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  • Gavin Greenwalt
  • Member Since Feb 28th, 2006
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Recent Comments:

I filled out one of these things for "Would you pay $9.99 for HBO shows on demand?".

Nothing has come of it.

These surveys aren't for eminent shifts in Netflix policy. Or at least all the ones I've filled out have taken years if ever to come to fruition.
iTunes is built on iTunes. Zune is piggy backing Windows Media Player APIs.

In order for Apple to port iTunes to Windows they just had to port iTunes to Windows Quicktime. Microsoft has no Windows Media Player APIs for OSX. A Zune OSX Port isn't going to happen.
@Ken Have you used Vista? There is tons of stuff which makes the user experience not just look better but actually work better.

Press Start. Just type in the name of the program or document you want.

Improved favorite places links on the left.

Bread crumbs.

Just a few off the top of my head.
The accelleration happens thanks to hardware not software.

PhysX was a problem which could easily be solved with GPGPUs. Raytracing isn't. In short it requires access to memory in a different way than a GPU operates. So Raytrace accelleration isn't terribly fast. As the movie describes it isn't just a matter of throwing more CPU clocks at the problem, there are other bottlenecks that need to be addressed. The caustic card addresses these hardware bottlenecks.

Now NVidia could license the hardware specs and add it onto their GPUs. But they can't emulate it and get any kind of performance improvement.
Elmer you completely miss the point.

This wasn't using the GPU at all. This ISNT a hardware renderer. This lets you use the full power of your raytracing shading pipeline. But accelerates it. It's a hardware co-processor for a SOFTWARE renderer.

A GPU is a hardware renderer. It's extremely limiting and extremely frustrating to work with. The Caustic card ISN'T A RENDERER. It's a render accellerator. It would be like calling PhysX a game engine. It's not a game engine, it's a co-processor.

Now if your game wants to use raytracing it can call data like it would the CPU. This is exactly the same as using a CPU only faster. This is also very clearly still 'developer art'. The simplicity of the shaders is a result of the demonstration not the capability of the card. Anything that uses Raytracing can use raytracing EXACTLY the same as it does currently just faster.
In the video they say it's running at 100mhz.

Hence why they would love for it to catch on so that they can release a commercial card running in the GHZ.

Get it up to 3ghz like a modern CPU and put 4 cores of that on a card and you're looking at a rediculously fast raytracer.

If they had NVIDIA's access to fab technology then they would have a use for a nice big loud fan.
It isn't random if you want it to look shitty.

Randomization is how you avoid aliasing.
I played GoldenEye on the 64 lately. It was completely unplayable now for me.

Also while I loved Perfect Dark I found a glitch in the game where the farsight if pointed on the radar at an opponent will start aimed right on them when you zoom in so a quick double button press kills them without aiming. As soon as they appear on the radar they're dead. I would hope that they would fix that.
Who doesn't want him to succeed?

I would love for the conservation of energy to have a loop hole. It would certainly solve a great number of problems. Hell we don't even have a very good means of extracting the energy around us currently. Imagine if we could easily convert all matter to energy directly.

I doubt he's going to deliver but I certainly would like to be wrong.
Marketing needs to be better.

I own a tx1 and use it as my sketch book. Every time I pull it out and start drawing in a starbucks or restaurant I'll have 3 or 4 people come over to me and ask what it is, how much it costs, are they brand new? Why haven't I heard about these things before? Where can you buy them?

The idea that you could write on your computer, draw on your computer and touch the sceen is always really exciting to them and want to know to know everything about it.

A good widely marketed 30 second spot could make these things sell really well.
Let the hive mind of Engadget get that for you.
"I'm looking for a solid state drive, around 32 to 64GB, for use in my web server. The drive will contain my web sites and the operating system, either Windows Server 2008 R2 or Ubuntu. Large storage is handled by a separate RAID array, so capacity is not an issue. Rather, I am looking for the fastest, longest-lasting, and most reliable drive under $150 that is suitable to my application. Any thoughts? Thanks!"
 

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