MasterJew said:

Hitler was mistaken: the Jews are the Master Race ; the aryans are the dogs who should’ve been gassed.

Hey we have Hitler’s opposite!

But Oldone hit the nail on the head. Except, men are better than women of course.

@MasterJew I myself am jewish, yet i am of the opinion that there is no such thing as a master race. Indeed, there is but one race, the human race. Now I will grant you that there are several different nationalities, yet no one nationality is above another.

- Oldone

Sounds like another typical EA fuckup on BF2.

I’ve seen Fable and it does look like a shallow RPG that I would enjoy, but I don’t want to play it enough to borrow an Xbox and the game from someone.

As far as “twitch”.. yes I love it. I knew shit about tech until I saw my friend playing a game when we were like 13-14, called QuakeWorld online. I was addicted. Which is why I can’t wait to get a Wii. It looks to be the best mouse/controller without buying a $2k PC that will run the newest FPS.

- 2GB, WinXP SP2, P4 3.4GHz, 1.0 TB RAID (200 GB free). PCI-Express - ATI (OEM) Radeon X800XT.
- I’ve also an aging Athlon XP (2400+) 1.5GB RAM, 500 GB RAID, but the video card was sub-spec, so I wasn’t surprised when it didn’t work.

(And yes, before our mutual friend Sony notes, I’d have done better with an AMD processor, but at the time AMD didn’t have a hardened PCI express chipset — heck they didn’t even have one to at all for end customers. PCI express meant work(company not uni) would pay for the computer. Without it, I would. Easy choice.)

I talked to support at EA and (unofficially) to a guy at Digital Illusions. The latter’s guess was it was an ATI/PCI Express quirk that they’d look into (I gave him chipset 411 etc). The former gave up and told me to return the game.

Yep, I did all the usual things, and some unusual ones — clean boot off my test drive with nothing but XPSP2 patches installed, try various drivers and various tweaks to directX, no dice.

son of the suns said:

Wolfe: No I haven’t because I mostly don’t have the attention span for strategy/rpg games. The only RPG’s I’ve ever finished were KOTOR1/2, obviously not the deepest games when it comes to RPG. When I actually have access to a system that can run them, I play FPS like CS: Source, Battlefield, Quake4, etc.

You might like Fable. It’s pretty short and story-oriented like KOTOR. Like KOTOR, it deals with the light and dark side (though in fantasy not ‘the force’) and is a tale of revenge. I wouldn’t buy it though; borrow or rent over a weekend should suffice.

And yeah, we’re flip sides of the coin. I don’t have the twitch gaming skills to excel at an FPS, and I don’t denigrate those skills by calling them ‘twitch’. RPG’s — even slow MMORPG’s are more my speed.

Regards,
-wolfe

“@SotS I tried BF2. Darn thing wouldn’t run on my system. (My system solidly exceeds all required specs). ”

What are your specs?

Wolfe: No I haven’t because I mostly don’t have the attention span for strategy/rpg games. The only RPG’s I’ve ever finished were KOTOR1/2, obviously not the deepest games when it comes to RPG. When I actually have access to a system that can run them, I play FPS like CS: Source, Battlefield, Quake4, etc. But alas I’m in “dialup rural land” so I waste time playing Madden 07(American football) for Gamecube.

MasterJew said:

Hitler was mistaken: the Jews are the Master Race ; the aryans are the dogs who should’ve been gassed.

Enjoying your naked Zionism?

Hitler was mistaken: the Jews are the Master Race ; the aryans are the dogs who should’ve been gassed.

@SonyAD Canada has far more than ATI.

@SotS I tried BF2. Darn thing wouldn’t run on my system. (My system solidly exceeds all required specs). I might try it again, but I’m really more into grand strategy games or RPG’s. Have been playing Company of Heroes; not bad. Have you tried it?

@Sony I’m quite familiar with the X2; I assembled (built sounds a bit pretentious given that all you’re doing is putting parts together) two X2 systems; one for a very close friend and one for my father. That was before C2D. 3 of my last 4 computers were AMD.

Intel has long incorporated cache into the die, though I agree ventures such as their ‘Slot 1′ (if memory serves) were amusing (Slot A, though, anyone?).

sonyad said:
they’d [Intel] not have stood any chance against AMD, not that they stood much against them anyway, except with the technophobe simple folk/corporations that will always go with their favourite prestigious brandname regardless what they buy and at what cost.

That’s the great thing about you Sony, you’re never lacking an opinion.

My perspective of AMD is a little more factually based than yours, though I applaud your uh… enthusiasm. I’m frankly more neutral on AMD themselves — they survived (and then prospered) thanks to NexGen (the K6) and a combination of the DEC Alpha team and the Nexgen team with a few K5 veterans thrown in for flavor (the Athlon/Athlon XP).

That said, K8’s almost all AMD, and Hypertransport mostly, so they’re certainly starting to produce. (The pathetic failure of IA-64 and the Itanium was certainly a glorious moment for AMD).

My concern is stability, performance, heat, price, and operating costs for my personal machine. For many years AMD was superior in almost all but stability; now Intel is for my purposes. I’ll be waiting to see AMD’s response (K8L) to the Core 2 architecture before I buy my next machine, but if I had to buy now, it’d probably be an E6600.

I do have to wonder what AMD will do with memory latency with the K8L; while the integrated memory controller on the X2’s was certainly elegant, it’s proving somewhat less impressive with AM2’s move to DDR2 and consequent higher latencies.

AMD has yet to match Intel in chipset stability, though they are close enough and good enough for me. If ATI/AMD gets serious about verification, they might well close this gap.

Having your L2 cache on mboard is just the lazy ass idiot’s sneaky way of pushing their production costs down

Which is why I don’t think anyone’s done it this century. NetBurst put a total end to that. Even stuff like Slot 1 had it on card, and Slot 2 had it in package.

To actually go back to mainboard L2 Cache, you’re talking… the mid-1990’s?

Moreover, every intel/amd product up until the K6-3 and the P3 Coppermine lacked on-die L2.

As always, you erect amusing straw-men, but they do your argument little service.

Only natural then that Intel stuck with it for so very long.

Except they didn’t, other than in the minds of a few fanboys. Moreover, that was ~8-10 years ago. Shall we bring up the 100 years war? The renaissance and its influence on chip development?

In any event, in the short term (6mos), I hope AMD comes out with something in K8L that’s a lot more viable. Competition is needed, or Intel will rest on its laurels again. In the mid-term (2+ years out), yes, I think AMD’s Fusion is going to be very interesting. This will be challenging for Intel to counter.

Regards,
-wolfe

I have a old Radeon 9550 256mb card, and haven’t got new drivers in months. For people out of braodband range in rural areas, it’s preposterous to download such huge video drivers frequently.

Luckily, I don’t need any new drivers anyway since any new game I’d want to play would require broadband as well.

With the Omega drivers, the choice of customisable settings, just the sheer amount of options available to you is awesome. Staggering.

I had to research previously alien concepts like the W-buffer and VolTxEnable settings before I felt anywhere competent to tweak them.

You’ve even got builtin overclocking features complete with a realtime d3d renderer to check for artifcats by comparing to software rendering. You can let it self adjust with incremental frequency steps subsequented by progressively longer scans for render artifacts.

- Apocalyptica feat. Sandra Nasic - Path. Vol.2

I now use omegadrivers, modded older ATI drivers. nVidia drivers for my nForce, AMD driver for the proc. Also the latest firmware/bios upgrades across the board. Unfortunately, newer is not necessarily better, as I’ve duely noted since switching up to Catalyst soft.package 6.12 which takes it upon its sweet, caring self to perform softoverclocking on my behalf with but a stealthily cryptic notification and can’t be deactivated in any obvious fashion (I can’t be arsed to start investigating the registry for it), presumably in my best interest.

It also does so poorly, jacking up to near the fail point for my gfx board. Odds were fifty-fifty it would need a reset whenever I ran anything involving 3D render mode, even windowed. I tried manually underclocking, disabling ati processes with msconfig to prevent it loading its overclocking profiles and temporarily alleviate the issue but the bastard still reclocked each chance it got when I needed to adjust gamma, brighness to watch some movie and unwisely opted for the driver settings for expediency, etc.

You can but imagine what sort of cruel, alien shit this is to pull on less knowledgeable users.

Such petty marketing stunts are just about enough to put me off ever buying ATI again. I certainly hope this idiotic policy has not come about as a result of them having recently merged with AMD. And that they’ll revert soon. Such policies can only hurt their image. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it were a semi knowledgeable woman’s idea, from their marketing or other gay (apologies to P Coderch) division.

I think I’ll try the tweaksrus drivers next, just for the hell of it. But I don’t foresee going back to ATI original drivers anytime soon.

- Alex - Yamasha

Yes Intel chips finally all have integrated L2 cache on-die, and many have 2MB per core. But their dual core architecture still doesn’t communicate with the cache/memory as well as AMD’s, because all the data is only handled by one “master core”. But in the end even with AMD’s newest X2’s with 1MB cache per core, Intel’s bountiful cache outperforms.

As for my politics, my best friend is a flaming democrat.. He’s a professional gamer who has placed top 20 in world Quake3/Quake4 tourneys.. yet he can’t even install video drivers by himself. He also is a standard moralist democrat who thinks cheating on his girlfriend is fine until he’s married.

Indeed SotS. Mine has a puny 512KB L2. I can’t remember, did Intel eventually also pass to integrating L2 on chip, or are they still the lamers I remember them for? They did, didn’t they? They must have, or they’d not have stood any chance against AMD, not that they stood much against them anyway, except with the technophobe simple folk/corporations that will always go with their favourite prestigious brandname regardless what they buy and at what cost.

If I had to guess, I’d say L2 on chip is worth 4 times the same amount on the mboard.

Having your L2 cache on mboard is just the lazy ass idiot’s sneaky way of pushing their production costs down by passing the buck to the mainboard manufacturers that were stupid enough to gobble down your chipset for the respective slot/socket while simultaneously single handedly lowering the overall performance of the ensemble. So, except for making your processors more attractive (or rather less insanely repelling) pricewise if less performant, it’s pure bollocks development policy.

Only natural then that Intel stuck with it for so very long.

You’re quite knowledgeable, btw. Alas, you’re also Republican.
Can’t have it all, can you?

- BRAN VAN 3000 - drinking in l.a.

Sony: Overclocking won’t help much, the main things that hold AMD back right now are the lack of Level2 Cache compared to Intel. Not that there’s any game a high end X2 won’t wun. Just for performance addicts it’s not the best.

Wolfe: I agree Core2 Duo is the fastest thing out right now. Also, if you have a high end system a game you should try is Battlefield 2. There’s one demo map that you can play online even for free and it features an aircraft carrier which you can fly F35’s off of. Or you can be the Arabs and try to shoot them down.

Correction, working with ATI. I should’ve have read more thoroughly.

Seriously now, could you, by any chance, take it upon yourself to soberly and officially, as befitting someone with a history in the industry, suggest to them that they attempt to develop such a driver for their cards instead of trying to slinkily sneak in automatic soft overclocking in the driver packages starting with the 6.12 installment, which I recently downgraded from? It’s not like no one’s noticing.

They just might take heed if someone with your presence raises them on it.

Their ring bus architecture certainly is something to behold, though.

- Men At Work - Land Down Under

Someone should just overclock the Athlon 64 X2 just to set you straight, Wolfe.
Intel? How could you?

And what chips are those you’ve mentioned? Anything related to PowerVR ips or tile based deferred rendering?

I do so wish someone would write drivers for the Radeon that emulate a TBDR rendering architecture and a wrapper for export to OGL and D3D api calling apps. It must be possible to coax conventional rendering pipelines into TBDR. Lord knows, they’ve got the power. I’d toast me some x1950xtx butt with something like that.

You’re a technophile that lives in Canada and has designed chips still in circulation, you must be working for ATI. Would you mind terribly?

Oh. As for the rest of your speech. I take exception to one point.

Please stop eulogiously referring to Milton Friedman as some conjectural beacon of wisdom, intelligence and human decency or citing the fallacy of Chile’s miracle somehow being owed to his benevolent and enlightened counsel to Pinochet. I concede to him being intelligent. But he was almost certainly either evil or insane. That goes for all the Chicago evil, meddlesome twits all too eager to try out their inane, simplistic theories at the expense of an entire nation. (thank goodness no money was harmed)

Chileans deserve better than that.

- Xzibit - Alkaholic

Intel outside!

Alright alright I concede, I retract my statement. The holocaust did happen ok, history says so and who am I to defy that. But jews weren’t the only ones Hitler killed. He killed anybody who didn’t have blue eyes, blonde hair, and wasn’t white. Now I’m not saying he killed as many, but lets remember not only the jews suffered.

It’s liek my belief that Christians are cool, but not the ones which shout on the street about ‘Jesus loves you, and you, and you. You will go to hell without him!’. My statement, albeit quite wrongly said, was directed at those people who use the holocaust to their own ends and only know it as an event which they can use to their advantage (As women usually do with such like things)

But again, sorry. I respect all peoples beliefs, race, culture etc. Cause I’m a nice guy.

Peace to all people who deserve it.
-Necroswordsman

OK SotS, then lets be clear for the sake of this site. The Jews are cool, and whatever they do is no conspiracy.

That said, jailing people for questioning the Holocaust isn’t a Jewish thing. It’s a Euro/Austrian/German thing. Given the unfortunate disappearance of most Jews between 1933 and 1945 from Europe, it’d be hard to characterize those laws as “Jewish”.

Call it Christian guilt, sure. Call it stupid, sure. In my view, a man should have the right to say “I question the Holocaust” without going to jail. He should also be subject to opprobrium, attack and social condemnation — but not, I agree, the force of law.

Instead, we have Irving going to Jail, while the Austrian ambassador sits and smiles at a table where a NATO ambassador refers to Israel as a “shitty little Jewish country”.

WTF!?

Now, as to Core 2 Duo, sheesh, I’ve designed silicon. Admittedly, I’m now a venture capitalist/historian, so you could argue my silicon sucks. (At last count, I’ve close to 1m chips in service though. Wish I could have earned $10 each!). No, C2D rocked the casbah. I agree, when AMD ships the Fusion processor, that may well change things. But right now, no one on the planet can directly compete with the Israeli designed Intel Core (2) architecture. If you believe otherwise, I’ll be happy to trade benchmarks as well as analyses of the pipeline with you.

Best,
-wolfe

This arguement is pointless because we mostly agree.

It’s obvious that Jews with their powerful intelligence will be bankers and owners of many important things. Just as it is obvious that Asians make good doctors.

I don’t believe in any conspiracies relating to Jew bankers ruling the world.

I DO believe that jailing people for QUESTIONING the Holocaust in a MODERN DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY is saying “we Jews run the world and anyone who questions God’s Chosen Ones will rot in a cell like the Devil himself.” It breathes new life into a long dead Nazi movement.

PS: Core2 Duo is the most expensive overated crap ever. Look in 2008 for AMD’s quadcore processor with on-die ATI graphics processing unit titled “Fusion”. The reason AMD dominated Intel for the past few years before Core2 DUO was the merger of processor and memory controller. Now AMD will jump ahead again with the first ever microchip with high end graphics on-die.