Right. So we should eliminate the 99.97% of children below the age of say, 18, since they obviously can't produce enough for this society (the remainder are probably geniuses anyway). We should also eliminate most of the retired people, some disabled, the sick, those on maternity, and...yeah, you get the idea. That is, your reasoning sucks, and luckily our society isn't that black and white yet.
Right, just like the government intervention in Canada, Cuba, most of Europe, parts of Asia, and many more countries are causing the inflated prices in health care. Oh wait, it's only really fucked up in the US...so how does that work again?
I admit I didn't read over my own comments very thoroughly. I meant to compare everything using (more or less) equivalent GPU hardware (obviously can't do the same for CPU, unfortunately). What I was answering is the question about how would a developer get a 100% boost going from a hardware-agnostic engine to a hardware-specific engine (or 50% loss in the reverse direction).
That being said, all my statistics are based on actual profiles -- you really can't beat seeing a 5% performance drop by deliberately adding one single line to invalidate a GPU cache state in the middle of rendering your scene.
In addition, I would argue that the CPU (on the PS3) coupled with the architecture is actually more flexible than that of a PC. Have you heard of a PC game developer explicitly writing the framebuffer back to main memory in the middle of a rendering just so they can do post processing on the CPU? And that's the type of post processing that you can't get until DX11 hits (scatter, arbitrary ordered writes, etc...). Furthermore, I'm not sure what why you look down on tricks. Isn't any modern day real-time rendering just based on "tricks?" Isn't rasterization itself a trick? Unless you think all the games out there are solving full global illumination in real time, otherwise I think you can classify every one of them as a collection of tricks for all sorts of specific situations. And to answer your last point, post-processing isn't exactly free.
Unless a cross-platform game company is willing to release their figures, I can't really cite a source. Even then, they can only release their numbers for the GPU (for obvious reasons).
To put this into perspective, let's just consider writing a game on the PS3 using console methodology vs. PC methodology. To begin with, you gain >50% performance just switching from PS3's OpenGL implementation to libGCM (15fps to 25fps...sad, I know). Then you consider the fact that you can carefully maintain your buffer states, early Z, double Z, special caches, etc...which is about 5~15% performance PER item (in addition to the fact that you can reinstate the buffer states). Then you consider the fact that you don't need to flush the rendering pipeline (~0.Xms per full flush), custom MSAA resolves (saves passes), hidden functions not exposed on PC hardware, texture bandwidth vs. computing power trade-offs, less worry about batched draw calls, etc.... In the end, it adds up to >50% performance loss going from hardware-specific to hardware-agnostic with an abstraction layer (DirectX or OpenGL). Put it another way: PS3 can push out about a couple million polygons per frame with all sorts of effects and stuff. You'd be hard pressed to find a PC game with a cross-hardware engine pushing out the same render quality at half the framerate.
On the other hand, the Intel CPU is way powerful and there really isn't a way for me to compare that vs. the PPC derivatives on the consoles. But trust me when I say that I've seen 1000X speedup by going from excellent C code to highly optimized ASM, which you can only feasibly get by working on a fixed hardware. However, I'm going to stop giving more details as I don't want to break NDA (everything I've said can be found on the web at very legitimate sites). If you want to know about the inner workings of the GPU (and maybe the CPU), you can always check out blogs such as Wolfgang Engel's (and remember to read comments!) or other GDC/SIGGRAPH presentations.
They dont care what GPU or CPU it has. How fast the L2 cache is. But I can still get on WOW or battle.net and play the same game title with everyone across the world despite the fact that we all share vastly different hardware.
And this is exactly why a lot of PC game developers have no idea why their games run at 1fps on consoles. This is EXACTLY the type of stuff that a console game developer has to take into account to make sure they get the most out of their hardware. And the trade-off that Blizzard had to make to get WoW running on so many different hardware configurations is a general loss of performance (>50%) compared to optimized console games.
You're totally right. I just hope every one of those "panels" gets slapped with a $30+ garbage tax. I'd rather see this kind of "land-fill material (literally) that lasts no more than one week off the shelf" not take off at all.
And let's face it, the vast majority of the readership aren't geeks, so they won't be hacking these things.
And to hell with my karma. It's for garbage like these that I can afford to burn it.
I'm not sure if your latter statement makes much sense. If so, then all new domestic college grads who never worked (or very little) before they graduated college would be on equal footing as international students, since they all paid the same taxes ($0...although arguably, the domestic student has a negative balance, because he/she probably received tax benefits). Of course, I'm not a tax lawyer/accountant, and I don't know how to factor in anything your parents paid to raise you...but this is just my $0.02. =)
I feel dirty about double posting with similar responses, but I don't get why everyone is emphasizing the lag issue (I can understand the Battle.net downtime part). It's not like you're playing with/against Battle.net. You're playing with/against your friends, which means your connections are directly to them (I'm pretty confident that Blizzard is smart enough to do a "if (my_ip.equals(connection_1_ip)) {...}"), and not going through Battle.net. I'm not sure how much is there to worry about for the end-game stats uploading and the intermittent ping/pongs to maintain the Battle.net connection.
I'm pretty sure that Blizzard is smart enough to know that the other players you're connecting to are on your subnet. At worst, you'll just bounce to the first hop on your WAN and come right back to your friend's connection (then again, I Am Not A Network Engineer). Remember, you're playing with your friends, not Battle.net. If you don't connect to anyone outside of your LAN for your game, you will only have to upload end-game stats and maybe intermittent pings/pongs with Battle.net.
I suppose as long as they install it only in the parking spaces where the cars are coming to a stop anyway, then it wouldn't really be stealing from the drivers/cars. It'd also help them save on their brakes as well.
Then again, this is Slashdot, so someone's going to point out that people may not park right the first time, or that they may be driving across parking spaces to get to the other side instead of on the designated driving lanes, etc...I guess I'll shut up now.
I think the problem mostly stems from the fact that the big publishers don't want to piss off the brick and mortar retail stores, like Gamestop. I'm pretty sure they'd be willing to price digital downloads at far better pricing (i.e. cheaper than retail), especially since they don't have to worry about manufacturing/packaging/distribution costs (well, less distribution costs anyway -- still gotta pay for bandwidth). But then that will anger the retail stores, which still hold the lion's share of sales.
Wow, that's probably some of the most strange reasoning I've read today.
Sure, we're tied to the machine. But I'm gladly tied to the machine and enjoying slashdot, rather than working on farms from sunrise to sundown. I personally would not say that farming is what I consider "decent living". I would think that most people today won't consider farming "decent living", especially if they can find better alternatives.
Would I say that the Luddites are wrong? No. That's just their preference. Would I want to live that way? Sure, maybe after a few million years of immortality I may get bored of my digitized godhood.
Just like how a big budget movie is over after just two hours? I would think people enjoyed those movies and feel that movies in general are worthwhile enough to go back to time after time.
If you're going to use that logic, then that's the same as asking:
- If a movie can be finished within two hours and has no "re-watch" value, is it really worth buying in the first place?
- If a snack can be finished within minutes and has no "re-eat" value, is it really worth buying in the first place?
- etc....
I think the key here is that there are certain things that are very valuable on their first-consumption, and not much afterward.
Note: I do understand one could argue how there are no movies without some sort of re-watch value. But that argument can be applied to games: all games are replayable.
Companies are making less money per copy sold, not "less money". If demand has increased faster than the decrease in profits per copy sold, then the company as a whole has more money (on average).
Not only do I think you're right, I also think the GP is sorely mistaken. Sure, the "bad" publicity will lead to less brown people flying on AirTran, but will probably attract more white/yellow/black people flying with them because of the perceived "safety" with the handling/kicking-off of brown people. I'm not trying to be racist...I just think people are hypocrites when it comes to rooting for some identifiable group but not getting on the same plane as them.
I totally agree. I think what slashdotters love to do is to present faulty analogies. The fact is that the purpose of a car is to transport people (and being comfortable at the same...and maybe exhibit some social status), and the ability to do so transfers with the physical commodity itself. Therefore, the resale price of the car reflects its present state of being able to perform its intended purpose.
On the other hand, the sole purpose of a video (game) entertainment is to be consumed. In effect, the residual value of the game to the original purchaser is effectively $0 (or close to it, depending on replayability). In a sense, if a game publisher can sell you the experience on a one-to-one basis (similar to a ticket to the theaters in that regards) wherein you possess eternal, nontransferable right to play the game, then I'm sure no one will be b*tching right now (other than GameStop).
So let's not compare games to other forms of media or goods.
*People can't compare games to cars because the purpose and intrinsic resale value is different.
*People can't compare games to DVDs because the majority of the content of the DVDs have already produced revenue elsewhere (be it movie theaters or broadcast...and which is why movie/TV producers aren't complaining).
* People can't compare music CDs to games, because music is intrinsically a repeatedly enjoyable experience, while games are not. In other words, assume you lost interest in listening to an album after the first time. Would you think your $20 is worth the 1 hour 15 minutes of entertainment? Probably not for most people.
Yes, I know some people will say to make games more replayable or what not. The point is, yes, there are games like that. They're called World of Pay-continuously-to-play-craft and Age of Subscriptions. Otherwise, I don't see people complaining about making movies with rewatchability (granted, some people rewatch good movies...but same goes that some people replay games).
I am probably biased on this issue, but I'm not advocating that used games are necessarily good or bad. I'm just saying that the issue isn't something so simple to boil down to a "it's just like XYZ industry blah blah blah". Then again, digital distribution is taking off. From what I can see, people seem to be between Steam/Live Market/PSN/etc... and the physical box, even though there's no resale of the digital version. So yeah, I guess that logic about people buying games because of the resale probably just lost some validity.
I'm trying really hard to not invoke Godwin's Law here, so I'll ask this instead: Are you saying that you shouldn't call 911 (or whatever it is in the reader's country) about your neighbor's fire until it's burning your lawn?
This is pretty awesome. Maybe academia should just attach all sorts of computer science problems (that humans are good at and computers are not) to these human-verification systems for large corporations. Soon, we'll have lots of academic papers coming from the spammer community!
Slashdot Mirror
You mean, like the bankrupt state of California? If one is forced to chose, you may wish to live free, but I prefer not dying.
Until they finish taking all your moneys. Socialism is a dog eat dog world, man. And capitalism is just the other way around.
Right. So we should eliminate the 99.97% of children below the age of say, 18, since they obviously can't produce enough for this society (the remainder are probably geniuses anyway). We should also eliminate most of the retired people, some disabled, the sick, those on maternity, and...yeah, you get the idea. That is, your reasoning sucks, and luckily our society isn't that black and white yet.
Right, just like the government intervention in Canada, Cuba, most of Europe, parts of Asia, and many more countries are causing the inflated prices in health care. Oh wait, it's only really fucked up in the US...so how does that work again?
So the default behavior is basically traffic lights in Los Angeles on a normal day? I feel soooo sorry for them. ;)
I admit I didn't read over my own comments very thoroughly. I meant to compare everything using (more or less) equivalent GPU hardware (obviously can't do the same for CPU, unfortunately). What I was answering is the question about how would a developer get a 100% boost going from a hardware-agnostic engine to a hardware-specific engine (or 50% loss in the reverse direction).
That being said, all my statistics are based on actual profiles -- you really can't beat seeing a 5% performance drop by deliberately adding one single line to invalidate a GPU cache state in the middle of rendering your scene.
In addition, I would argue that the CPU (on the PS3) coupled with the architecture is actually more flexible than that of a PC. Have you heard of a PC game developer explicitly writing the framebuffer back to main memory in the middle of a rendering just so they can do post processing on the CPU? And that's the type of post processing that you can't get until DX11 hits (scatter, arbitrary ordered writes, etc...). Furthermore, I'm not sure what why you look down on tricks. Isn't any modern day real-time rendering just based on "tricks?" Isn't rasterization itself a trick? Unless you think all the games out there are solving full global illumination in real time, otherwise I think you can classify every one of them as a collection of tricks for all sorts of specific situations. And to answer your last point, post-processing isn't exactly free.
Unless a cross-platform game company is willing to release their figures, I can't really cite a source. Even then, they can only release their numbers for the GPU (for obvious reasons).
To put this into perspective, let's just consider writing a game on the PS3 using console methodology vs. PC methodology. To begin with, you gain >50% performance just switching from PS3's OpenGL implementation to libGCM (15fps to 25fps...sad, I know). Then you consider the fact that you can carefully maintain your buffer states, early Z, double Z, special caches, etc...which is about 5~15% performance PER item (in addition to the fact that you can reinstate the buffer states). Then you consider the fact that you don't need to flush the rendering pipeline (~0.Xms per full flush), custom MSAA resolves (saves passes), hidden functions not exposed on PC hardware, texture bandwidth vs. computing power trade-offs, less worry about batched draw calls, etc.... In the end, it adds up to >50% performance loss going from hardware-specific to hardware-agnostic with an abstraction layer (DirectX or OpenGL). Put it another way: PS3 can push out about a couple million polygons per frame with all sorts of effects and stuff. You'd be hard pressed to find a PC game with a cross-hardware engine pushing out the same render quality at half the framerate.
On the other hand, the Intel CPU is way powerful and there really isn't a way for me to compare that vs. the PPC derivatives on the consoles. But trust me when I say that I've seen 1000X speedup by going from excellent C code to highly optimized ASM, which you can only feasibly get by working on a fixed hardware. However, I'm going to stop giving more details as I don't want to break NDA (everything I've said can be found on the web at very legitimate sites). If you want to know about the inner workings of the GPU (and maybe the CPU), you can always check out blogs such as Wolfgang Engel's (and remember to read comments!) or other GDC/SIGGRAPH presentations.
They dont care what GPU or CPU it has. How fast the L2 cache is. But I can still get on WOW or battle.net and play the same game title with everyone across the world despite the fact that we all share vastly different hardware.
And this is exactly why a lot of PC game developers have no idea why their games run at 1fps on consoles. This is EXACTLY the type of stuff that a console game developer has to take into account to make sure they get the most out of their hardware. And the trade-off that Blizzard had to make to get WoW running on so many different hardware configurations is a general loss of performance (>50%) compared to optimized console games.
You're totally right. I just hope every one of those "panels" gets slapped with a $30+ garbage tax. I'd rather see this kind of "land-fill material (literally) that lasts no more than one week off the shelf" not take off at all.
And let's face it, the vast majority of the readership aren't geeks, so they won't be hacking these things.
And to hell with my karma. It's for garbage like these that I can afford to burn it.
I'm not sure if your latter statement makes much sense. If so, then all new domestic college grads who never worked (or very little) before they graduated college would be on equal footing as international students, since they all paid the same taxes ($0...although arguably, the domestic student has a negative balance, because he/she probably received tax benefits). Of course, I'm not a tax lawyer/accountant, and I don't know how to factor in anything your parents paid to raise you...but this is just my $0.02. =)
I feel dirty about double posting with similar responses, but I don't get why everyone is emphasizing the lag issue (I can understand the Battle.net downtime part). It's not like you're playing with/against Battle.net. You're playing with/against your friends, which means your connections are directly to them (I'm pretty confident that Blizzard is smart enough to do a "if (my_ip.equals(connection_1_ip)) {...}"), and not going through Battle.net. I'm not sure how much is there to worry about for the end-game stats uploading and the intermittent ping/pongs to maintain the Battle.net connection.
I'm pretty sure that Blizzard is smart enough to know that the other players you're connecting to are on your subnet. At worst, you'll just bounce to the first hop on your WAN and come right back to your friend's connection (then again, I Am Not A Network Engineer). Remember, you're playing with your friends, not Battle.net. If you don't connect to anyone outside of your LAN for your game, you will only have to upload end-game stats and maybe intermittent pings/pongs with Battle.net.
I suppose as long as they install it only in the parking spaces where the cars are coming to a stop anyway, then it wouldn't really be stealing from the drivers/cars. It'd also help them save on their brakes as well.
Then again, this is Slashdot, so someone's going to point out that people may not park right the first time, or that they may be driving across parking spaces to get to the other side instead of on the designated driving lanes, etc...I guess I'll shut up now.
I think the problem mostly stems from the fact that the big publishers don't want to piss off the brick and mortar retail stores, like Gamestop. I'm pretty sure they'd be willing to price digital downloads at far better pricing (i.e. cheaper than retail), especially since they don't have to worry about manufacturing/packaging/distribution costs (well, less distribution costs anyway -- still gotta pay for bandwidth). But then that will anger the retail stores, which still hold the lion's share of sales.
Wow, that's probably some of the most strange reasoning I've read today.
Sure, we're tied to the machine. But I'm gladly tied to the machine and enjoying slashdot, rather than working on farms from sunrise to sundown. I personally would not say that farming is what I consider "decent living". I would think that most people today won't consider farming "decent living", especially if they can find better alternatives.
Would I say that the Luddites are wrong? No. That's just their preference. Would I want to live that way? Sure, maybe after a few million years of immortality I may get bored of my digitized godhood.
Just like how a big budget movie is over after just two hours? I would think people enjoyed those movies and feel that movies in general are worthwhile enough to go back to time after time.
If you're going to use that logic, then that's the same as asking:
- If a movie can be finished within two hours and has no "re-watch" value, is it really worth buying in the first place?
- If a snack can be finished within minutes and has no "re-eat" value, is it really worth buying in the first place?
- etc....
I think the key here is that there are certain things that are very valuable on their first-consumption, and not much afterward.
Note: I do understand one could argue how there are no movies without some sort of re-watch value. But that argument can be applied to games: all games are replayable.
Companies are making less money per copy sold, not "less money". If demand has increased faster than the decrease in profits per copy sold, then the company as a whole has more money (on average).
You mean, companies should look at what is best for the global society and humanity as a whole? Sure, I can totally agree with that.
Not only do I think you're right, I also think the GP is sorely mistaken. Sure, the "bad" publicity will lead to less brown people flying on AirTran, but will probably attract more white/yellow/black people flying with them because of the perceived "safety" with the handling/kicking-off of brown people. I'm not trying to be racist...I just think people are hypocrites when it comes to rooting for some identifiable group but not getting on the same plane as them.
I totally agree. I think what slashdotters love to do is to present faulty analogies. The fact is that the purpose of a car is to transport people (and being comfortable at the same...and maybe exhibit some social status), and the ability to do so transfers with the physical commodity itself. Therefore, the resale price of the car reflects its present state of being able to perform its intended purpose.
On the other hand, the sole purpose of a video (game) entertainment is to be consumed. In effect, the residual value of the game to the original purchaser is effectively $0 (or close to it, depending on replayability). In a sense, if a game publisher can sell you the experience on a one-to-one basis (similar to a ticket to the theaters in that regards) wherein you possess eternal, nontransferable right to play the game, then I'm sure no one will be b*tching right now (other than GameStop).
So let's not compare games to other forms of media or goods.
*People can't compare games to cars because the purpose and intrinsic resale value is different.
*People can't compare games to DVDs because the majority of the content of the DVDs have already produced revenue elsewhere (be it movie theaters or broadcast...and which is why movie/TV producers aren't complaining).
* People can't compare music CDs to games, because music is intrinsically a repeatedly enjoyable experience, while games are not. In other words, assume you lost interest in listening to an album after the first time. Would you think your $20 is worth the 1 hour 15 minutes of entertainment? Probably not for most people.
Yes, I know some people will say to make games more replayable or what not. The point is, yes, there are games like that. They're called World of Pay-continuously-to-play-craft and Age of Subscriptions. Otherwise, I don't see people complaining about making movies with rewatchability (granted, some people rewatch good movies...but same goes that some people replay games).
I am probably biased on this issue, but I'm not advocating that used games are necessarily good or bad. I'm just saying that the issue isn't something so simple to boil down to a "it's just like XYZ industry blah blah blah". Then again, digital distribution is taking off. From what I can see, people seem to be between Steam/Live Market/PSN/etc... and the physical box, even though there's no resale of the digital version. So yeah, I guess that logic about people buying games because of the resale probably just lost some validity.
I'm trying really hard to not invoke Godwin's Law here, so I'll ask this instead: Are you saying that you shouldn't call 911 (or whatever it is in the reader's country) about your neighbor's fire until it's burning your lawn?
This is pretty awesome. Maybe academia should just attach all sorts of computer science problems (that humans are good at and computers are not) to these human-verification systems for large corporations. Soon, we'll have lots of academic papers coming from the spammer community!
So wait, Microsoft is good now?
And the first mass-market mechanical use will be for bubble wraps. "Now with more bubbles for you to pop!"