DaBeast on 5/8/2011 at 03:24
Quote Posted by Volitions Advocate
several have said it before, you have to actually try it before complaining about the bezels. They don't get in the way or take anything away from the game. Also. Eyefinity works with projectors. Linus from NCIX even did a demonstration, it was wicked.
You do get used to it, but it clearly isn't an ideal solution. Now we can get the ultra thin bezels, and some kind of frame where you remove the actual bezel cover and link the screen to another one.
The gap would annoy me when gaming, but I feel hindered without additional monitors when I'm working on assignments and programming etc. For a game I don't really feel anything of the sort, I'd prefer to have something usable on the other screen, some games let you have a map or something along those lines.
Koki on 5/8/2011 at 06:03
Quote Posted by Volitions Advocate
Is that somehow more idiotic than complaining about lack of support for multi-core processing? or 64 bit processing when those technologies were new?
Yes. Very.
Quote:
I've invested the money and time to get my set up working and it has done nothing but greatly enhance my gaming experience.
You've wasted your money on a gimmick that is not only pointless, but also broken as the three screens aren't even connected. Good job, but I fail to see why anyone would give a shit.
Yakoob on 5/8/2011 at 21:34
Quote Posted by Bjossi
I really hope multi-cores don't have a long future tn this world. EPIC is a far more impressive and efficient architecture. Those redundant cores should instead be replaced by more math and logic units that can work on 20+ instructions per cycle, which is several times more than the limit of the superscalar architecture which relies on very complex dependency checks done on-die that takes up a lot of space and time. Those dependencies are pre-mapped by the compiler in the case of EPIC, making hardware-based checks unnecessary. They can do much more with much less, and saves the headaches of writing multi-threaded code. Though admittedly the (as far as I know) lack of backwards compatibility with instruction sets and a really complex compiler make going mainstream very difficult.
Oh I havent even heard about this EPIC thing (im far more of a software than hardware guy), do you have some kind of a simple-but-to-the-point links I could read up on it?
Also, isnt the reason we are moving towards multicore because, given the technology and heat issues, it is becoming difficult to simply increase clock speeds? At the same time, it is fairly easy (and increasingly cheaper) to just add extra cores at lower speeds. You say that the EPIC one can do 20+ instructions per cycle, which is far better than current multicores, but the beauty of multicores is that we can just keep throwing in more and more cores if we need them. Didnt they recently get a 128 core processing up and running?
That being sad, I do agree that linear programming is FAR, FAR easier than multithreated one, and there is no needed overhead of locking shared resources and synchronizing cores, so theoretically it should be more efficent as well.
You say the epic can do 20+ instructions per cycle... which sounds a lot like SSE. And while SSE is nice for efficiency it is, to put it blunt, a bitch to take proper advantage of, and why it is strongly underused. There are, thankfully, libraries nowadays that obfuscate all that and make it a bit easier to use, but even those put some rigid restrictions on how your code is structured. For example, all your data needs to be in vector format, 4 floats aligned. And thats just for vector math, what about inherently non-vector tasks? If you want to use SSE for ray/sphere collision checks, you not only need additional SSE-ready "placeholder" structures you can fill in with the ray and sphere data (For 4 rays or 4 spheres), but also rework your physics pipeline so it batches all the data into fours instead of just doing a single linear check at a time (which, ironically, is very similar to the conceptual working of a multi-core system).
Long story short, SSE can "do 4 instructions per cycle" but you pretty much have to work around it and be constantly conscious how you represent your data, making it more difficult and restrictive to use it. How does EPIC and its "20+ instructions per cycle" compare?
Bjossi on 6/8/2011 at 00:18
You kind of lost me during the programming talk. :p My knowledge of this stuff is kind of amateurish as it is just my hobby to read about computer architectures and talk about them with really tech-savvy friends, so I can not really go into any details. Google around for Elbrus or Intel Itanium, the former especially. It is originally a Soviet computer that dates back to the 1970s, but its development is still going on today. It is however very annoying how little information there is about Elbrus, so I was actually talking out of my ass earlier as it seems they have already moved to the multi-core territory, Elbrus-PF (2011?) will be an EPIC/VLIW (This and EPIC are closely related in their functionality.) processor with 8 cores clocked at 2 GHz. With performance measured in TFLOPS and PFLOPS in the case of large supercomputers it is obviously targeting servers and supercomputers but this is still staggering. Also take a look at Elbrus 2000. This one is a single-core made in 2005, clocked at 300 MHz and being able to do up to 23 instructions per cycle it has the peak performance of a high-end Pentium 4 (3 GHz) when working with 32-bit data. It does have some backwards compatibility with x86 which makes it possible to run some Windows versions on it, like XP. I see claims of just <5 watts power usage but I have not been able to find the context so that number is pretty meaningless.
Koki on 7/8/2011 at 05:59
Cool stories bros
Quote Posted by Some article apparently
-Co-op will stick to 4 players
-Different Variety of Vehicles, one being a Bandit Technical, and the article states there will be a vehicle with 4 seats.
-Eridium, can be used to enhance weapons or are the only Currency to purchase the most powerful weapons in the world
-Bearded drawf guy is Salvador, the Gunzerker. Special ability is Dual-wielding. Any weapon can be dual-wield.
-The original Vault Hunters will be support NPC's.
-Bandits now have their own brand of weaponry.
-Each manufacturer will now have their own weapon styling/color/personality.
-Weapons can have custom decals and enhancements.
-Enemies are more responsive, and actually interact with each other better.
-The players will also have interacting dialogues, similar to those in Left 4 Dead.
