Pyronick

Yes, the downfall of the DEC Alpha was very unfortunate. It was one of the first VLIW-like processors which could easily outperform x86 and PPC.Seperate FP and int units, just like the upcoming AMD Bulldozer... If it weren't for Intel, DEC Alpha would probably not only run on Windows NT 4.0 but on all Windows operating systems after that. CPU's would be pushing FP performance to teraflops, you might not even need a dedicated GPU. AMD does however give us at least some progression, if it weren't for them we would have MCM motherboards with a thousand chips on them. If it weren't for AMD, we would still use NetBurst having 1 kW TDPs.

There are lots of retail games which can be coupled with a Steam account.Take Unreal Tournament 2007 for instance, it's serial key can be activated on Steam. This will give you access to various Steam services which are stored on the Steam cloud. These are achievements, keymaps, various other settings, campaign state, personal adjustments for multiplayer, etc. Steam or Valve does not force you or the developer to anything, as far as I know it's the cheapest way to provide the global market. The only real disadvantage is the fact that you can't resell your game, but legally you aren't allowed to do that with a retail copy either.

I'd like the retail key to be registrable in the Steam client, this gives people to opportunity to use the advantages of the Steam platform while being able to have the game work without the use of Steam. That looks pretty much win-win to me. AFAIK, there are no costs for the developer.

In this case the IGP compliments a discrete AMD graphics card using Hybrid CrossfireX.Also, the new Fusion processors have a built-in switch/thread dispatcher which forwards FP operations to the stream processors whilst doing int operations on the CPU itself. About the Core architecture, true. The NetBurst architecture was probably the only reason why AMD reigned supreme during that time. However, the fact that AMD is behind on Intel's production scales also gives AMD a big disadvantage. GlobalFoundries might just fix that problem, but that's not a guarantee for success.

The early Athlon 64 CPU's outperformed the entire Pentium 4 line back in 2003. Intel had to work hard to regain their performance crown. All they did until then was trying to make easy money. Currently I'm running a Q9650 and prior to that all Intel, but my next CPU/APU will be an AMD. Why? The next-generation of CPU's will be even more SoC-like (system-on-a-chip), integrating GPU's and interconnect bus (PCI Express) controllers, leaving only the I/O on the "southbridge". We all know Intel's IGPs suck, whereas AMD's are very good. This could potentially improve performance in combination with a discrete ATI graphics card.

That.

Nah, I'll pass until there are SAS2-spec SSDs with hardware TRIM.

The audience of milsimmers is way too big to simply abandon. Actually I'm sure that any arcade title by BIS won't be as popular as the Operation Flashpoint/ArmA series due to that fact that BIS marketing does not exist. A game like Operation Flashpoint or ArmA 2 advertises itself. A regular arcade game also, but not aswell.

ArmA 2 needs a better sound dynamics. 64 channels seem more like it, otherwise channel blending should help. Hopefully the next-gen title from BIS will have a software DSP accelerated using OpenCL, because dedicated sound cards are dying as we speak.

Yeah, but steep learning curve != controls fubarSomehow it reminds me of Enemy Engaged.

Thank the dynamic duo Microsoft-nVidia for that.Tesselation is a very old technique from the n-patches/TruForm era in the early 2000's. It has been postponed by Microsoft (excluding the Xbox360) for years, it would finally get out of draft and in the DirectX 10 specifications but due to nVidia it has been postponed because they didn't have a hardware tesselator and the dual precision FPU was too weak. That's the problem other than being a memory hog. It's not geometry it's just a texture. As soon as the disc is going past 45 degrees it looks like crap.Also the borders of the textured plain looks like crap.

Yes or any OpenCL compatible DSP. But that doesn't matter because those have poor floating point performance aswell as the CPU.

Only BIS, Tripwire Interactive, Blackfoot Studios, etc pay attention to PC gamers.

No need to run this on the CPU. It can be offloaded in the near future using OpenCL or Direct Compute. I have been craving for this since Operation Flashpoint. Particle dust is already in the game, it's affected by helicopters only AFAIK. No need for that with DirectX 11 tessellation, which is real 3D instead of parallax effects. There should be some sort of Facial Action Coding System like in the Source engine.This means that every important usable muscle group in the face is simulated, and as you can see in Half-Life 2 and Crysis it looks very realistic. I think that using tessellation instead of parallax mapping and normal mapping could reserve enough power to handle physics and even 3D audio processing on the GPU. With the huge bandwidth growth of everything going fiber optics, LTE and what not I think networked physics could actually work in maybe a year.

Physics and sound improvements can be done homemade or through licencing middleware such as FMOD or Havok. You don't need Frostbite 2.0 for that as it's featureset is far too limited for a game such as ArmA. Animations are made using BIS' motion capture studios, it won't get better than that. ;) Destroyable building are in the game, but I think you are referring to the dynamic destruction in Bad Company. That stuff such be processed by a physics engine, which might be improved in the next "iteration" of the ArmA series.

PhysX is proprietary and I don't think BIS would implement something that would split the community in half. Maybe some (opensource) OpenCL-based physics engine could power a future BIS title.

Codemasters could have implemented DirectX 11 spec tessellation to at least make it look less like Battlefield 2 for people who own the new ATI HD 5k series, but they even didn't manage that.

Webkit != Gecko.Webkit is a layout rendering technology initially made by Apple. Gecko is initially made by DigitalStyle (Netscape) and then continued by Mozilla. Both are open-source btw, Webkit is used by Nokia (Symbian), Google (Chrome, Android), Palm webOS, Apple (Safari), etc. Gecko is used by Mozilla, all XULrunner forks, Nokia (Maemo), etc. Webkit is the most used mobile layout engine, followed by Presto (Opera). Trident (Internet Explorer) is the most used PC layout engine, followed by Gecko (Firefox).

Hehe, wait until the SAS2 spec is out with TRIM commands. Then the SSD craze will really begin. SATA only eats CPU power and has long command queues.

Apart from the cape and the flying tiles/debris, everything in the game could be either animated.The cape and flying tiles can done through CPU physics processing like seen in the cinematic physics in Half-Life 2: Episode 2. It's really more the lack of interest that developers haven't implemented such physics. Cloth physics were done in 2003 on the Open Dynamics Engine, on old Pentium 4's. And we're almost in 2010 and we're still stuck with parallax and normal mapping to fake geometry detail. Tessellation is there since the early 2000s and it looked better back then compared to what alternatives we have now. It seems as if nVidia is trying to create a more malicious vendor-lock-in environment á la Microsoft. If it weren't for nVidia we would already have DirectCompute and (hardware) tessellation in the DirectX 10 spec. Thank God we are lucky enough to have consistent shader architectures (call it unified shaders, whatever you like) and high-bandwidth memory (busses).

LOL 5char

It is part of the DirectX 11 spec. But nVidia chose to do tessellation operations on the shader core. Which still is hardware tessellation.ATI uses a dedicated tessellator.

I don't know. It lacks a hardware tessellator, so their stream processors will really have to push hard.And both cache coherency and dual precision floating point processing is nice, but I don't think it'll be interesting for games yet. Their architecture seems very futuristic though, very GPGPU orientated. Maybe PhysX could finally add something to games. But it'll probably die before they'll get that chance when games are released with fully OpenCL/DirectCompute-compliant Bullet, Open Dynamics Engine, Newton and Havok.

I use both Firefox 3.5.3 aswell as Chrome unstable. Because Firefox is the more common alternative on Internet Explorer I use it more frequent than Chrome. I'm a big fan of Google's philosophy of evolving the Web. But with Firefox 3.7 coming soon, they'll have to push it real hard.

AMD/ATI joined the Khronos Group on OpenCL way before nVidia did.Although the nVidia 8-series are already compatible with the OpenCL 1.0 specifications. Now nVidia tries to strike back with Fermi, but by the time it's on the market ATI will already be producing the revision of the Evergreen chip.