New nVidia drivers to have more peformance, dual-core support!

[herulach]

How much of this really isn't compiler dependant tho thesedays? Gone are the days (for me anyway) of needing to write assembler to do things as tightly as possible. I'm sure carmack has said that the last hardcore inner loop he wrote was for the quake 2 engine - back when the gpu really wasn't doing as much work as it is now - and even then the builk of the code was C.

The thing is just because it isnt neccessary on a pc doesnt mean it is irrelevant on all platforms, look at the xbox for example, admittedly the resolutions are relatively low, but the steady increase in graphics quality of the lifetime of most consoles is surely down to programmers getting better at writing very machine specific code that runs slightly faster, or with slightly less mem overhead. I realise it doesnt apply so much to pcs, but i kind of wish it did, rather than the curretn 'those who havent got a 1500 quid machine can either watch a slideshow or something akin to the graphics of a 5 year old game' kind of mentality the game industry seems to be in at the moment. anyway </rant>

[Butcher]

How much of this really isn't compiler dependant tho thesedays? Gone are the days (for me anyway) of needing to write assembler to do things as tightly as possible. I'm sure carmack has said that the last hardcore inner loop he wrote was for the quake 2 engine - back when the gpu really wasn't doing as much work as it is now - and even then the builk of the code was C.

Depends how good the compiler is. Consoles often have quite poor compilers, meaning you need to do more assembler.

With what? The GPU? (!)

Between platforms...

Though doing some AI tasks on the GPU is not beyond the realms of possibility. It's not really a good fit though (too much time spent shuffling data up and down), and the next gen consoles are relatively CPU heavy (especially by console standards!) which means people are more likely to dump AI on the CPU.

[dangel]

Depends how good the compiler is. Consoles often have quite poor compilers, meaning you need to do more assembler.

Ok fair enough Did that apply to the xbox tho? P3 processor n'all? Presumably your just running the xdk with devstudio like an nominal pc developer?

Between platforms...

LOL sorry wasn't clear!

Though doing some AI tasks on the GPU is not beyond the realms of possibility. It's not really a good fit though (too much time spent shuffling data up and down), and the next gen consoles are relatively CPU heavy (especially by console standards!) which means people are more likely to dump AI on the CPU.

I think to use the GPU for anything other than heavily parallelized processing wouldn't work too well, plus it's a er.. little busy Yes plenty of _multi core_ (back OT) cpu power on these next gen consoles. I'm keen to see what the cell's like for generalized processing, and whether it's applicable in the applications world.

[fuji]

back to the topic:

October 4, 2005

The new Forceware 80 also adds new functions, which include the ability to dynamically enable and disable SLI, auto display detection for HDTV systems, vertical synchronization (Vsync), primary display switching, TV and HDTV out, and updated Linux features.

Performance improvements, according to Nvidia, will cover most popular games running on enthusiast machines today. For single GPU as well as dual-GPU systems the manufacturer promises speed gains in the range between 5 and 20 percent for Battlefield 2, Far Cry, Doom 3 Splinter Cell 3 and UT 2004. (THG)

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews...04_100354.html

[Butcher]

Ok fair enough Did that apply to the xbox tho? P3 processor n'all? Presumably your just running the xdk with devstudio like an nominal pc developer?

Me personally? No, but then I work for Sony so we don't exactly do a lot of xbox dev.

The xbox dev toolchain is very good though - better than what a PC developer has.

[dangel]

Me personally? No, but then I work for Sony so we don't exactly do a lot of xbox dev.

The xbox dev toolchain is very good though - better than what a PC developer has.

Working for the great Satan eh? Well i'm working for the Germans so i guess we're even