Archive for June, 2008
audio is a precursor to video
Audio technology isn’t improving. It’s basically dead in the water. You can say 44.1k 16bit is good enough for anyone and be correct (not counting ‘pros’). The digital audio signal has saturated our perception. The typical internet connection can easily carry it. The typical cpu can process it to death. and you can nearly store *all* recorded contect on a single harddrive (coming soon).
Video will go the same way. Here is my road map to saturating human visual with digitial equipment….given there are 6 million color sensors in you eye and they can sense color at about 30fps. Current 1080p has 3 million color emmiters, and can run 60fps.
now: 1080p common. (20% to saturation)
2 years from now: high dynamic range hd (33% to saturation)
5 years from now: Larger 2xHD resolution super bright high dynamic range large screens and quality HD stereo glasses (50%) saturation .
7 years from now: light, cheap, 2xHD resolution stereo glasses (100%) saturation
the future of server side
google streammygame.
Its a way to stream one game from one computer in HD to another computer or machine on your local network. This will eventually be possible over the internet.
In my last article I mentioned that consolidation is efficiency. Streaming games has advantages that will make it the only way to play certain games in the future.
-copy protection:
you can’t copy it if you don’t have the game
-more pricing control:
game ‘publishers’ will be able to charge you per play, per hour, per month, etc
-lower hardware costs:
Microsoft looses coin for each xbox 360 they sold. They make it up when people sell the games. Most consoles remain unused and wasted. Build a room full of computers, and they can be used 80% of the time…plus people playing low powered games could be clustered on the same machine etc…
-flexiable innovation
A new game can require a chip upgrade that the client doesn’t have to know about
There are other advantages, yet the only disadvantage I can think of is increased bandwidth costs. Once bandwidth and latency are better suited for this task, we will see it happen.
in the heart or in the head
I suggest this video for your side-by-side reading multitasking experience.
In the mid 90s I bought a rendition verite GPU and was excited to run vquake. Quake was the first significat attempt at a true 3d first person shooter with client server networking. VQuake was the first GPU accellerated game
For the next 10 or 15 years nvideo and ati have remained the two major dedicated graphics processing companies.
GPUS offload graphics tasks from the CPU. However these days companies like NVideo and Apple are looking to use the capibilities of GPUS for general purpose computing.
Basicly we find ourselves back in the math coprocess days again. I think its just a matter of time before NVidia needs to turn their GPU into a CPU.
Originally the GPU made some sense. The bus between the CPU and the graphics output wasn’t all that great. It took quite a bit of CPU horsepower to just drive the pixels. Putting 2d and 3d accelleration closer to the output made sense.
However for the next 5 years I don’t think we are going to see much improvement on resolution. I have a hard time detecting the difference between 720p and 1080p at 60 fps. There isn’t much motivation to increase the resolution.
While the resolution slows, the bus continues the speed up. Part of the reason for this is so that the CPU can talk to the GPU to off load general purpose computing tasks. However, its always more cost effective to consolidate processors. The real cost of a chip is strongly related to how large it is and how many you make. It seems the motivation will always be to consolidate and make a more general processor.
Ideally every machine would have nearly the same specs. Its cost effective and good for the consumer. However I think the industry got greedy. They pumped specs of some items while crippling others. In order to reach 200-400 dollar pc markets they fragmented the equipement. Here is an article that sums all that up.
word of the day
“Usage Note: When deceptively is used to modify an adjective, the meaning is often unclear. Does the sentence The pool is deceptively shallow mean that the pool is shallower or deeper than it appears? When the Usage Panel was asked to decide, 50 percent thought the pool shallower than it appears, 32 percent thought it deeper than it appears, and 18 percent said it was impossible to judge. Thus a warning notice worded in such a way would be misinterpreted by many of the people who read it, and others would be uncertain as to which sense was intended. Where the context does not make the meaning of deceptively clear, the sentence should be rewritten, as in The pool is shallower than it looks or The pool is shallow, despite its appearance.”