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  • #31
    Originally posted by locovaca View Post
    An "alternative" generally implies something that actually is available and offers comparable features.

    That project still has yet to release an actual consumer-oriented usable product, and their graphics engine is basically something that's barely capable of low-speed OpenGL 1.x. Calling that an "alternative" to any product offered in the last 10 years (literally, one decade) from the likes the AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, or so on is just silly. You might as well call "begging for a cure from God" to be an alternative to a routine appendectomy for someone dieing from appendicitis.

    You might be able to accelerate RENDER on that hardware (if it exists as anything other than a ridiculously expensive FPGA board), but then RENDER is an 11 year old spec that predates the release of programmable GPUs, which are pretty much mandatory for any modern acceleration (even on basic 2D desktops). If all you have is a basic triangle rasterizer you might as well just dump the hardware acceleration entity and do everything in software on the CPU's SIMD engine; you'd get better performance.

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    • #32
      i hope that at some point we'll see a third company challenging nVidia and ATI in the desktop/workstation sector (and hopefully even more foss friendly than ATI)

      there isn't enough competition in that segment i think

      except if CPUs become so fast/advanced (ie APU) that we wont need dedicated GPUs any more

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      • #33
        The HD8xxx/9xxx might mark the beginning end of the traditional desktop computer.

        Tablets with wireless keyboards will take over. So I hope future Fusion CPUs will be acounted for as well. I might not ever buy a desktop computer again (maybe one).

        And if you don't believe me then considder the following;
        iPad 2 will get Adobe Photoshop. It has an HDMI cable plug available. It has iWork, video editing, music making and even X-Plane 9!

        There is also the jMonkeyEngine working on Android. It is a full featured allround game engine (MIT license), completely written in Java 1.6 with multithreading and shader based. In notime you can make a real commercial grade game with it.

        The desktop _will_ die and I just know that the HD9xxx will propably be the last (if any) GPU I might still buy. This is also the very end of Microsoft Windows and the era of extreme calculation power chips that require fans for cooling.

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        • #34
          doubt that the desktop PC will die soon

          you still need a big screen (except if we move to something like projecting glasses) for some tasks and you still need a powerfull processor for things like rendering engineering and similar applications.

          but who knows

          time will tell

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          • #35
            Originally posted by 89c51 View Post
            doubt that the desktop PC will die soon

            you still need a big screen (except if we move to something like projecting glasses) for some tasks and you still need a powerfull processor for things like rendering engineering and similar applications.

            but who knows

            time will tell
            Sure there are HDMI ports on some smartphones and tablets. Others already feature a screen over WiFi thing, but I'm not sure how that works. The iPad is compatible with the Apple wireless keyboard an the new Mac OS X doesn't have traditional scroll bars anymore; you scroll with the trackpad (also available for the iMac). It also features an App store and the aiOS homescreen for launching them.

            There is ofcourse a battle to be faught on the server side and ARM knows it; they are already developping ARM server cluster chips.

            Sure there are still _workstations needed_, but that's a niche market.

            Given the keyboard and monitor support in these tablets, coupled with the upcomming 32core ARM CPU's with shader based full hd OpenGL ES 2.0 and DirectX (I'm not kidding you; google it), this is it.

            Given that KDE js already prepairing for this and Qt is touch era proof; we might get somewhat new Mac OS X-y desktops.

            Check Apple.com for the details of the upcomming Mac OS X for developpers for proof

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            • #36
              Originally posted by V!NCENT View Post
              The HD8xxx/9xxx might mark the beginning end of the traditional desktop computer.

              Tablets with wireless keyboards will take over. So I hope future Fusion CPUs will be acounted for as well. I might not ever buy a desktop computer again (maybe one).
              We've heard that many times before, trust me.

              At the end of the day, there's no substitute for a 20"+ screen and a pointing device that doesn't require half the screen to be covered by your hand.

              There may well be some devices someday that deprecate the need for a desktop or a proper notebook computer, but little handheld devices are not them. Even if they had all the power of a desktop PC, the sheer limitations of the medium of touch and small screens puts a very real limit on what exactly such devices are useful for.

              Remember, tablets are in no way new. That the iPad has made them hip again is irrelevant. Apple's MacBook sales have only gone up since the iPad came out.

              And if you don't believe me then considder the following;
              iPad 2 will get Adobe Photoshop. It has an HDMI cable plug available. It has iWork, video editing, music making and even X-Plane 9!
              And it can then be used for a lot of trivial, low-level, amateur-level stuff. People who want to do real photo editing work sure as shit aren't going to do it on an iPad or similar device.

              There is also the jMonkeyEngine working on Android. It is a full featured allround game engine (MIT license), completely written in Java 1.6 with multithreading and shader based. In notime you can make a real commercial grade game with it.
              Except actually, you can't. JME is just one in a very large sea of little hobbyist game engines that is nowhere close to professional grade. You can make goofy little $4 Android games in it, sure. You can't make Dead Space 2 in it, not to

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              • #37
                You come home and throw it in a docking station station and you're done. Problem solved.

                And all the techniques in Dead Space are provided by jME3 alpha 4. Cinematics, walking paths, bullit physics, camera types, multithreading, shaders, lightning, UI building, scene files and editing, nodes, geometry calculations (vector), particles... What exactly am I missing?

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                • #38
                  Even if we solve the computing power "problem" the problem with the tablet is the user interaction IMO. Not when you want to do simple stuff (browse, mail etc) but in more demanding "work" tasks ie write code or text thats more than a few characters long, design a 3d object or whatever. Those are fine if you can connect to a monitor or a keyboard but on the move its going to be a bit tricky.

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                  • #39
                    Do keep in mind that HD9xxx is probably released three years from now (2014) and that a desktop will last 5-6years (2019-2020) so there is a lot to be conquered and figured out in 8-9 years.

                    Also setting up office in a caf? takes no longer than placing your 13" tablet on the table along with a wireless keyboard (those Apple keyboards are not large!) en you're up and running.

                    Do you realy carry around a 19" laptop to model on the go? o_O

                    Also a case with a build in keyboard can turn it into a laptop any time you want (I've already seen them in real life)

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                    • #40
                      Originally posted by V!NCENT View Post
                      Do keep in mind that HD9xxx is probably released three years from now (2014) and that a desktop will last 5-6years (2019-2020) so there is a lot to be conquered and figured out in 8-9 years.

                      Also setting up office in a caf? takes no longer than placing your 13" tablet on the table along with a wireless keyboard (those Apple keyboards are not large!) en you're up and running.

                      Do you realy carry around a 19" laptop to model on the go? o_O

                      Also a case with a build in keyboard can turn it into a laptop any time you want (I've already seen them in real life)
                      A 13" tablet + wireless keyboard = a laptop by another name. Once you add a keyboard then you add a mouse, because taking both hands off the keyboard to grab the screen and move something around gets tedious and slow. And then you're looking for an OS that favors using a mouse, and we're right back to where we started.

                      I recall the same predictions for PDAs in the early 2000s and that they were going to kill the Notebook market for business travelers entirely. Pull the PDA out of your pocket, take the Stoaway Keyboard out and dock the two. A laptop replacement the size of two wallets. It was a great idea, except that it did not overcome the actual need of a laptop.

                      If you're going to carry around a 13" Tablet + Wireless Keyboard/Mouse, what's the point, just go for a 13" laptop which is all the more powerful, gets just as good battery life, and doesn't suffer from the clumsiness that comes with such a configuration.

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