81–90 of 172 posts
It would be awesome if you could install Linux on modern Xbox or PS4 consoles and use them as PCs...
See their 33c3 presentation on how they did it. It's filled with great details on how PS4 differs from PCs: https://youtu.be/-AoHGJ1g9aM
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To play devils advocate, you can sell games without building perfectly viable general purpose compute hardware and then locking it down with DRM to make it useless as such. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers. The consoles that existed in…
I would have loved SteamOS to be a general purpose Linux OS with Steam preinstalled instead of the... thing it actually was.
But it wasn't, mostly due to the games. Many of them would require emulating a mouse just to get into the game, which meant emulating a desktop. Then the game would start and it would switch over to the controller mode.
Many games just didn't work well under it, and so forth.
This was the moment that Sony could have made something useful out of themselves here for allowing Linux to be used on a popular games console at the time, as in improving the accessibility of installing Linux on a computing machine. (Or even basing GameOS on Linux). Instead they cowardly remove it due to a 'hack' by Geohot and locked it down for 'security purposes' and potential researchers, scientists and those wit…
This is OT, but I think people here might enjoy it: Geohot doing hackerrank problems for 5 hours straight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EecfVsdQMcM
The Playstation 1, 2 and 3 are each in their own way Sony's take on an alternate history of computer graphics. It was Sony's intent with all three consoles to put the "special effects" (that in 2019 are performed using shaders) in the CPU , and not the GPU. As a result, the PS1, but especially the PS2 and PS3 were engineered to have amazing vector capabilities in the CPU. The PS2's Emotion Engine had extremely high p…
Why doesn’t Intel make a chip specialized for gaming? Something like a dual core CPU optimized for single threaded performance and a variable number of GPU cores (a guaranteed minimum up to a perfect maximum), binned by clock speed. Skip all the support for extra pcie lanes (except maybe for storage). From your comment, it seems like Sony tried exactly this but failed. Is there an inherent flaw in such a design or ju…
From what I understand this is still different from the Sony approach where you'd have a weaker GPU, but would offload shaders etc to the CPU which could do this due to it's powerful dedicated vector processing units. Of course this had the flaw of GPUs eventually develping shader capabilities etc and making it pointless - and harder to program for if you have to target PC/xBox etc as well.
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The last time I spent 15 minutes doing a possible ROI calculation on a GPU based Ethereum mining system, about a year ago, I came to the conclusion that the upfront cost of buying the GPUs alone, plus the electricity (entirely ignoring the cost of a dedicated mining purpose motherboard and cpu/ram, power supply, etc) would not have a reasonable payback period. Even if the electricity was 1.5 cents a kWh, and cooling…
I should have paid more attention to my phrasing. If you were running less than 7 cards per rig you likely did it wrong. Now if you do it at all you're doing it wrong. ROI is more or less impossible now. By the time you'd get close the reward will halve again. Also back then the diff kept rising increasingly quickly as well. I was doing this back in like 2016 with free power and cooling and made a grip of money.
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PS1 didn't hold back PC or other consoles so I bear it no ill will. PS2 dominated sixth gen sales. By being the winning console but releasing 18 months earlier it held back everyone. And since, like you said, Moore's law was very much alive this represented a significant reduction in overall quality for an entire generation. :( PS3 at it's peak was great. But it took waaaay too much effort to get there making it a ve…
> But it took waaaay too much effort to get there making it a very poor value proposition for developers. It’s funny that this is always a criticism levelled at the CPU and not the developers.
Assume you have a developer who is one of the best in the world at writing hyper-optimized SPU code. Imagine this dev WANTS to write micro-optimized assembly. (And there are many such devs). This developer's time would far more efficiently spent if they were writing "normal" code for a "normal" processor.
So yeah. The criticism belongs squarely on the processor. :)
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To play devils advocate, you can sell games without building perfectly viable general purpose compute hardware and then locking it down with DRM to make it useless as such. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers. The consoles that existed in…
> Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers. I think this is a bit harsh. Is artwork a waste of good canvas? (I guess to be fair to you here, at least canvas is a renewable resource)
I was trying to come up with some convoluted analogy about making art on a gold plated easel that self destructs every decade and burns any canvas besides a specific size that is put on it, but just trying to formulate a physical analog hints at the absurdity of it all.
Actually, wait. You buy a tractor but you can only use it on certain days of the week and it permanently shuts off after 3 years and stops working if you try to attach a snow plow to it. Except that is already the reality of John Deere products being DRM locked and not owned by the buyers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To play devils advocate, you can sell games without building perfectly viable general purpose compute hardware and then locking it down with DRM to make it useless as such. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers. The consoles that existed in…
Have you used a switch? There is no commodity tablet on the market with the attachable controller form factor & dockable with HDMI passthru that the Switch has, at the Switch pricepoint.
They take the air out of the industry with how much money they make operating the way they do. That doesn't make it right, ethical, or reasonable.
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To play devils advocate, you can sell games without building perfectly viable general purpose compute hardware and then locking it down with DRM to make it useless as such. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers. The consoles that existed in…
If consoles were sold at a profit what you say may make sense. However building an open platform means you need to devote resources to it both from a capital perspective and opportunity cost. Driving demand towards the hardware, instead of software and licensing costs on a negative margin product is a pretty sure way to run a company out of business.
When reading through this I was sure this was about Folding@Home but turns out this was a different project! Strange that Folding@Home isn't even mentioned, if I recall it correctly, you could install Folding@Home easily via the store on the PS3, and a normal user could contribute. The Verge article seems more focused on customized machine (rooted to run Linux and stored at location) instead of using the standard OS…