Question about ATI/Nvidia graphic cards.

[Tracer]

I think a few people on the board have been talking about how this next generation doesn't seem to be a significant jump in graphics quality. True enough, GPUs haven't radically changed in a while, but CPUs have.

Expect the next generation to be all about physics and AI, because the extra cores and processors that these new machines are packing won't produce better graphics at all, all that parallel processing power can only really be leveraged by AI and physics. This PPU sounds interesting, and has potential to be even faster than the next gen's parallel processors at certain tasks, but I think you'll see hints of their potential in the 360, PS3, and Rev.

You know more than I, but the "procedural whatever" that the 360 does sounds a whole lot like the CPU taking a load off of main memory and the GPU.

[outRider]

I haven't come across the "procedural whatever," what are they saying exactly?

[Diff-chan]

I haven't come across the "procedural whatever," what are they saying exactly?

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paed...rs?42715&28783

Procedural synthesis, its a system whereby the CPU generates items procedurally instead of having an artist draw them and put them on the DVD. Its kind of like how some games procedurally generate the world, except they generate the world and them put them on the DVD... here its all done in real-time.

[outRider]

Interesting. This isn't anything new, it's been done in a limited manner since Quake 3 IIRC, but they seem to have hardware tailored to it.

What I meant by "the extra cores and processors that these new machines are packing won't produce better graphics" is that at the end of the day its the GPU doing the rendering, and having 1 or more wont make a GPU run faster, and these CPUs wont be used to do much rendering, if any, in most games, it's not their strength.

But true enough, in addition to AI and physics I guess more devs might make use of procedural content now that they have much more CPU power at their disposal. Most of the 64k-type demos are heavy into generating content at runtime from various algorithms, but usually only once at load and not continually, since it's expensive.

An example off the top of my head is precudural skies and cloud textures. To the GPU it's still a texture, whether an artist made it during dev or a CPU generated it after boot, but the difference is that the CPU can constantly regenerate that cloud texture to move and billow in different ways and to be lit from different angles as the sun moves across it. The Day-Night sky in OOT was primitive by comparison.

So I guess the end result can better graphics, but I was speaking from a narrow point of view that rendering speed and quality isn't directly affected by more CPUs.

[TobalRox]

As long as I can't play my FPS on my couch with mouse + keyboard comfortably, I won't be playing my FPS's on my couch. I'm still happy with Q3 though, so I guess I don't fall into thier marketing section.

I do that now already... when I got my new HDTV, it had a VGA port, so I started using it as my monitor. becuase of this, I went out and bought a wireless keyboard and mouse. Works just fine. Of course, I'm not hardcore into games, so maybe it's not as accurate as you'd like (I noticed no difference, but I don't want anyone mad at me for something I dont' care as much about). I played Carmageddon as well.