Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Kamikaze on June 20, 2002, 03:34:27 am
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http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,53220,00.html
this could help create a bunch of games with cool shading techniques, I hope :D
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Ooh-hoo.
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Unfortunately, its gonna take a while for it to become mainstream. I can just hear it. "Sigh. Another stupid language to learn."
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Sounds cool, gotta check it out. :)
* runs off to learn it *
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So...3Dlabs and Matrox release better DX9 parts and then Nvidia tries to knobble them by bringing out a proprietry language.
Goddamn that company really piss me off, I hope they drown in red tape!!
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Microsoft bashing, fair enough, Windows is ****. But nVidia's stuff is actually quite good. As much as this is an attempt to force "nVidia or nuthin" it will inevitably mean better graphics and better games coming from low-budget companies. Besides, if it helps crush DX and stiffles MS's profits, more power to 'em.
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plus it seems it's available for everybody, so I don't see anything wrong with it. If it's as good as they say, well, it could be a little revolution for videogames...
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Originally posted by an0n
Microsoft bashing, fair enough, Windows is ****. But nVidia's stuff is actually quite good. As much as this is an attempt to force "nVidia or nuthin" it will inevitably mean better graphics and better games coming from low-budget companies. Besides, if it helps crush DX and stiffles MS's profits, more power to 'em.
Actually windows is quite stable (if they'd only make a decent SDK)
This will not mean better games and certainly won't make better graphics, maybe you're not aware of what a monopoly Nvidia is becoming in the market?
I'm not a directX fan either (i'm far more openGL inclined)
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If nVidia get a monopoly then they can concentrate on making better cards as opposed to competing with others.
Windows is crap.
I'd rather see nVidia with a monopoly and running the 3d market into the ground than see MS getting money/fame/control through DX.
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Originally posted by an0n
I'd rather see nVidia with a monopoly and running the 3d market into the ground than see MS getting money/fame/control through DX.
Everyone knows directX is a cranky toy API compared to openGL.
i'd rather get spit roasted for a month in death valley than see nvidia get a monopoly.
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Originally posted by an0n
If nVidia get a monopoly then they can concentrate on making better cards as opposed to competing with others.
Just like MS concentrates on making a better operating system right now? :rolleyes:
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Originally posted by Styxx
Just like MS concentrates on making a better operating system right now? :rolleyes:
ROFL. :D
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Originally posted by an0n
If nVidia get a monopoly then they can concentrate on making better cards as opposed to competing with others.
yeah right. you know you improve your stuff only when there's competition, right?
oh well, never mind.
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Originally posted by Styxx
Just like MS concentrates on making a better operating system right now? :rolleyes:
Nothing rivals Win Xp, trust me its uber stable and uber cool.
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Originally posted by venom2506
yeah right. you know you improve your stuff only when there's competition, right?
oh well, never mind.
All competition does is force companies to keep going one better, making something just that little bit faster than the other persons. It kills innovation. If nVidia could divert it's marketing budget to research they might find a new, completely opposed to the norm way of rendering that is a million times faster.
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Originally posted by an0n
All competition does is force companies to keep going one better, making something just that little bit faster than the other persons. It kills innovation. If nVidia could divert it's marketing budget to research they might find a new, completely opposed to the norm way of rendering that is a million times faster.
Yeah, sure. Or they can just sit on their asses and swim on all the money they'll get, because there won't be any other card on the market. What would be the point of investing if you're already making all the money you can make?
:rolleyes:
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if nvidia had a monopoly status, they'd release a new version of the same card every year, and increase the prices. Just like what 3dfx did. period.
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Originally posted by an0n
All competition does is force companies to keep going one better, making something just that little bit faster than the other persons. It kills innovation. If nVidia could divert it's marketing budget to research they might find a new, completely opposed to the norm way of rendering that is a million times faster.
Competition kills innovation? Now that's an odd theory :)
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For sure...thats like saying that butter won't melt in an oven :)
(bizzar analogy too :D)
Competition typically drives prices lower and forces innovation. Its do or die and it makes people take risks. Right now Microsoft takes so few risks in the operating system market because they have it all basically. They have little to compete with right now....I hope to god that someone has the insight to show them up on their doorstep with a MS OS compatible system that is just as easy to use. That'd be great.
nVidia still has ATI as its chief competitor and with the new cards from Matrox and 3D Labs showing up they won't have time to sit on their laurels anytime soon.
And there is nothing in that article that says or indicates to me that nVidia or MS is trying to corner the market. Two key things:
- Cg works with DirectX 9 AND OpenGL
- Cg works with nVidia and non nVidia cards
Thats pretty free flowing! Right there. Now tell me how they corner the market that way?
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Well, really, its quite interesting to compare the economics in America and other western countries compared to Japan... In Japan, they don't have any restrictions on mergers, monopolies, etc... And their system seems to be very sucessful
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BTW, I'm downloading the Cg toolkit, will try it out this weekend if all goes well. :)
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Well lets' just wait and see what happens, shall we?
I bet you sooner or later it'll go Nvidia-exclusive (just like they tried with the directX programmable shaders) and everyone else will get hung out to dry.
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Well, that may or may not happen. Although major companies do get quite a bit of tax concessions... All you have to do is take a look at Rupert Murdoch's companies... some of em only pay ~2c in the dollar for tax
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Originally posted by wEvil
So...3Dlabs and Matrox release better DX9 parts and then Nvidia tries to knobble them by bringing out a proprietry language.
Goddamn that company really piss me off, I hope they drown in red tape!!
Uh. Proprietary? Since when?
[q]More important, Cg is open and lets programmers tell the chip to draw exactly the way they want it, rather than within the limits of a graphics library like OpenGL or Microsoft's Direct3D.
Cg was developed by both Nvidia and Microsoft and will work on non-Nvidia chipsets, including arch-rival ATI's cards. Any chipset that supports OpenGL or Microsoft's upcoming DirectX 9.0 will be able to use Cg. [/q]I think you're letting your feelings get in the way of rationality.
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Originally posted by venom2506
if nvidia had a monopoly status, they'd release a new version of the same card every year, and increase the prices. Just like what 3dfx did. period.
3dfx did not do that though
if you compair each Voodoo card to the other you can see the differances is technology over the years...
3dfx were the main innovators of GFX card tech.....
just too bad T-Buffer went down the drain when nVidia bought em out....then the nVidiot ere began
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I think you've got it the wrong way round - the Voodoo series (at least in the early years) couldn't help but be innovative because nobody had ever done anything like it before but it was nVidia (in particular the TNT2 IIRC) that started doing new things. Remember that to get their extra speed 3DFX relied on hooking two of their cards together - nVidia did all that on one board from the start. Alright, so the V3 (or was it 5?) range bought along some interesting features like blurring and so on... but who cares? both nVidia and 3DFX had FSAA (although 3DFX people used to claim otherwise I think...) and nVidia bought along hardware T&L which changed the playing field somewhat.
All in all both sides were innovative but nVidia - at least at an early stage - did more. Now things may be different - but they still make great cards. I've come to realise that theres a little saying - it goes "just because something is popular, it won't necessarily be bad - some people hate the mainstream purely because it's mainstream". It's human nature :)
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3Dlabs had Glint out on the PC platform as the first 3D chip to make any decent cash and/or penetrate that market to any degree.
This was openGL based which, to be quite frank, always had a far superior feature set to whatever 3dfx put out. Since glide was really only a perverted form of openGL anyway....
Evans & Sunderland were first with hardware T&L, Nvidia creeping on the scene with a specification that performed about 2% good as they claimed it would (the origional GeForce was supposed to be a 50Gflop unit that performed WORSE than a 3Gflop 3dlabs Glint T&L chip..wtf went on there?) and about 5 years later than everyone else.
To call either of these companies innovative is a gross insult to all the engineers who pioneered these technologies.
The only thing 3dfx and Nvidia have done is stripped down pre-existing specifications and sell them at a bargan basement price - and for some reason everybody loves them for it.
We'll see when the whole industry falls flat on its' face (well...things aren't looking too rosy atm, are they?)
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Alright then, they made the hardware commercially available to the new-comer. I for one knew didly squat about 3D Cards language or specs for some amount of time and therefore relied on large companies to present me with the best possible solution at the time (back then it was 3DFXs Voodoo2). If magasines, websites and everyone else with a say in the matter and an influence on the user would mention that there are alternatives or the names of the engineers that made the technology in the first place then I for one would probably have a different opinion. But they don't, and we can only go on the facts we know...