Right. Xbox 360 does not support OpenGL, while PS3 (and Linux and Mac OS) do not support DirectX. So multi-platform developers must use both and decide which of the two to use for PC.
Maybe, if enough of us make declarations such as this, and we win over millions of new pirates, we can get Activision to PERMANENTLY delay the PC version! /sarcasm
I don't "hope" for any franchise to go console-only, but I do think we're seeing the start of an evolution in video game distribution. Today, it's increased PC prices. Tomorrow, it will be NO PC prices...
It always seemed odd to me that the segment responsible for the majority of games piracy was "rewarded" with the lower prices. Of course, the increased price will be used as further justification to steal by the pirates (as we're seeing from the comments here...
I agree that these are signs, rather than reasons.
Having said that, I think these signs are spot-on!
They may have declined AMD's help if the work that NVIDIA did was proprietary and not easy to split out.
NVIDIA may have brought us CUDA, but NovodeX brought us PhysX and there were several graphics hardware venders (not to game developers) that brought us 3D Gaming, before NVIDIA was a force with which to be reckoned. From Wikipedia:
"In the early and mid-1990s, CPU-assisted real-time 3D graphics were becoming increasingly common in computer and console games, which led to an increasing public demand for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. Early examples of mass-marketed 3D grap...
So, as I theorized in http://www.n4g.com/up/Actio... it turns out NVIDIA has, indeed, integrated some changes in the new design that are reminiscent of the PhysX Hardware IP. Looking at the whitepaper ( http://www.nvidia.com/conte...
I saw the actual game-play footage in the NFS: Shift TV commercial just now. I dunno, didn't seem to be all THAT fun with all of the "flash to view your skull/brain glowing through your head" every few seconds...
Wouldn't the OP have posted a picture of one of the assets, rather than the image from Halo? The way it is now, you HAVE to click the link to see what's so special. If the picture had been one of the untextured weapons, I doubt there would have been much click-through or response to the story.
The screens look fairly realistic when they are mostly foliage, atmospherics and shadow (such as Picture 9, among others). Wherever they depend on texture application alone, however, they really fall down. Pictures 3 & 4 are prime examples of repeating textures and lack of variability in the buildings. Picture 6 is an example of stretched and low-resolution textures (on the rocks to the left). Picture 7 has a magic table that casts no shadow.
One thing I'm hating is the possibility that this will turn into the next "Cinematic Mod". Imagine the headlines we'll see in the coming years:
"17 Year Old's Halo Untextured Weapon Work Rivals Bungie's"
"17 Year Old's Halo Untextured Environment Work Rivals Bungie's"
"18 Year Old's Halo Untextured Character Work Rivals Bungie's"
"18 Year Old's Halo Textured Weapon Work Rivals Bungie's"
"19 Year Old's ...
Actually, I HAVE been keeping up with GPU news - for the last 15 years or so. The fact that I'm a programmer for a video game developer, have written software for years that supported the Havok and PhysX SDKs, and have worked with the PhysX hardware itself probably qualifies my knowledge on this subject above 99% of the readers of this site...
Yes, GPUs have become more and more programmable over time, and are well-suited to highly parallel computation with coherent memory access...
¿Qué? ¿Qué significa usted?
Yes, isn't this about the 8th story about the cinematic mod posted on N4G - each installment just a little different from the next?
With this chip being a complete redesign, I wonder if they are making any use of the hardware IP they acquired from AGEIA?
I found it interesting that Google offered to translate the article, but then stated it couldn't do it...
Suppose I design a computer (call it "Deep Thought") to compute the Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything - and set some FLOPS records... I could create an integrated circuit that consisted of 50,000 floating point adder circuits (at about 20k transistors each, and none needed for memory, this gives us 1 billion transistors, less than modern processors) that computed the same operation (using the same input, "20" and "22") in parallel. It should run anywh...
I agree that comparing GPU flops to CPU flops is, at present at least, pretty useless - different strengths, different application domains. It would be tortuous to get the original Unreal or Doom to run on nothing but this new GPU (though you would still need the CPU to interface with the OS and system hardware), yet 100 Mhz CPUs with about 1/50 - 1/100 the horsepower of modern CPUs were able to - without any GPU.
Whether or not GT5 runs at a native at 1080p at 60 fps, I disagree with naming it in response to my question for two reasons:
1. GT5 has not been released, yet...
2. GT5 Prologue (if that's what you meant) is not what I would consider a "high-end 3D title"
I just loaded it up on my PS3 to refresh my memory as to why I think that. Now, I understand different people have different definitions, but here's mine: A high-end 3D title has most or all ...
In the early 90's, a few guys could spend 3-6 months to create a cutting edge game for PC. In the early 00's, this increased to 30-40 guys working 2-3 years. These days, you see as many as a hundred or more (sometimes split across multiple studios) working 3-4 years on a cutting-edge PC title. I believe World of Warcraft may have more than 1000 full-time developers. Increased time + increased manpower = increased cost...