My question to you would be, why the hell would you want GPU multi-tasking? I wouldn't WANT hardware acceleration for the desktop and an app at the same time. The desktop doesn't need it, and it would reduce performance in your applications. I want my games to perform faster, not slower.
Also, just because XP doesn't support GPU multi-tasking doesn't mean DX10 cannot be used on XP. If coded properly, you would just need to disable that feature depending on the OS.
Q = Quad core X = Xtreme Edition (unlocked multiplier) 9650, I don't know.. But I wonder if thats a typo, as the latest quad core is a 6850, so maybe this is the 6950? I could be wrong.
I can see your point though. I mean they had the 2000 series, the 4000 series, and the 6000 series. What happened to 1000, 3000 and 5000?
Best idea would be to wait to see REAL benchmarks, by unbiased sites. I went Intel this round, but like you, I love competition (as most consumers should), and I would like to see AMD make a comeback.
I have heard about Crytek (making Crysis) and Valve (Half life series) trying to make better use of the cores, but most games do not. I personally opted for a dual core, while I could have afforded a quad. Mainly chose it over single core due to the fact that there aren't really any single core processors that can keep up the speed for a lower price. Spent about 185 CDN on my E6550. I like that I can run things in background (which I have always been able to do) but I can still alt-tab out of a game, and have no delay in windows whatsoever. Usually things would be sluggish but not anymore. It is also handy when a program craps out and uses 99% of the CPU, but with dual core it just uses 99% of one core. I can then easily go to Task Manager and kill it without the PC hanging.
So, to answer your question, its chrome on the car.
Yes you would need to modify OGL and DX to do this kind of thing, but it would be vastly simpler then what is implemented now. I've done all the software work needed to raytrace a single scene, and it looks very good for such a small amount of code. I even added in bloom effects with relative ease. I can only imagine all the presets you might have in an OpenGL raytracing environment. Optimizations for RayTracing would go a long way, for sure.
A highly parallel device would excel at raytracing rendering, as you could easily feed each ray into its own thread. ATI and nVidia are in a perfect position to do this, Intel, well yes they are doing very well right now, I bought an E6550 and I love it. But I'd rather them stay away from there, give AMD some room to play catch up, I'd hate to lose a competitor.
That video is pretty cool, I've seen it before. It would be relatively cheap to construct proper raytracing hardware even right now, with good results. I guess its just hard to leave a standard we've had for ages.
One of the main selling points of Ray Tracing is that you save time writing rendering techniques. It is actually very simple to construct a ray tracer, I have made one myself for my 4th year graphics class. It's actually very easy to add different effects to ray tracing. If anything, more time will be available to spend on these textures, scenes and models. The time they spend on these things won't change, but they will have saved time by using a ray tracing engine.
But even so, there isn't a 1 to 1 relation with pretty games and terrible stories. If I had to hazard a guess, the relation would be the amount of money they can spend on each side. Since the developers and writers generally have little to do with each other, there wouldn't be much problem even if it did take more time, other than it might cost more money, meaning less money to spend on the writers. But that doesn't necessarily translate to terrible stories, they just need to hire the right writers, or just not hire morons, lol.
Re:Worth buying the 360 Over?
on
BioShock Review
·
· Score: 1
I guess I neglected to mention how much more useful a PC is, for at least someone like myself. Opens up a lot more options, and you aren't paying 10 bucks extra per game. I've actually seen the PC version of bioshock at around 45$ on sale at some places, CDN. While that doesn't make up for the PC price tag, I'm sure someone would get much more use out of a PC. I think it all boils down to whether or not you constantly use a PC or not. I kind of assumed pretty much everyone on slashdot did. You're right about standardized hardware though, makes it much easier for devs to optimize. Makes you wonder why they feel the need to charge more money for console games? PC gaming isn't at the popularity it used to be, I'm pretty sure consoles have all but taken over. Especially considering the game pricing difference.
If they had added keyboard/mouse support, I would have a 360 already. Although Crysis would might have deterred me in the end;)
Re:Worth buying the 360 Over?
on
BioShock Review
·
· Score: 1
To be honest I would rather spend twice the money on a new PC. Bioshock does kick ass, but it doesn't warrant buying a 360. Reason being because its a shooter, and to be honest, shooters belong to keyboard/mouse platforms. If you could get a working keyboard/mouse adaptor for the 360, and that responds like the PC, then by all means. But also, I see consoles as more of a multiplayer/have your friends over kind of console. Either that, or I would play jRPGs on it.
If you're big into shooters like I am, you would probably be better off with a new PC, for games like Crysis and Far Cry 2. Prices are much cheaper now, and you can get something top of the line for less than a grand.
The 360 would be worth it for other games, but I can't think of much other than Halo 3. Gears will have a solid (i hope) PC port, and there aren't really any other games exclusive to it worth buying IMO.
I can't see it winning any time soon. There will always be need for larger capacities, especially with the relatively new HD formats becoming more and more common. I don't really see the two as truly competing, I doubt the capacities will catch up for a long time, perhaps some new format will appear long before then. I can see a lot of systems using SSD or hybrids for their main partition, including an OS (although that would probably kill an SSD much sooner than a contemporary disk), and hybrids/contemporary harddisks as data storage/backup etc.
I agree with you though, the need for larger capacities has most definitely slowed down, but theres some time before HD really becomes a standard. Maybe in a year or two it will be more popular to download a movie (legitimately) to own, and just store it on a hard disk. Or data back up (businesses, etc). Games are much larger and larger now as well, its common to have a game use up 6GB on its own.
Also, I believe that contemporary harddisks actually have faster transfer rates for large files. Also with the life expectancy of an SSD and use for storing temporary files, I can pretty much guarantee you won't see Seagate throwing 5 year warranties on them if they develop them, lol.
I don't think either format will win, if anything I think hybrid disks will become the standard. While storage uses have dropped, people still like hearing the sound of more.
Err, it did say that it was per platter, not a single drive. I'm not sure how many platters 1.8" drives have, if I had to guess, that Samsung might use 2 platters. Just a guess anyway, too lazy to look that up.
I can agree with you that hiding behind AC is a pathetic move and I usually ignore these posts when I'm moderating. But at the same time, knowing Twitter somewhat, I can't help but laugh at the AC's post. It may be unjust in this particular situation, but like I said, you kind of have to know Twitter's history. I don't expect you to agree with me, as we clearly have different impressions of Twitter. Sure, he can write some intelligent stuff, but more often than not it's usually for the purpose of trolling. The AC's post is what I would consider flamebait.
I do like things about MS and Windows, so it bothers me that Twitter can't seem to say anything nice about either one. Yeah, they do stupid things, yeah they make mistakes, yeah they are greedy, but their software works contrary to what most people believe. I mean its more of a casual user's OS than anything else, although that isn't what it's marketed for. So I don't really understand why people expect it to be something else. But, that's another argument, somewhat offtopic.
At any rate, I can agree with you about the entire AC concept and I don't understand why it even exists. I do appreciate that some people, like yourself, can also think things through, and don't resort to low brow tactics.
It's not just an attack on Twitter's post, rather a humorous poke at the kind of posts people make when they describe MS as M$ and Windows as Windoze. And it has a lot of truth to it, actually. It seems very common among people using that terminology. Might have a bit of an exaggeration but not too far from real, I think he was aiming for +1 Funny. The rest of it, well, yeah, that was a direct flame.
Judging from Twitter's "Vista Failure Log", sounds like he's quite the troll. The whole thing is just a big flame towards Vista, and judging from his sig, it doesn't stop at that. I don't have specific examples, but I have seen plenty of posts by this guy, and its almost always flaming MS in some manner. If that isn't trolling I don't know what is.
Also, a lot of the AC's post relies on previous postings by twitter, so it's more of a "I'm tired of hearing you're crap, so I'm going to make fun of you". When he says its impossible to argue with someone like who he described, he makes the point that it would be useless to strike up any normal kind of debate with Twitter.
Getting kinda late so I'm not going to preview this, so if you still don't understand, too bad:P
Mod parent up please, this is an extremely good point.
If it were that our internet connection was free, then perhaps then advertising would be okay, similar to that of free to use programs. Since it isn't, well like parent says, screw em. Don't waste my bandwidth.
I'm going to have to agree with you. I have a whole bunch of 100MB HD's, and ALL of them work. I've had bad sectors before on one of my Seagates, but it was easily fixed and the drive still worked without any problems. I've pretty much only bought Seagate drives though, perhaps that has something to do with it.
You don't need to do that with SATA drives. They are hotswappable. Of course, you might be stuck if you can't use SATA drives (are SCSI's hot swappable?).
Yeah no kidding. Theres a very high failure rate for just sending satellites to orbit the damn thing, something like 80% if my memory serves me. It's not exactly a guaranteed investment, thats for sure.
It doesn't matter. Like the 360 hardware, I believe that it has a special chip in there to calculate 4xAA on its own. Of course, that depends on the hardware manufacturer. This way, its basically a free visual upgrade. Older cards won't have to run anything at 4xAA since it won't run DX10.1 hardware (although I bet it could easily be emulated).
Programs would be coded in the iPhone's own assembly language, wouldn't they? Probably not as fast as x86 asm but still, NES should not be a problem at all.
My old Pentium 200mhz can handle Zsnes, although its not perfectly smooth, but definitely playable. I'd imagine the iPhone has difficulty because emulation is not the only thing its doing.
Hmm, I tried that but I get a warning from Firefox saying that unencrypted data is being used on an encrypted page, could be possible its refering to something else, like the slashdot RSS feeds or something. Not entirely sure how this all works.
Is there a method to do this with Google's Personalized Homepage, as you can enable it to give you a preview of your email? I didn't see any options to change that.
lthough I guess I don't have much to worry about since we don't use wireless in our home.
Slashdot Mirror
My question to you would be, why the hell would you want GPU multi-tasking? I wouldn't WANT hardware acceleration for the desktop and an app at the same time. The desktop doesn't need it, and it would reduce performance in your applications. I want my games to perform faster, not slower. Also, just because XP doesn't support GPU multi-tasking doesn't mean DX10 cannot be used on XP. If coded properly, you would just need to disable that feature depending on the OS.
Q = Quad core
X = Xtreme Edition (unlocked multiplier)
9650, I don't know.. But I wonder if thats a typo, as the latest quad core is a 6850, so maybe this is the 6950? I could be wrong.
I can see your point though. I mean they had the 2000 series, the 4000 series, and the 6000 series. What happened to 1000, 3000 and 5000?
Best idea would be to wait to see REAL benchmarks, by unbiased sites. I went Intel this round, but like you, I love competition (as most consumers should), and I would like to see AMD make a comeback.
I have heard about Crytek (making Crysis) and Valve (Half life series) trying to make better use of the cores, but most games do not. I personally opted for a dual core, while I could have afforded a quad. Mainly chose it over single core due to the fact that there aren't really any single core processors that can keep up the speed for a lower price. Spent about 185 CDN on my E6550. I like that I can run things in background (which I have always been able to do) but I can still alt-tab out of a game, and have no delay in windows whatsoever. Usually things would be sluggish but not anymore. It is also handy when a program craps out and uses 99% of the CPU, but with dual core it just uses 99% of one core. I can then easily go to Task Manager and kill it without the PC hanging. So, to answer your question, its chrome on the car.
Yes you would need to modify OGL and DX to do this kind of thing, but it would be vastly simpler then what is implemented now. I've done all the software work needed to raytrace a single scene, and it looks very good for such a small amount of code. I even added in bloom effects with relative ease. I can only imagine all the presets you might have in an OpenGL raytracing environment. Optimizations for RayTracing would go a long way, for sure.
A highly parallel device would excel at raytracing rendering, as you could easily feed each ray into its own thread. ATI and nVidia are in a perfect position to do this, Intel, well yes they are doing very well right now, I bought an E6550 and I love it. But I'd rather them stay away from there, give AMD some room to play catch up, I'd hate to lose a competitor.
That video is pretty cool, I've seen it before. It would be relatively cheap to construct proper raytracing hardware even right now, with good results. I guess its just hard to leave a standard we've had for ages.
One of the main selling points of Ray Tracing is that you save time writing rendering techniques. It is actually very simple to construct a ray tracer, I have made one myself for my 4th year graphics class. It's actually very easy to add different effects to ray tracing. If anything, more time will be available to spend on these textures, scenes and models. The time they spend on these things won't change, but they will have saved time by using a ray tracing engine.
But even so, there isn't a 1 to 1 relation with pretty games and terrible stories. If I had to hazard a guess, the relation would be the amount of money they can spend on each side. Since the developers and writers generally have little to do with each other, there wouldn't be much problem even if it did take more time, other than it might cost more money, meaning less money to spend on the writers. But that doesn't necessarily translate to terrible stories, they just need to hire the right writers, or just not hire morons, lol.
I guess I neglected to mention how much more useful a PC is, for at least someone like myself. Opens up a lot more options, and you aren't paying 10 bucks extra per game. I've actually seen the PC version of bioshock at around 45$ on sale at some places, CDN. While that doesn't make up for the PC price tag, I'm sure someone would get much more use out of a PC. I think it all boils down to whether or not you constantly use a PC or not. I kind of assumed pretty much everyone on slashdot did. You're right about standardized hardware though, makes it much easier for devs to optimize. Makes you wonder why they feel the need to charge more money for console games? PC gaming isn't at the popularity it used to be, I'm pretty sure consoles have all but taken over. Especially considering the game pricing difference.
;)
If they had added keyboard/mouse support, I would have a 360 already. Although Crysis would might have deterred me in the end
To be honest I would rather spend twice the money on a new PC. Bioshock does kick ass, but it doesn't warrant buying a 360. Reason being because its a shooter, and to be honest, shooters belong to keyboard/mouse platforms. If you could get a working keyboard/mouse adaptor for the 360, and that responds like the PC, then by all means. But also, I see consoles as more of a multiplayer/have your friends over kind of console. Either that, or I would play jRPGs on it. If you're big into shooters like I am, you would probably be better off with a new PC, for games like Crysis and Far Cry 2. Prices are much cheaper now, and you can get something top of the line for less than a grand. The 360 would be worth it for other games, but I can't think of much other than Halo 3. Gears will have a solid (i hope) PC port, and there aren't really any other games exclusive to it worth buying IMO.
I can't see it winning any time soon. There will always be need for larger capacities, especially with the relatively new HD formats becoming more and more common. I don't really see the two as truly competing, I doubt the capacities will catch up for a long time, perhaps some new format will appear long before then. I can see a lot of systems using SSD or hybrids for their main partition, including an OS (although that would probably kill an SSD much sooner than a contemporary disk), and hybrids/contemporary harddisks as data storage/backup etc.
I agree with you though, the need for larger capacities has most definitely slowed down, but theres some time before HD really becomes a standard. Maybe in a year or two it will be more popular to download a movie (legitimately) to own, and just store it on a hard disk. Or data back up (businesses, etc). Games are much larger and larger now as well, its common to have a game use up 6GB on its own.
Also, I believe that contemporary harddisks actually have faster transfer rates for large files. Also with the life expectancy of an SSD and use for storing temporary files, I can pretty much guarantee you won't see Seagate throwing 5 year warranties on them if they develop them, lol.
I don't think either format will win, if anything I think hybrid disks will become the standard. While storage uses have dropped, people still like hearing the sound of more.
Err, it did say that it was per platter, not a single drive. I'm not sure how many platters 1.8" drives have, if I had to guess, that Samsung might use 2 platters. Just a guess anyway, too lazy to look that up.
I can agree with you that hiding behind AC is a pathetic move and I usually ignore these posts when I'm moderating. But at the same time, knowing Twitter somewhat, I can't help but laugh at the AC's post. It may be unjust in this particular situation, but like I said, you kind of have to know Twitter's history. I don't expect you to agree with me, as we clearly have different impressions of Twitter. Sure, he can write some intelligent stuff, but more often than not it's usually for the purpose of trolling. The AC's post is what I would consider flamebait.
I do like things about MS and Windows, so it bothers me that Twitter can't seem to say anything nice about either one. Yeah, they do stupid things, yeah they make mistakes, yeah they are greedy, but their software works contrary to what most people believe. I mean its more of a casual user's OS than anything else, although that isn't what it's marketed for. So I don't really understand why people expect it to be something else. But, that's another argument, somewhat offtopic.
At any rate, I can agree with you about the entire AC concept and I don't understand why it even exists. I do appreciate that some people, like yourself, can also think things through, and don't resort to low brow tactics.
It's not just an attack on Twitter's post, rather a humorous poke at the kind of posts people make when they describe MS as M$ and Windows as Windoze. And it has a lot of truth to it, actually. It seems very common among people using that terminology. Might have a bit of an exaggeration but not too far from real, I think he was aiming for +1 Funny. The rest of it, well, yeah, that was a direct flame. Judging from Twitter's "Vista Failure Log", sounds like he's quite the troll. The whole thing is just a big flame towards Vista, and judging from his sig, it doesn't stop at that. I don't have specific examples, but I have seen plenty of posts by this guy, and its almost always flaming MS in some manner. If that isn't trolling I don't know what is. Also, a lot of the AC's post relies on previous postings by twitter, so it's more of a "I'm tired of hearing you're crap, so I'm going to make fun of you". When he says its impossible to argue with someone like who he described, he makes the point that it would be useless to strike up any normal kind of debate with Twitter. Getting kinda late so I'm not going to preview this, so if you still don't understand, too bad :P
I think the AC's point went straight over your head.
Mod parent up please, this is an extremely good point.
If it were that our internet connection was free, then perhaps then advertising would be okay, similar to that of free to use programs. Since it isn't, well like parent says, screw em. Don't waste my bandwidth.
I'm going to have to agree with you. I have a whole bunch of 100MB HD's, and ALL of them work. I've had bad sectors before on one of my Seagates, but it was easily fixed and the drive still worked without any problems. I've pretty much only bought Seagate drives though, perhaps that has something to do with it.
You don't need to do that with SATA drives. They are hotswappable. Of course, you might be stuck if you can't use SATA drives (are SCSI's hot swappable?).
Yeah no kidding. Theres a very high failure rate for just sending satellites to orbit the damn thing, something like 80% if my memory serves me. It's not exactly a guaranteed investment, thats for sure.
SP1 will work fine on our hardware. Vista has never required the use of DX10. You could probably use a DX7 or 8 card if you wanted.
It doesn't matter. Like the 360 hardware, I believe that it has a special chip in there to calculate 4xAA on its own. Of course, that depends on the hardware manufacturer. This way, its basically a free visual upgrade. Older cards won't have to run anything at 4xAA since it won't run DX10.1 hardware (although I bet it could easily be emulated).
Programs would be coded in the iPhone's own assembly language, wouldn't they? Probably not as fast as x86 asm but still, NES should not be a problem at all.
My old Pentium 200mhz can handle Zsnes, although its not perfectly smooth, but definitely playable. I'd imagine the iPhone has difficulty because emulation is not the only thing its doing.
Was there ever any posts about emulation on the iPods? iPod has its own gameboy emulator, and I think NES emulator as well.
Hmm, I tried that but I get a warning from Firefox saying that unencrypted data is being used on an encrypted page, could be possible its refering to something else, like the slashdot RSS feeds or something. Not entirely sure how this all works.
Is there a method to do this with Google's Personalized Homepage, as you can enable it to give you a preview of your email? I didn't see any options to change that.
lthough I guess I don't have much to worry about since we don't use wireless in our home.