased in favor of whatever you use now. But comparing new Linux vs. 10 year old memories of FreeBSD isn't exactly fair.
Of course, that's also comparing an old CURRENT version, which they've never recommended any non-developer to use as their primary desktop or for production machines, and often had debugging enabled which a non-savvy person wouldn't have turned off to improve interactivity or speed.
Most of the Phoronix tests used here don't enlighten the reader at all about the characteristics of the underlying OS, but are metrics mostly based on compiler version or filesystem options. You can tell someone's lying if Linux ever wins on 'compile speed' for most C projects, though.
Even on the aging UFS filesystem, FreeBSD has traditionally blazed there by a margin of 2-5x on both UP and SMP. On C++, it's more CPU bound, but still edged out. Even if ext4 really did speed things up (most benchmarks and independent evaluators have concluded it doesn't impact the worst cases much), you still wouldn't see it beat FreeBSD, not by such a large margin, and not 'all of a sudden', either. The problem is, the CPU scheduler is also a major indicator of how quickly anything is allowed to compile. (FreeBSD's ULE > Linux's BFS > Linux's default CFS)
UFS2 doesn't use journaling. Soft updates is entirely different. UFS2 has the option of using gjournal on FreeBSD to add journaling, but it's not the default option.
Phoronix using ext4 vs UFS2 (instead of the more direct stable/age-based comparison against ext3) is a bit stacking the deck as far as anything that touches I/O. They also don't mention what options they use/changed if any, but could've further stacked things on ext4 via mount options, and other people cheerily mention Phoronix never using 0 for the basis of axis.
They might as well have used ZFS (production) vs. btrfs (alpha) in such comparisons. In both cases, you'd be talking about filesystems that have been production stable for years, vs. 'the new schitzo kid on the block', whether for better or worse.
I said 41.5%, which is considerably less than 'more than every other country combined', and only the last two figures from 2001 and 2003 are from the budget.
The source which your URL quotes ( http://www.sipri.org/yearbook/2009/05 ), says that most of the increases have been 'emergency' approved and fast-tracked outside of normal budgetary procedures.
(All amounts in USD.) World Expenditure for 2008: $1,470,000,000,000. US Expenditure for 2010: $636,292,979,000. Difference: $833,707,021,000. (Really, that's FIRST GRADE math.) Iraq Expenditure for 2009: $32,400,000,000. France Expenditure for 2008: $70,613,746,423. People's Republic of China Expenditure for 2009: $70,308,600,000. Russian Federation Expenditure for 2008: $39,600,000,000.
US Expenditure as percentage of GDP as of 2005: 4.06%. Iraq Expenditure as percentage of GDP as of 2006: 8.6%. France Expenditure as percentage of GDP as of 2005: 2.6%. People's Republic of China Expenditure as percentage of GDP as of 2009: 1.7%. Russian Federation Expenditure as percentage of GDP as of 2005: 3.9%.
IMF GDP estimates as of 2008 (in Millions of GDP): United States: $14,264,600. Iraq: $90,907. France: $2,865,737. People's Republic of China: $4,401,614. Russian Federation: $1,676,586.
United States FY2001 budget request: $305.4B. United States FY2003 budget request (includes Department of Energy): $396.3B.
The US likely spent a similar percentage to other 'first world' countries in 2001 and 2003. Bloody war starts in Iraq, percentage increases. US has a very large GDP, has large military spending, but in-line with percentage except when having to deal with large-scale deployment of troops, even then, significantly less than other nations with serious external security concerns.
Iraq doesn't make nearly as much money, but spends very significant amounts on military.
France spends in-line with other 'first world' countries.
Russia spends directly in-line with US 'high' watermark.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute figures for 2008, listed on the very same page on Wikipedia. US world share of spending: 41.5%. (For slow people: it'd have to be greater than 50% to be 'more than the sum of all other countries combined'.
You should know better than spreading FUD on Slashdot, especially when your own link proves you were making it up. Also, that's a pretty epic fail at reading.
Also, technically, that'd be like earning with $1862 (US revenue for 2004 in billions) in your personal monthly budget, somehow spending $2338 (US expenditure for 2004 in billions), after you've already completely tapped out your savings and gone significantly into debt (accruing $7001 of outstanding debt as of 2004, yes, in billions; ~2002 was $13) of which between $305 and $636 is for the your personal alarm system and a family pet/guard dog (inclusive of food, housing, cleaning, grooming, etc, most people forget that), and you spend $18 or $21 on a weather-proofed telescope for your back porch. So...like many Americans' average spending (and I live in America, do not spend like this), the priorities are fairly strange and bass-ackwards, and going into debt. A President with an MBA probably should've done better with YOUR analogous projected household monthly budget so you don't have the bank repossessing your house.
My boyfriend loves it when people are as grossly incorrect as the parent was. He's going to be sorely disappointed that I beat him to the 'this is extremely basic math/logic' correction.
Too Long Didn't Read version: Parent is FUD, grossly overestimating US expenditure vs. world expenditure, not taking into account excessively basic math, completely ignoring charts on webpage he/she linked that state exactly what he/she said him/herself, would probably blatantly misreport your income and expenses on taxes and get you audited.
It all seems like everyone jumped the shark shortly after PC Gamer's Coconut Monkey became an interactive video on the attached CD-ROM.
Some of the demos were okay, but most were blindingly atrocious, with more and more of the disc being taken up by Coconut Monkey easter eggs and such. That was around 1996?
Computer Gaming World, and most other magazines equally rapidly became less and less about information, and increasingly about the tepid sales pitch and promo tie-ins.
But, someone might as well call time of death on the notion of print media covering games, particularly PC games.
People want to actually get their hands on games. Gamers are getting more jaded with release after release of blatant shovelware, most of which needed at least another year of fully funded development (cough, EA, cough).
Almost everyone knows by now, most of the trailers, screenshots, and even occasionally demos (although demos are RARE nowadays) are all carefully staged to make something look awesome, but in the end, it's a 1/10 POS.
Despite making profits that make non-casual gamers turn mauve in disgust, game companies are having trouble selling the flaming piles they have almost-exclusively in recent years. If nobody produces truly good, inspiringly made games, nobody's going to want to read about it, either. That's kinda like adding Director's Commentary to Tom Arnold comedies. Nobody wants to listen to commentary about something that's akin to self-harm.
Print magazines have been on the decline for a long time, but it's been the canary in the coalmine as far as quality vs. quantity in the gaming industry goes. Now you've got a dead canary, and the miners can't be arsed to fix any gas leaks before they all suffocate.
Slashdot Mirror
Solaris and FreeBSD don't run on workstations? Better tell Nvidia, better tell people who use it as such.
You don't really have to care about the EULA of binary drivers if you have nothing to do with them. Nouveau isn't a licensee, doesn't use VDPAU, PhysX, or anything else that is intrinsically or defacto Nvidia's property.
EULA applies to the end users agreeing to the license (see where that acronym comes from?).
It doesn't, and can't, cover other scenarios. That'd be a bit like saying that Windows' EULA doesn't permit ReactOS or wine. It doesn't have to. Third party clean room interoperability/compatibility is generally allowed, expected for software, and without a EULA to violate, DMCA and any other provisions which would give company grounds to complain, don't apply.
http://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq
Nouveau driver is already utilizing Gallium3D.
But, really, can you (or anyone else) say that AMD is trying completely independently of the quality of its own drivers vs. the competition? They haven't been improving and they likely understand that other people can probably do it better, by this point, assuming it's not hardware defects, like were well known with the original X*00 series and Radeon 32 series (and Nvidia had with certain 5, 8/9 [nearly entire second generation unified shader from G92 up], and MX cards).
The "original source" of the perplexing xbitlabs article. An internet forum, not confirmed nor corroborated by anyone. Here's hoping that xbitlabs publishes a retraction for their non-existant fact checking and/or technical editor oversight: http://www.ngohq.com/graphic-cards/16223-nvidia-disables-physx-when-ati-card-is-present.html
(For what it's worth, NGOHQ was also the source of the rumor about ATI adding PhysX support themselves, along with 'Russian Hackers' publishing info on how to enable PhysX on ATI 'next week' last year.)
Wine translates the fixed function and shaders to OpenGL/GLSL/ARB shaders as necessary. Most newer games work somewhat out of the box, several run perfectly out of the box, some without requiring the closed source version of "DirectX 9 extension DLLs" ala d3dx_39.dll, which wine is also implementing.
Basically, if it runs straight DirectX 9, or most things before d3dx9_35.dll, it runs okay on wine.
But implying that Starcraft is the average age of things that 'work okay on wine' certainly isn't the case. You can happily run World of Warcraft, Half Life 2, Oblivion, and many other games on it.
Check the Platinum and Gold lists for some goodies: http://appdb.winehq.org/
I can happily load most any retail game released as brand new -today-, and at least get to title screen, or know exactly why it failed. Many work correctly in-game to a significant degree.
Gosh. Don't tell that to id Software, icculus, Linux Game Publishing, the former Loki Games, AND OTHERS, who were using OpenGL 1.x and 2.x to do that since at least 1998.
What, is "OpenGL3" the new buzz word that people don't understand what it actually implies?
(Also, PhysX never was, never has been, any sort of standard, nor has it been used much.)
It's also worth noting that Bullet physics implemented GPU acceleration via CUDA (same as PhysX) themselves...10 months ago: http://www.bulletphysics.com/wordpress/?p=50
That was always the case, and Nvidia didn't make a move. This has been the exact same case since the merger in the first place.
Game developers still only rarely use PhysX as a 'GPU acceleration tool', and nor is any 'real work' often done on the GPU in the 'accelerated' codepath.
Red Faction 3, used Havok. Most games, use software-only PhysX, or Havok.
This isn't news, and this impacts quite literally nobody, nor is it a situation within Nvidia's control. Primary driver determines what gets done on any secondary VGA cards, if anything. No 3D acceleration = no CUDA = no PhysX.
This is a rhetorical question, but could you do it BEFORE?
No, you couldn't.
Not allowing a specific feature because of lack of 3D acceleration on the secondary card is not 'harming the user experience', especially not of a presumably rich-er subset of the population which can afford A( dual-GPU enthusiast motherboard, B( two graphics cards, C( fully intends to dedicate an entire graphics card, nevermind the power bill, to PhysX, when all GPU PhysX does is add optional visual-only effects that can slow down your graphics card a little, but otherwise works exactly the same as the CPU only variant. Can I also point that it's on the order of 5-6 retail games that actually have "GPU hardware PhysX acceleration", and the rest either used the Aegia PPU (incompatible with Nvidia's implementation of the base engine), or are software-only in the first place?
They never supported that scenario on any OS to begin with. Even on the touted Windows 7, it just wouldn't work. The secondary video card has 3D disabled, unless you happen to have a matching card, and CrossFire/SLI as applicable.
Windows itself won't even allow you to so much as try it pre-Windows 7, either.
Effectively, you got trolled by whoever made the original post, and responded as if it made any sense, and are, in fact, effectively furthering it by making claims that were never true.
PhysX is optional-effects-only (in effect) for GPU, most games that use PhysX, only use the software (not GPU) component.
PhysX, CUDA/ATI-Stream-SDK, and base 3D acceleration never worked with ATI primary/Nvidia secondary, nor with Nvidia primary/ATI secondary, when trying to get anything meaningful (besides basic 2D non-accelerated multi-monitor) to work vs the secondary card.
Equally worth noting, is that only 'new', specifically GPU-PhysX enabled games (of which there are very few) work on Nvidia cards with acceleration. This also only (generally) supports 'optional', visual only special physics effects, and not game-changing or FPS-accelerating methods.
In fact, due to the fact that it's taking shaders on your GPU to do the work, it often decreases performance compared to baseline.
The traditional PhysX games are also not supported in this manner.
Doesn't that (rather) exactly describe the Nvidia Tesla product, released starting in 2007? http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/495
Nothing about these PhysX claims, or these conspiracy theories, are news.
Except, no.
Nvidia sells reference GPU designs to third party companies that manufacture them and get to call themselves Nvidia GPUs.
PhysX is a software product that runs on any CPU. They replaced the conditional hardware acceleration with a version that works on their GPUs. They don't have control over third party low level libraries (like AMD's Stream SDK), so can't integrate a proper solution without third party help. Third party help that is undesired by one or both parties, otherwise it'd happen.
PhysX is not a 'user level' library. A developer makes the choice to use it.
PhysX is not disabled nor degraded in the CPU case, merely 'visually enhanced' in the case of Nvidia case. 99% of developers only use it for optional visual effects, not for offloading the general physics solution, since the game has to behave the same in both cases.
There's no 'tying' there, as the game works exactly the same in every CPU case, and is purely visual in the non-GPU case.
AMD was also approached about working together to make a version that also worked on their chips, according to various news reports, and they declined.
Nvidia isn't a monopoly, this isn't tying, and all of this debate is mostly over something trivial, optional, and generally won't increase FPS, UNlike the old Aegia PhysX dedicated solution, which was minor at best, and largely before commodity dual/quad core CPUs.
I have a GTX 260 as my only installed card now, run with PhysX disabled, always, even for the 5-6 retail games that have PhysX 'hardware acceleration' that I never use.
This has been the case since 2008. Did anyone care or moan then? A few, but why is this 'news' now? Why are people complaining way after the fact?
Nvidia supports PhysX in the case of the 'primary' card, because PhysX uses CUDA. If you have two cards, more recently, they added the ability to disable SLI and use the second Nvidia card for CUDA/PhysX. They support Nvidia, Nvidia + Nvidia, and Nvidia + othercardthatdoesnothing.
Nvidia doesn't support Othercard + nvidia, for the sole reason that the primary card has the primary driver and effectively arbitrates what happens on other addin cards. You'd actually have to ask ATI to support and 'bless' that configuration via their drivers for Nvidia to have any chance of supporting it. Who the hell are you to decide that Nvidia has to support PhysX acceleration in that configuration, when they don't support the underlying 3D acceleration necessary (and neither does ATI) in such a configuration?
Common sense is that you don't mix ATI and Nvidia cards, because gee, the SLI/CrossFire stuff is incompatible, and no acceleration is possible for the secondary card.
This whole 'debate' over the issue is simply rabblerousing and trying to blame Nvidia for a situation that they have no unilateral control over, frankly.
Most 'consumer' level motherboards still don't have SLI/Crossfire and two PCI-E slots theoretically to support this in the first place, but nobody ever has, or has ever made effort to move toward it. Rabblerabblerabble?
The obvious solution there, would be to use something other than ATI, because they won't adaquetely support either Windows or Linux via their driver support, necessary to run any software or games with better than VGA/SVGA tops?
That's how I voted with my money, anyway, but ATI having truly awful drivers for Linux (I kept trying to get my 3870 to 'support Linux' and 'run anything' until early this year) doesn't mean that they support open source out of altruism, but because they want someone else to do it for them since they apparently can't pay people enough to do it for them correctly in-house.
There are also Nouveau open source drivers out there for Nvidia cards. They work for some people, on some cards. If you expect 'open source' drivers to work any time soon, for reasonable purposes, you're probably also not donating money to the projects to encourage the developers to work any faster, and -will- be waiting a while.
Isn't "the open source graphics card" out there, going to be better for open source, and better for 2D in the end (its primary focus), besides?
Bullet Physics http://www.bulletphysics.com/wordpress/ claims to, and ohmigod, has support for Nvidia CUDA acceleration(just like PhysX). That ATI and other card makers have not yet provided an API that an open source and competing (#3 behind Havok) product finds desirable, is not Nvidia's fault either.
Personally, I'd take a 21" Trinitron CRT (would prefer 19" or 17") for free, and pay shipping. LCD is 'nice' and crisp, but the ghosting and tearing issues prevalent on almost any LCD made or sold make me long for the days when I didn't have to use a compositor (or buy a $250 or $1400 '120hz' LCD) merely to avoid tearing.
Bullet was made CUDA-acceleration ready last year for Nvidia users, by Bullet physics developers themselves. http://www.bulletphysics.com/wordpress/?p=50
Nvidia has beta/developer OpenCL drivers out. I can't find any download location for AMD's reported OpenCL drivers, despite mention of them everywhere, not even on developer.amd.com. It seems like AMD's backing the wrong pony, and being a bit disingenuous to boot. Par for the course?
It seems like they're officially 'taking a swipe' for the fact that Nvidia wasn't paying Bullet Physics devs to add OpenCL first, even though Bullet supported Nvidia all along.
Also hilariously worth noting, the Bullet physics website (quoted by parent) has absolutely no mention of this "push" by AMD at the time of writing.
Let's take a gander at NewEgg, shall we?
There's a socket AM3 Athlon X2 "240" 2.8Ghz with VT for $60, socket 775 Intel E5300 2.6Ghz with VT for $69. Basically the same specs overall. $10 might as well be a wash on two near-identical spec CPUs, assuming they perform about the same (and most people won't notice a 200mhz difference, especially since performance metric is often grossly misrepresented by hertz, since what matters is work per cycle, as further limited by internal and external efficiency).
Traditionally, Core 2s beat the stuffing out of higher end X2s, no idea if that's still the case, though. The general rule of thumb also used to be (rather simply) E6xxx or up, it has VT. E5xxx or below, no VT. E5300 does have VT, though. That's about as 'complicated' as "non-Semprons have VT". Is "AMD X2 7550" somehow less complex a model designation compared to "Intel E6600"? That's more than a bit silly.
Honestly, if you aren't researching your CPUs carefully, though, it's probably a bad idea for you to be picking (and presumably assembling) your own parts together into a machine.
My custom built Intel gaming/compiling machine (quad core, Q6600 2.4ghz base, about $750 including Radeon 3870; not counting the GTX 260 that replaced it due to basic shortcomings, from early 2008), is very happy compared to AMD offerings. More than double the performance-per-watt compared to the Phenom 9850 Black that was available at the time (pre-overclock). Also, please don't count "GPU RAM" as part of the "total RAM". It's not correct.
It's great if your customers are happy (though should probably scrutinize some of the prices more carefully), but that doesn't mean any of what you've stated is necessarily correct. People actually pay money for a 'fart app' on the Apple Store. People are not so good with money on the curve.
Nvidia has third party open source nouveau drivers in progress, and natively supports Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris/OpenSolaris with their official, continuously maintained drivers.
AMD barely supports Linux, the open source drivers are significantly worse off, and you can check Phoronix for people repeatedly asking "do these Catalyst drivers FINALLY unbreak AMD graphics??".
The same way they chose it before, considering that Nvidia has always disabled it running alongside an ATI card, and this isn't news by any stretch?
Why on Earth would someone pick ATI as primary card, with a beefy-enough Nvidia card as secondary, on a motherboard that supports two PCI-E x16 slots, presumably with either SLI or CrossFire enabled? MBs with two x16 PCI-E slots are, as far as I'm aware, still not mainstream/budget gamer.
Why would someone with such a strange combination even care? You can't run them with 3D acceleration together (which is what PhysX uses), so there's never been any incentive to run ATI and Nvidia cards together, rather than ATI-ATI or Nvidia-Nvidia.
Reportedly, and in empirical testing, using Nvidia adapter as primary always entitles you to PhysX, so the supposed market you're talking about (ATI primary, Nvidia secondary, two PCI-E slots) is very limited, and has never been of benefit to gaming purposes.
More recent versions of FreeBSD (starting with about 5.0, of course) dramatically improved desktop interactivity with the option of using SCHED_ULE (now the default).
If you know old (in that case, ancient; pre-2000) FreeBSD, but know new Ubuntu, of course you're going to be biased in favor of whatever you use now. But comparing new Linux vs. 10 year old memories of FreeBSD isn't exactly fair.
Of course, that's also comparing an old CURRENT version, which they've never recommended any non-developer to use as their primary desktop or for production machines, and often had debugging enabled which a non-savvy person wouldn't have turned off to improve interactivity or speed.
Most of the Phoronix tests used here don't enlighten the reader at all about the characteristics of the underlying OS, but are metrics mostly based on compiler version or filesystem options.
You can tell someone's lying if Linux ever wins on 'compile speed' for most C projects, though.
Even on the aging UFS filesystem, FreeBSD has traditionally blazed there by a margin of 2-5x on both UP and SMP. On C++, it's more CPU bound, but still edged out. Even if ext4 really did speed things up (most benchmarks and independent evaluators have concluded it doesn't impact the worst cases much), you still wouldn't see it beat FreeBSD, not by such a large margin, and not 'all of a sudden', either. The problem is, the CPU scheduler is also a major indicator of how quickly anything is allowed to compile. (FreeBSD's ULE > Linux's BFS > Linux's default CFS)
UFS2 doesn't use journaling. Soft updates is entirely different. UFS2 has the option of using gjournal on FreeBSD to add journaling, but it's not the default option.
Phoronix using ext4 vs UFS2 (instead of the more direct stable/age-based comparison against ext3) is a bit stacking the deck as far as anything that touches I/O. They also don't mention what options they use/changed if any, but could've further stacked things on ext4 via mount options, and other people cheerily mention Phoronix never using 0 for the basis of axis.
They might as well have used ZFS (production) vs. btrfs (alpha) in such comparisons. In both cases, you'd be talking about filesystems that have been production stable for years, vs. 'the new schitzo kid on the block', whether for better or worse.
I guess you went the TLDR route
I said 41.5%, which is considerably less than 'more than every other country combined', and only the last two figures from 2001 and 2003 are from the budget.
The source which your URL quotes ( http://www.sipri.org/yearbook/2009/05 ), says that most of the increases have been 'emergency' approved and fast-tracked outside of normal budgetary procedures.
And from http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0607-03.htm , "In 2003, U.S. spending stood at $405 billion, SIPRI said.". This chart, from your link, also bolsters that, since the amounts there are in 2009 dollars, and previous reports in 2003/2004 dollars. http://static.globalissues.org/i/military/us-spending-2000-2010.png That's an astounding difference of 9 billion dollars. 2%. Not as far off or irrelevant as you're implying.
(All amounts in USD.)
World Expenditure for 2008: $1,470,000,000,000.
US Expenditure for 2010: $636,292,979,000.
Difference: $833,707,021,000. (Really, that's FIRST GRADE math.)
Iraq Expenditure for 2009: $32,400,000,000.
France Expenditure for 2008: $70,613,746,423.
People's Republic of China Expenditure for 2009: $70,308,600,000.
Russian Federation Expenditure for 2008: $39,600,000,000.
US Expenditure as percentage of GDP as of 2005: 4.06%.
Iraq Expenditure as percentage of GDP as of 2006: 8.6%.
France Expenditure as percentage of GDP as of 2005: 2.6%.
People's Republic of China Expenditure as percentage of GDP as of 2009: 1.7%.
Russian Federation Expenditure as percentage of GDP as of 2005: 3.9%.
IMF GDP estimates as of 2008 (in Millions of GDP):
United States: $14,264,600.
Iraq: $90,907.
France: $2,865,737.
People's Republic of China: $4,401,614.
Russian Federation: $1,676,586.
http://www.cdi.org/issues/usmi/fy01/topline.html
http://www.cdi.org/issues/budget/FY03topline-pr.cfm
United States FY2001 budget request: $305.4B.
United States FY2003 budget request (includes Department of Energy): $396.3B.
The US likely spent a similar percentage to other 'first world' countries in 2001 and 2003. Bloody war starts in Iraq, percentage increases. US has a very large GDP, has large military spending, but in-line with percentage except when having to deal with large-scale deployment of troops, even then, significantly less than other nations with serious external security concerns.
Iraq doesn't make nearly as much money, but spends very significant amounts on military.
France spends in-line with other 'first world' countries.
Russia spends directly in-line with US 'high' watermark.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute figures for 2008, listed on the very same page on Wikipedia.
US world share of spending: 41.5%. (For slow people: it'd have to be greater than 50% to be 'more than the sum of all other countries combined'.
You should know better than spreading FUD on Slashdot, especially when your own link proves you were making it up. Also, that's a pretty epic fail at reading.
Also, technically, that'd be like earning with $1862 (US revenue for 2004 in billions) in your personal monthly budget, somehow spending $2338 (US expenditure for 2004 in billions), after you've already completely tapped out your savings and gone significantly into debt (accruing $7001 of outstanding debt as of 2004, yes, in billions; ~2002 was $13) of which between $305 and $636 is for the your personal alarm system and a family pet/guard dog (inclusive of food, housing, cleaning, grooming, etc, most people forget that), and you spend $18 or $21 on a weather-proofed telescope for your back porch. So...like many Americans' average spending (and I live in America, do not spend like this), the priorities are fairly strange and bass-ackwards, and going into debt. A President with an MBA probably should've done better with YOUR analogous projected household monthly budget so you don't have the bank repossessing your house.
My boyfriend loves it when people are as grossly incorrect as the parent was. He's going to be sorely disappointed that I beat him to the 'this is extremely basic math/logic' correction.
Too Long Didn't Read version: Parent is FUD, grossly overestimating US expenditure vs. world expenditure, not taking into account excessively basic math, completely ignoring charts on webpage he/she linked that state exactly what he/she said him/herself, would probably blatantly misreport your income and expenses on taxes and get you audited.
It all seems like everyone jumped the shark shortly after PC Gamer's Coconut Monkey became an interactive video on the attached CD-ROM.
Some of the demos were okay, but most were blindingly atrocious, with more and more of the disc being taken up by Coconut Monkey easter eggs and such. That was around 1996?
Computer Gaming World, and most other magazines equally rapidly became less and less about information, and increasingly about the tepid sales pitch and promo tie-ins.
But, someone might as well call time of death on the notion of print media covering games, particularly PC games.
People want to actually get their hands on games. Gamers are getting more jaded with release after release of blatant shovelware, most of which needed at least another year of fully funded development (cough, EA, cough).
Almost everyone knows by now, most of the trailers, screenshots, and even occasionally demos (although demos are RARE nowadays) are all carefully staged to make something look awesome, but in the end, it's a 1/10 POS.
Despite making profits that make non-casual gamers turn mauve in disgust, game companies are having trouble selling the flaming piles they have almost-exclusively in recent years. If nobody produces truly good, inspiringly made games, nobody's going to want to read about it, either. That's kinda like adding Director's Commentary to Tom Arnold comedies. Nobody wants to listen to commentary about something that's akin to self-harm.
Print magazines have been on the decline for a long time, but it's been the canary in the coalmine as far as quality vs. quantity in the gaming industry goes. Now you've got a dead canary, and the miners can't be arsed to fix any gas leaks before they all suffocate.