By the way, turds, the fact that you keep calling me gay goes to show what you REALLY think of them. It’s obvious that you’re using the term to try to insult them. It’s blatant homophobia. But hey, even though I’m not gay, I wouldn’t have any problem with being one, since it would mean I wouldn’t need to put with women and their crap all the time. I can see your rationale here:

“Lets’s call him gay to insult him. Gay = not a real man!”

Yeah, it’s all so boring and predictible. For all of your talk about me being prejudiced and all, you turds are worse than me, and yet pretend to not have any prejudice so as to put yourselves on a moral high ground.

You all want to go back to the 1950s, when women were protected and pampered, to feel “manly” by being a serve of the State throught the military draft, etc. Morons. You wan t gays in the closet again, because, hey, they’re not really men and we just pretend thy are to make allies for our cause. Bunch of pussy-whipped sons of bitches! So go ahead with your delusions. I’m far more of a man than you’ll ever be, because I speak my mind and assume the consequences. I hope the few gay men who post here read your replies to me and realize that you little shits are no friends of them, even though you pretend you are. Suck my dick and drink my spooge, you fucking sons of cunts! If I met you in person, I ASSURE that none of you bitches would talk to me like that.

P Coderch

son of the suns said:

P Coderch said:

Wow, what a bunch of nerds talking about specialized technical bullshit that no one cares about! Although I hate and despise women with unspeakable intensity, I think that they have a point in rejecting you guys: you are boring as fuck, and completely devoid of charm.

P Coderch

Good point Coderch, anyone who is intelligent must clearly be void of charm and charisma.

Bzzzzzzzzt. Nice try. Homosexuals don’t have a monopoly on charisma.

The thing is, nerds, like you, are not intelligent. If you were, you’d be able to get women. I’d rather be a dumb stud, like Rocco Siffredi, than a four-eyed loser who is nows everything about computers, but who’s a sexual failure.

As for homosexuals don’t having a monopoly on charm, I agree with you: I’m not a homosexual, and yet I have lots of charm, so your conjecture is correct. Thanks for playing, turd boy!

P Coderch

To be honest my head began to spin after reading some of the terms you guys used lol. I know I’m good with computers but… damn. Still, nothing wrong with being smart. After all, we aren’t women.

I rather like Coderch, Billy. He is forging new frontiers and breaking the secular-humanist stereotype that all homosexuals are peaceful and loving and better than us squares.

son of the suns said:

P Coderch said:

Wow, what a bunch of nerds talking about specialized technical bullshit that no one cares about! Although I hate and despise women with unspeakable intensity, I think that they have a point in rejecting you guys: you are boring as fuck, and completely devoid of charm.

P Coderch

Good point Coderch, anyone who is intelligent must clearly be void of charm and charisma.

Bzzzzzzzzt. Nice try. Homosexuals don’t have a monopoly on charisma.SotS
I think you forget, P Coderch is every bit a woman as Germaine Greer.
She came here made everyone her enemy and continues to stay and argue. Only a woman would stay and argue where no one liked them.

P Coderch said:

Wow, what a bunch of nerds talking about specialized technical bullshit that no one cares about! Although I hate and despise women with unspeakable intensity, I think that they have a point in rejecting you guys: you are boring as fuck, and completely devoid of charm.

P Coderch

Good point Coderch, anyone who is intelligent must clearly be void of charm and charisma.

Bzzzzzzzzt. Nice try. Homosexuals don’t have a monopoly on charisma.

Wow, what a bunch of nerds talking about specialized technical bullshit that no one cares about! Although I hate and despise women with unspeakable intensity, I think that they have a point in rejecting you guys: you are boring as fuck, and completely devoid of charm.

P Coderch

Continuation here:

http://www.menarebetterthanwomen.com/forums/post-7730.html#7730

Let’s take it to the Man Forums, guys.

-Dick

Dissapointed that neither of you has talked about Procedural Synthesis.

I downloaded a full game demo of a game called “kriegger” that was like 60 or 600 kilobytes. A modern FPS game with Unreal2 engine level graphics.

Procedural Synthesis uses CPU only like the old days, except no game textures or data of any kind is needed except the executable. It is a extremely interesting system that uses raw CPU power to synthesize maps/textures/etc.

Granted in these days of CPU’s hitting road blocks in heat and speed it doesn’t seem very plausable, but it’s very possible if we have some type of huge breakthrough in a non x86 architecture that allows a huge surge in clock speeds, that the GPU might not be put on-die but become a relic of the past.

Yes, but gpus are of a high level of operational specificity, regarding standardised geometrical computations. It’s programmable shaders, and especially highly programmable model 3.0 shaders, alone that allow for any kind of flexibility in controlling what operations can be performed on the data fed to the gpu. Even so, a gpu’s got nowhere near the flexibility of a cpu.

My humble vision for future computing architectures is to have specific, fixed (unprogrammable), fully pipelined routes within the cpu for any of a given set of fundamental mathematical operations’ (just as we’ve vertex shader and pixel shader units on the gpu) operands to follow for computing.

Thus, we’d have, say, 8 pipelines for and, or, xor, nxor bitwise operations, 16 pipelines for integer addition, subtraction, 32 for ultiplication, division, etc. Likewise, 32 pipelines for floating point addition, subtraction, 64 pipelines for multiplication, division, etc.

I believe multicore is not the future. That it’s a short therm hack and multi pipeline cpus are the wave of the future, as the legacy of knowledge from the years of gpu refinement is being driven home.

You’ll no longer have an instruction(operator) per to operands per cpu pipeline. You’ll have 2 operands per pipeline, period. Or no operands at all, in which case the pipeline idles or is given something else to work on that can be computed in parallel as it doesn’t directly rely on results from other pipelines or future computations for operands. Permanent 0IMD.

Alternatively, programmable pipelines could be used, similar to the programmable pixel and vertex shader units of today’s gpus. For example, if a particular program might require an exceptionally large amount of floating point multiplication computations in relation to other float operations, one could temporarily reprogram cpu pipelines from performing various other float operations to performing float multiplications to supplement the number of pipelines available for multiplication as needed.

A sort of cvasi permanent SIMD. This would naturally be slower than fixed, fully pipelined routes and would likely lend themselves harder to parallelisation due to the varying amounts of cpu cycles required for completion depending on each’s programmed type of float operations at any given time.

Future computing will become increasingly parallelised on the multiple pipelines model. New programming techniques and guidelines will find themselves increasingly being adopted for lower and lower thresholds of computing power, in everything from mainframes down to handhelds.

son of the suns said:
I play no favorites between the AMD and Intel, my intrigue with Fusion is ever since the advent of OGL/DirectX games and the $400-600 video cards that came with them, I’ve been pining for a chip with high end graphics on-die. It’s going to have the effect of bringing GPU price down MUCH I hope.

Yep. SotS hits the nail on the head here. We could be talking a savings of up to $300-500 on an AMD system. (e.g. $200 price premium vs $500 for graphics ; $100+ price premium on mobo).

An AMD system with inferior core architecture (no, I’m not saying that’s what AMD is forced into; I’m saying even if they are…) can crudely match the performance of a $400 more expensive intel system. (Say 85-90% at 2/3rds the price).

Sony suggests physics in hardware as a differentiator. I don’t know. I doubt it. But I’d be the first to admit that I know very little about this area. I’m very impressed by physics engines in games.

@Sony your analysis of PhysX API defaulting to CPU — I’ll accept your word on that. Not something i know. Plausible. Disturbing for their shareholders. I think you might be over-fond of Havok, but I’m no expert there.

We are hitting thermal walls and speed walls. Massive transfer of GPU capability to the CPU is a ‘free’ response that will yield outsize results to merely transferring more general CPU cores.

It’s not like I really care enough to so readily still devote memory to this trivia. You, on the other hand, are a brainy Wolfe historian.

I don’t either. You quoted it aggressively (erroneously; I suspected it was wrong, spent 10 seconds checking my old intel and AMD developer books, and, sure enough, it was)

Why not just simply state what you know rather than rely on ‘triva’ you ‘don’t remember’.

In any event, even assuming K8L goes nowhere, AMD is going to have some interesting opportunities on system pricing for enthusiasts that Intel likely won’t.

-wolfe

http://www.ageia.com/developers/index.html

It seems, in their aim to underpin havok (Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter implements both Ageia PhysX api and the Havok engine which can be used alternatively or concurringly - the latter can use Shader Model 3 compatible gfx boards for hardware acceleration using programmable shaders without any need of a PPU unavailable to it anyway) and create a market for their designed PPUs, Ageia are now offering their Ageia PhysX SDK, including PhysX Builderâ„¢, PhysX Createâ„¢, PhysX Rocketâ„¢, PhysX VRDâ„¢, royalty free.

The plot thickens.

http://www.techreport.com/onearticle.x/9923

Havok contends in the e-mail message that Ghost Recon uses Havok’s API for all gameplay-impacting physics, on the PC and in the various console releases. They argue Ageia’s API is only used for eye candy-type particle effects and only on the game’s PPU-accelerated code path. What’s more, they claim, those particle effects are unimpressive, with volumes easily achievable in software, yet the game slows down observably when PPU acceleration is active. Havok says Ageia lays the blame for these slowdowns at the feet of the graphics processor, as if it were a vertex processing bottleneck or the like. The email then dismisses that possibility, saying “NVIDIA specifically can technically verify that the GPU is not the cause of the slowdown.

And…

Anyhow, the drama intensified when AnandTech’s benchmarks of Ghost Recon and the PhysX card showed lower frame rates with PPU acceleration than without, substantiating Havok’s assertion and throwing discussions of physics acceleration into overdrive with speculation about the technical reasons for the lower frame rates.

Something fishy here. It seems to me, their vaunted PhysX API slinkily defaults to CPU more readily and often than even Ageia ‘point blank’ admit it does, even on client machines incorporating a PPU.

Why spend money on a PPU if you’re gonna end up having computations performable by havok using the ‘massively parallel’ architecture of the gfx board done with the CPU because that’s Ageia’s definition of hardware acceleration with a ‘massively parallel’ PPU?

Also, I find it difficult to understand how physhics modelling (involving a myriad of collisions from which one also needs to except self collisions) lends itself so readily to effective parallelisation on a ‘massively parallel’ PPU engine. And if so, why not just use the Havok solution if you’ve a shader 3.0 comp. gfx board, the tried and tested, undoubtedly far superior ‘massively parallel’ and flexible processing unit with no additional cost except in some fps?

- Flying Steps - We Gonna Rock It (jetset remix)

It seems Ageia* is synonymous with PPUs. No other developer on the market. Apparently, I was yet again wrong about them producing their own cards. 3 manufacturers, 2 of which ASUS and somewhat anonymous BFG Technologies.

- Infernal - from paris to berlin (club mix)

An awesome, albeit quite risky, venture would be to add a physics engine to their GPUs. Caution with Ageya, though. They’re holding lots of patents and I should think they’re quite keen on protecting their own niche product, the first PPU accelerators. Not sure how the software defelopers fare through all of this. Ageya cards aren’t exactly flying off the shelves everywhere.

Don’t see (m)any games yet that would know what to do with them either. What’s the point buying one if of the handful of games that use Physics Engines, some use Havok Physics or other competitors’ engines that simply won’t run on an Ageya card. Ageya is also seeking dough off of licensing their physics api, that defaults to CPU in absence of an ageya product on the client machine, to those developers that would choose theirs. But without their PPU to run on, their engine probably isn’t significantly above what their competitors have achieved.

One thing’s clear though. Don’t expect any unitary physics API (analogous to OGL or D3D) with ubiquitous hardware as long as Ageya are the only ppl making PPU boards. They sure as hell won’t help Havok and others make their engines run on their boards.

Back to graphics. The best thing would be for either side (nVidia/ATI) to implement a tile base deferred rendering pipeline, if they can somehow get around the various patent holders in this area, and screw the other one over royally. Get the creative juices and competition flowing again with both. TBDR is the future. I don’t think it should be too hard even to write drivers for the boards currently on the market to emulate TBDRendering. Course, with an x1950xtx defaulting to TBDR, it can be reasonably argued it’s not in their best interest to implement such an efficient rendering pipeline anytime soon. There’d likely be no need to upgrade your gfx board for years at a time.

Shea Seger - Clutch

I play no favorites between the AMD and Intel, my intrigue with Fusion is ever since the advent of OGL/DirectX games and the $400-600 video cards that came with them, I’ve been pining for a chip with high end graphics on-die. It’s going to have the effect of bringing GPU price down MUCH I hope.

When ATI works for AMD and AMD wants high end GPU on-die without costing a fortune, Nvidia will have to make very powerful standalone chips, or die like 3DFX. ALthough.. some have been saying that Nvidia has been considering adding CPU functions to their GPU’s, to compete with AMD|ATI and Intel.

Looks like aprsing errors with the imbricated quotes.

wolfe said:

@SonyAD Canada has far more than ATI.
[Of course. I was merely jesting.]

@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.
[No, I've always got one of the buggers lurking around somewhere. Lying in wait.]

My perspective of AMD is a little more factually based than yours, though I applaud your uh… enthusiasm.
[Yes, there's a degree of frivolous irrationality to my own predilections as well.

When I'll have the dough I'll promptly get up to speed with everything relevant that's been going on with the hardware industry over the last loop and proceed to informed and wise choices for components. Such as my Radeon x800xl, which there weren't any of in the entire country when I placed the order.]
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?

[I was under the mistaken impression that the PII also had its L2 cache on the mboard. Memory failed me. I've had a PII 233, Klamath core, late into 2005. Also a PIII @750.]

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.

[Quite. For some reason, I had the mistaken recollection of them having L2 on mboard, instead of onboard but not on-die. My mistake. It's not like I really care enough to so readily still devote memory to this trivia. You, on the other hand, are a brainy Wolfe historian. It behoves a historian 'worth his salt' to have the memory of the detail and specificity of an elephant.]

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?

[Quite. I've earned my salt in the eye. He's to the few demented fanboys!]

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.

[First time I catch wind of it(Fusion). Goes to show, ignorance is bliss when you've wind blowing in your pockets.]

Regards,
-wolfe
___
Cheers.

I’ve an USB Logitech mx310. It’s an 800 dpi mouse, if memory serves. Though I’ll vouch for its excellence, not sure you can get one of these anywhere but eBay now. Not cordless though. I’ve also increasingly worn QcK SteelTech pad, medium size (you can go camping on the largest pad size of theirs). Both excellent gaming equipment.

In my view, by far the most important thing to do is make sure you’ve get adequate, gaming grade drivers for your pointing device. Some drivers will also work with most mice of other brands or different types of connection. Such as my Logitech drivers which I’ve installed on all computers I regularly work with.

They’re true gaming grade as they completely remove the pointer acceleration ubiquitous with mice defaulted to Microsoft generic driver since W2000. You’ve also an option to “Remove acceleration in games” that I believe disables acceleration in the dxinput api most games use nowadays. With some games, such as CS and CS:S, you can also achieve this through parameters you add to the command line of the shortcut:

***********\Steam.exe -applaunch 10 -nomaster -noforcemparms -noforcemaccel -noforcemspd

I personally hate the microsoft standard mouse driver. It’s really quite impossible to exercise any decent degree of predictable control over where your crosshairs will fly, especially when twitching. And this is paramount to the aimer (headshots with predilection) and sniper styles of play/team positions I enjoy. You need to worry about moving the hairs to the headshot. Not back to the headshot as well. And back again.

- Hermann; Martin Buttrich; Rogers; Timo Maas feat. Kelis - Help me

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.