They are gaining ground because Sony's customers don't care about the stuff you mentioned. As long as they can buy their game, put the disc in and start playing they're happy. They don't care about DRM or Linux or anything else.
Also, the PSN is free, you don't need to give them money to use it, unlike Xbox Live.
Even if you have a good GPU it's still useful. In your typical game the GPU is generally the bottleneck, so if you can offload some stuff to the CPU all the better. That's how it done on the PS3. It has an ok GPU and a very good CPU so a lot of graphics stuff is run on the CPU. In fact, even if it was invented by Intel, I believe it was the PS3 game developers that were the driving force behind MLAA's popularization.
Indeed, those benchmarks are so old that they are most likely CPU-limited. When you get the same score at different resolutions that's usually the case. That or their are locked at a specific framerate, which makes them useless as benchmarks. Why don't they use something more modern like the Unigine benchmark, or a not so ancient game like Enemy Territory Quake Wars?
AMD hasn't opened their drivers. What they did was release the specs and documentation for their GPUs and other people write the open source drivers. AMD still has it's own proprietary drivers which are faster and support more features than the open source ones.
Clock for clock it appears roughly comparable, according to Atom vs. P4 on Tom's.
If you take a close look at the benchmarks in that link, you'll notice that the only ones Atom wins are those that take advantage of multiple cores. They're comparing dual core Atoms with single core P4s. The single core Atom in there gets destroyed in pretty much all those tests.
You'll also notice notice that they're using desktop Atoms in there, which usually have more cores and are clocked higher than the netbook variants.
Then what do you recommend as a baseline target for low-budget PC game development?
Oh I agree with you there, a standard netbook configuration (say an Atom N270 + GMA 950 and 1GB of RAM) seems like a good target for a low budget game. I was just pointing out how it is in some ways underpowered even compared to a decade old mid-range configuration.
An Atom CPU is nowhere near a P4. It doesn't even come close to most P3s. Unless your Atom has 2 cores and the programs you're running make use of them, which is not very common.
And according to your link, the GPUs you find in netbooks, GMA 500 and 950 (and 3150, it's not on the chart but it's just a slightly overclocked 950), are closer to the original GeForce 256 or the crippled GF2s than to the GF3. They even miss some major features like hardware vertex processing that the GF 256 had.
It makes no sense to compare this to an Atom, they are nowhere near the same market segment. If you want to compare Atoms to something, it's closest competitors are the AMD C-50 or the VIA Nano.
No, the GPU is integrated with the CPU in Sandy Bridge. In fact, you could even say they are better integrated than in Llano since in Sandy Bridge they share the same L3 cache.
It's not a desktop environment either, it's a display manager, the thing that allows you to log in, choose your session, shutdown and reboot and other stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't remember there being an FPS in any previous HIB.
Personally, I keep buying Sony's stuff because I've never had a problem with them.
They are gaining ground because Sony's customers don't care about the stuff you mentioned. As long as they can buy their game, put the disc in and start playing they're happy. They don't care about DRM or Linux or anything else.
Also, the PSN is free, you don't need to give them money to use it, unlike Xbox Live.
The PSN incident didn't affect PS3's sales. If anything, during the month or so when the PSN was down PS3 sales increased slightly.
In the early days perhaps. These days most PS3 games use MLAA or variants of it running on the CPU.
If it blurs the text and GUI then it's poorly implemented. The AA should be applied before drawing the UI.
Even if you have a good GPU it's still useful. In your typical game the GPU is generally the bottleneck, so if you can offload some stuff to the CPU all the better. That's how it done on the PS3. It has an ok GPU and a very good CPU so a lot of graphics stuff is run on the CPU. In fact, even if it was invented by Intel, I believe it was the PS3 game developers that were the driving force behind MLAA's popularization.
Indeed, those benchmarks are so old that they are most likely CPU-limited. When you get the same score at different resolutions that's usually the case. That or their are locked at a specific framerate, which makes them useless as benchmarks. Why don't they use something more modern like the Unigine benchmark, or a not so ancient game like Enemy Territory Quake Wars?
AMD hasn't opened their drivers. What they did was release the specs and documentation for their GPUs and other people write the open source drivers. AMD still has it's own proprietary drivers which are faster and support more features than the open source ones.
The iPhone version of Rage is different from the others. They only share the setting and some of the art assets. The engines are completely different.
Sony gave them to you.
Clock for clock it appears roughly comparable, according to Atom vs. P4 on Tom's.
If you take a close look at the benchmarks in that link, you'll notice that the only ones Atom wins are those that take advantage of multiple cores. They're comparing dual core Atoms with single core P4s. The single core Atom in there gets destroyed in pretty much all those tests.
You'll also notice notice that they're using desktop Atoms in there, which usually have more cores and are clocked higher than the netbook variants.
Then what do you recommend as a baseline target for low-budget PC game development?
Oh I agree with you there, a standard netbook configuration (say an Atom N270 + GMA 950 and 1GB of RAM) seems like a good target for a low budget game. I was just pointing out how it is in some ways underpowered even compared to a decade old mid-range configuration.
An Atom CPU is nowhere near a P4. It doesn't even come close to most P3s. Unless your Atom has 2 cores and the programs you're running make use of them, which is not very common.
And according to your link, the GPUs you find in netbooks, GMA 500 and 950 (and 3150, it's not on the chart but it's just a slightly overclocked 950), are closer to the original GeForce 256 or the crippled GF2s than to the GF3. They even miss some major features like hardware vertex processing that the GF 256 had.
It makes no sense to compare this to an Atom, they are nowhere near the same market segment. If you want to compare Atoms to something, it's closest competitors are the AMD C-50 or the VIA Nano.
No, the GPU is integrated with the CPU in Sandy Bridge. In fact, you could even say they are better integrated than in Llano since in Sandy Bridge they share the same L3 cache.
I don't think you can pirate 3DS games yet.
If that's what they're aiming at, isn't a 400mhz 32 bit ARM CPU overpowered?
It's not here yet, and I personally doubt it ever will, given who's making it.
It's not a desktop environment either, it's a display manager, the thing that allows you to log in, choose your session, shutdown and reboot and other stuff.
How about starting with assembler?
http://altdevblogaday.org/2011/03/24/machine-code-is-for-kids/
Netbooks are perfectly capable of running plenty of 3D games.
What charts has it been topping?
Isn't QuickBasic a compiled language? If so, I don't see anything weird in making 3d games in it, even on old and slow hardware.
They're just trying to preemptively comply with future EU legislation.
Some people are confusing it with the iPhone version which is on rails and was released a few months back.