AMD gets beaten by NVidia, any plans?

[EmbraceUnity]

Give me liberty or give me death! Linux forever! Open Standards Forever!

OpenCL > Everything Else

Why do open standards matter? Why does technology freedom matter?

http://adciv.org

It is one piece of the puzzle in producing a sustainable, decentralized, post-scarcity society.

Please try not to be counterproductive towards this goal.

[EmbraceUnity]

Heterogenous computing is a major paradigm shift in computing that will have enormous consequences for fields like genetics, physics, etc. It is an absolute necessity that cross-platform open standards are adopted.

On a level more directly relevant to our own lives, it will have enormous impact on video games. The future of video gaming is Ray Tracing, and according to the engineers working on this, OpenCL is very necessary for this goal.

Here is a recent attempt to ray trace Quake Wars. It required 4 quad-core processors and could only get 20 fps.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F26%2F0336245&from=rss

The end of the article talks about how Larrabee and similar platforms will allow for much better performance.

[cb88]

@RealNC you realize what happened to 3dfx glide right?

Nvidia bought 3dfx and glide was killed by them the very company you now support also a lot of the tech nvidia is now using was sapped off 3dfx as far as I understand

also do you realise that if glide had been an open standard Nvidia couldn't have killed it if they had tried?

Open standards are the only true standards and they ROCK!!!

[RealNC]

If M$ doesn't allow for ray tracing, it will never happen in games. They rejected Intel's proposal to put ray tracing in DX11.

[RealNC]

@RealNC you realize what happened to 3dfx glide right?

Nvidia bought 3dfx and glide was killed by them the very company you now support also a lot of the tech nvidia is now using was sapped off 3dfx as far as I understand

also do you realise that if glide had been an open standard Nvidia couldn't have killed it if they had tried?

Open standards are the only true standards and they ROCK!!!

Valid points. My point though was that I can't use CUDA nor PhysX which are pretty cool.

[EmbraceUnity]

If M$ doesn't allow for ray tracing, it will never happen in games. They rejected Intel's proposal to put ray tracing in DX11.

Many games are OpenGL, and they are already starting to have experimental ray tracing implemented. That is why OpenGL will destroy DirectX. Freedom has its benefits.

Also, you may have seen the hoopla around Nvidia's shitty hardware-based stereoscopic 3D. OpenGL has great software-based stereoscopic 3D.

http://web.archive.org/web/20071012155505/http://futurelab.aec.at/vrizer/

There is another project called Chromium that claims to be able to do this, but I'm not sure how easy it is to use. It was lead by Tungsten Graphics's Brian Paul. Seems interesting

http://chromium.sourceforge.net/

[RealNC]

OpenGL cannot destroy DirectX simply because DirectX is from M$.

[energyman]

that is right, direct won't die. But opengl is going to get a lot stronger. What is used on the ps? mac? wii? directx? certainly not. and as long as studios have to write games for non-directx platforms, linux has a chance to see the game too.

[RealNC]

Now you just made me remember that NVidia offers much better support for OpenGL than ATI. With ATI, I'm happy that DirectX has the upper hand because OpenGL games run worse on ATIs than DX games.

Gah.

[bridgman]

I think you'll find that was with the old OpenGL driver. We started rolling out an all-new OpenGL stack across the OSes a couple of years ago :

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...ance-surprises