Ebert only considers the rules and point system to be a Game.
As soon as you bring in story, characters, open-ended exploration or anything beyond rules and scoring he says it's no longer a Game and is something else.
His definition is too narrow and restrictive. By his definition of "game" barely a game in existence today is still a game.
I would agree with his argument that no level of rule elegance will ever constitute Art. But I would also argue that "Game" means more than once did. Game more often now means interactive story than it bares any resemblance to checkers. Ebert thinks we have to rename this new art form so that he isn't proven wrong. I say Ebert needs to just relax his definition of what a Game is. Especially considering he doesn't know what he's talking about in this regard.
Art is any creative work which is designed to offer a unique perspective on the world. Stories, novels, paintings, scultpures etc all hopefully offer something to the listener, viewer or player new ideas or ways of feeling about the world in which we live.
Art is important because it can deeply affect those who are enriched by it. I find films in particular important to my own life because they've expanded my perspective on the world and my place in it.
To deny that video games are Art is to say that all those who have had profound experiences which have enriched and expanded their understanding of the world are essentially lying. Roger Ebert is saying that games can be exciting and stimulating, that they can be challenging and entertaining but he's denying it's even possible for them to be a medium in which an artist can convey an emotional and philosophical idea that transcends literal expression. That is idiotic. Or at least on first glance it appears idiotic until you read his caveat and his caveat is that as a game becomes more than what essentially amounts to chess or Mario it's NO LONGER A GAME.
So he's right. Any game which is less sophisticated than Mario can never be Art. But I completely reject his position that a game which transcends simple mechanics of competition and score keeping suddenly ceases to be a game and is now a "story" "novel" or "film".
It's like saying film can never be Art. It's just plastic and silver running in front of a lens. As soon as someone puts it together and captures intent and meaning it's no longer a film, it's then a story. And that story can be art. But not film.
Art has always been about using an 'inert' medium to carry an emotional payload. Dyes and Inks have no artistic merit. Neither does a game engine. But when a designer has something they want to express beyond competition and entertainment then it's art.
This is my experience. I am loyal to my current employer because I feel like they are fair to me and do everything in their power to take care of their employees first. As a result we've only had one person who was working part time quit since I've started working here and that was because they went back to school to completely change fields.
Employee good will is a precious commodity and pays huge dividends. If you think the company is trying to screw you and penny and dime you don't be shocked when your employees stretch out their lunch breaks to the last second, take advantage of every loop hole, charge the company for every expense, demand overtime for every second they have to and even then save their best work for personal projects. It's amazing how much 'free' work a company gets when its employees are working on something they believe in.
If you stretch the rules and give people extra vacation days that aren't in their contract, or send them to training, or take them out to lunch you'll probably get the same out of your employees. They'll stay extra long to finish that project that is running late. They might even work on the project at home off hours to get it done, because they understand there is give and take.
The current business trend is to be all about cost cutting. To be more efficient. I think that if companies did a real analysis what they'll find is that it's starting to hurt their bottom line. They're cutting costs at the expense of their brand and their customer loyalty. Look at Toyota. People are getting so focused on cutting costs they're losing sight of the important part of any business which is providing a service or product people want to pay for. Too many executives are trying to find the exact number of peanuts they can cut from a snack bag before passengers notice instead of offering a product someone would choose over the competitors.
"We cut the cost of our new MP3 Player's plastic housing by 10% increasing our profits by $3 per player." "Great but what's the user experience like?" "No idea."
Trouble with liability is often the ability of the customer to make an accurate determination of risk.
There's always risk. The question is how much risk and what sort of risk? If the airline said "everything is fine but you'll have to sign a waiver" and the Finnish Airforce said "we aren't flying unless someone tries to invade us." I would be wary of signing that waiver. But if the airline just said "everything is fine but you'll have to sign a waiver" I would be less concerned and more likely. In the second scenario the airline had provided inadquate decision to make an informed decision.
It's like "informed consent". How am I supposed to make informed consent on something I don't understand. "So you're saying this lump is bad and it needs to go or I'll die." Ok I'll take your word for it. I made an "informed" decision in that I was told the doctor's opinion on the subject. He could say "that's cancer" or "That's a clot" and I would be none the wiser probably either way.
Despite what software vendors like Microsoft and Oracle would tell you, bits don't actually rot. Software doesn't age. It's a mathematical construct that works or doesn't. If it worked once then it always will and if it didn't who cares?
Software doesn't age but our competition isn't standing still.
If we were still using 4 year old software we would be less efficient and create less work every day. Being slower. Being more expensive and less profitable would cause us to fall behind. Lots of software today is advancing at an incredible rate. What would have taken an hour a few years ago can now be done 15 minutes. If your software can't keep up then you're wasting money.
Development is expensive so we only spend our own time and money for outside developers when the competitive or efficiency benefits will pay themselves off. Maintaining most large modern apps and adding even minor features would never pay itself off. If your hourly rate is $200 an hour and a software upgrade costs $400 it only has to save you 2 hours a year to pay itself off. 2 hours of development rarely pays itself off.
If you want it done you need to do it yourself because, the developers don't have resources and the will to full-fill every users desire
Maybe not every users desires. But there has to be a system where people actually using the software full-time are listened to and included in the decision making even if they don't contribute a lick of code. All the features in the world are useless if it's unusable.
Look at the improvement in the Blender foundation thanks to Elephant's Dream and Project Peach. Real professionals using the product on real projects is how you get real feedback on your product. That's no different than how closed sourced products get their feedback, they invest a lot of time and money listening to the users and delivering what the users need while keeping an eye to the big picture. A bad community interaction is one of the leading indicators of misdirected development and stagnation.
Assuming development continues. If the open source app isn't staying competitive with alternatives then you're in just as bad of straits as being a closed source customer.
I've seen numerous open source projects just completely die. I've seen numerous closed source projects just completely die. Usually unless you're a top 5% company you can't afford to continue development yourself long enough to make any meaningful contribution. It's usually easier to adjust your infrastructure than it is to continue developing the product to keep it competitive.
I got in trouble for this in gradeschool. Our system admin was incompetent and useless. All of our nice at the time large 17" and 19" monitors were running at 640x480. We asked repeatedly for him to change it but the only action I ever saw him take was to show up and reinstall windows.
Breaking his password was easier than guessing it. Instead of using a unified login system he had Novell and a local roaming profile. He put a password on his local roaming profile which was identical to his network admin password. So it was just a case of opening the.pwd file for which there are numerous easily googlable apps to brute force. In fact I'm pretty certain there is even a utility built into windows to open it.
Admittedly we caused a little more havoc than just changing the resolution, we also played pranks on other students by taking over their computers while in Word and pretending to be an Artificial Intelligence.
Unfortunately for us when we were caught we just had gotten a new principle who was in his 70s and didn't know anything about computers so the SysAdmin portrayed us as the manifestations of the antichrist. Looking back on it we should have stood up for ourselves, but we were in gradeschool, what can you do when your authority figures are all saying they're going to call the FBI and prosecute you for a felony unless you agree to everything they say. Looking back on it the school probably broke a dozen more laws than we did in their handling of the situation. We agreed to 40 hours of volunteering around the school each. And after all that, all the teachers still called on us instead of the IT guy to help fix things. Yeah, no bitterness.
By the way, his password was his first name followed by two numbers (13). I don't know if I could think of a password which is easier to brute force.
And more *windows* users, more windows license, more vendor lockin, and fewer alternative OS's...
Until Windows users realize that all their favorite apps run great on Linux as well as Windows.
If chrome runs on Windows and Linux and you just use Chrome most of the day then it becomes trivial to switch over to Linux since your app will look relatively familiar. The largest obstacle to Linux adoption besides its contempt for its users is the lack of applications people are familiar with. If someone got used to pidgen then they would be less likely to revolt when they tried using Linux.
Nothing MS does is good for anyone but Microsoft this is no different.
Yeah like when they added desktop search so that I could find files easier. That did nobody any good except for Microsoft... somehow. Or when they sold me Halo. I really wish I could have benefited from that purchase somehow but sadly only Microsoft had any fun.
Exactly which is why Citizen Kane deserves its place in history.
It changed the grammar and expression of cinema. It is a pivotal movie in how movies are made. As a side effect it's also dreadfully boring. I don't know if it used to be boring, but certainly in a modern context we've advanced forward.
In a Slashdot analogy the 8086 is a landmark processor. Its signature still is with us today. But as a processor it's not really useful anymore.
So what you're saying then is that we should have a carbon tax?
Let's be sure we aren't in "Perfect Solution" world where we reject every proposal if it has any flaws. Or reject entire concepts because implementation isn't perfected.
I'm not for cap and trade. I'm for a carbon tax personally but I'll accept cap and trade over "let's just wait a few more decades and see if the problem doesn't just go away."
The only way though to enforce those Geo-IP checks is to have some form of DRM. I'm not saying XBMC and get_iplayer couldn't be allowed to do this. But that would require them to implement some form of DRM and compliance check on the BBC's part.
My point was though that it's disingeuous to say that "BBC owns most of the programming that they're adding DRM to." Yes they did create most of the content under DRM. But they're under a legal obligation to their customers (UK taxed citizens) to maximize their profit which means they have to protect their location checks.
The fact that UK citizens can record these same programs DRM free over the air is irrelevant since someone in the US can't record it over the air.
BBC owns the rights to many programs that they then sell to other markets.
For example the currently very popular "Life" series is a BBC program but the Discovery channel has bought rebroadcast rights.
If you can stream the iPlayer in the US because a player includes no DRM then the Discovery channel can sue the BBC for breaching their exclusive distribution rights.
This is true of all of their programs. It's the BBC's responsibility to extract as much profit as possible from foreign markets. It's part of how they fund their operations beyond local taxes. So while they may have originally had the rights to the programs they relinquish limited distribution rights to others around the world. The BBC World Service for instance is another example of this. Radio stations around the world license BBC World Service for broadcast.
I'll take you seriously when you step out from anonymity. Messiah complex much? Unlike you my identity is extremely easy to determine, down to my address and phone number if you're so inclined. So if you want to accuse me of "being paid to rally against a free, open technology so they can control content" then why don't you find you? Answer: No I'm not payed a penny nor do I have any interest in the debate except in which delivers the best quality.
By the time H264 free ride ends H264 will be horrifically out of date. It already is. It would be like complaining that MPEG1 or Real videos are no longer patent free online.
I'm perfectly happy to say unpopular crap online and let my Karma take the hit. You know what, it rarely does. You've got some serious perceived victimization issues.
Can we please mod down anyone who uses any derivative of: "I'm going to be modded down because of this but..."
Do as they ask. Keep them modded at 0. I'm so tired of people playing such whiny victims on here. I've never seen one of them actually modded down./rant.
Given the huge amount of money that can be made with a decent CODEC by the film industry, it seems pretty obvious that the research and development would have been funded even without patents.
If there is sufficient motivation to create open source patent free licenses then they'll happen regardless if there are patented competitors.
This is a case where the FOSS community wants all of the benefits of patented software which is in this case technically superior without having to pay for it.
So just because it's on a computer and not manufactured it shouldn't be patented. Poppy-cock.
The virtual world should get the same protection as meatspace. If you invent a new non-obvious widget you should be able to patent it regardless if a CNC machine or injection molder was required to manufacture it.
You were looking at GTX 480 SLI which means that it's two GTX 480s. A single GTX 480 is only marginally better than an HD5870 in the majority of benchmarks, and costs $100 more to boot. A crossfire HD5970 system would out perform a GTX 480 SLI system.
No I was looking at the GPGPU benchmarks (OpenCL and CUDA). The GTX 480 was 8x faster at raytracing than then than GTX 285. The GTX 285 was faster than the 5970 in all of the benchmarks by a good margin. So we can assume that the lead would be even greater in the raytracing test if it was OpenCL.
If you even skimmed my post you would have correctly read that I dismissed OpenGL and DirectX benchmarks as irrelevant at present and was simply talking about GPGPU capabilities.
I guess you also haven't heard of Metro 2033, STALKER: Call of Prypiat, or Shattered Horizon, all of which are very demanding games. And there will be more demanding games out later this year (Rage, Deus Ex 3, Crysis 2). I'm calling you a troll.
Metro 2033: Everything at max @ full 1080p and both push out about 40fps on average.
Rage: Christmas 2010 at best (knowing Id probably Christmas 2011) Deus Ex 3: A game without screenshots even released yet? Yeah. That really disproves my point there are no games out which are demanding more hardware. Crysis 2: Christmas 2010
By the time games start stressing the system we'll be seeing the next release of cards from AMD and NVidia. Eventually AMD is going to need to redesign their chips to support GPGPU functions. More and more non-gaming applications will start taxing the GPU. Games in the future will start to employ more and more GPGPU functionality for physics, for ray-traced reflections and refractions, for Ambient occlusion, for photon mapping, for better looking soft shadows, etc etc.. the list goes on. The Fermi architecture is ready for all that. The Radeon architecture presently isn't. Both AMD and Nvidia have comparable chips out right now. Nvidia's runs a little hotter and costs a little more but also has way more video memory which is great for GPGPU applications as well. Did they suffer huge delays? Yes. During that delay was its product missed? No I don't think you can make that argument. Everything on your list of "needs good gaming chip" games came out at most a month before Fermi shipped. If they had hit their ship date in November you could have bought a Fermi... and really had little to no use for it since there wasn't anything that demanded that level of performance. If there was a time to burn working on a new architecture it was last year which saw very little demand due to the economy and only lightly taxing applications. They got a lucky break. AMD now has to hope that their efforts to roll out OpenCL don't cause similar delays or that if they do they fall during another plateau in performance.
Yes. If you take one sentence out of context that's overstating it. But let's do a real job of quoting what I said:
Both AMD and Nvidia have released gaming cards that are overkill. So Nvidia has decided to take a different tact. They've managed to release a gaming card that is competitive with the very best video card for gaming and also redesigned their cores to be fast GPGPUs.In the AnandTech review the GTX400 is 2x-10x faster than the GTX 285 or Radeon 5870.
The paragraph break was perhaps unwarranted but my entire post was about OpenCL performance. In OpenCL benchmarks the GTX480 is significantly faster. The word I used to describe their DX and OpenGL performance was "competitive" as in "comparable" as in 'around 10-15%'
The point is DX and OpenGL performance is sort of a moot point at present. Either card is adequate for just about any game you would run.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the trouble with this discussion.
Ebert only considers the rules and point system to be a Game.
As soon as you bring in story, characters, open-ended exploration or anything beyond rules and scoring he says it's no longer a Game and is something else.
His definition is too narrow and restrictive. By his definition of "game" barely a game in existence today is still a game.
I would agree with his argument that no level of rule elegance will ever constitute Art. But I would also argue that "Game" means more than once did. Game more often now means interactive story than it bares any resemblance to checkers. Ebert thinks we have to rename this new art form so that he isn't proven wrong. I say Ebert needs to just relax his definition of what a Game is. Especially considering he doesn't know what he's talking about in this regard.
Art is any creative work which is designed to offer a unique perspective on the world. Stories, novels, paintings, scultpures etc all hopefully offer something to the listener, viewer or player new ideas or ways of feeling about the world in which we live.
Art is important because it can deeply affect those who are enriched by it. I find films in particular important to my own life because they've expanded my perspective on the world and my place in it.
To deny that video games are Art is to say that all those who have had profound experiences which have enriched and expanded their understanding of the world are essentially lying. Roger Ebert is saying that games can be exciting and stimulating, that they can be challenging and entertaining but he's denying it's even possible for them to be a medium in which an artist can convey an emotional and philosophical idea that transcends literal expression. That is idiotic. Or at least on first glance it appears idiotic until you read his caveat and his caveat is that as a game becomes more than what essentially amounts to chess or Mario it's NO LONGER A GAME.
So he's right. Any game which is less sophisticated than Mario can never be Art. But I completely reject his position that a game which transcends simple mechanics of competition and score keeping suddenly ceases to be a game and is now a "story" "novel" or "film".
It's like saying film can never be Art. It's just plastic and silver running in front of a lens. As soon as someone puts it together and captures intent and meaning it's no longer a film, it's then a story. And that story can be art. But not film.
Art has always been about using an 'inert' medium to carry an emotional payload. Dyes and Inks have no artistic merit. Neither does a game engine. But when a designer has something they want to express beyond competition and entertainment then it's art.
This is my experience. I am loyal to my current employer because I feel like they are fair to me and do everything in their power to take care of their employees first. As a result we've only had one person who was working part time quit since I've started working here and that was because they went back to school to completely change fields.
Employee good will is a precious commodity and pays huge dividends. If you think the company is trying to screw you and penny and dime you don't be shocked when your employees stretch out their lunch breaks to the last second, take advantage of every loop hole, charge the company for every expense, demand overtime for every second they have to and even then save their best work for personal projects. It's amazing how much 'free' work a company gets when its employees are working on something they believe in.
If you stretch the rules and give people extra vacation days that aren't in their contract, or send them to training, or take them out to lunch you'll probably get the same out of your employees. They'll stay extra long to finish that project that is running late. They might even work on the project at home off hours to get it done, because they understand there is give and take.
The current business trend is to be all about cost cutting. To be more efficient. I think that if companies did a real analysis what they'll find is that it's starting to hurt their bottom line. They're cutting costs at the expense of their brand and their customer loyalty. Look at Toyota. People are getting so focused on cutting costs they're losing sight of the important part of any business which is providing a service or product people want to pay for. Too many executives are trying to find the exact number of peanuts they can cut from a snack bag before passengers notice instead of offering a product someone would choose over the competitors.
"We cut the cost of our new MP3 Player's plastic housing by 10% increasing our profits by $3 per player."
"Great but what's the user experience like?"
"No idea."
Trouble with liability is often the ability of the customer to make an accurate determination of risk.
There's always risk. The question is how much risk and what sort of risk? If the airline said "everything is fine but you'll have to sign a waiver" and the Finnish Airforce said "we aren't flying unless someone tries to invade us." I would be wary of signing that waiver. But if the airline just said "everything is fine but you'll have to sign a waiver" I would be less concerned and more likely. In the second scenario the airline had provided inadquate decision to make an informed decision.
It's like "informed consent". How am I supposed to make informed consent on something I don't understand. "So you're saying this lump is bad and it needs to go or I'll die." Ok I'll take your word for it. I made an "informed" decision in that I was told the doctor's opinion on the subject. He could say "that's cancer" or "That's a clot" and I would be none the wiser probably either way.
Despite what software vendors like Microsoft and Oracle would tell you, bits don't actually rot. Software doesn't age. It's a mathematical construct that works or doesn't. If it worked once then it always will and if it didn't who cares?
Software doesn't age but our competition isn't standing still.
If we were still using 4 year old software we would be less efficient and create less work every day. Being slower. Being more expensive and less profitable would cause us to fall behind. Lots of software today is advancing at an incredible rate. What would have taken an hour a few years ago can now be done 15 minutes. If your software can't keep up then you're wasting money.
Development is expensive so we only spend our own time and money for outside developers when the competitive or efficiency benefits will pay themselves off. Maintaining most large modern apps and adding even minor features would never pay itself off. If your hourly rate is $200 an hour and a software upgrade costs $400 it only has to save you 2 hours a year to pay itself off. 2 hours of development rarely pays itself off.
If you want it done you need to do it yourself because, the developers don't have resources and the will to full-fill every users desire
Maybe not every users desires. But there has to be a system where people actually using the software full-time are listened to and included in the decision making even if they don't contribute a lick of code. All the features in the world are useless if it's unusable.
Look at the improvement in the Blender foundation thanks to Elephant's Dream and Project Peach. Real professionals using the product on real projects is how you get real feedback on your product. That's no different than how closed sourced products get their feedback, they invest a lot of time and money listening to the users and delivering what the users need while keeping an eye to the big picture. A bad community interaction is one of the leading indicators of misdirected development and stagnation.
Assuming development continues. If the open source app isn't staying competitive with alternatives then you're in just as bad of straits as being a closed source customer.
I've seen numerous open source projects just completely die. I've seen numerous closed source projects just completely die. Usually unless you're a top 5% company you can't afford to continue development yourself long enough to make any meaningful contribution. It's usually easier to adjust your infrastructure than it is to continue developing the product to keep it competitive.
I got in trouble for this in gradeschool. Our system admin was incompetent and useless. All of our nice at the time large 17" and 19" monitors were running at 640x480. We asked repeatedly for him to change it but the only action I ever saw him take was to show up and reinstall windows.
Breaking his password was easier than guessing it. Instead of using a unified login system he had Novell and a local roaming profile. He put a password on his local roaming profile which was identical to his network admin password. So it was just a case of opening the .pwd file for which there are numerous easily googlable apps to brute force. In fact I'm pretty certain there is even a utility built into windows to open it.
Admittedly we caused a little more havoc than just changing the resolution, we also played pranks on other students by taking over their computers while in Word and pretending to be an Artificial Intelligence.
Unfortunately for us when we were caught we just had gotten a new principle who was in his 70s and didn't know anything about computers so the SysAdmin portrayed us as the manifestations of the antichrist. Looking back on it we should have stood up for ourselves, but we were in gradeschool, what can you do when your authority figures are all saying they're going to call the FBI and prosecute you for a felony unless you agree to everything they say. Looking back on it the school probably broke a dozen more laws than we did in their handling of the situation. We agreed to 40 hours of volunteering around the school each. And after all that, all the teachers still called on us instead of the IT guy to help fix things. Yeah, no bitterness.
By the way, his password was his first name followed by two numbers (13). I don't know if I could think of a password which is easier to brute force.
Even if it's a monopoly there is no guarantee everyone else wouldn't do it as well.
And more *windows* users, more windows license, more vendor lockin, and fewer alternative OS's...
Until Windows users realize that all their favorite apps run great on Linux as well as Windows.
If chrome runs on Windows and Linux and you just use Chrome most of the day then it becomes trivial to switch over to Linux since your app will look relatively familiar. The largest obstacle to Linux adoption besides its contempt for its users is the lack of applications people are familiar with. If someone got used to pidgen then they would be less likely to revolt when they tried using Linux.
Nothing MS does is good for anyone but Microsoft this is no different.
Yeah like when they added desktop search so that I could find files easier. That did nobody any good except for Microsoft... somehow. Or when they sold me Halo. I really wish I could have benefited from that purchase somehow but sadly only Microsoft had any fun.
Exactly which is why Citizen Kane deserves its place in history.
It changed the grammar and expression of cinema. It is a pivotal movie in how movies are made. As a side effect it's also dreadfully boring. I don't know if it used to be boring, but certainly in a modern context we've advanced forward.
In a Slashdot analogy the 8086 is a landmark processor. Its signature still is with us today. But as a processor it's not really useful anymore.
You're vastly overestimating the necessary brightness of the warning. 10W per square meter is way in excess of what's necessary.
We can see satellites just fine and they're only a dozen or so square meters and they're just reflecting the sun.
At the very least we could power a laser for a a few minutes blinking as bright as the sun reflecting off of a satellite.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH4p8wzqtuA
Because as we all know, flash can't handle 3D.
So what you're saying then is that we should have a carbon tax?
Let's be sure we aren't in "Perfect Solution" world where we reject every proposal if it has any flaws. Or reject entire concepts because implementation isn't perfected.
I'm not for cap and trade. I'm for a carbon tax personally but I'll accept cap and trade over "let's just wait a few more decades and see if the problem doesn't just go away."
Distribution isn't expensive. Content creation is expensive.
Except that you can like... block people online and never have to hear anything from them through email or twitter or facebook.
Filter: Assholes@yahoo.com -> Trash
The only way though to enforce those Geo-IP checks is to have some form of DRM. I'm not saying XBMC and get_iplayer couldn't be allowed to do this. But that would require them to implement some form of DRM and compliance check on the BBC's part.
My point was though that it's disingeuous to say that "BBC owns most of the programming that they're adding DRM to." Yes they did create most of the content under DRM. But they're under a legal obligation to their customers (UK taxed citizens) to maximize their profit which means they have to protect their location checks.
The fact that UK citizens can record these same programs DRM free over the air is irrelevant since someone in the US can't record it over the air.
BBC owns the rights to many programs that they then sell to other markets.
For example the currently very popular "Life" series is a BBC program but the Discovery channel has bought rebroadcast rights.
If you can stream the iPlayer in the US because a player includes no DRM then the Discovery channel can sue the BBC for breaching their exclusive distribution rights.
This is true of all of their programs. It's the BBC's responsibility to extract as much profit as possible from foreign markets. It's part of how they fund their operations beyond local taxes. So while they may have originally had the rights to the programs they relinquish limited distribution rights to others around the world. The BBC World Service for instance is another example of this. Radio stations around the world license BBC World Service for broadcast.
I'll take you seriously when you step out from anonymity. Messiah complex much? Unlike you my identity is extremely easy to determine, down to my address and phone number if you're so inclined. So if you want to accuse me of "being paid to rally against a free, open technology so they can control content" then why don't you find you? Answer: No I'm not payed a penny nor do I have any interest in the debate except in which delivers the best quality.
By the time H264 free ride ends H264 will be horrifically out of date. It already is. It would be like complaining that MPEG1 or Real videos are no longer patent free online.
I'm perfectly happy to say unpopular crap online and let my Karma take the hit. You know what, it rarely does. You've got some serious perceived victimization issues.
Can we please mod down anyone who uses any derivative of: "I'm going to be modded down because of this but..."
Do as they ask. Keep them modded at 0. I'm so tired of people playing such whiny victims on here. I've never seen one of them actually modded down. /rant.
Given the huge amount of money that can be made with a decent CODEC by the film industry, it seems pretty obvious that the research and development would have been funded even without patents.
If there is sufficient motivation to create open source patent free licenses then they'll happen regardless if there are patented competitors.
This is a case where the FOSS community wants all of the benefits of patented software which is in this case technically superior without having to pay for it.
So just because it's on a computer and not manufactured it shouldn't be patented. Poppy-cock.
The virtual world should get the same protection as meatspace. If you invent a new non-obvious widget you should be able to patent it regardless if a CNC machine or injection molder was required to manufacture it.
You were looking at GTX 480 SLI which means that it's two GTX 480s. A single GTX 480 is only marginally better than an HD5870 in the majority of benchmarks, and costs $100 more to boot. A crossfire HD5970 system would out perform a GTX 480 SLI system.
No I was looking at the GPGPU benchmarks (OpenCL and CUDA). The GTX 480 was 8x faster at raytracing than then than GTX 285. The GTX 285 was faster than the 5970 in all of the benchmarks by a good margin. So we can assume that the lead would be even greater in the raytracing test if it was OpenCL.
If you even skimmed my post you would have correctly read that I dismissed OpenGL and DirectX benchmarks as irrelevant at present and was simply talking about GPGPU capabilities.
I guess you also haven't heard of Metro 2033, STALKER: Call of Prypiat, or Shattered Horizon, all of which are very demanding games. And there will be more demanding games out later this year (Rage, Deus Ex 3, Crysis 2). I'm calling you a troll.
Metro 2033: Everything at max @ full 1080p and both push out about 40fps on average.
Rage: Christmas 2010 at best (knowing Id probably Christmas 2011)
Deus Ex 3: A game without screenshots even released yet? Yeah. That really disproves my point there are no games out which are demanding more hardware.
Crysis 2: Christmas 2010
By the time games start stressing the system we'll be seeing the next release of cards from AMD and NVidia. Eventually AMD is going to need to redesign their chips to support GPGPU functions. More and more non-gaming applications will start taxing the GPU. Games in the future will start to employ more and more GPGPU functionality for physics, for ray-traced reflections and refractions, for Ambient occlusion, for photon mapping, for better looking soft shadows, etc etc.. the list goes on. The Fermi architecture is ready for all that. The Radeon architecture presently isn't. Both AMD and Nvidia have comparable chips out right now. Nvidia's runs a little hotter and costs a little more but also has way more video memory which is great for GPGPU applications as well. Did they suffer huge delays? Yes. During that delay was its product missed? No I don't think you can make that argument. Everything on your list of "needs good gaming chip" games came out at most a month before Fermi shipped. If they had hit their ship date in November you could have bought a Fermi... and really had little to no use for it since there wasn't anything that demanded that level of performance. If there was a time to burn working on a new architecture it was last year which saw very little demand due to the economy and only lightly taxing applications. They got a lucky break. AMD now has to hope that their efforts to roll out OpenCL don't cause similar delays or that if they do they fall during another plateau in performance.
Yes. If you take one sentence out of context that's overstating it. But let's do a real job of quoting what I said:
Both AMD and Nvidia have released gaming cards that are overkill. So Nvidia has decided to take a different tact. They've managed to release a gaming card that is competitive with the very best video card for gaming and also redesigned their cores to be fast GPGPUs.In the AnandTech review the GTX400 is 2x-10x faster than the GTX 285 or Radeon 5870.
The paragraph break was perhaps unwarranted but my entire post was about OpenCL performance. In OpenCL benchmarks the GTX480 is significantly faster. The word I used to describe their DX and OpenGL performance was "competitive" as in "comparable" as in 'around 10-15%'
The point is DX and OpenGL performance is sort of a moot point at present. Either card is adequate for just about any game you would run.