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Intel have been trying to do that for years, ever since the first hardware accelerators came along. I did a lot of business in the mid 90’s with people like them and Real3D (who designed what was then Intel’s branded accelerator chip, the i740 series), as well as other chip manufacturers who are no longer around. The original technology roadmap for the i740 was that its descendants would end up being part of the CPU.
It has always been a dream of the CPU vendors to have a “system on a chip”. But the problem with graphics in general, and 3D in particular, is that the *type* of things you can do (as opposed to sheer performance) has been changing so rapidly. Nobody wants to buy a machine whose capabilites are so tied in with the CPU.
Now it could be that as the graphics technology change is slowing, and the whole field maturing slightly, that the CPU guys feel it is time that they can get enough graphics power on the chip that this problem goes a way a bit.
Aye, the capabilities of graphics cards are tied into DirectX so much these days that they only introduce new features with new releases of DirectX. How long has it been since 9.0c was released? Shader model 3 was the last major change in graphics cards and that was supported by the 6800s which were released in 2004 if I remember correctly. A 2 year cycle is fairly reasonable in the computer industry, most people who want to stay up to date change their CPU at least that often anyway.
admitedly I dont mind spending the money on something if that something is going to have more than a shelf life of 6 months to a year. Once vista becomes the standard (which really would take over a year to start getting stable) and this is apparently supposed to coincide with the release of dx10. (question for the geek minded) Am I to understand that any card that has been made up untill now will not support dx10? if so then theres going to be a lot of money flying around in the next few months 😯
No – it would be commercial suicide to do that. It’s possible that a handful of particular features of DX10 may require new hardware, but any app writer will ensure there is a graceful downgrade if that thing is not supported. It’s hard enough making any profits on a PC game without limiting your potential installed base even further.
But one thing to remember is that todays high end graphics chips are also extremely general purpose as they can be programmed to do many different things – some rocket scientists exploit the power of these chips to do really hairy arsed mathematical stuff. I even saw somewhere that someone has exploited the inherent parallel processing of Nvidea chips to provide a really quick engine for certain SQL database tasks.
Why this is relevent is that if today’s processors are so easy to exploit to other applications, it is very likely that there will be programmable solutions to some particular DX10 features. Unfortunately I don’t know off hand what is coming in DX10, and I can’t be arsed to look it up 🙂
Fuck me… If I had known Lensman was a geek, I would never have put him forward for XDC!
Get a room!
😉
@TurksMeister wrote:
Fuck me… If I had known Lensman was a geek, I would never have put him forward for XDC!
Get a room!
😉
I used to be a geek, but I’m better now!
@=XDC=sPUNKer wrote:
@Deicist wrote:
You Know Direct X 10 (which that card doesn’t support) is due in a few months right?
nice card though 😀
yup…nice dinosaur in a few months. bollox! well i may just put it back in its box and wait till they come up with a better solution. Ive got time to return it and wait till them nbastards do a dx10 compatible card. Lets just say Ive been product testing for the week and its not too bad.. but SHIT…thanks for the heads up D. funny i never read any info on that as its the last thing i would expect from the latest nvidia cards but..hey ho..as I said …back in the box it goes…lol
As for the quad boards Doc . its just a monopoly ploy to increase market sales of those complete systems all these companies with lots of money rub each others backs (eg type “Hearst,anslinger and dupont” in google as an interesting example tho not related ). The motherboards themselves will show up in a few months 😉Doh – thanks captain obvious! I was trying to say the same thing with my smilies if you look at them carefully 🙂
Unfortunately the smilies on this board are shite…. come on magicker – get the dancing monkeys back!
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