nigratruo

April 21, 2010 at 11:28pm

::What they need is to both use an open
source application or use one which neither of them have any dominion
over.  To expect one of these two rival companies to concede to the
other is ludicrous.  It isn't going to happen.

 Yeah, they never will. That is the problems with companies: there are in every case totally bent on dominating the market, megalomaniacially so. Me me me, they don't really care about anything else than themselves. 

It is like in the HD / bluray fight: the consumer had nothing from that, on the contrary, it was actually bad for the customers. If there would have been an alternative, a third one that would not have fought for dominance, but just offered the customer the most bang for the buck, they would have taken that and left bluray and HD in the dust. Why did this not happen? Well, these companies are huge and powerful and they can do pretty much anything they want, even stuff that harms or is of little benefit to the consumer. 

And they do and that is when things start going wrong, when companies don't have to work anymore for winning customers and have a defacto monoply. It harms the market. It is pretty much like Microsoft: they have never been less innovative, vista was a desaster (and they expected it to still work, because heck, they got the monoply and they know it), the don't have to fight anymore for consumers to buy them. And eventhough there are more innovative OS out there, they make sure they bully and kill all companies that could show how mediocre they are. Heck, what about the 3d Desktop of Vista and 7? How lame is that! there are no effects whatsoever, you can't call this a 3d desktop. Ever seen what compiz on Linux could do even before Vista came out? THAT is a 3d desktop. But Microsoft has so far been successfull of blocking all OEMs to install and offer Ubuntu on their laptops and desktops. Why? It would make Windows look bad (and too expensive). Dangerous: Customers might pick up Ubuntu, instead of Windows, to save 50 bucks or to escape the pathetic Windows 7 starter edition (a total ripoff on the netbooks).

and they might even like it. Heck, you can read mail, browse the web, listen to your music, use skype on linux, no problem. MS knows  that and they are affraid.

Anyway, gaming is not possible in the degree as in windows, of course. But the large majority does not use their PC for gaming, you can see that by the fact that Intels shared chipsets outsell any GPU manufacturer by far.

So it is these companies that really don't care about us, they only care about their profit. Very short sighted. They don't realize that nobody is going to buy into something that is going to be supported by every game studio, every GPU producer and every OS. PC gaming is dieing, there is no room for these extravagant charades. 

GPU that badly?  Couldn't it hurt gaming as
much as help it?  Do I really want my GPU to be doing physics
algorythms during Crysis when it could just as easily leave it up to the
CPU and focus on what it does best?

Again, NVIDIA was selfisch by saying that physix must run on the GPU, not on the CPU. Heck, they don't sell CPUs, that is all there is to it. Of course it performs badly on the CPU, and they made sure it does.

But it is this simple: Crysis is overloading the GPU right now. You have to choose between framerate, quality or resolution, you can't have it all, the game is just too demanding. Try to buy a rig that can perform HD in full quality with 60 fps and do tell me if you won the lottery. 

Games have always been like this on the PC: The GPU was overloaded, you could easily do with a faster one if you could afford it. But the CPU was bored to death, nothing to do. There is only one game on the planet that ever maxed out the CPU and that is Supreme Commander (the original, not nr. 2, which you cannot really call supreme commander at all anymore, that uses less cpu and gpu than the predecessor and less brain of you too and much less realism to boot :-(

So in pretty any game, (except if it is really really old and you got a fast GPU) your GPU is maxed out. Now what happens if you run physix on that? Well, your frame rate drops, it has to. And this, while your CPU is almost sleeping.

::   Perhaps ATI and NVidia should be making
plans to manufacture dedicated physics chips on their cards, if they are
already planning on which engine to use.

 I think that would be a specially bad idea, since the field is currently in movement, lots of changes. And why do more chips, if you got the capacity already? But of course, Intel plays the same dumb game: they don't want any physical engine run on GPUs. OpenCL is that: you run it on both. OpenCL does not care where stuff runs, and using your GPU and CPU to calculate and work is obvious.