Rep's Ramblings of an Angry Kitty

AMD's Nervous Breakdown

2011-11-11T10:41:00.000-05:00

So Bulldozer bombed. The biggest change in CPU architecture for AMD since the K7, and their one true hope for finally making up the miles worth of lost ground towards Intel in the processor performance race. Up in smoke.

Oh, it's a disappointment alright. On paper -- and granted, I'm not a whiz at processor architectures -- it sounded pretty darn good. Sure two threads had to share a single FP unit inside one of its modules, but it could do 256-bit vector operations. General consensus is that the design of the chip, from a high level, was sound. But it hinged on something very important: clockspeed. It was a beefier engine, and it needed more cycles to keep it fed, and the end product was simply starved of those. Unless you were following all the leaked benchmarks and performance indicators leading up to its launch, you were shocked. The world was shocked.

It seems like Rory Read was shocked too. Announced as AMD's new CEO in August of this year, he's recently put into effect mass layoffs in excess of 10% of the company's workforce mere weeks after the first Bulldozer processors debuted. Rumors are circulating on what this might mean for AMD's future goals. Rory has issued an internal memo stating that this is the start of a new strategy for AMD, which many journalists and analyst believe means a shift in focus towards mobile markets, and an emphasis on embedded solutions.

As AnandTech stated, among the many employees let go during the operation was Carrell Killebrew, the Director of Product Planning for AMD's GPU division. Anand points out that this move is peculiar for one supposedly based on cost savings, and indicates a differing of philosophies between Carrell and the company.

"When reducing workforce to cut costs, you don't go after your product planners - unless their vision and your vision don't line up. [...] Carrell's vision saw the continued growth of the high-end GPU."

So suddenly this sounds like AMD may in fact be leaving the highend GPU market, especially since, as XbitLabs reported Jon Peddie as saying, "AMD was far from fat. And they were making a profit. I don't see any need for such a huge cutback."

And if they're leaving the highend GPU market, and actually moving more towards the mobile market, one could speculate that they might abandon the enthusiast market entirely, including CPUs. But we'll leave that one alone for now.

Needless to say, this brings with it a about a thousand different questions pertaining to the consequences of such a decision. The vast majority of the innovations in the GPU market are driven by tough competition, as well as API advances brought about by Microsoft and Khro-...well no, just Microsoft. Without that competition, there won't be any hard push to improve the quality experience for end users (and professionals for that matter). Most large companies aren't at their best without heavy competition, and the result might be similar to what we saw with the sound card market, where innovation gave way to incremental improvements that had little to do with real R&D and more to do with bloated software packages and marketing. The GPU market on the PC is largely a two-horse race, and without that second horse, the other one is free to trod along at its own pace, and unfortunately that means inflated prices.

Of course, without any real advances in real-time rendering technology, developers don't have much incentive to keep pushing the boundaries either. That might have the side effect of allowing them to take better advantage of the hardware that's already available, but it also means we might be close to the end of what we'll see computers capable of in games. This could also mean the end of future console generations without a significantly more powerful GPU to build around.

There's no question that graphics has hit a point of diminishing returns already. With so much investment required to make any truly noticeable changes to visual fidelity, it was an eventuality that we might see the highend GPU market collapse. That's why NVIDIA has started investing so heavily into the mobile market as a windfall for when that happens. Instead of trying to pack more transistors into massive chips as process sizes shrink, we might see those advances used to squeeze today's cutting-edge graphics into smaller packages. Computing in general has been shrinking since its inception, and there's no doubt that devices like tablets and smartphones are the future for the majority of people's computing needs. That means not only providing all the features found on full desktops, but running them at a comparable level.

More mobilization means more consolidation of devices too. Hardware that once required it's own box to house, like DVRs or even game consoles, might find itself crammed inside TVs. It's the age of convenience, after all, and the easier it is to access the things you want, the more likely consumers will eat it up. If the vast majority of what you want to do can be done on a tablet or your TV directly, why buy another device that does only a subsection of those things?

AMD wants to ride this wave, and to do so it's going to need to focus more on its Bobcat architecture, and possibly something even smaller. It can wait for manufacturing processes to continue to scale its existing cores, but what if they were to go a different route? Would AMD rely exclusively on x86, where it's almost always had at a disadvantage to Intel, or turn to ARM instead, and hope to gain a leg-up in efficiency compared to Intel's Atom processors? ARM has the advantage of allowing licensees to either use ARM-designed processors, or to just take their instruction set and put it to use in a unique architecture. It might be to AMD's advantage to broaden their portfolio with ARM technologies and pick up where Intel failed in that regard.

In the meantime, what's going to happen to desktops or even laptop computers? As time goes by, the big hulking desktop tower looks increasingly obsolete sitting next to all the slim computers flourishing in the market. Laptops have made great strides to catch up, already capable of doing almost everything high-performance desktops can. According to Jon Peddie research, discreet GPUs are still holding steady in sales in recent years, but as the PC market continues to grow, GPUs sales aren't growing with it. Integrated graphics, however, is growing fast, and quickly taking over laptops with the introduction of AMD's Fusion and Intel's latest HD graphics processors. On the same die and with the same cutting-edge transistors as those composing CPUs, integrated GPUs are free to take off in performance, leaving low-end GPUs utterly obsolete and more mainstream chips straining to keep apace. It seems like only a matter of time before having a graphics card in any form is rendered unnecessary.

Still, one questions the reasoning behind leaving the enthusiast graphics market when AMD has been doing so well in it. Certainly their prowess in the ultra-mobile field is, to say the least, unproven, and when taking on a new venture, it's probably a good idea to have a back-up plan. So why fire your GPU product planner? AMD still has the Southern Islands family set to debut soon, and probably has a generation after that well in-place already, but in 2014, what comes then?

At this point it's not hard to imagine what would happen if they really did exit the performance GPU market, and if the sales of discreet GPUs doesn't dramatically fall by 2014, perhaps they hope to be the ones to make that happen. We won't know AMD's plans concretely until early next year at their Financial Analyst Day event, and I'm sure consumers, and most of all stockholders will be eagerly listening to whatever method might be behind the looming madness that seems to be on the horizon. But if things materialize the way they appear to be, this could be one of the biggest changes to the PC market landscape in decades. Of course, I've been saying that a lot lately...

Mobile Convergences

2011-09-28T19:18:00.000-04:00

I feel it's time to revisit the subject of mobile devices. I've written a couple times on the subject, mostly focusing on ARM processors in doing so. But the subject covers a broad array of design houses, manufacturers, as well as form factors. It's something that's worth looking at from a fresh perspective after it's had some time to evolve further.

The mobile craze really started around the time of the recession, at the height of the economic slump (there's an oxymoron). The iPhone came out in 2007, and took the friendliness of iPods and merged them with the versatility of smartphones, while adding some completely new concepts to the mix. The result was a revolution, and competition was quick to emerge, and eager to make a grab at its potential market.

Around the same time, netbooks were building a lot of steam. They were cheap computers when people couldn't afford to spend very much, and over time even grew to have their own advantages over more expensive alternatives. They evolved into more elegant shapes and sizes, and with more powerful hardware, while offering leading-edge battery life that couldn't be found in many other portable PCs. They were the right product at the right time, and tapped a need in the market that few others had even thought of before.

There were premium portable devices too, usually cumbersome touchscreen computers with desktop OSes and the occasional slide-out keyboard. They were expensive, slow, and blew through their batteries in a couple hours, usually. Netbooks all but killed what little appeal they had, and it wasn't long before people forgot the term UMPC almost as fast as it had been coined.

So what's changed in the last few years? Well, a shit-ton. The iPhone set the standard but many other companies ran with it. Leading their charge was Google, which evolved their Android OS from a simple widget-based interface and a few built-in functions to now quickly eclipsing iOS in market share and app downloads. The processors in smartphones are not just adept at media now, but even multitasking and full-fledged internet browsing. They've essentially struck the "good enough" computing level sought after by the mainstream market, which has led to their widespread use in tablet computers, the final reincarnation of UMPCs. With their surging popularity, tablets are effectively killing netbooks, many of which still struggle at HD playback, and which failed to grab onto cellular networks so they could carry their net prowess with them on the go.

At the same time, falling prices and advancing technology have taken e-readers out of their tiny niche and into the realm of prolific success. While a lot of their functionality is easily replicated on more expensive mobile devices, their easy-to-read eInk displays and wristwatch-like battery life combined with their inexpensive cost and elegant connectivity have helped to keep them relevant. The idea of the e-reader is evolving too. While they were almost always able to offer audio playback, the introduction of color has opened them up to much broader uses, closing the gap between them and tablets. Now Amazon has announced an actual tablet version of their popular e-reader (a "super-reader"?), the Kindle Fire, blurring the line between portable devices completely. E-readers may end up merely being cheap, cloud-backed tablets in a closed software environment, which would only serve to drive costs down on real tablets.

But tablets (and "super-readers") need to start looking into lower-power screen technologies, such as transflective displays as a means of answering to the threat of e-readers. Once they can start to resolve the disadvantages in price and battery life, e-readers may become remembered as a stop-gap measure that bridged a gulf in technology and the market, much like netbooks. At that point their only competition will be smartphones.

Tablets don't get the benefit of cellular data save for a couple models that have received the privileged blessing of a mobile carrier. The devices do have the advantage of harboring the same companies and similar software of their smartphone counterparts, ensuring that major carriers have at least one tablet in their stable. But often this means signing and paying for a separate data contract, one that's usually more expensive. Until carriers realize the benefits of consolidating their billing methods, most consumers will do just as well buying WiFi-only tablets, leaving their smartphones to do most of the spur-of-the-moment web activities when not at home. As 4G takes off, truly mobile internet won't be seen as a slow, annoying hindrance compared to hooking up to the nearest hotspot. This leaves WiFi-chained tablets at a disadvantage as cell phones become a more capable means for general purpose use. The only thing going against cell phones is their screens, which are typically centered around 4 to 4.3 inches, with a few touching on 4.5". Even that will be mitigated some with the next generation of smartphones coming in at around 5" and a full 720p resolution. In my opinion this will become the next sweet-spot for mobile devices and may render the less portable tablet computer as an edge-case option.

For gamers, the other device in the mobile equation are gaming handhelds. For most consumers, simple touch-based games within reach of their pockets is enough to satisfy the brief instances of boredom encountered during the day-to-day. More complex games (that aren't strategy-based) however will always be crippled by the lack of real controls. Unfortunately the people that demand such a thing on the go will continually shrink in number, leaving the rest to play their handhelds at home, often a room or two away from a TV. The usage scenario for gaming handhelds starts to look very limited at this point, only cropping up when you aren't willing or able to cross the hallway to your home console in the living room, or when you're making long trips that are planned in advance. These days though, trips lasting much longer than three or four hours might require you to switch to your phone anyway once your 3DS or Vita runs out of power. Still, for the first year or so of their availability, gaming handhelds will offer more bang for the buck in performance, which might appeal to enthusiasts. A smartphone or tablet with the capabilities of the Vita may be several months away, and when it gets here, it won't be nearly as cheap. There also won't be much, if any software that really takes advantage of its hardware, at least for a long time.

When you're not looking to get basic browsing and media playback, and are ready to do some real computing, there's the upcoming ultrabook standard being lead by Intel. Ideally it will entail a sub-$1000 notebook at less than an inch thick, with all-day battery life, a real dual-core processor, and SSD storage allowing instant boot-up and resume time, all encased in an 11 to 13 inch form factor. In reality, they may not hit that price, at least initially, but it's a move in the right direction. Intel is looking to migrate their Atom into smaller packages (as they have been for some time), by finally embracing Android, and leaving the clam shell laptops to more capable processors. Getting more performance into tighter spaces just means the desktop computer in its big, hulking tower will continue to look more and more obsolete. Eventually I could see the larger system builders move exclusively to laptops and tablets, leaving desktops to enthusiasts and professionals, either built by themselves or through smaller retail channels.

Anyone not looking for portable computing devices might find themselves stuck plugging laptops into full-sized monitors, and syncing them with their wireless keyboards and mice. They may do that with smartphones for that matter, and if wireless HDMI (WiDi) ever takes off, there may never be any plugging of cables again, except for power. Imagine a laptop shell for your smartphone, where instead of docking the phone into a port in the back, you just press a button on either device and sync them to each other wirelessly, leaving the smartphone in your pocket or clip-on (though a means of physically connecting would probably still be necessary for battery life reasons).

In a world where smartphones and tablets start to become the center of our internet consumption, the vast majority of computers may be ones stored on our person or sitting on our nightstands. In that world, the hardware and software that makes up the fabric of computing will look a lot more diverse than the one we're in now. Consumer habits have changed, spending habits have changed, and how we consume has changed. As the devices change both to address and to influence those shifts, what we see going forward may be less centralized computing, and more computing that moves with us.

Stumbling for a Comeback

2011-08-10T00:37:00.006-04:00

There are few things as bad as when you realize that the entire time you've known something you've been completely wrong about it. Sometimes it's as simple as using the wrong fork at a fancy restaurant. Sometimes it's as bad as telling Chinese people that you "bite purple duck nipples" as a way of exhibiting your mastery over their language. Every time it happens it's embarrassing, and causes you to have to back-peddling in some form or fashion, which can be injurious to your pride. For Nintendo, that time came a couple weeks ago when they announced they are going to drop the price of the 3DS $80 by mid-August, although the actual realization undoubtedly came much sooner than that.

I've written at-length about handhelds on many occasions. The last time I wrote about the 3DS in particular, it was enthusiastic, but cautious on its prospects. That was a while ago though--shit, that was before we even knew the official name of the NGP. Things are a little clearer about its future now, and there's a lot to recap that has happened since that last rambling, so let's just quickly go over it.

First, price. I haven't written anything about modern game systems since E3, and that was when we learned that the NGP will regrettably be called the PlayStation Vita, and that it will cost $250 (baseline). Right away the proclamations of doom and gloom came flooding in for the 3DS, and it became pretty clear to most people that unless Nintendo set aside their arrogance and dropped the 3DS price in response, that the system would be remembered as a major stumble in Nintendo's history. Initially Nintendo denied questions of a price drop, but the plain truth is, you can't ask Nintendo anything unless they've already announced it, or they will lie to your face. Eventually they DID announce a price drop for the 3DS, and a sigh of relief followed for all those watching the industry.

If we got a price drop this year, I never figured on it being more than $50. I was even reasonably sure that if it did happen, that it could very well be less than $50, and in my mind, that wouldn't be enough. If the Vita was anywhere close to $30 more than the 3DS, I felt that it was still the clear winner. But $80 is HUGE. It's a complete about-face, a total market adjustment. It's not just Nintendo changing to respond to a new development, it's an admittance that they were wrong. The 3DS hasn't sold well, and price was a big reason for that. It's like when NVIDIA dropped the cost of the GeForce GTX 280 by $150 within two weeks of its release (god I'm such a nerd). NVIDIA even offered distributors a chance to refund customers who bought the card at full price, and Nintendo's doing something very similar. As part of the Ambassador's Program, you get 20 free digital games as a result of being suckered into buying the 3DS early. These games won't even be widely available until many months afterward, in some cases possibly never. It may even be a better deal than Sony's Welcome Back program. What's even more telling is that Nintendo is apparently going to be losing money on the systems sold under this new price, and they don't even have any immediate plans to lower the price of the DSi XL, which will be sitting at the exact same $169.99 price point. They're essentially losing whatever extra money they made from the original price point with free games, they're losing money on subsequent 3DS systems being sold, and they're threatening the sales of their current bread winner DSi systems, all for the sake of retaining a competitive upper-hand. This is a desperate move.

Nintendo's never done anything this drastic before, and I think it illustrates something very important about the company. They firmly believe they cannot afford to lose the handheld market, and they will do anything they can to make sure they don't. I think this is in contrast to their home console business, which they essentially decided to throw in the towel several years ago in regards to, and while that resulted in unexpectedly huge sales for them, their next generation doesn't show any real signs of taking things more seriously. They still don't care about specs, they're still disconcertingly quiet on the online front, and they're still out of step with the rest of the hardcore gaming market. As more gets revealed about the Wii U's performance, the more it looks like it will not be a significant leap over the current HD generation, and being several years late the party, looks to be less than a compelling sell for the already-entrenched gamers. But the Wii has sold a little over 87 million units since it launched, and while that's a great deal more than any previous home console they've ever made, it pales in comparison to the nearly 150 million that the various Nintendo DS iterations have sold. My guess is that if they're looking for lightning to strike twice, their best hopes lie with the handheld market, not a console market that has largely left them behind. Specs has never mattered in the handheld market, and while the Wii was a success, its market is not craving an upgraded system, and the only hope for growth is to sell to people who care about better graphics and more intuitive, traditional controls. Unfortunately those people haven't taken Nintendo seriously for over a decade now. Their only chance is indeed with handhelds.

Second thing to discuss that was announced was their software lineup for the rest of the year. There's no word on Kid Icarus: Uprising, so we'll assume that's been pushed back to next year. In its place though, we get an iteration to one of their bestselling franchises, Mario Kart 7. This game is my most anticipated for the system, because I am a Mario Kart nut, and this game will move units, doubly so if they can get a nice package deal going for about $200. The number one bestselling game for the DS was New Super Mario Bros., and so following in its footsteps we'll be getting Super Mario 3D Land as well, another that I'm sure they're hoping will push sold units. It's probably just me, but I think the game automatically becomes more appealing just by having 'Land' in the name. It's about damn time they brought that nomenclature back, and this will hopefully be an awesome return to form for handheld Mario adventures. In between now and then, we get Star Fox 64 3D, which is cool...I guess. Certainly it looks pretty, and for many it's the best in the series. Not a lot of new features seem to have been added though, not even online support, so it seems like the title could have made do with a digital release instead of a full game, but oh well.

Nintendo definitely wants to take as much advantage of the 3DS's first year and the holiday season as they can, especially now that the Vita has been confirmed for a 2012 launch. Sony undoubtedly wants to not repeat Nintendo's mistake by launching their system without a good software lineup, but could they be trading one mistake for another? Giving Nintendo free reign for an important shopping period will do wonders for them, especially with the price drop. In fact, as much as it might dent Nintendo's finances in the short term, I think they've set things up for a success that was anything but guaranteed in the beginning. They're positioning themselves closer to the larger demographic that made them billions in the last generation, and Sony better have a hell of a launch to make up for the lost opportunity. Instead of catching Nintendo when they're weak, they'll get them at their strongest, and credit should be given where its due for being able to turn their situation around so fast like that. You might say it's too early to be telling fortunes, but I can tell you that by the time the holidays come around, if the 3DS with a new Mario Kart and Mario Land game isn't the undisputed hottest selling thing on the planet, I'll start wearing headwear just so I can eat my hat.

But does this mean that we're right back where we started with the DS vs PSP comparisons again? Certainly the PSV is significantly more expensive than the 3DS, and certainly it will appeal much more to the hardcore crowd, a tactic that many will claim hurt the PSP more than it helped. A lot of my arguments against the 3DS get thrown out the window because of the price drop, but let's not forget about all the things that have not changed. The 3DS is still more expensive than the DS was, and it still doesn't have the wide appeal the DS did. Why? A big reason is the 3D feature. For a lot of people that's the big selling point, but for many others, it's detrimental to the enjoyment of the system. Many can't handle 3D for very long, and for some it doesn't even work right, because it requires almost perfectly aligned eyes which not everyone has. If anything 3D is actually a limiting factor to its appeal, because it effectively locks out a decent chunk of potential buyers, people for whom a regular 2D system will pose no such barrier. And even though you can turn off 3D and play in 2D, you then have to contend with rest of the package, a slightly less glamorous looking set of features that does little to differentiate itself from past Nintendo systems and even other portable systems, some that aren't implicitly gaming-oriented. And the fact of the matter is, the PSV will not play a mutually exclusive role in handheld gaming between casuals and the hardcore. Sony will be investing heavily into online distribution, a lot more than Nintendo ever could, and that will lend themselves well to smaller gaming titles more akin to indie devs and smartphone markets, as well as larger Wipeout HD and Super Stardust types that would have been passed off as full games under Nintendo's business model. The PSV has every bit the chance to deliver the same kind of niche titles that Nintendo has enjoyed, especially with full multi-touch support, and aside from additional new entries in popular Nintendo franchises, which will undeniably sell well, what has Nintendo got? There's one thing they won't have ever again, and that's the explosive sales they've experienced the last generation. The perfect storm is over, and I still think Sony has a better chance than ever at striking big at where it will hurt Nintendo the most. But at least Nintendo has their guard up now.

Retro Kick

2011-06-21T02:14:00.001-04:00

Lately I've been on a retro kick. It started in early May, with the purchase of an Atari 7800 and a ColecoVision, and has continued on since with a slew of game purchases from eBay, local flea markets, and most recently with the purchase of an Atari 5200. It's a bug that bit not necessarily so suddenly, but persistently, gnawing at my hide like a tireless insect that feeds on addiction. My retro collection wasn't exactly nonexistent before. I already had an NES, SNES, N64, and Genesis, and my latest game spending spree has not left them untouched either. I've added a handful of NES games to my library, a couple SNES games, a few for the Genesis, and I've doubled my meager N64 selection. But I seem to have taken up an even greater interest in pre-3rd generation consoles, to the point of dwarfing all other systems I own with the 8-bit era.

Perhaps there's just something appealing about that age just before the video game market crash, when video games were new. The industry was a completely different place back then, when arcades were the source of all originality, and home consoles were treated merely as a platform to play those games at home. Back then everything was exciting about video games. Just the idea of them, playing games using a computer--it was revolutionary. No longer bound by what could be done mechanically, as had been the case with pinball machines and carnival games, now you could create challenges out of anything, limited only by your imagination and the computing capabilities of the time. Indeed the earliest arcades started off essentially as electronic versions of mechanical cabinet games, such as shooting galleries and driving games. Pong was an interpretation of a tabletop sport, preceded by Tennis for Two as the first attempt at a computer game. Other games were exploring new possibilities, like Space Wars, and Asteroids and Space Invaders after that. Once color came into play in 1979 (a milestone ironically preceded by the decidedly underpowered home console, the Atari VCS), the sky was the limit. Characters could be distinct from one another, recognizable forms could take shape, and games could be flashy and eye-catching, leading to an utter explosion in popularity that surged unabated until 1983.

Home consoles essentially rode that wave for those first several years, borrowing classics from the arcade to drive their popularity with consumers. If a game was successful in the arcade, it could probably be a big hit on a console. But as technology advanced and new consoles started to emerge, people started to realize they were getting the same games over and over again, just with better, more faithful visuals to their arcade counterparts. These were games played for the sheer thrill of improving your score, and part of the excitement of that was lost at home when you didn't have a leaderboard of the top players like in the arcades. These were games you could only really enjoy for short bursts at a time, and there was no real sense of progression or achievement besides the goals you set for yourself or by your friends.

With a slew of rehashes, a dearth of originality, an overwhelming onslaught of games and game systems without much oversight for quality, the games market collapsed under its own weight in North America, taking with it a great many awesome game systems and companies that had yet to realize their true potential. The ColecoVision lasted a measly two years, as did the Vectrex, and the Atari 7800 wasn't even released, instead held off until 1986 when its arcade offerings were no longer adequate in a gaming environment transformed by the Nintendo revolution. Nintendo knew that gamers were craving deeper experiences, and they had games more expansive and varied than any that had been seen outside of the PC. More importantly, they had a true end-game, something rare in games before its generation, and that gave gamers something to shoot for, a reason to keep playing, and a sense of accomplishment and completion when they finally obtained it. People were playing the NES for longer, and with far more ravenous an appetite than they ever played games before.

I was not alive for any of this. I hold no nostalgic memories of this generation. So what is the source of my appeal towards old games? It could be largely aesthetic. The 80s styling of hardware, with its silvery accents, or faux wood grain decals, the sharp rectangular shapes, the molded vent grating on all spare surfaces, the curvy lettering... Maybe it's the bright graphics of the games, the colorful melodies and fluttering sound effects, or the simple and challenging gameplay. The enthusiasm of the era shows in all the various aspects of the arcade classics of the time. Videogames were burgeoning with success and optimism, and hot with anticipation of a promising future.

More than anything I think it's just the feeling of owning a piece of history. Games back then were nothing like games that would define the modern era of the industry, making for a completely different experience that's uniquely separate from what was to come in the future. Sure, the gameplay was shallow and entertaining only for brief periods at a time, but as a collector that's part of their charm. They're perfect to pull out of the closet for a short play session or two (or three or four), and to remember the quaint and simplistic fun of a gaming age many decades gone by.

So, back to the Wii 2

2011-06-08T04:11:00.004-04:00

Or, I'm sorry, the "Wii U". As much as you'll hear it on message boards, Facebook, Twitter and everywhere else in the gaming circle, you're going to hear it from me too: the name just sucks. Hard as it is for me to fathom though, there are actually supporters of the name, and generally they cite the predecessor from which this new console owes its branding heritage to as reason why. The Wii was laughed and scoffed at, ridiculed and made fun of, but look at it now! It's synonymous with fun and all-inclusive gaming! It's something everyone the world over can recognize! And while those arguments may be true to some extent, the situation is a bit different here. It's understandable to want brand recognition to continue on into the next generation, and I have no problem with what they've done on their handhelds with their choice of the 3DS name. But this isn't just a bunch of childish adults making potty jokes and saying it sounds stupid. If you look at the logic they used on the name Wii, then sure, alright, it sorta makes sense. People can come to understand that, and eventually move on. But what's the logic of Wii U?

Reggie went on stage and told the E3 audience that many felt the hardcore folks weren't being catered to by Nintendo. This is something they wanted to change with the new system, so they created a system for "you", meaning the audience he was speaking to at the presentation consisting mostly of hardcore gamers. We're so confident this system will appeal to you, he said, that we're even putting it in the name. So, that in a nutshell is how they explained away the reason behind the U.

But if U is supposed to mean hardcore gamers, what does Wii mean? Originally it meant us, or everyone, playing together, right? Well, no, apparently. It must have meant something distinct from hardcore gamers, or at least now it does, so that must translate to the casual crowd. Forget what you learned in English class about the meaning of the word "we", it does not include everyone plus yourself, so now they have to put "U" in the name so you're given proper representation.

Throwing logic out the window, we're left with more intangible reasoning for the name. Yes it carries the Wii brand with it, and yes it's just silly enough to stick with people, though it will be somewhat difficult to distinguish for many consumers, since it doesn't clearly separate itself as something new and totally different from the Wii, and this is exasperated by the fact that the system looks very similar to the Wii, and the controller can even interface with some of the Wii accessories and software. But Nintendo considers it an evolution from the Wii anyway, so to them, the name fits.

The controller is very unique, for sure. It got the brunt of the attention from Nintendo's Wii U announcement, and for good reason. They want it to be the defining feature of the system, the thing that makes it stand out from the pack even if all other features don't. The system itself wasn't important. Reggie even called it "just a box with a GPU and a CPU". To Nintendo, the console itself doesn't matter, specs don't matter, HD graphics is just a check mark on the list. The controller is what's special, and that's significant to note, because if games from third party developers are just copy/paste jobs from other platforms, the controller can at least give them some sort of edge even if it doesn't offer much extra functionality. It can add convenience in games that would have otherwise required the action to pause while accessing a menu, or clear up some space on the TV that the HUD would have taken up. For hardcore gamers, it's a dual analog controller that will give you that familiarity and precision necessary for more traditional games, although it remains to be seen if the bulk of the device might pose an issue. For games that truly take advantage of it, some very innovative ideas can be played around with. Nintendo's most important job at E3 was selling people on the controller, and they spent a lot of time trying to do that. Personally, I'm not there yet, but I see the potential for a lot of interesting and unique concepts that can, at the very least, be more useful than motion controls were.

Very little else was talked about. Online will be disclosed in greater detail later on, but supposedly, just like HD graphics, it's just a check off the list, something that's now "granted". Features will be supposedly comparable to current-gen consoles, but is Nintendo taking it seriously enough? Are they the ones just taking it for "granted"? One of the important aspects of the new console mentioned was for there to be a strong connection between you, your TV, and the internet. The rumor was that they went to a outside company for help setting up their online support, and that could certainly be true, but what is certain is that Nintendo is taking it more seriously than previous generations, and that's good. A unique advantage in that realm would be a boon for them, but if they just consider it a bullet point on their feature set, that may be too much to expect.

The only other thing to talk about is timing. In my previous rambling, I mentioned that it seemed like Nintendo was quite content doing things cheaply and making loads of money off the casual market, with no real incentive to change. I'm glad they decided in the end to get back to the hardcore crowd and try to win back third party developer support. I think that's a major plus of this whole announcement, but the question is, will it be enough? If performance is only slightly above current-gen consoles, and not considered an important aspect of their new platform, will simply having those ports as opposed to not having them be sufficient to woo the more serious gamers back to their side? These same people likely bought one or both of the two current-gen consoles already, and have enjoyed those types of games for several years now. What's the incentive for them to make the move to a new platform that just offers more of the same? In an interview with Reggie Fils-Aime, the NOA CEO stated that their distinguishing feature will be first-party games, with the rest being left to the developers to provide whatever benefits they feel necessary. Obviously Nintendo's approach is very hands-off when it comes to third-party devs, and the problem is that if they aren't aggressive about getting unique advantages put into their games, then the Wii U may end up no better than its predecessor at getting that audience to take them seriously again. All this is important because, again, there's a timing issue here. Nintendo's got a little bit a lead with releasing new hardware, but the clock is ticking on how long they'll be able to run unopposed before the other big boys get the ball rolling on their next generation. Of course, this announcement might very well put a fire under their asses, and Nintendo won't have very long to win back the true gamers before some much meatier competition lands on their lap.

One small step for gaming, one giant leap for Nintendo

2011-04-14T20:52:00.006-04:00

Rumors are surfacing for the 100th billionth time about Nintendo releasing a Wii successor. I'm not going to call it the "Wii 2" or "Wii HD" because I think those are stupid names, even as temporary standbys. Nintendo only made a direct "sequel" console once when they made the Super NES, and even then, it was not called the "NES 2". Lately they've preferred to come up with original names, but I think it would be cool to put "Nintendo" back into the actual name of the console. It's more iconic, makes more of a statement about who they are, and gives the system more of a impactful presence in the market. It wouldn't be GameCube, Xbox and PS2. It wouldn't be Wii, 360 and PS3. It would be the Nintendo, 360 and PS3. It puts the others in their place, because what other company can claim true leadership of the console market? Nintendo not only is the leader of sold units, they are what started the modern era of consoles. Others can only bow in reverence to their legacy. It would pay homage to the old Nintendo, the one fans used to know and love, and if there's ever been a time to win back their old fans, it's now.

Nintendo hasn't had the greatest track record of third party support since they pissed many of them off with the design of the N64. Since that system, Nintendo's made a name for themselves of putting innovation ahead of all else, choosing to differentiate their products from the rest of the pack at the cost of popularity with the more hardcore crowd. They're not a company to sit complacently with the status norm, and while they invented how consoles are played nowadays, they've all but denounced it, instead swinging into a completely different direction, refusing to play ball in the same court as their competitors. But by effectively "skipping" a generation with the introduction of a revamped GameCube, they have a chance to one-up the competition while they have their pants down, and in turn possibly win back some of the support they've lost.

Right now many gaming enthusiasts are getting antsy about a new console generation. They've always gotten it, like clockwork every five or six years. But this generation is different, and while most consumers and developers are perfectly content with how things are now, others have to contend with a massively extended console cycle. Such a thing rides against the grain of experience, and it's enough to drive many people to rock anxiously in their seats, restlessly waggling their feet while chewing their fingernails to the point of bleeding. The best they'll get this year is new handhelds, which is enough for some, and should make for an exciting and successful new generation of portables. But consoles will continue to languish in excitement for some time to come, and while some ambitious attempts to reinvigorate the current generation have been met with some success, the sense of novelty has long worn off, and now they share familiarity with a pair of visiting hobos overstaying their welcome.

Nintendo can't help but see an opportunity here. What better time to launch a new system than now, when others still have three or four years of growing repetition to look forward to? With the latest rumors, IGN goes so far as to claim performance will leapfrog the PS3 and 360. That's something that isn't too hard to do at this point, and cheaply at that. If they can at least offer marginally better performance, specifically addressing the memory bottleneck of current consoles, they can produce a solid enough improvement to at least entice some of the more cutting-edge developers and get the hardcore crowd energized. Such a thing would do wonders for Nintendo's flagging third-party support, and at the very least get them included amongst the cross-platform mega releases.

You can almost picture the hardware specs. Continuing their relations with former ATI, an AMD Fusion chip would be a cheap and powerful successor over the Wii and even the big boy machines. The latest information pegs a Fusion's integrated graphics at 400 SPs, and even if you knock that down by a couple SIMDs, and cut the quad-core CPU down to two, you still have a low-profile, low-cost solution that trumps the competition and leaves you sitting at least somewhat comfortably when the next generation rolls around, at least more comfortably than the Wii is next to the PS3 and 360. But Nintendo rarely goes the predictable route with hardware, and the question is, do they even want to?

Thing is, Nintendo is making a killing doing things the way they are now. They've taken Gumpei Yokoi's philosophy of "the lateral thinking of withered technology" from the handheld realm into their console business, and it's paid off big for them. Using old technology on consoles allows them to sell their console cheaply, and make money off of them from the first day of launch. It also allows developers to make games cheaply, and by coming up with innovative new ways to play on that old technology, they've attracted non-gamers as well, expanding their sales range outside of previous boundaries, beyond what is achievable on traditional consoles. And the future of high-tech consoles isn't too terribly bright either. Sales of this generation of HD consoles has been drastically slower than the previous generation, and promises to be even slower the next generation as the visual difference between them diminishes.

Now that 2005-level graphics has been the mainstay for quite some time, following the withered technology thesis, that may be all Nintendo tries to shoot for. While it may disappoint a vocal segment of gamers, what say do those folks have next to the enormous pool of mainstream consumers out there that pour in the real revenue? Sad as it is for the more serious gamers out there, Nintendo has no incentive to answer to them anymore. In many ways, a lot of people feel abandoned by them, and those are the sort of people that now align themselves with the 360 and PS3. While at one time, they considered Nintendo a mighty and omnipotent force in gaming, with every new release heralding a new era of greatness, they now consider themselves driven away -- an afterthought and irrelevant in the business strategy of their once beloved company.

The latest gaming platforms from Nintendo have seen a huge disproportion of great games to utterly shitty ones. Developers will release whatever they can pick loose from the scraggly hairs of their unwashed asscracks, and Nintendo's once formidable Seal of Quality no longer has any bearing on what it constitutes as subjective thresholds of acceptability. While most companies might stop and think "Can we really sustain ourselves for very long on an overt plethora of mediocrity and crap?" Nintendo has long since left behind considerations of consumer perception and self-image. This is a drastic philosophical switch from their humble beginnings when they limited developers to five games a year, and imposed strict guidelines for how games should be, just to ensure that what caused the videogame market crash of the 80s couldn't happen to them. It wasn't companies pushing the technological envelope that nearly killed the industry, it was the sheer avalanche of horrible games. Unfortunately if that's truly the belief of the executives behind Nintendo, then it will take more than a platform change to turn them around.

Still, a new Nintendo console is inevitable, and when all is said and done, Nintendo still makes some incredibly acclaimed games. Their franchises are some of the very few that not only withstood the 2D to 3D transition, they reveled in it, and are some of the longest running successes in the industry. When you look at all the once-loved franchises that toppled out from greatness only to be forgotten or even scoffed at, it really puts it into perspective for what an achievement Nintendo has made here, and the kind of true prowess they still possess all these years later. For many, it may be enough to finally see those franchises in glorious HD with all the bells and whistles of modernity, and certainly it would be enough to propel them into another success. Many are shuddering nervously at the thought of what strange concoction of outside-the-box thinking they've incorporated this time. But as any system advances, so must its games, and that might mean more contemporary standards of gameplay than the family-friendly deluge that we've become accustomed to. Whenever it happens, here's hoping, at least.

WiiDS

2011-03-30T22:09:00.004-04:00

So the 3DS is upon us, and I'd be remiss if I didn't make a post on it. After all, I espoused my enthusiasm for it some time ago and have written at length on the handheld market in general. I intend to do a great deal more writing on the subject in the future too, and that includes this.

I was excited about the 3DS. Reading through the first rambling I wrote about it, it sounds like a rabid Nintendo fanboy extolling the virtues of an infallible portable gaming monarch. Having enough time to let the heat leave the room, and now able to hold the system itself in my hand, I can approach the subject with a little more temperament this time around. The 3DS will be a great system, but it won't be perfect.

Part of the reality check comes in the form of the PSP2. Sony did a lot to steal Nintendo's thunder, at least among those who keep up with such things, and once we were yanked back down to Earth from our lofty euphoria among the clouds, we as a community of handheld gamers had a chance to really study the thing, drawing perspective and criticism in the sense of a discerning observer. Soon our analysis brought about comparisons between the 3DS and the original PSP, realizing that many games exhibit similar graphical prowess, along with the single analog pad and short battery life, and some were even predicting the untimely failure of the device, few in number as they were.

Nobody in their right mind will claim a Nintendo handheld's success to be anything but extraordinary, and even the PSP's level of sales wouldn't paint the system as a failure from the right perspective. Some have pointed out that the PSP has sold more than either "next-gen" consoles, and ranks among the top several bestselling game systems of all time. On top of that, the 3DS follows on Nintendo's most successful handheld to date, and the second bestselling gaming platform ever. It's destined to be a blockbuster.

My second article on handhelds was decidedly less cheery on the prospect of the 3DS, in fact it seems to swing the tonal pendulum in the opposite direction. In a nutshell, the 3DS has its limitations, and the PSP2 has very few. If they're at all similar in price, it could work to the 3DS's disadvantage, and Sony isn't afraid to take a revenue hit for long-term success. Battery life has become one of the biggest complaints about the 3DS since its debut, and there's a fair share of quirks and defective systems dirtying its fledgling reputation. Many of those can be chalked up to early production woes, and the fact is that by and large, the system is blowing away expectations in the key area that the system is banking the most on.

Nintendo didn't give it the name 3DS for shits and giggles, and after having seen the system itself in action, many people are finding the effectiveness of its screen astounding. Demoing is crucial to the 3DS's appeal, and as such its success depends more on word-of-mouth and first-hand experience than any other factor. Nintendo has experience using this technique to sell past systems, letting the hardware speak for itself rather than having the marketing do it for them. It's a powerful asset, leading to the two most successful game platforms in the company's history. After seeing it for myself, my attitudes on the 3D have changed somewhat. Really my attitudes have changed a lot, going from curious and interested, to lamenting it as misguided and possibly detrimental, to now being wholeheartedly supportive. I'm officially sold on the 3D, and I now understand why Nintendo bet so heavily on it, setting aside graphical performance and battery life on what on the surface may appear to be a cheap ploy. 3D is what distinguishes the 3DS, it defines it. Without it, the system is just another portable gaming device, hardly different from the PSP or modern smartphones. It's what makes the system more than a simple successor to the DS, and it's what generates excitement. It doesn't matter how primitive the graphics may be, because they're real. It's like objects in a window that you could reach out and touch. It makes the visuals that are there substantial, like they have more weight to them, more immersion despite the lack of technical realism. Other system's graphics may be more advanced, more detailed and convincingly shaded, but how can advanced graphics compare to graphics that are real?

That becomes a question the PSP2 will have to deal with. Going from a 3DS to any other handheld will make you envious of 3D visuals. As good as PSP2 games are going to look, you will play them wishing they were in 3D, and the 3DS does a good job of convincing you that everything, not just games, but movies, television, and all the displays that bring them to you should have 3D, as effortless and beautiful as the 3DS provides it. Not having glasses effectively takes 3D out of the realm of cumbersome and awkward experimentation into that of convenience, practicality, and yes, necessity.

We can't presume on the success of the 3DS however. The PSP2 is going to split the market like no handheld has done before. The past is no indication of the future either, because while the PSP may have been geared to the hardcore gaming base, I don't think it effectively tapped it. The PSP2, with its true-blue dual analog controls, is destined to do hardcore games more justice than a handheld has ever managed in the past, and already it's generated interest from those who have sworn off its predecessor entirely. Graphically the 3DS is like a portable Wii, and the third system Nintendo's released on that visual level, seemingly indicating a funk they seem unable to break through. The PSP2 will be an entire generation beyond it technologically, and well ahead of other mobile devices for some time. 3D, however, will be seen in smartphones as early as this year, and as a feature has a very short time-frame of exclusivity in Nintendo's court. That may only serve to popularize the idea of 3D and spur on preference of their system over Sony's, and it remains to be seen if the PSP2 missed the boat in that regard. But until viewing angles and battery life improve, not to mention some solid drops in price, the 3DS won't convince mainstream consumers that it should deserve the same reception the DS received. While a year's head start will help Nintendo in raw proliferation, they still need some damn games.

iPad redux

2011-03-12T19:39:00.005-05:00

When the first iPad came about, I like much of the internet media and public rejected the idea as derivative and superfluous. I didn't see the market for an oversized iPod Touch, and didn't see Apple putting much thought into the design other than to say "it's magic". Well I like many others were dead wrong, and the thing sold like crack candy. I should know better than to doubt the success of an Apple-branded consumer device. But really, as little effort as Apple put into it, they touched on the desire for tablet computers way before anyone else, and because they were Apple, people flocked to it, eager to get a hold of the new form factor. Sometimes good timing is all you need.

So in the wake of an onslaught of competing tablets bursting at the seams for a release, we have the iPad 2, destined to continue the success of the original, again with very little effort. It's the first iPad, but with a thinner enclosure and faster hardware, and the cameras finally glued in place. In a nod to Moore's Law, it debuts at the same price of the predecessor, and from that perspective you can say they're at least not gouging people on it. But the reality is Apple's up to their old tricks of arrogance with a pinch of innovation, except in the case of the tablet market, their only selling point is that they came first. That helps them win the popularity contest, but things are going to become a great deal more cutthroat in a short amount of time.

As I said a couple months back, the tablet market is the wild west of computing all over again, with more competitors than ever experienced in the industry since the dawning days of personal computers. Literally anyone can make a tablet. The idea behind them is simple, the hardware is widely available, and the software being prepped for them is second to none. Probably the worst competitor Apple could ask for is Google, as their aggressive tactics are nearly peerless, and their ambition knows no bounds. Honeycomb is shaping up to be the OS to beat in the tablet space, and analogous with the PC market, their only real competitor is stuck on one set of hardware. That leaves all other hardware makers free to flood the market with Android 3.0 products, and a battle of attrition ensues from there.

Worse yet, iOS can't even claim superiority in any way shape or form. Flash support continues to be a problem, and yet the usability of the OS itself is already starting to feel dated. Google has taken great strides to utilize the tablet touch interface to the utmost efficiency. There's still a ways to go in this before we reach the ideal, but already we're seeing much better task switching and multitasking, functional Widgets, an unparalleled web browser, and a cleaner UI with a notification bar, custom app list views, and much greater customization. Google knows that they're a year behind, so they can't hold back any on features. The foundation is set for a very approachable and yet very powerful user experience that will take tablet computing to the next level, and frankly, Apple can't afford to be sitting on their laurels.

Then you have the hardware. That's the biggest change in the iPad 2, and yet, still very underwhelming. As far as core components go, iPad 2 has a good thing going. Its A5 chip is undoubtedly more than competitive enough with Tegra 2 and similar SoCs, and RAM and storage are fine too (keep in mind that while they use different OSes, memory usage is still largely dependent on web browsing, not the OS). However, external features still lag behind. The screen resolution is unchanged from the original, which hurts when competitors are bragging about full 720p support. We still do not have USB support, and we still cannot expand the storage with flash cards. The long-awaited cameras are a throwaway feature, decidedly last-gen in quality next to everyone else's.

So what are you left with? A new iPad that still has most of the problems of the old one, and is essentially more of the same. But for some, that may be just fine. Not a lot of tablet users are very discerning about such details, and that's the great thing about tablets, because they're open to users of any technical level. The main point for most people is to just be easy to use, comfortable, and convenient. Both iPads certainly deliver on that front, which has made them the success that they are. The new iPad simply increases some of the functionality, in rare cases where normal usage was hindered by performance, or when someone had the urge to do video chat. Certainly it's an easy upgrade choice for fans of the original, because there's really nothing dramatically different or disadvantageous about the new device. On the OS side, some people might prefer more of the same, so there isn't anything to relearn.

On the other hand, what would anyone lose by having a USB port, or an SD card slot? What customers would be driven away by a higher resolution screen? How might Apple harm the market appeal of the iPad 2 by adding exponentially more features instead of just a handful of them? I argue that it might actually hurt them more in the long run, as the market continues to intensify with new product introductions.

But competitors can't be lazy, either. Most of them already missed the window by a year, thanks largely in part to the prolonged gestation period of Honeycomb, but also because of timidness in approaching a new computing segment. Few people could break the ice as well as Apple, and it's perhaps fitting that they did, but now the water's warmed quite a bit, and it's already time for others to jump in. But on that token, they have to be products that really make a compelling purchase choice for consumers, as the cookie-cutter derivative behavior we see in other markets like netbooks won't necessarily cut it if they hope to make a big splash. Internal hardware is already showing plenty of variety, and hopefully external features show some individuality as well. Rush your product out the door too quickly though, and you might end up like the ViewSonic G Tablet.

At the same time, they have to compete with Apple's entrenched footing in the market, not just with the userbase, but with software. The iPad is leveraging not just the software offerings tailor-made for the platform in the past year, but others originally designed for smaller iOS devices going back much further. This is an extremely mature software market, and Apple itself is a big contributor to this. The productivity software being shown at the iPad 2 launch is the sort of stuff Android users wish to see on their platform, and can only hope the support ramps up fast enough that they don't have wait long for it. This is one of the few ways Apple tries to distinguish the iPad from the iPod Touch and iPhone, and it's done much to demonstrate how simply having a larger, higher resolution screen can grant you greater functionality than some might have anticipated. And this software advantage doesn't just stop there. One of the biggest types of software to benefit from Apple's extended presence is games.

Gaming is a particularly sensitive subject to most Android tablets, seeing as most of them are Tegra 2 powered. NVIDIA would like nothing less than to be the king of tablet gaming, and they feel their developer relations and general know-how give them the edge they need to eventually do so. But software is one of the areas most affected by having a head-start lead in the hardware field, and by having that head-start well in hand, Apple may have already secured their gaming dominance into the foreseeable future. One of the big contributors to this is the GPU used in the iPad 2.

Arguably Tegra's big claim to fame is the GeForce GPU. Utilizing trickle-down R&D from the latest and greatest of NVIDIA's graphics technology, the GeForce in use in the Tegra 2 sports some highly power efficient designs in an immediate mode rendering engine that boasts some very decent performance. But in the ultra-mobile space, absolute power is not really in contention, since at this level of performance, there are many viable competitors. That's why the Tegra 2 has a lot to worry about when it comes to PowerVR solutions. The problem with Tegra 2 is that it's available in a limited, set number of versions varying almost solely on clockspeeds. But if you're a device maker and you have the luxury of customizing your SoC, you have the option of choosing a different GPU, with completely different performance characteristics. At the moment, Imagination Technologies' best GPU offering, the SGX543, can be scaled from a single core (4-shader core) version all the way up to 16 cores. Even going with something conservative like two cores nets you quite a bit of gain over the Tegra 2's GeForce ULV, and that's exactly what the iPad 2 does. Beating NVIDIA at its own game in the desktop and laptop PC markets is no easy task. Beating them in the SoC space turns out to be much easier, and that coupled with the software support spells all sorts of trouble for NVIDIA's gaming aspirations in the tablet market.

Like it or not, the iPad line is here to stay. With few features to call its own, the most people can say about it is that it's available, it's not really expensive, and it works just fine. Sometimes good timing's all you need, but solid execution helps a lot too. Now if they hope to keep up that momentum, that will take some real magic.

PSP Too

2011-01-29T16:40:00.006-05:00

When I gushed about the 3DS earlier this month, talking about how it will probably be the best handheld Nintendo's ever made, and how some of the innovations within it were 'huge', I had no idea Sony would be announcing their Next Generation Portable so soon after. Yes, January just wasn't crazy enough with new announcements and developments, between 50,000 tablets shown off, most with Tegra 2, NVIDIA's Project Denver, Windows 8's ARM support, AMD's CEO leaving, NVIDIA and Intel's settlement, Sandy Bridge's launch, OCZ leaving the RAM market, new cellphones, gaming news, and tons and tons of other shit too numerous to be counted...no, we had to close this phenomenal month with the friggin PSP2 unveiling.

This was one of the first unveils I was actually present for (online at least) when it happened live, and let me tell you, it's pretty exciting to be there right when something like that occurs. Technically the name hasn't been finalized yet, instead referred to as the NGP by most circles, but I refuse to use that, preferring the more universally recognized acronym. Rumors leading up to the PSP2's announcement really started several years ago, but as these things tend to do, the accuracy much improved as time approached the supposed due date. Just a couple days before the announcement, a spec list showed up with some pretty ridiculous suggestions, but it turns out, almost all of it has been shown to be true. The PSP2 is pretty much a gadget fan's wishlist brought to life.

While a lot of it is what most people expected, some of it is actually pretty creative and interesting. In fact Sony's been showing some pretty unique, almost Nintendo-like innovation, along with an increasingly open attitude towards gaming. Sure, there's the whole Other OS fiasco, which has now lead to Sony suing a hacker, mostly serving just to fuel a fire of bad PR for themselves, but aside from that, things like Sony adding Steam support for the PS3, and PlayStation Suite show that they're not as restricting as some companies with how they let people play their games. The Steam support is nice mainly for people who like Valve games and don't want to pay for downloadable game updates, along with some nifty cross-platform PC-to-PS3 interoperability. But PlayStation Suite caught me off guard. Essentially Sony's allowing many of the games that were only purchasable through their PSN store, to now be purchased on any Android Gingerbread (and presumably newer) smartphones. This a big deal for a company primarily making their business on Sony-branded hardware. While their secret-to-everybody PlayStation Phone has yet to be made official, it's nice to know Sony won't be limiting gaming access to their own Ericsson brand. Instead the main selling point for the PSPhone, or Xperia Play, will be a gaming-native button layout, leaving the choice to consumers if they want to play games with an emulated touch interface, or a more ideal control scheme. I think Sony knows that with all the cellphone games out there, they can't pull consumers on the merits of their Suite portfolio alone, so I think this will prove to be a positive move for them.

A lot of what you see in the PSP2 admittedly comes off as a "me too!" response to the 3DS. The PSP2 has two built-in cameras, it has an internal gyroscope, and hell it even uses flash ROM for games, making it the first cartridge-based Sony gaming system. But the biggest "me too" feature is touch. Granted, it's probably more a response to smartphones than the 3DS, certainly in regards to which it most resembles. The 3DS still uses the now archaic resistive touch technique, being less finger-friendly and generally necessitating the use of a stylus, while only accepting one touch input at a time. Sony's multi-touch capacitive surface is much more up with the times, as is pretty much everything else about the PSP2, but they take it one step further by putting another touch surface on the back of the device. This is an intriguing inclusion to say the least, and has led to some really innovative ideas on display at their press conference. Sony probably realizes they've got to differentiate their portable with more than just great specs and Sony-exclusive game franchises. It's a bit of a risky move, but not quite up there with some of Nintendo's oddball designs.

No one can argue it's not a beast though. It's got not one, but four of ARM's top-of-the-line processors, when other companies are only now just thinking about quad-core mobile devices. They've taken the same approach to their graphics, packing a four-core version of the fastest embedded GPU Imagine Technologies offers. The best part is, these parts are using standard API protocols. It's more a symptom of the current hardware ecosystem than a conscious decision on Sony's behalf, in that the best performing parts are only going to come in the ARM/OpenGL ES-compliant variety, but Sony finally has a system that is truly easy to program for, and it shows. The press conference was full of demos claiming to have only taken a couple weeks to create, and in the case of MGS, were able to be ported straight off of the PS3 version.

The sheer power of the device has garnered it the designation of "almost PS3 level graphics", which may or may not be an accurate description, but there's no doubt that this system follows along the same lines of its predecessor, sitting just under the big console of the time. Many are talking up the possibility of cross-platform games being similar enough that you'd essentially be getting the same experience, even able to carry your saves across systems, or play multiplayer games between them. It opens a lot of questions about such ideas, and also others that are less rosy. If the PSP2 shares so much of the experience with home consoles, what will make it stand out? What's the incentive, besides taking that experience on the go? This may be why Sony chose not to include TV-out functionality, and while some may lament that fact, there's no doubt the built-in OLED screen is going to be one of the best viewing experiences possible for any gaming device, beyond that of current commercial televisions, still limited to conventional LCD or plasma technologies in the near future. Sony certainly built the PSP2 to withstand the test of time, but did they build it to stand up in the market?

Many will argue this is a continuation on the misguided direction Sony took with the original PSP, leading to a fairly mediocre percentage of the portable gaming market next to the DS. Debates rage on about which will be the dominant portable of the future, with many stating that the PSP2 really doesn't have a chance for the same reason the PSP didn't. But let's analyze that for a bit. Is this really a second take on the same exact situation from the last generation? There were many reasons the DS was such a success, and why it had practical and competitive advantages over the PSP, and there are many reasons why those advantages don't apply this time around.

First of all, the DS was cheap. At $149, it was a lot more attractive to mainstream consumers than Sony's $249 handheld. This price advantage would only increase over time, as Nintendo continually dropped the cost of the DS, and Sony did very little to reciprocate. The DS also had a more sturdy design, with much longer battery life, and all the colorful Nintendo games you'd expect on the system. All these factors added up to one key selling advantage: parents. The DS was the choice for young children, and much like the Wii, even had a lot of productivity software that made it appealing to non-gamers as well. This was spurred on by another key advantage.

The touchscreen. Of course, it was more than the touchscreen, it was the fact that it had a second screen to go along with it, and pure digital controls and limited 3D capabilities that made traditional games less appealing to produce on the system. This fostered a lot of experimental game experiences on the system, more out of necessity than anything. Sony was much more about console-like experiences, with very little to distinguish their games from PS2 ones.

The last reason was the game medium. Sony failed at this twice with the PSP. Of course everyone knows about the infamous UMD format. It was loud, it was slow, and it sucked for portable gaming. Sony has experience in using optical discs as leverage over their competitors, but the PSP was a hard-learned lesson in why not all truths are universal. To address this fault, they attempted to go with an even more forward-looking game delivery system with the use of digital distribution. But with less overall features than the first PSP iterations, and a price that wasn't lessened, the PSP Go didn't take off with consumers. Flash ROM carts were cheap, small, and quick to load games off of. In short, the perfect portable medium.

That's probably why Sony sucked it up and chose flash carts for their next generation portable. In fact, if you look at all the above points, you'll notice that none of them really apply anymore. The PSP2 may still be powerful, and still may provide console-like game experiences, but in many ways, so will the 3DS now. The DS hit a unique niche with its limitations that I don't think Nintendo will really be able to duplicate again. The 3DS now has very capable 3D graphics and an analog nub that more firmly grounds it in traditional gameplay. The 3D screen may not even pay off for them, possibly limiting its appeal further instead, especially in the long term. With the touch surfaces on the PSP2, there emerges the possibility for innovation just as unique as Nintendo has enjoyed, and we're already seeing it in games like Little Deviants. They're both going to dip their toes in augmented reality games, and since the 3DS is no longer cheap, neither system is really going to appeal to mainstream consumers. Until the 3DS gets a major price drop, that just leaves the more hardcore gamers, and with the second analog stick, the PSP2 has a much better chance at finally delivering the full-fledged gaming experiences first attempted, but poorly executed on its older siblings that those kinds of gamers look for. Battery life on either system won't likely be very satisfying, and lightweight games might actually be better served on the PSP2, where multi-touch iPhone ports will align well with its capabilities.

In essence, the PSP2 has more of a competitive chance than the PSP did not wholly because of the changes made to it this time around, but because of the changes made to the 3DS. The DS stands a good chance of enjoying an extremely long overlapping existence with the 3DS, with consumers likely unwilling to jump to a system that really has very few of the appealing niche qualities of the forebear. In fact, Nintendo's greatest competition, especially during this first initial year, will be with itself. When the PSP2 comes around, its uptake will undoubtedly be slow, but with few factors holding it back, we might just see for the first time Nintendo being usurped as absolute market leader. I'm not saying I anticipate writing the 3DS's obituary some time in the future, because I can't imagine it not becoming a huge success. But if Nintendo isn't feeling worried about the potential threat that lies ahead, maybe they should.

Sandy Meh

2011-01-25T21:56:00.003-05:00

As expected, Sandy Bridge launched this month, among a flurry of revelatory announcements, news, and rumors within various areas of the tech industry. Sandy Bridge's launch is preceded by much expectation, amidst a string of products made in recent years by a company known for delivering on such expectations. In many ways Sandy Bridge continues on that legacy, but in many ways, it's largely forgettable, certainly the most forgettable since the Core 2 generation first launched.

As a new generation, you expect new features and a new architecture to be introduced, much like the Core 2 was a complete change in philosophy from the Pentium 4, and the first-gen Core i7 was a complete change in cache memory hierarchy, and the first to bring the northbridge on die for a consumer Intel chip. So what does Sandy Bridge bring? Improved IGP and an integrated video encoder. Granted, there are a lot more low-level stuff, but none of them are really revolutionary like the last two generations, and as far as the end-user is concerned, there isn't a whole lot of new stuff to be had. Of course, at some point you have to expect the advances to slow down. There were a lot of big-ticket items Intel needed to get out of the way in the move away from P4, and in the competition against AMD. AMD rarely had the performance crown, but there were plenty of enviable innovations under their heatspreaders, and for the most part, Intel's been spending the last four years copying those ideas while also making them perform at a benchmark level.

But now even speed is starting to get less attention. Intel's made huge strides in IPC, more than most people expected they could, but even with the benefit of a die shrink, it looks like the aces are beginning to dwindle from underneath Intel's sleeves, as the burden grows heavier on the need for parallelism to bring about the next strides in performance. To that end, Intel's got a couple of nifty additions. The first is a very fast 256-bit AVX vector engine, and the second is the aforementioned video encoder.

The video encoder is an interesting addition, and one not entirely expected. It's obvious Intel's beginning to feel the squeeze from GPGPU progression, or rather, they felt the squeeze some years ago when they were still formulating Sandy Bridge. It's not hard to foresee the growing desire to move such a parallel load to a chip that is best suited for such program types, and a CPU's core count can't hope to catch up to all the little stream processors comprising a GPU. So a little stop-gap measure is needed, and what you see is Intel installing a fixed-function vector unit specifically to address this concern. The good news is this stop-gap measure is a damn fast one, and it can produce some good results. The bad news is, just like CUDA and OpenCL and any other co-processor initiative, it requires new programs to be written to take advantage of it. The other problem is that the video encoder, because it is fixed-function, while efficient from a transistor standpoint, won't be able to support codecs beyond what was already considered in its design. Intel is hoping to leverage their software developer ties to get Multi-Format Codec (MFX) support, but while performance is great, the inflexibility will be less appealing compared to OpenCL solutions, especially when NVIDIA's future chips require less intervention from the CPU to impede on the performance picture.

The other appealing feature for consumers, at least the enthusiasts among them, is the overclocking capabilities. New for this generation is K-branded CPU models that sport unlocked clockspeed multipliers for a little extra money, a feature AMD users have been familiar with for some time now. While in many other areas Intel has done a lot to try to constrict overclocking ability in their products, this is the first time Intel has really embraced the idea, and it's already looking to be a very popular move on their part. No longer limited by FSB constraints, tinkerers are free to explore the furthest boundaries of their CPU's capabilities, and the results have been some very impressive breakthroughs on the existing barriers of air-cooled clockspeeds. I remember when 4GHz was a strain on even Vapochill-equipped systems. These days, it's just a starting point.

Even still, clock-for-clock, little has changed compared to Nehalem, and it's evident even in the name they chose for the new line of CPUs, sticking with the tried-and-true "i7" (and lower numerations) branding. In many ways this doesn't even feel like a new generation, as the first 32nm processors came about with little more than a whimper, mostly focused on the mobile side of things. Notice most people are still using the "Sandy Bridge" distinction, even though codenames usually die out after the product's release. Add to that, Intel still insists on their bombardment of new sockets and chipsets to go with every CPU iteration, so if you want to adopt the new family, you'll have to also befriend its uglier companion platform.

AMD has always been better about this, allowing lots of overlap of their new socket introductions, even across new memory standards. They won't get any advantages though when Bulldozer arrives, as you'll still have to upgrade your motherboard then, and if you're still on DDR2 which a lot of folks are, you'll have to upgrade that as well, whether there are tangible benefits to it or not. The notion of choosing an upgrade path becomes more ambiguous then, if you're not in a big hurry to improve your system performance. If you need the performance sooner rather than later, you'll doubtlessly be happy with a Sandy Bridge setup. If you're otherwise pretty well happy with what you have, and only want the speedups for more extreme demands, either wait until the next-next generation, or see what Bulldozer brings to the table. The architectures are looking strikingly similar between the two, with physical register files, macro-op fusion, and multi-threaded cores, and with AMD bringing back the FX moniker, it may mean a return to form for AMD's performance prospects, or at least, reason enough to wait it out and see, if you can.

Intel also more than doubled the IGP performance, but this is a moot point on the onset of the AMD's Llano release. If there's anything worthwhile to note about the improved graphics capabilities, it's the implication that Intel is finally taking that aspect more seriously, in hopes of bringing up the minimum graphics performance of their solutions to a level approaching acceptable. This is probably spurred by the same reasoning behind their video encode engine, and that is the threat of an AMD equipped with a mighty GPU powerhouse behind them. If AMD can eventually achieve the widespread proliferation of Fusion chips in the market, that will be a huge boom for their platforms in the OEM space, moreso if OpenCL applications ever take off. Intel isn't likely to ever catch up to AMD's IGPs, but the last thing they want is to look completely stupid sitting next to them, and an improved HD graphics component will at least help to save face.

Really, it looks more like Sandy Bridge is just the dip of a toe in the next-gen waters, waiting to see what the ripples stir up in the other camp. When Bulldozer hits, Intel can move in with their hexa-core and eventually octo-core parts, sufficiently effecting a counter-blow that will restore them the performance crown, if that's even in contention. It may even be as simple as a clockspeed bump, but either way signs point to a more apprehensive Intel than in the past couple go-rounds, and a much more competitive AMD. Here's hoping for the best.

ARMed for a Revolution

2011-01-11T16:51:00.005-05:00

Back in 2009 I first wrote about ARM in a rambling I titled ARM's Ascension in which I talked about the rising aspirations and potential of ARM processors in the general computing field. A lot of what I said still rings true, and a lot of what seemed apparent in the future of the market back then is now known to not be true anymore. Smartbooks were prototyped many times, but never made it into shipping products. Instead what happened was the iPad.

iPad ended up doing exactly what many other Apple products have done in the past. When Apple entered the portable media player market, it flourished. When they entered the smartphone market, it flourished. Now that they've entered the tablet market, or maybe better said, initialized the tablet market, that market is set to flourish also. At the forefront of this new emerging form factor is ARM. No matter what SoC your product is using, be it Apple A4, Qualcomm Snapdragon, Samsung Hummingbird, or NVIDIA Tegra 2, ARM lies in the center of it. From the get-go it seems ARM has an iron grip on the market, leaving competitors, namely Intel, with a cliff face of an uphill climb if they want in on it.

The problem with Intel is that they're acting complacent, even arrogant, towards the emerging ultra portable trends. Atom was a good initial first step in that direction, with the ultimate goal being smartphones, but Intel failed to execute on their own plan to put that into motion. In essence, the crux of the success of Atom rested on Intel's superior manufacturing advances. Intel was a generation ahead of their nearest competitors on process size, and Atom would have been a great testing ground for their 32nm process launched a year ago. Instead Atom is still stuck on the two year old (plus) 45nm process, allowing competitors like ARM and AMD free reign on low-power alternatives built on more efficient technology. This complacency is what drove Microsoft to announce the biggest shift in direction for Windows since its inception.

For over 20 years, Windows was built off of the basis of x86 architectures. This was initially necessitated by the original foundation on which it was built off of, MS-DOS. In the span of Windows' existence, several offshoots of the core desktop and professional products have been spun for smaller, chiefly embedded devices, but those were almost always underdog products in a world that was dominated by proprietary solutions. The latest offshoot, Windows Phone 7, has seen mild success, but rather than enhance that OS and port it over to larger devices, Microsoft wanted to spread the reach of their bigger, mainstay OS into smaller devices. Teaming up with Intel, Microsoft was able to keep Linux at bay in the netbook market, and no doubt the plan was to continue riding Atom's coattails into smaller form factors as Intel continued to refine and slim its power characteristics. That did not happen. Instead Intel got, for lack of better reasoning, lazy, and Microsoft seemingly got fed up waiting. So they announced Windows 8's support for ARM processors.

This is huge. First of all it breaks the public perception of the alliance Intel and Microsoft have always had. Secondly it takes away one of the key advantages of Intel going into smaller form factors. Without being able to keep Windows all to themeselves, Intel can't tout the advantage of industry standard x86 support, primarily in regards to one of the biggest pieces of x86 software there is. Windows tablets with Intel and x86 will still exist, but their claim to fame will be PC software compatibility at the cost of ARM-type power efficiency and battery life. Arguably x86 compatibility doesn't mean much in ultra-portable devices, and even Intel will be quick to point out their support for Linux type lightweight OSes, such as Moblin. Additionally, though the possibility does remain slim, there is the remote chance that Google could announce x86 support for Android, effectively nullifying whatever blow to the company Microsoft's announcement may have had. But of course, Google seems perfectly content where they're at, and looks to be shaping up to be the OS provider of choice for smartphones and tablets not branded with pomaceous fruit.

In fact it's been confirmed that Google's platform of choice is one ARM solution in particular, NVIDIA's Tegra 2. NVIDIA's been getting a lot of good press lately, raising hope for their future and (not inconsequently) causing their stock price to shoot up. Biggest among them is Project Denver, an actual enthusiast, high-performance ARM processor. That alone would have been pretty neat, but coupled with Microsoft's timely revealed support for it, gives the prospect an incredibly tantalizing appeal. There's almost enough just in that one nugget to dedicate a whole rambling to, but there's tons of nuggets to digest this month, so I'll just say that while the notion is extremely interesting, NVIDIA will have a struggle getting not only the performance in place, but the software support (remember how well CUDA went?), and even if either of those factors are squared away, they still have to somehow differentiate their product enough to sell not just gamers this time, but average consumers on its potential. And since I've mentioned gaming, how will their graphics cards work with this new CPU? Will they come with PCIe slots, or will it exclusively work off of integrated graphics on the processor itself? And furthermore, without legacy PC game support, or presumably game support from future big-budget franchises, how will they justify their graphics performance advantage that has been the bread and butter of the company since its founding? Will they simply port Android games made for Tegra 2? Tons of questions loom over this announcement, more than we have answers for, and only time will reveal what those are.

The software question extends not just to games but in general. ARM has always been eyeing the specter of bigger PCs, only daring to dream the dream in recent years as their processors have been catching up to entry level laptop computers (read: netbooks). ARM finally has a backer willing to realize that dream in NVIDIA, but will the much-touted advantages of ARM's efficiency carry over into larger systems where transistor counts and razer thin power envelopes aren't such a concern? While the idea is fascinating, Intel's ironclad hold on the desktops and full-sized laptops seems impenetrable, not only in regards to the install base but also in the sheer vastness of the software support, with few consumers likely willing to move away from it, probably the most staunch of whom are the enthusiasts themselves. Average Joes may not care what kind of system they play their blu-ray movies on, but tech savvy users might have a whole catalog of applications that they've grown accustomed to over the years. It's a fun dream to ponder over, but for now ARM probably doesn't hold out much hope beyond the ultra-mobile stronghold they've already established.

An ultra-mobile market that's still very much evolving, I might add. When netbooks first came out, there was a lot of experimentation before they eventually settled on the 10" form factor (with some deviations into 12" sizes). This was chosen for the readability of the screen, as well as the size of the keyboard. Whatever device you're using, a key requirement is the ability to comfortably type. Tablets are riding on the expertise gathered from the netbook market, but as it is, they're fairly awkward devices to use. Just browsing is generally fine, but if you have to type out something relatively lengthy, you'll have a hard time finding a comfortable seating position. It either has to lay flat on your lap, or flat on a table, either way placing the screen at a somewhat extreme angle, either necessitating an IPS panel type, or straining your neck. Holding the device while typing isn't a very pleasing option, because you're either stuck typing one-handed, or trying to use your thumbs, for which most tablets are too wide. 7" tablets are a small majority of the upcoming offerings, and are only really good for thumb typing. But then 7" tablets are too bulky to carry around everywhere you go, neither fitting in your pocket or sitting very comfortably at your hip with a belt holster. So you're stuck using it at home, which seems kinda pointless with such a small screen given all the alternatives you'll likely have available. Smartphones are great for providing the full web experience everywhere you go, but they're not quite the decent computing experience that full on 10" tablets can provide. Given that both smartphones and tablets use identical hardware, and overlap a great deal in functionality, its seems inevitable that they must eventually meet somewhere in the middle. I'd wager something between 5 and 6 inches might be the future. Alternatively, ideas are being tried to plug smartphones into docking stations resembling netbooks, with the possibility of connecting them to full-sized desktop monitors and peripherals some time down the road.

Certainly there will be a lot of companies engaging in some heated competition in this new market, moreso than any other computing field in recent memory. Cell phone makers in particular are entering the market, understandably so given the similarities between tablets and the field they already know. In addition to that, new players like PixelQi, Pandigital, and ViewSonic who only made Atom PCs before, are rising to the call of a super ergonomic computer. Such competition will evolve the new form factor probably faster than any other type of device. It's the wild west of computing again, like in the 80s when standards were being written and everyone was vying for authorship of it. We're not even bound by x86 anymore, and for the first time in decades the fundamentals of computing are being contested, and ARM is poised to lead that revolution. It's exciting to be a technology enthusiast again, and if you're not feeling it too, well then there must be something wrong with you.

Into another dimension

2011-01-02T23:00:00.005-05:00

How do you like the new décor? Nifty eh?

It's 2011, and everyone's getting ready for one of the most awesome years in years to hit them in the face. As a PC gamer, I'm looking forward to things like Rage, Crysis 2, and lest I forget....fuckin Duke Nukem Forever. But the biggest gaming event this year in my book is outside the PC space. It's the 3DS.

Handhelds in general hold a special place in my heart. The PSP not so much, not that it's not a good handheld (and hey, anything deserves props for finally managing to stay afloat next to Nintendo, I don't care how big its parent company is). I guess for me, the PSP never shook off that early stigma revolving around a short battery life and noisy annoying disc loading system. But to be fair, I never really followed it, and I suppose it's been holding onto a pretty stout fanbase, probably more to do with hardcore RPGs and system hacking.

Nah I guess I'm more a Nintendo fanboy in this instance. As absurd as it is to even hear myself say it, a handheld just doesn't seem like a handheld unless it's got Mario on it. A Nintendo handheld was my first videogame system, so that probably explains the sentimentality. I was finally awarded a Game Boy Pocket in 3rd grade for earning good grades, back when my friends were sporting Super Nintendos. But that didn't stop me from loving it, and I had at least one really good game on it, which I purchased before I even got the device. Of course I had to go for Mario, in this case Super Mario Land. I'd lay in bed staring at the cartridge, wondering what awesomeness resides inside, and perusing the manual for every little detail I could discern. When the time came to buy the system itself, I had to go with the coolest one there was, Toys R Us' exclusive Extreme Green edition. My friend and I would play it to death, trying to get further than the other one did, and celebrating every new level and new world we achieved.

When the Game Boy Color came out, I was all over that shit, and when I turned on Super Mario Bros. Deluxe for the first time and watched the title screen animate in full brilliant color, I was enthralled. Nintendo knew how to show off their hardware, and yet again, I was detained for many hours on end, soothing the woes of having never owned the original NES (or almost owning, but that's it's own tragic story), and thrilling at every challenge I surpassed. My fondest gaming memories however were still that of playing the Super NES at a friend's house, getting my ass kicked in Super Mario World and Super Mario Kart, but hearing that music and watching those wonderful colorful graphics so ingrained in my memory. I almost had one of those too, and that story was also tragic. Parents may never tell you for sure what you'll get for your birthday, but I held such firm hope one year that it would be my very own slim Super Nintendo, newly released at the time, and I wasn't hearing a firm no at the proposition. The vision of owning it was so dazzling and palpable in my dreams, so entwined in my daily thoughts, and when my birthday arrived, there lay a familiarly-sized box enshrouded in wrapping paper that thinly veiled what I knew it would contain. When the moment finally came, I feverishly ripped at the coverings only to reveal a sickening brown box underneath. Inside was sitting a pair of rollerblades, which I didn't even know how to use.

Growing up, my parents had an almost religious resentment towards the concept of videogames, fearing that it would inescapably trap me in hypnosis, and rob me of what was deemed healthier activities. I could be thankful I had a Game Boy at least, and when news started to hit the grapevine of a successor that would finally advance the hardware past the 8-bit age, I was overjoyed. The possibility of Super Nintendo-like gaming in the palm of my hands was almost enough to instantly launch me into puberty just to spooge my pants. Mario Kart on the Game Boy! It was almost too good to be true! For the first time, I could now save my own money and buy the system myself, on launch day. When Mario Kart finally did come out on the GBA, it was one of the greatest gaming experiences of that entire generation, irrespective of platform.

Then there was the DS. The DS sort of came about mostly to a reception of arched eyebrows. It was a strange thing, definitely not a Game Boy...but then where was the Game Boy? Was this it? Two screens? Touch controls, a microphone, and WiFi? It could either be a really bizarre experiment, or one of the greatest things to happen to handheld gaming. Turns out, it was a little of both. The DS was certainly host to a large assortment of applications that could hardly be called games. It introduced the idea of using gaming devices for more general purpose tasks, and serving audiences not previously acquainted to the premise of gaming. The Wii was a further expansion on this, and on both systems there was a fair share of games that didn't know what they wanted to be, or how to make things work and be fun. Probably half of the games on the DS that were really good and really fun eschewed the funky touch interaction in favor of traditional button controls, mostly benefiting from the new 3D graphics support than any other hardware addition. What made the DS for me was, again, Mario Kart, and one that I still consider to be the best entry in the series. It seemed like when the franchise hit handhelds, it was a match made in heaven, and one destined to remain.

So the 3DS was announced last year, and with it some really unexpected changes. Of course people expected the hardware to get faster, that was a given. People were hoping for an analog stick, and we got that too. But 3D? What? Glasses-less 3D? That could be....awesome! And the more was learned about the future handheld, the more excited I, and I think many others out there became. Videos showed 3D cameras and augmented reality gaming. This was huge! Major online support that surpasses the Wii! Another huge plus! Personally I got really excited when talk went around about the use of NVIDIA's Tegra 2 chipset. Such processing capabilities would have made it one of the most powerful handhelds period, beyond even most smartphones. Of course, as we know now, that wasn't to be. Instead we still get a really interesting option. While its CPU(s) remains a bit of a mystery, we do know it's using a completely new GPU architecture never used in a major consumer device. The PICA200 is a 200MHz, (up to) four rendering pipelined chip with all the features of OpenGL ES 1.1, but some really interesting extensions that bring its capabilities well beyond the standard spec and into a sorta likeness of DirectX9. While that wouldn't mean much on cross-platform smartphone games made for standardized software OSes, on a proprietary gaming device you can bet those extensions will get some serious use. As much as they would have probably had to throttle down the Tegra 2 chip to fit within Nintendo's requirements, it might be safe to assume this little GPU alternative would be very competitive with what NVIDIA had to offer.

And we'll finally have graphics on a Nintendo handheld that's up to the standards of the most cutting-edge mobile devices, and certainly at least on par with that of the PSP. Early screenshots show promise, albiet some inconsistency, but what's more interesting is how good some of the better examples look considering every frame has to be rendered twice for the 3D effect. Thanks to optimizations, it doesn't necessarily mean halving the potential performance, but it does mean a significant hit. Nintendo knows it's a much more competitive landscape than in the past, and the lax hardware specs they're known for won't cut it in the current day market. Not only did the PSP survive the handheld gaming curse, but cellphones (especially iPhones) have emerged as a wholly relevant gaming platform in themselves. More than anything, the 3DS has reached a niche of performance and accessibility that lends itself to more viability for developers of all sizes, and to an openness of gameplay ideas and experimentation not apparent in more sophisticated gaming systems requiring greater expense. Smaller digitally distributed games are home here, and exciting concepts are arising in a field that embraces simpler gaming experiences and purer, distilled expressions of fun. It's not just a more competitive hardware landscape, but a freer, more creatively charged software environment that we frankly need more of these days. The graphics fidelity is still such that we can have an enjoyable visual experience as well for developers able to invest more into it. You could call it a sweet spot in the market, and with added gimmicks like 3D, and a greater focus on gaming than smartphones enjoy, thanks to both first party and big-name third party support, Nintendo is hoping this will give them the edge they need to stay on top.

I preordered the 3DS barely after the point when it first became available to do so. Yeah, I'm really excited about it, and can't wait to see what awaits in its future (Mario Kart), with what looks to be more interesting and possibly more engrossing games that get back to the core of great gameplay (Mario Kart), helped in no small part by the analog stick that should better ground the system in well-implemented controls (Mario Kart), and clearing the fog and confusion that developers had on how to approach games on the original DS, which along with giving greater backend support for online features that will bring both gaming handhelds and Nintendo into the modern era, there's just too much promise not to be giddy about what could be the best handheld Nintendo's ever released (MARIO KART!!!!!!).

Opening a can of...wrist slapping

2010-12-15T03:36:00.006-05:00

I put off writing another rambling in anticipation of the upcoming Caymen GPU release, figuring nothing else was happening in the technology world worth writing about as much. Well, guess what? It released.

And it's about damn time too. About a month delayed (plus a NDA lift postponed a few days), we have the 6900 family, a sub-group of the 6000 order tailoring exclusively to the highend portion of the market. AMD can hardly be faulted for a comparatively minor delay next to NVIDIA's pitfalls, but when all is said and done, this amounts more to a swift kick to the shin than an ass whoopin'.

When the GTX 580 came out about a month ago, many reviews concluded with a teaser about what to expect with AMD's response. HardOCP stated in their review:

If it were possible, we would have compared the GeForce GTX 580 to the new 6900 series GPUs from AMD. Will NVIDIA be able to stay ahead? AMD has been at NVIDIA’s heels very closely this year and certainly has excelled in the performance per watt landscape for a good while. The GeForce GTX 580 surpasses the Radeon HD 5870, but the GTX 580's real competition is going to be the Radeon HD 6900 series, and it is not far off.

Reading statements like that might make you feel like the 6970 may end up being something really special. Certainly a lot of people would love to see AMD compete with NVIDIA on their own turf, especially given NVIDIA's been left with a lot more strategic openings in recent years, while AMD's been on a roll with successful launches. But the 6970 simply doesn't compete with the GTX 580. Many will say that it was never meant to; that's the job of the 6990. I'd counter that by saying that AMD's Crossfire generally sucks, and for the most part so does depending on multi-GPU solutions in general. If you aren't stuck waiting for drivers with updated profiles on new game releases, you're contending with microstuttering issues that make an impressive framerate on paper feel half as good in practice (which, like it or not, is more a bi-product of the technology itself and isn't likely to ever go away). The 6970 does manage to improve upon its 5870 predecessor by around 20% on average, which is a fair gain on the same manufacturing process. It puts it a little over the GTX 480 using a smaller die, which might as well be the final nail in the GF100's coffin. But the GTX 580 still bests it by around 10% (often higher in really GPU-dependent scenarios), which, to be fair, will cost you ~$150 more if you can find one in stock, which seems to be a challenge right now.

The 6970 is at least interesting, though, from the perspective of a technology enthusiast such as myself who's been following the industry for some years, and holds a fascination with the inner-workings on how a piece of computer hardware gets to where it's going. The rumors on the 6800 series that I addressed a couple ramblings back turned out to at least be half true in regards to the 6900 series, where things start to suddenly diverge in terms of architecture. While not a ground-up reworking of the engine, things have been tweaked on a fundamental level for the first time since the Xbox 360's Xenos GPU was developed, in order to make them more efficient (and in many ways, closer to NVIDIA). It would have been nice to have a separate shader clock, but that may be asking too much anyway. What we do have is the VLIW4 layout that narrows down the width of the shaders in favor of more threads and symmetrical SP units. The actual gains of such a change simply aren't going to be night and day, as in the case of the 5870 vs the 6970, you're able to process 320 threads compared to 384 respectively. Not a huge increase, but addressing the abysmal utilization of the R600 shader architecture to any degree is desperately important.

On top of that, something that comes as a complete surprise, the triangle setup rate has been increased ala GF100, breaking up the rendering engines into completely separate cores, though not to the extent of Fermi. Hell, even the multiple kernel dispatching was added, and even better than NVIDIA did, which is a real slap to them because they could have really benefited from the asynchronous dispatch feature with their PhysX push (but who cares because PhysX is as good as dead anyway). Essentially this might mean AMD can pull off things like morphological AA in a computer shader instruction at the same time as they're doing pixel and vertex and every other kind of shader, without losing cycles to context switching every time. As game engines continue to become more multithreaded as the features of DX11 get more use, all the different shader types and compute instructions will grow in their need for parallel execution, and it's pretty cool that AMD is addressing this, and even more cool in regards to GPGPU, where AMD hadn't really given much attention before.

The release of the 6970 does further highlight the silliness of this generation's naming convention. While the 6870 was already pretty poorly named in so much as its performance and and design related to previous generations, the 6970 actually has a new architecture, and here it shares its nomenclature with Barts GPUs essentially using a last-gen architecture. The last time I remember something like this happening was when NVIDIA released the GeForce 4 series, with the excellent Ti4000 cards and the ludicrous MX400 mainstream cards using slightly tweaked GeForce 2 architectures. While not as bad as that situation was (they're all still DX11-capable), it begs the question of what the 6800 series brought to the table to warrant inclusion into the new generation when the 6900 series was going to bear the real fruit of the new product line?

All-in-all, I'm rather impressed with what AMD was able to pull off in such short notice given the reigns on the 32nm process were so quickly pulled without a viable alternative within a reasonable timeframe. NVIDIA managed to take a failed design and tweak it to make it work, but it was still basically their old GPU made new again. The 6970 is completely new, but definitely feels like a prelude to what was meant to be the real deal--a major birthing cut premature by strenuous circumstances. We won't see what the architecture was really capable of until we get a smaller process, but for now, what we have is respectable, if not a little underwhelming in some regards as graphics card releases have tended to be in recent times. Performance has indeed been stagnating some, and with a need for some reinvigoration in the market, 28nm can't come soon enough.

Bobcat versus the caterpillar

2010-11-16T16:08:00.003-05:00

Previews are out for the new Bobcat platform from AMD, technically called the Brazos platform, but Bobcat is the architecture powering it. It sorta coincides with the Bulldozer architecture powering the Scorpius platform, although in the real world, Bobcat makes bulldozers, not the other way around.

A lot of people, myself included, had high hopes for Bobcat. It's the fabled Atom-killer, the next challenger to stand and face the titan of the ultra mobile market in a long line of would-be usurpers. Reading up on the architecture, it seemed to be a pretty robust design for its market, owing more to VIA's Nano than anything AMD had previously. This was not a shrunken, slimmed-down version of the K8 architecture, like the old AMD might have done (and did). The new AMD is more nimble, aggressive, and cunning, and doesn't recycle old CPUs in shiny new packaging. They have less to worry about in terms of fabricating their chips, so now they focus more on their design, and where their products fit in the strategic view of things.

ARM has yet to live up to the netbook promises they've made in the past, likely scaring off OEMs with their lack of major OS support. Netbooks are just a smidge too large to satisfy people with a small linux-based OS such as Android, and so ARM processors will likely find better success in the newly invigorated tablet market where Apple currently holds reign. So we're back to x86 solutions, where only two hopefuls reside alongside Intel.

AnandTech recently did a preview for the new dual-core VIA Nano, a refresh hoping to rekindle interest in the mobile architecture that failed to gain much ground in its first incarnation. Nano held a lot of promise, particularly in its early years when Atom was still very new and the market was perhaps a little more open to alternatives. But now Atom has slowly refined into a real battery life monster, getting to the level of some of the better CULV systems out there and distancing itself from similarly positioned architectures. The problem is Nano is still built on the now downright ancient 65nm process, and much like everything else VIA does, a die shrink will likely be too little too late. The dual-core Nano simply hits an entirely different power envelope, higher even than CULV systems, and with a merely adequate IGP platform, it just isn't going to turn a lot of heads in the ultra mobile field, less so than even the single-core variant (which at least found itself in a reasonably-built Samsung system). I feel for VIA, because I'd like them to succeed in a market I feel they have the best chance at, but unfortunately as big as Intel and AMD are, they're simply more agile and capable than VIA could ever hope of being.

So that leaves Bobcat. For the first time, AMD actually has a die size advantage at least when compared to CULV platforms. AMD knows it's the mobile market that their past architectures have been hurting the most. Desktops don't care much for TDP considerations so AMD can simply price to match as they see necessary. In the mobile market, that shit don't fly, and merely adequate to mediocre performance coupled with pretty lousy battery life mean it doesn't have a toehold anymore as far as notebooks are concerned. But try to remember, that was the old AMD, and starting next year they're gonna try their best to make you forget that image and focus on how they're doing things now. They've got more specialized CPUs and platforms designed specifically to address those markets, thanks to the long-in-waiting ace up their sleeve in the form of their new GPU branch (must...not...say...."ATI"...). Bobcat is the first time they've gone so far as to draw up an entirely new design separate from any of their desktop lines exclusively for mobile platforms, and this not long after AMD's CEO poo-pooed the whole netbook category.

Bobcat's performance generally outpaces the top-of-the-line Atom by a fair margin, as expected. Obviously the real bread and butter is the equal-parts GPU component of the chip, which trounces anything within sight of the Mississippi. What's concerning, however, is how close they are when the Atom compared to the particular Bobcat model that was tested boasts about half the TDP. This Bobcat SKU, called the E-350, is meant more for entry CULV platforms, where it fares less well against, and to get to a level competitive with the Atom power envelope, you have to knock down the core clock by 600MHz, or 37.5%, and cut the GPU clock nearly in half, which gets you the C-50. The performance picture might get a lot fuzzier at that point, and even more unclear is how well systems will do on the whole compared to some of the most popular Atom netbooks. Will there actually be a substantial uptake of OEM solutions made by popular brands such as Asus, Acer, HP, and Samsung? Or will we get one or two experimental machines and then back to business as usual with the Atom offerings? My hope is that these companies take Bobcat seriously, and that it gets the treatment it deserves in systems that have the quality and battery life you'd expect from a real Atom killer. One thing's for sure, Atom, and Intel that makes it, needs a nice firm slap on the behind to get moving so we actually get some decent performance out of the netbook category. It won't be til the middle of next year that Intel will finally supply a fully integrated HD video crunching Atom platform, and the advances won't get much more elaborate after that, according to their roadmaps. Bobcat will be ready-built with HD media in mind, and aggressive performance ramping going forward with future iterations, so it really all depends on the reception it receives in the market come release time.

All I know is my 1000HE is getting a little long in the tooth.

5870 + 1000 naming points

2010-10-25T15:01:00.004-04:00

The next generation 6000 series is upon us, and it's another case of fact being less interesting than fiction. Rumors had the chip pegged as re-architected shader setup with a Vec4 layout consisting of more capable and versatile SP units, coupled with an uncore clock domain system ala G80 that would clock the shaders higher than the rest of the chip. They're pretty interesting ideas that make sense in light of being stuck on the previous generation 40nm manufacturing process. If you can't boost transistors, find a way to push those existing transistors harder.

Instead AMD chose to trim off some transistors, and just make a more economical chip. They called it "rebalancing" the architecture, as apparently game graphics stagnating with the success of the consoles doesn't demand as much horsepower as AMD anticipated, and other than a revamped tessellation unit to save face after all their gloating over their experience with geometry subdivision, much remains the same. With less SPs, less texture units, but a slightly higher clockspeed, AMD ended up with a marginally slower chip than their last generation single-GPU flagship, but with a significantly smaller size. Instead of getting a highend card first, we're getting an upper midrange chip to replace the old $400 flagship, with the real highend replacement still pending. Mum's the word on the specs of that card, but preliminary rumors and benchmarks show significant improvements, so we're not stuck with blue balls this year thankfully.

The only thing screwed up is the naming scheme, and that's been the general consensus everywhere you look. While not on the level of NVIDIA's shameless botchery of the past, it still introduces confusion in the market, and coming from a company that started probably the best naming convention in graphics card history, it's rather disappointing. The x900 series, while previously relegated to dual-chip SKUs, now apparently denotes cards $300 plus, while cards in the x800 series go back to their $250 roots. That's fine and all, except when people look at the 6870 and compare it to the 5870, they're not looking at a faster card despite the name, and similarly when the 6970 comes out, it will not be faster than the 5970.

On top of that rumors are building full steam on the GTX 580, the successor to the massively disappointing GF100 flagship. So far murmurs suggest a take two on what they were trying to do originally, essentially a GTX 480 "The Way it was Meant to be Made". Looking back, a historical analogy comes to mind from when the FX 5800 Ultra debuted, let everyone down, and then a couple years later a midrange 6600GT comes out with the same clocks, same number of units, but fantastic performance. Had the 5800 Ultra simply had the holes in its design plugged up, I imagine something very similar to the 6600GT would have resulted. The 5800 Ultra was certainly intended to be a beast, and if it had realized its potential, it not only would have decimated the competition but remained relevant with the times a good few years after its launch. But the 5800 Ultra was truly designed for the games of its era, and when the next generation of games started rolling out, the weaknesses of the architecture began to surface. Since then, NVIDIA has planned out their designs with the future in mind, a strategy that has paid off for them until Fermi, when forward looking became presumption, and all the emphasis on GPGPU became a major hindrance.

Supposedly Fermi is doing well in HPC fields where some might say it prioritized, and that's great, I'm happy for them. The problem is, gaming is still their bread and butter, and 500 prototypes of Tegra tablets don't add up to a business until they become shipping products, and CUDA doesn't matter to gamers unless it makes games more fun, which PhysX failed to do, and then of course the nForce chipset, once considered a household name, is now a distant memory. NVIDIA needs to pull their shit together really soon. The 400 series didn't completely flesh out until just this month, while AMD did the same thing within six months of the launch of their first DX11 card. The halo part, the pièce de résistance of the family flopped on its face for the most part, and if the GTX 580 encounters any similar problems, it'll be the start of a really bad trend that might lead to the deterioration of the company as a whole. I'm seriously concerned that NVIDIA, or at least its leadership might be diluting itself, because if you make bold claims like your new mobile chip venture will be a billion dollar revenue deliverer in a short amount of time, and instead of slowly easing yourself into that new direction you just suddenly jump tracks and forget the markets that made you, you might just end up the next Creative Labs. It wouldn't be so bad if AMD wasn't sitting there making graphics cards for gamers that are economical, quick to market, and extremely competitive. Get your priorities straight NVIDIA so you're still around in ten years!

Tech Updates

2010-08-31T23:30:00.003-04:00

Before I commit the entire month of August to headphone rambling, here's a few things in the tech world I sort of skipped over since the last relevant post.

The biggest I think is AMD ditching the ATI name. A lot of computer websites and myself included mostly referred to ATI products by AMD anyway, but occasionally "ATI" would slip back into consciousness and find its way into our writings whenever the thought arose about what actually produces these products. Well AMD hopes to dispel any such confusion in the future by erasing any question of the source of their graphics solutions, emphasizing the dissolving of any subdivisions into a unified, singular company. To some, this is a startling reminder of the extremity of the event that took place now four years ago, one that carries with it some pretty heavy significance in the history of computing, and in the minds of those who follow the industry. Those folks might have foreseen this eventuality from the outset, but the sudden immediacy of its arrival is no less sobering especially for fans of ATI in years gone by. It seems hard to imagine a Radeon without an ATI, but we must be quick to remind ourselves that it isn't the name that made the Radeon, but the company, the engineers and innovators within that kept an underdog alive, and even gave their opposition a bloody nose from time to time. Now more than ever they're on top of their game, and with NVIDIA struggling to flesh out their product line, their clockwork execution and unwavering onslaught have put them in a position few would have thought possible after the stumbling first couple years following their acquisition.

On the subject of AMD, recently some new information about their future architectures, Bulldozer and Bobcat, was disclosed. Not one to let them linger in the spotlight too long, Intel allowed the covers to be lifted on Sandy Bridge performance, just three days later. What's more encouraging to the tech observer? Some bits and pieces of architectural whitepapers, or some real-world results from its competition? You may not know how Sandy Bridge gets there, but at least now you know it does. Intel has maintained their ante-upping stride, whilst its closest rival on the bar graphs lags two generations back. However good Bulldozer might be, I doubt many think it's going to make that kind of a jump, and it doesn't help that throughout the article it's compared to current-generation Intel chips. AMD has macro-ops now. AMD has a 4-issue engine. AMD has something akin to hyper-threading. Instead of pushing the envelope with innovative new features, I'm seeing a lot of catch up, and unless all the lower-level stuff is really special, I'm not expecting this to do much better than Nehalem. I've seen enough from the first two Phenoms to know I have to keep my expectations in check.

Also on AMD, there've been some information leaks on the upcoming, presumably named HD 6870 graphics card, and this time they're looking a lot more like Intel in the CPU business: skimpy on architectural details, but with promising performance numbers, and a generation ahead of its competition. If ever there was an embarrassment to the GTX 480, it's those Crysis and Heaven results. The 6000 series is built on the same manufacturing process, due out less than a year after the heavily delayed Fermi card, not only matching its 15% average advantage over current-gen 5000 series flagships but raising it another 20%, and I doubt it runs as hot or ends up quite as large. It may be barebones feature-wise compared to NVIDIA, but all that extra engineering to make Fermi the GPGPU monster haven't really panned out for them, and it's starting to look like CUDA is a dud in the market, and with it the 400 series. AMD had their priorities straight, they had level-headed goals and they met them. Like a well-oiled machine, the 5000 series rolled out top-to-bottom in less than a year (really half a year), while NVIDIA is still trying to finish their lineup. When NVIDIA finally gets their budget cards out, AMD will be on their second-generation DX11, showing little slowdown from the 28nm delays, and still able to milk out a speed increase. I must say I've been extremely impressed with AMD's execution the last few generations, even if the technology behind them wasn't all that interesting. NVIDIA had their flaws, but they had slick and innovative designs, resembling more CPU than GPU, and had the raw performance edge and features to back it up. Unfortunately their ideals have been drifting further and further away from market realities, and they've been betting more on hope and prayers than concrete real-world trends. I don't mind a company that likes to dream, but one that doesn't seem capable of realizing those dreams is a company with their head in the clouds. It's time to get your feet back on the ground NVIDIA, because you ain't no Disney.

AMD's future looks bright, and even if Bulldozer doesn't set new records, their graphics business will be bringing home the bread, especially in upcoming heterogeneous designs, where Intel is already showing some muscle. If graphics in games don't get much more demanding, eventually GPU-on-CPU solutions might be good enough even for gamers, since it looks like competition could be pretty fierce, which means some pretty big performance jumps in a short amount of time. The next generation of consoles might help to spur on discreet GPUs, and that will be especially important to NVIDIA, as even their Tegra business is slow to start. Meanwhile AMD will continue to grow their cash reserves, and their CPU designs could get a lot more interesting going forward. It took this long for them to rework key architectural elements tracing back to the K7, but now that the ball's rolling, I expect the departures to keep growing. AMD made some seriously risky moves in recent years, but the result may be a more agile company with more IP and more innovation with a better competitive stance in their underdog position. If only I had a crystal ball...

Iso-orthodynamagnaplanarstats

2010-08-24T22:44:00.003-04:00

One of the great things about headphones and any audio endeavor is the human ear. Well, the human perception of sound, I should say. A human's aural memory is quite fickle and volatile, especially when it comes to minute details and differences. You can barely remember what you heard one minute to the next, which can make comparisons between audio equipment a pain in the ass, but it has benefits when you have a really good audio setup. When I bought a new LCD, going from a TN panel type to an IPS type, I could immediately tell the difference, and it was striking. I could easily recall how the old screen looked, and even given the amount of time it took to set up the new screen, I had no trouble distinguishing all the improvements it made. This same ability to remember all things visual also meant that as time went on, a short amount of time actually, I got used to the IPS screen, and it was no longer breathtaking to look at. The brilliant colors, contrast, and image stability just became the norm, and the thrill was gone before a month had passed.

With audio, you can't remember shit. In the time it takes you to unplug one pair of headphones and plug in the next, which is less than a minute, you've already forgotten all the little characteristics of the sound enough to not be able to pinpoint the differences between the two, unless it truly is night-and-day (and we're talking a vast expanse between them). This is in sharp contrast to other animals, like birds, who use acute audio memory to discern the subtle differences in the sound of their mate's call from all the other birds in the flock (and in cases of domestic birds, sometimes the ability to imitate sounds with high accuracy). For this reason, every time you play music through your speakers, you're rediscovering them, and even after a long time, they can still shock and amaze you, and thrill you all over again. It's one of the things that makes audio hobbies so much fun, and why they have such a following, while computer monitors and TVs....don't.

The above really doesn't have anything in particular to do with this topic, but I just thought it would be a nice intro into an article that delves further into my growing passion for headphones. This passion has culminated recently into one of the most reckless purchases I've ever made, and this is in a long line of pretty reckless purchases. With computer hardware, it's pretty simple. You go to your favorite website (or sites), look at the latest reviews for the kind of hardware you're shopping for, pick the one with the better looking numbers in the price you want, go to the online store and buy it. It's a lot of analyzing, research, and planning, and the whole shopping experience is very intellectual and deliberate. With audio, you still do plenty of research, you might even do a bit of planning, but it's mostly compulsive. A lot of it is going on your gut feeling, you're not comparing graphs and numbers (well maybe the really obsessive do), you're not going off of really concrete data and making decisions based on logic, you're just going on what sounds good to you (in a manner of speaking). If I read a headphone has a really natural sound, full, dynamic, rich, with great detail and an immersive portrayal of music, I'm going to get really excited about it. Such are the sort of things I read about the HiFiMan HE-5LE, a headphone from a relative unknown that has all the characteristics of a super highend headphone with the price of only a...slightly less super highend headphone. It looked slick, and the price was about at the limit of what I'd ever picture myself paying for this sort of thing. So I figured, one day, I'd probably buy one, when I've exhausted all else and have nothing left to spend my money on.

Well that one day was last week, apparently, although I certainly haven't exhausted all other avenues of expenditure (or will I probably ever), nor could I really afford it. But it was a good deal, and I figured if I was ever going to buy one anyway, I might as well save $150 on it. What started as trying to talk myself out of it ended in sending a message to the seller with my offer. I need help.

When I received my pair shortly afterward, I was blown away by all the things that had been said about it, along with a sense of refinement and realism I hadn't yet experienced with any kind of speaker system before. I was memorized, and unlike my K702s, which I bought kind of knowing I might not like them, and ended up doing exactly that, I was completely satisfied, and almost instantly fell in love. They have such an incredibly smooth, silky, liquidy seductive sound, full and lush and a little warm with a tone so natural it renders instruments more like a window than a speaker. They're just so inviting you just can't help but want to listen to them all the time, and part of the reason for this is also another reason why I decided from the very beginning I wanted them so badly.

You see they use a speaker technology completely unlike anything in conventional speakers, where instead of using dynamic drivers, where a big magnet pushes and pulls on a voice coil attached to a speaker cone, it uses what's called orthodynamic drivers (or isodynamic, or magneplanar, or magnetostats), where a voice coil is laid out flat on a diaphragm and has an array of magnets on either side of it pushing and pulling as the voice coil changes polarity. Wikiphonia explains it better than I care to, but basically you get a much faster moving diaphragm with less resistance, creating less distortion and better transient response. It's often described as a hybrid between dynamic drivers and electrostatic drivers, the latter of which uses static electricity to push and pull on a diaphragm instead of magnets, resulting in even finer response but requiring a shit-ton of electricity to work. Orthodynamic drivers aren't going to be as responsive as electrostats, but they'll be potentially a lot better than dynamic drivers by their nature. You can also power them with conventional headphone amps, making them directly competitive to dynamic headphones. The whole notion fascinated me.

Orthodynamic technology hasn't really taken off in the speaker world because you need a lot of moving mass to create serviceable bass response and force in the full-size configuration, and that requires a lot of power and a lot of magnets. But headphones live off of small drivers and low sound pressure requirements, so it doesn't take much to get great bass response and dynamics in such a configuration. Yamaha was one of the first companies to make a successful push with this idea, and in the late 70s to mid 80s produced several models with this technology. Since then, the only company to really continue with the concept was Fostex, a company better known in the professional audio segment than with regular audio enthusiasts. But orthodynamic drivers have accumulated a large following over the years, with many still snatching up the old vintage Yamaha models and modifying the modest Fostex orthos into real audiophile-grade headphones.

But starting in 2009, orthodynamics have been thrust into the limelight yet again, for a whole new crowd of enthusiasts to discover, and the buzz has been off the charts. HiFiMan is a relatively new player in the market, as I said, and from what I gather a subsidiary of Head-Direct. In late 2009 they released the HE-5, their first foray into highend headphones, the brainchild of China-native Fang Bian, to much acclaim and warm critical reception. A few short months later, in April 2010, they released the HE-5LE, an updated version of the HE-5 addressing some of the flaws of the original design, and cementing itself as a staple of highend headphone paraphernalia. But by then, hype was already building for another newcomer, this time from an even smaller company called Audez'e (pronounced odyssey), essentially run out of a garage by two enthusiasts named Alex and Sankar. They were fast approaching the release of their second iteration of an orthodynamic headphone, this time intended for widespread availability. It would be called the LCD-2, and despite being essentially a DIY amateur production with barebones design and materials, was a creation of the headphone community, and has become a massive success (as far as the top-shelf headphone enthusiasts are concerned). This sub-$1,000 headphone would go on to be called one of the greatest ever made, competing with the likes of the Sennheiser HD800 and Beyerdynamic T1.

So here's where the industry needs to pause and think about things for a moment. How is it a couple no-name companies can produce reference-level audio equipment that rivals the multi-million dollar investments from venerable giants in the audio world? These are headphones that have taken several years, using revolutionary designs to achieve what they do, being equaled or surpassed by tinkerers and oriental upstarts! Clearly there's something out of balance here, and if these companies were any larger, the industry moguls would certainly stand and take notice.

Now, of course we can't sell the dynamic driver proponents short. Dynamic drivers have inherent disadvantages in their design, and the fact that they're able to keep up so well only shows how far they've been able to push the design over the many decades it's been in use. For companies specializing in all aspects of speaker production, with a large part of their market being full-size models, I can understand the desire to continue to pour into the dynamic approach. But for companies that make their whole business out of headphones, it would seem to me the time has long passed to start looking closer at other approaches to sound reproduction. Certainly both Sennheiser and Beyerdynamic have dabbled into electrostatic drivers before, but outside of that, they haven't brought anything else to market. Headphones are a very flexible and agile speaker type, and by their nature are very open to out-the-box thinking. I'm not going to say that dynamic speakers have hit a brick wall, but it only took two nobodies to show the world there are extremely promising alternatives out there that were prematurely abandoned by the industry that pioneered them. They're not a completely flawless advancement in driver techniques, of course. For one thing, they'll always be on the heavy side, which can be difficult to make comfortable, and they're intrinsically harder to drive, which while common in the highend segment, makes them impractical in more mainstream markets (but improvements can be made...).

Because these small companies have exploited an opportunity in technology, I have no doubt their future will be very bright. As they continue to grow, so will their profile in the market, and sooner or later the big boys will have to reevaluate the feasibility of this driver type, and possibly release their own variant sometime in the future. Until then, I and many others out there will continue to enjoy the orthodynamic headphones already available, and extol their virtues to the audio community. They truly have a character all their own.

They can take me anywhere I want

2010-08-11T20:00:00.003-04:00

Of the many earthly possessions I fill my life with to inject into it some level of enjoyment, headphones stand out as one of the most expensive, and possibly most controversial. Early on headphones were something my dad and I shared when we'd make long trips away from home, visiting relatives for what would be weeks of pushing on our threshold of boredom. We'd find a moment to slip out from their company and make a stop by a department store of some sort, what substituted at the time for a fun getaway. Often we found ourselves looking at headphones, sometimes out of a need for a new set or just as a passing interest. We'd pick up a pair or two and bring them home, eagerly anticipating what the fruits our discoveries might bring. Armed with portable CD players (remember those?), we'd compare and contrast between old and new, different models, different styles. "This has more bass," I'd comment, "but that has more loudness." My father might concur, adding, "you can hear the guitar strings better with that one." It would be a fun moment sitting on the couch, trading opinions, enjoying music, and bonding. Unfortunately my father and I don't share a lot of interests, and such occasions are dear in my memory.

So it seemed only natural that my interests in headphones would grow beyond the sparse excursions away from home, into something all its own, a fascination into the quality of audio derived from headsets of unknown characteristics, a sort of treasure hunt within the vast array of choices hanging from the walls and racks of various retailers. Those were all fairly inexpensive though, and it wasn't long before I found myself unsatisfied with what was available at those prices. I wanted to know what lay beyond, what you could really achieve with the headphone form factor. That inevitably led me to the internet, and searches there uncovered a vast wealth of brands and price ranges, and huge communities sprung up around them. I soon came to know the name Sennhesier, and soon after I spent some hard-saved money on a model costing nearly $100. Quite an expensive initial entry into the world of boutique audio headgear, considering my then fledgling enthusiasm. Upon their arrival, I knew instantly there were more to headphones than I had ever known, and my fascination was greatly spurred.

Sadly, my dad's interest in headphones mostly subsided when the trips were over, and by that point I had greatly surpassed any budget he'd ever be willing to meet. From then on my interest was one-sided, and it no longer provided the kind of emotional fulfillment it once had, but nevertheless it persevered. The pursuit of the next level of audio fidelity was reason enough to keep going, and by the time I finished high school, I spent my graduation money not towards a car, or a vacation overseas, or a deposit into savings...but on headphones. A pair of Beyerdynamic DT990s, costing over $300, along with a dedicated portable headphone amp to power them. They were my first truly highend headphones, and many thought I was crazy. A part of me still thinks I was crazy, but I loved those headphones. Enough so that I was content for a long time to never buy anything headphone-related again.

Well, eventually I reentered the furor, knowing my little portable headphone amp wasn't really enough to do my DT990s justice, and after giving my computer an overhaul, one of the last details I added to it was a sound card, and I decided to get one that would solve two problems in one. The Asus Xonar Essence STX did it all: a great DAC, good headphone amp section built-in, and PCI Express for futureproofing. The sound was cleaner, more controlled, punchier, more detailed, and just all around better in every category. A good upgrade is when there's no aspect that takes a step backwards, and the Essence STX did that. Again, I was content with that setup for a while.

But then the ball got rolling again, and this time it seems it's gone out of control. In the span of several weeks I bought a pair of Sony MDR-XB700s, a highend amp, and most recently an AKG K702. I can't stop myself, not necessarily out of an inability to, but a lack of desire to. One can spend a ridiculous amount of money on any hobby related to audio, and even though headphones are by far the more price-efficient of the audio equipment types, they're also the most collectible, and instead of settling on just one pair of really nice speakers, you might have several pairs of upper-tier headphones to satisfy different moods. And forget the rest of the hardware. That amp I bought alone cost more than any one of the headphones it powers.

Such is the way of things though, usually. Headphones are made by larger companies in highly competitive fields, and their prices are known to sometimes drop dramatically. When at one point a DT990 might have cost somebody $300, now it's quite common to find them for a bit over $200. AKG K701 headphones were another really popular option, and I remember when you could only buy those for $400. Now they're found for about $250. There are a few other headphones in that price range, all of them very highend, requiring investments in all other areas of your audio setup to get the most out of them, but the bright side is, you'll hear the improvement the more you put into them. Headphones costing much more don't have quite the dramatic leap in quality compared to if you came from a $50 or $80 headphone to a $200 one. The $200-300 point is the sweetspot in the headphone world, beyond which you start to see diminishing returns.

Headphone amps are even worse in that regard. They don't have the large companies with deep pockets, highly publicized and aggressively competitive landscapes that headphones do. Instead you have to contend with smaller companies, sometimes consisting of people running it out of their garages, and higher prices for smaller improvements. The differences going from a $200 sound card with a built-in headphone amp to a discreet dedicated headphone amp worth $400 isn't as large as the price delta may suggest. On top of that you have to deal with some really obscure stuff here. Most of it you won't hear about except from the occasional thread in an enthusiast forum, and competent reviews and comparisons between models is scarce and hard to rely on. Most of it requires a leap of faith, since, although there are community meetings all over the country where people can test equipment, and some online stores might be willing to loan out products before you buy, or at least return within a decent amount of time for a full refund, odds on favor you won't know or be able to find out how something sounds before you take the plunge. It's a very expensive gamble, and often the only way you can get your money back is to resell it at a loss.

But it's that search that keeps people going. That sense of discovery and exploration, looking for what's around the corner, delving into all the deep facets of your music, uncovering that last bit of immersion factor. All it takes is the first bite. The first $80 headphones you buy will be such a huge jump over the iBuds or cheap Walkman headphones you got at Radioshack or Wal-Mart. Suddenly you're hearing things you never knew were there, you're hearing detail and clarity you didn't know was possible, and just when your mouth is starting to froth, you realize this is just the beginning. There's a whole other world of even more highend headphones, ready to show you that what you thought was "good enough" before, was really the deprivation of enjoyment you've never known, and couldn't imagine. Unless you know somebody, or have been around someone with some really high quality audio equipment, it's impossible to know what you're missing out on. And no, those Boss demo kiosks and cool surround sound movie rooms at your local electronics stores don't count. If you thought those sound good, you ain't heard nothing yet.

It's one of the most exciting and engrossing hobbies there are (albeit an often lonely one), and while some may balk at the prices you pay, they might understand better if they knew what you're getting out of it. Few things move you to the emotional core like music, and when music sounds really good, you feel a strong and visceral connection to the sound hardware that creates that sensation, on a level that goes beyond most other hobbies. It's one I'm glad to experience for myself, and one I wish I could share with others more. For now, I think I'm going to focus more on the actual music.

M11x Revisited

2010-06-13T01:51:00.002-04:00

I had briefly mentioned the M11x once before when Alienware first announced it, noting it was an interesting product. Then shortly after its debut, NVIDIA launched Optimus, which is the leader of the Automatic power-saving faction fighting the evil forces of the Deceptively power-hungry opposition. What the power savings actually are I'm not too sure, but I think the main point is that it's about twice as convenient as the manual switching types from before, and it'll be getting all the driver support going forward. So current owners of manual switching discreet graphics laptops are pretty much screwed, and that includes early adopters of the M11x.

It was only natural that people started hoping for an updated M11x that supported the new technology, and while they're at it, updated to the new Core i-series CULV CPUs, and maybe given some tweaks to the aesthetics. But of course there was some fear that we'd have to wait until the next wave of products to see such changes, if they ever came at all. It seemed silly to release the M11x as it was, so close to the introduction of Optimus technology, when surely they must have been informed by NVIDIA ahead of time of its approach. A lot of tech companies will do that to ensure early adoption of new products. It reminds me of a time several years ago when Alienware put a lot of R&D into making a custom multi-GPU graphics system, complete with custom motherboards with multiple AGP slots and software hacks, touting it as the return of SLI. Then about a year later NVIDIA announced the actual return of SLI, coinciding with the launch of PCI Express. Alienware just has a history of doing things at just the wrong time.

But our prayers were answered and the M11x was refreshed not only with Optimus, but Core i5 and i7 support, and even a matte finish for those who criticized the glossy one (though it still looks gaudy). It seems they were listening to the consumers (and website editors), and that's always nice to see. Undoubtedly they must feel they've got a hot product on their hands, and rightly so. All the appeal that the M11x had before was still there, with all the big problems that were holding people back now fixed.

The M11x has the devilish characteristic of being a device you really want but have no purpose for. It's a solution looking for a problem, an idea looking for a niche. It's not a full laptop, it's not a netbook, it's not an extremely capable gaming laptop but then it's small and inexpensive. It's really portable PC gaming without the crappy battery life and sticker shock. Its an innovative prospect and to be fair, there are some people who have a use for it. Those who travel a lot, those who go to a lot of LAN parties, those who want to game in another room in their house without setting up a permanent station for it. Unfortunately I'm none of those people, but I still find it really interesting and find myself helplessly drawn to it.

I'm not the only one from what I've read in my daily forum perusals. There are people who sheepishly admitted to buying one when they didn't have a need for it, often very soon after finding out about it. It's just one of those things, sort of like the iPad for some people, it has a crippling effect on your financial discipline. Much like me, they probably already have a nice gaming desktop, and either a laptop or a netbook that they can use when they're lying in bed or sitting at the TV, and in either case they probably don't have the pressing desire to play a quick match in TF2 or run an instance in WoW. Most laptops and netbooks are more than capable of 90% of the tasks you'll want to do with a computer, it's just that other 10% that the M11x caters to. It's also that other 10% that a lot of people like myself find the most exciting.

So what if you want a laptop that you can play games with should the urge suddenly arise? What if you want a laptop that you can play HD movies on and probably even encode them, even while you sit in front of a monitor or TV with better colors and full 1080p? What if you want to spend $900+ right away for something that will only really come in handy when you make your yearly trip out of state (God knows when)? Or for when you want to play Quake 3 with your cousin at his house because that's the only game he can run?

If you think hard enough, you can justify anything, and it's especially easy when you only have yourself to convince, and you already know you want it. Hell if you make enough money, you might not even have to wait for that. I know people that upgrade their gaming laptops on a bi-annual basis mainly just to play WoW or for when a friend comes over. For the same price, you're looking at laptops at either a fraction of the performance, or a fraction of the battery life, and none of them will be easily totable in your offhand. Did I mention it's just really, really cool?

Those IPS Reports

2010-06-01T02:38:00.001-04:00

Remember when LCDs first came out? They all had like 16ms response times, they all topped out at 1280x1024, they all cost like $500...and they looked like crap. That was when they first started hitting it big, sort of like where solid state disks are right now, and for some people it was enough that they were flat and didn't take up a quarter of your desk, or produce as much heat as your tower. For most people, the fact that you couldn't (or perhaps just shouldn't) change resolutions, there was a crap-ton of ghosting, and the colors and viewing angles sucked for like twice the price of a more capable CRT was enough to deter any thoughts of early adoption.

Funny enough most of those disadvantages are still there, but LCDs have caught on nonetheless. Manufacturers must have seen the potential in it because despite the lack of initial demand, they continued investments and advancements in the technology, and eventually we got to a point where you could have high res LCDs for as much or cheaper than CRTs (right before they completely disappeared from the face of the planet). The contrast, colors, and response time were good enough that people were satisfied with them once they factored in the other advantages LCDs have. And at least now they finally found an aspect ratio that makes sense.

But the most popular LCDs people are buying still have problems, the biggest being you can't hardly slouch in your computer chair without noticing the colors going disco. Not long after the LCD craze started taking off did manufacturers start working on that problem, if nothing else to ween the photo and media professionals off of the big bulky counterparts with something of comparable color accuracy. But as these higher-end panel types emerged their prices put them firmly out of reach of most consumers, and any attempts to lower costs would never be enough to put them within pissing range of the cheaper alternative. TN panels were here to stay.

Of the two higher end panels, most agree S-PVA/MVA had the advantage of contrast and black levels, with IPS getting the nod for viewing angles and latency. But with the problems of IPS being less formidable, a simple refining of its disadvantages would put it at the pinnacle of LCD technology, and that's essentially what's been happening. With full colors, great viewing angles, and latency the most comparable to TN, it is no doubt the best overall panel type of them all. In an ideal world, everyone would be using them, but the problem is still price.

Enter LG and their e-IPS initiative. Of the IPS types, S-IPS and H-IPS being the other big two, e-IPS seems to be the first to address the cost issue, allowing for less expensive and power hungry backlighting. Combined with the 16:9 ratio of current-generation displays, which allow for higher yields than older aspect ratios, a new wave of affordable IPS LCD monitors have emerged very recently to capture the hearts and imagination of everyday hardware enthusiasts everywhere. No longer is true color, wide viewing angle LCDs the exclusive right of the privileged few in the professional sector.

ViewSonic and NEC were the first to jump onboard the economy IPS bandwagon. Once reviews for the 23" Viewsonic model were published it was quickly dismissed on account of its dim, lifeless image. NEC has been the only other alternative for a while now, but just a couple weeks ago Dell announced the availability of their own 23" (and 22") e-IPS monitor, and once wind hit the airways of a 20% coupon, contrasted by the price hike on the NEC competitor, a sudden fervor was born over the new kid on the block.

As someone who's been watching this market segment since first being made aware of the original 23" NEC wonder, I immediately took interest as soon as the Dell competitor was announced. It was instantly apparent that the U2311H had the advantage in ergonomics; the EA231WMi from NEC had a utilitarian look about it that gave way to bulky bulges on the back and simple looking buttons. The U2311H also had simplicity, mixed with a slick modernistic style that gave it a clean, fashionable appearance. It's the sort of thing you wouldn't mind having on your desk at home just as much as the office. The only question was performance, and while information was scant, many took the blind plunge and divulged their experiences. It started to become evident that while it did not exhibit the dimness problem of the ViewSonic model, almost everyone's unit showed tinting issues, to varying degrees of intensity. Dell did have a zero tolerance policy on dead pixels, but you were stuck with a much higher rate of uniformity problems than the EA231WMi.

But power consumption was impressively low, image quality was otherwise good, and most importantly the price was right, especially with the coupon. Combined with the warranty advantages and superior design aesthetics, it looked like the better buy, so I made the leap. I pretty much thought myself an idiot for throwing away $255 for a new monitor when my old one was only a year old and didn't have anything wrong with it, but once you get excited about something it's hard to shake it. I bought my previous monitor under the premise that it was full HD and didn't have problems with inverted blacks, both being deficiencies of its predecessor. I had blu-rays to thank for that purchase, but this time I mostly blamed my friend. He has a TN panel, but it's the best damn TN panel I've ever seen, and it's no wonder, as it's made by Asus, a company with a reputation for having excellent TN panels. Watching movies on his display rendered colors that were bold, bright, and beautiful, and made everything, not just movies, look better. My monitor looked washed out compared to even my previous non-HD screen, and I grew jealous of the vibrancy I was lacking, the immersion and luster of it, the lifelike appearance that made you forget you were watching an LCD only for it to suddenly remind you of the dazzle it's capable of. It would help me derive more enjoyment from my entertainment, and that seemed good enough reason for me.

When I finally received my monitor, the difference was jaw-dropping. Having expected the improvement to be subtle and distinguishable only under close inspection, I was awed when it proved a change of night-and-day. Everything popped, everything glowed, everything seduced me with its sultry deep hues. It was the kind of excitement you get when you upgrade your graphics card, and suddenly you can enable all the settings and games look glorious and run silky smooth. But this affected everything. Things you've seen hundreds of times looked like they just got a fresh coat of paint.

But like all things in life, there were flaws. One corner exhibited significant backlight bleeding in really dark tones, though mostly only black. The tinting, while fortunately vague enough to only be discernable when specifically sought after, was still there. The viewing angles weren't as good as I expected either. Contrast and brightness decreased quite a bit when looking from somewhat extreme angles, but the colors didn't invert, and you could still easily read text. Uniformity was much better than either of my old TN panels, and contrast was amazing. Best of all input lag was nonexistent and motion blur wasn't hardly any worse either. Most importantly, the colors were better than I ever imagined they would be, and even the sharpness seemed to improve, despite the added inch and a half reducing the pixel pitch size.

Overall I'm extremely happy with this new IPS display, and happier still that I was able to buy it for under $300, a notion that was unheard of just a year ago. I believe it to be a sign that these professional panels are going to start trickling down to within reach of the mainstream market. They're just right for those who consume a lot of media on their computers, play games or do light photo editing, and it may even surprise these companies the amount of interest they receive from the regular buying public despite positioning these monitors more towards businesses and schools. It may open the floodgates once they take a greater initiative to market IPS panels towards the masses, further reducing prices and improving performance as it has for TN panels.

Originally I thought to wait for an LED 120Hz display or an OLED monitor, but I realized that 120Hz displays are expensive, and LED will only increase the price while not affecting image quality. OLED are much further out than I had anticipated at first, but breakthroughs are being made and we might eventually get sanely priced production models at reasonable sizes, but as long as it took IPS to reach this point, it'll take OLED all the longer to achieve prices the humble computer enthusiast is willing and/or able to pay. They still have yet to take that first step into the professional market.

AMD Rising

2010-05-06T14:14:00.006-04:00

So I'm sitting here with my 5870 churning away, I've gotten rid of the Catalyst Control Panel entirely, updated the drivers, noticed some bugs getting fixed, and I'm just thinking, "you know, this card is pretty damn nice." It may not have had much wow-factor for me, and it may lack some features, but the performance is damn good, the quality is damn good, and as I start to adjust to the new equipment, I'm starting to realize how happy it's making me. AMD's got a good thing going here.

Despite a loss of market share, AMD is finally in the black again, thanks to the completion of their GlobalFoundries spinoff. They've just launched their 10xxT series, finally competitive with the more enthusiast range Core i-series Intel CPUs. Their newly-launched Phenom II X4 and X3 chips for mobile platforms has just been announced in a multitude of Dell and HP notebooks, for the first time bringing them out of the long-held Turion slump of the last several years. All this while they're steadily gaining market share in the world of graphics, with the only top-to-bottom DX11 lineup available and the only mobile DX11 solutions in existence.

The GPU market shouldn't surprise many people, it's a one-horse race for the most part, with NVIDIA limping along on three legs. The CPU results are the first good news AMD's had in a long time, with Intel dominating in sales and market share and dominating in performance while AMD has bled money. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer, they say. Looking strictly at the <$300 segment, AMD's margins aren't as good as Intel's, compensating with a large die and more cores where their architecture falls behind. As The Tech Report said, they can afford to do this now that they don't have to dump so much into manufacturing. Intel simply has better engineering on their side, and more of it, so they can work on not just awesome desktop processors, but lots of side projects, even able to waste a few billion on failed ones. That's AMD's biggest disadvantage, and while AMD's manufacturing is just about caught up to the best contract fabricators in the industry, they now have the disposable revenue to start addressing that problem.

But until that's totally resolved they will continue to throw more cores at the problem, and worry about the financial ramifications from behind the scenes, while pretending they don't have a power consumption disadvantage. One thing they're really good about is making their new CPUs back-compatible, so while Intel might have multiple sockets for a single generation of CPUs, some of which only work with their own tailor-made chipset, AMD still has one socket that will fit 1 to 6 core CPUs across multiple generations, and all of their chipsets will follow along. Sure there's AM3, but that's an optional socket. Intel got close to that with LGA775, but screwed it up with their chipset iteration.

Then there's Bulldozer, a chip that's supposedly on schedule for availability next year. What we know of the architecture looks promising, working more towards good multi-threaded integer performance and leaving floating-point performance open for expansion with the integration of their GPU architectures in the future. Lucky for AMD, Intel's next-gen Sandy Bridge has hit a snag and won't be out till next year also, pitting the two against each other more directly rather than taking turns trading blows with one of them inevitably lagging behind. I don't expect Bulldozer to make the multi-generational leap necessary to reach parity with Intel, but I do think it's a step in the right direction, setting a course that will lead to a stronger overall strategy than Intel has going for them. Intel has their GMA graphics and their Larrabee-derived higher-level performance, but the two don't meet in the middle, where they would need to if Intel was to have a versatile processor that could ride the GPU-computing wave when it took off.

AMD's going to start building its capital and paying off its debts, gradually putting more into R&D as they desperately need, and introducing more dramatic changes to their designs than they're known for to eventually start catching up to Intel, who is eventually going to run out of the sort of performance jumps they've been having the last few years, while probably being even worse prepared for the coming heterogeneous computing environments than even NVIDIA. I see it as the start of the beginning for AMD.

My ATI

2010-04-12T22:16:00.001-04:00

Since the launch of the 5870, I was never really impressed by it. Set with the simple goal of doubling everything in the previous flagship, architecturally it left little for the technology enthusiast to scrutinize, taking what we already knew and just expanding it. This resulted in performance bound by limitations instilled in the design of a graphics pipeline dating back several years, and not a particularly forward-looking one even then. Certainly some tweaks were made, mainly to do with caches and registers and low-level things of that nature, but the overall layout remained, itself strictly a product of a general analysis of current-day graphics engines.

Weathering all expectations was the realization of a meager 40% gain over the 4890, a number that's since ballooned to about 58% average under a more modern selection of games and drivers. Clearly a card that was more a victim of the times than anything else; a ceiling imposed by the limited demands of contemporary software.

But my new build was going on nine months old then, and a single component short of a complete overhaul from my previous system. I held off buying the graphics card specifically for when one came around that could run Crysis maxed out at 1080p. The thought arose many times over whether I should just spring for a GTX 295, a proven card within my criteria. Instead I decided a single-GPU solution would be best, free of the issues with SLI or Crossfire that depended on game profiles, or sometimes led to microstuttering. Although the 5870 technically fulfilled my needs, it did so only barely, without the headroom for added comfort of gameplay and peace of mind going into future games. By the time the GTX 480 debuted, I knew my alternatives were few.

The advantage of the 5870 and the Cypress core in general is not the architectural design, but the performance per watt and per square millimeter of the chip. While a GTX 480 can make do with similar performance using only 480 SPs, a 1600 SPs 5870 can make do with a die 63% of the size, and 72% of the power. The difference is that while a GTX 480 must obtain its amazing utilization through the use of an extremely complex hardware scheduler, the 5870 frees what transistors it would have used for that task in favor of a predominately software scheduling system. And certainly if AMD concerned themselves with having performance flexible enough to address more compute-centric demands, they could have easily thrown in an extra billion transistors or so, but they had some very specific goals in mind: make a chip in the same power envelope as its predecessor, and get it out in time for Windows 7 and the fall/holiday season. What you get is a barebones gaming solution, nothing extra. Conversely, NVIDIA shot for the moon, and ended up hitting an orbiting satellite instead.

So the 5870 was to be it then, even if it isn't terribly interesting. I am buying these things mostly for what they'll do for my games, riiight? When it came time to choose a specific model, I set eyes on this one, and never looked back:

Taking the design strengths of the reference cooler, while slapping a nice big, manly red fan in the middle, it's probably the best looking 5870 available, aside from maybe this one. There seems to be a sudden trend with custom 5870s, all using center fans and new PCBs. In truth I could have saved money going with an uglier card like that of Sapphire's, but hell I'm already overpaying for this thing regardless, and aesthetics notwithstanding, the XFX card also boasts their trademark double lifetime warranty. Really, XFX dropping their NVIDIA exclusivity was probably one of the best things to ever happen to ATI.

It would be the first time in six years that I've used an ATI card personally, and the transition, I knew, would not be an easy one. The biggest point of concern would be the drivers. Although undoubting of their stability and quality, the interface on the other hand wasn't something I anticipated using with much enthusiasm. NVIDIA has their control panel down to an artform. All the options are laid out before you in a column on the left side, and with a couple of clicks you're editing in-depth settings, rarely ever wondering where to find them. The Catalyst Control Panel, however, insists on hiding everything behind drop-down menus and menus obscured behind buttons poorly laid out in an interface whose only design goal seems to have been to be smaller than their competition. To that they've succeeded, what little consolation it provides to the end user.

Upon installing the card in my system, I encountered black borders around software-rendered screens, an egregiously long driver installation process riddled with 'next' screens, punctuated with a Lord of the Rings Online icon spamming my desktop, improperly rendered fade-to-black effects in Windows, and to make the drivers at least functionally comparable to NVIDIA's, I had to supplement them with an installation of ATI Tray Tools.

I then went looking for a way to set automatic profile options for my games. ATT has a tray icon that, upon right-clicking, gives you a somewhat random list of options somewhere within which you'll find things for setting AA, AF, screen resolution, v-sync overriding, driver optimizations, overclocking, and options for the program itself, among many other things. Of course it's a bit difficult to tell which is going to be under "3D" or "Hardware", or which is going to be under "Options" or "Tweaks", but thankfully game profile management sits at the top, labeled "Game Profiles". Under there you'll find "Manage Profiles...", and then there are tabs for setting things like v-sync and triple buffering, and sub-menus for setting things like AA, AF, and variants thereof, and of course the .exe program you want to associate the profile with, and it's all done in a very frustrating and convoluted manner. Again, NVIDIA has most of these things right there in their control panel, easily located.

The added benefit to having a dedicated third-party program to do all this stuff with, however, is that it generally works better. In particular, v-sync actually works when you tell it to, a common problem with NVIDIA. There are some really fine-tuned controls for optimizations too, far beyond what NVIDIA goes into. What you'd want most, texture filtering optimizations, NVIDIA gives you, but with ATI Tray Tools, you get that and a whole lot more. There are some issues though, specifically that AA wants to stay on sometimes even after closing a game.

And yes I played some games. There are a few times in my life I can distinctly remember being blown away by a graphics card, all of which were on my friend's system. They were the 9800 Pro, the 6800GT, and the GTX 295. There was even a time before that when we ran 3DMark2001SE on his system, yielding a framerate just high enough to appreciably animate the trees at the end of the demo, to which I exclaimed "THOSE MOVE?!" The 5870 just wasn't one of those times, and in fact I was quite surprised how easy it was to bring the card to its knees. Playing STALKER Clear Sky completely maxed out, or the Heaven 2.0 benchmark, or the very reason for buying such a card, Crysis at highest settings, all caused it to struggle, and even Borderlands posed a challenge, due to some sort of performance bug with my configuration. It was an underwhelming card on paper, and now, a somewhat underwhelming card in practice. I haven't even bought Metro 2033 or Bad Company 2 yet!

Still there were some bright spots of course. Dawn of Discovery proved a laughable prospect for the card, unflinchingly churning out frames at the highest my monitor could display them, whatever the settings I chose. Coming from a crippled 8800GTS 320MB, this was pretty amazing. STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl with the graphical enhancements of the Complete 2009 mod posed no problem, but then I couldn't use AA. And it was nice to have World of Warcraft with working alpha-sampled texture AA.

When you look past the software inconveniences, the card is a pleasure to use. Image quality is sublime, and performance is adequate to great, but this truly is a barebones gaming solution. There are no extras like CUDA or PhysX, which aren't much on their own, but together add up to be fairly nice bonuses, with potential to become crucial in the future. A CUDA video encoder with x264 support is more than a little tantalizing. In a year's time, I may sell this 5870 and buy a shrunken version of the GF100, but for now, this will hold me over well enough.

Taiwan Semi-(bad)Conduct

2010-04-05T23:51:00.004-04:00

NVIDIA has a problem. It's got a bad chip launch on its hands: it's hot and uses a lot of power, it's huge and yields suck, and it hasn't nearly hit performance targets. Worst of all, they're stuck with that for a whole year before the option for a die shrink shows up to fix all their woes.

TSMC has been promising that 28nm would be well ready by this year. But as reported by The Inq and a very good news article by Xbit Labs, they might barely make it out by the end of this year, with GPU-suitable versions only being ready by early next year. Also mentioned in the Xbit article (and here as well), 32nm has been scrapped, so that leaves NVIDIA no other alternative but to wait, and thus so must we.

Both NVIDIA and AMD have already been burned by the problems with their 40nm production. As explained in the excellent article by AnandTech, AMD managed to stave off much of the issues they might've otherwise had with the chip itself using some clever tactics, but they were/are still not immune to the issues of yields, whereas for NVIDIA that's just one of their problems. The last time NVIDIA had an issue like this was (and the comparisons continue) the FX series, and they reacted by pulling production for their next generation and giving it to IBM. But IBM isn't an option anymore, so despite all the problems having to depend on a single manufacturer, NVIDIA and AMD have no choice but to suck it up, right?

Well as much as TSMC would like to think so, this latest major foul-up has cost them dearly in the technology race, leaving them open to competition by an emerging up-and-comer called GlobalFoundries. Not only do they appear to be caught up in terms of schedule, their particular 28nm process seems to be superior to TSMC's. Obviously a company jointly-owned by their chief rival makes NVIDIA a little skittish at the prospect of joining under their wing, but for that same reason that means AMD is primed to start utilizing their own facilities at the nearest opportunity, and I imagine then that we might start seeing budget and mainstream 6000 derivatives churning out of a brand new GPU fabricator as early as Q2 2011.

Of course the more AMD starts pulling their GPU production in-house, the more that will leave NVIDIA greater share of TSMC's focus and capacity. So the incentive is certainly there for NVIDIA to stay where they are, but there are plenty of reasons not to as well, and if GF100 is going teach them anything, it's that it's good to leave your options open. A little sweat on TSMC's brow probably won't hurt NVIDIA's bottom line any.

In short, this is the worst possible time for TSMC to be having problems. On top of that, chip designers probably don't enjoy being lied to, especially if it causes them to completely reshuffle their plans because certain roadmaps turned out to be a little less accurate than they were claimed. No one gets hurt worse than NVIDIA this generation though, and while their trial-by-fire experiences might help them learn the 40nm process as well as anyone in time for a formidable mainstream Fermi derivative, the damage is already done. They and the rest of the market are ready for a new kid on the block, and he might grow to be bigger than anything that has come before.

An R600-based architecture with a shader clock might be interesting to see, though.

FX Reincarnated?

2010-04-02T01:46:00.003-04:00

I held off writing another blog post for a couple months just waiting for Fermi. I didn't have much else to write about, and as far as tech-related stuff goes, Fermi was the biggest thing on my mind. I've already said pretty much everything else I'd ever want to say about it, and there wouldn't be anything new to comment on until it finally released. (I did think about writing a rambling about Bioshock 2 but I didn't have anything to say about that that hadn't already been said elsewhere.) Since its release, it was just a matter of setting aside the time to do it.

The last six months have been agonizing. I remember the day the 5870 came out. I had WoW running in the background and a webpage sitting there in front of me with a NewEgg listing of all the 5870s available, all of them $380. I had to will myself not to pull the trigger on one, because NVIDIA might have something much better right around the corner, and it might be stupid not to at least wait and see. Usually in the tech world that's always the best policy, but this is one of the few times I'm kicking myself for not indulging in some impulse buying.

After waiting so long, to say I'm disappointed would be an understatement. I was expecting something with 512 SPs running at around 1800MHz. What I got instead was something crippled. Of course the price ended up exactly where I expected, $500, but at that point it isn't worth it. On top of that, 5870s have gone up in price, with no incentive to drop.

During the long wait I had to withstand a lot of ugly rumors surrounding the new GPU. It was only bearable since the bulk of said rumors spawned from Charlie Degenerate, but a few came from elsewhere making them a little harder to ignore. As it turns out, most of the ugly rumors were true (although Charlie never got any of the specifics right), and our worst fears were confirmed. Since very early on this chip has been compared to the FX series due to its problems, and after finally receiving the benefit of full disclosure, those comparisons haven't stopped. So instead of simply restating facts about the chip, let's do something a little more interesting, and draw comparisons with the past history that has supposedly been repeated, and see how much of it really holds up.

First let's get the obvious similarities out of the way. Like the FX 5800 Ultra, the GTX 480 launched six months late. Like the FX launch, the GTX 480 is hotter and louder than the competition. Like before, the new card only marginally outperforms the competition (say ~15%), if it outperforms it at all. Since power consumption wasn't an area of focus for hardware websites at the time of the FX series, we can't make any comparisons there.

Areas where the GTX 480 launch is worse than the FX 5800 Ultra launch: The FX card wasn't priced higher than its competition. The FX card didn't launch with the competition enjoying a full top-to-bottom complement of cards covering the next-generation API. The FX card enjoyed some time in the sun before being completely trounced by an even higher performing version of its competition (the 9800 Pro -- the GTX 480 must already contend with the 5970, whose performance advantage is much higher than ATI enjoyed before). By rough estimates, the FX card never ran as hot as the GTX 480 does.

Lastly, we'll look at how things are better this time. The GTX 480 doesn't have any glaring architectural weaknesses compared to the competition (128-bit bus says hello). The GTX 480 doesn't have issues supporting the next-gen API, and performance seems to be fine in that regard. The image quality doesn't take any noticeable hits compared the competition either, especially regarding AA/AF. The GTX 480 does not get as loud as the 5800 Ultra did. Availability for the GTX 480 remains to be seen, but we can probably assume it's going to be better than the 5800 Ultra.

Overall I'd say the GTX 480 isn't quite as bad as the 5800 Ultra was, but there is definitely cause to reflect back on it. One interesting similarity between the two is the questionable architectural choices touted by NVIDIA in regards to next-generation gaming. As I said before, it's already apparent that the GTX 480 won't have any problems with DX11 games like the FX series had with DX9, but the design is forward-looking in a way that may not mesh up with the direction developers choose to go.

The FX series was designed for what NVIDIA called "Cinematic gaming", in which games would take a dramatically photo-realistic turn primarily by way of high floating-point color, or FP32 specifically. NVIDIA felt that just having support for this was a marked advantage over their competition, and banked so heavily on it that they didn't even support the less demanding FP24 standard that DX9 called for. Unfortunately for NVIDIA, coming out six months late left the developers building on the 9700 Pro instead as their hardware standard, and Microsoft sided that way as well, not really exposing FP32 in the initial DX9 version but completely axing FP16 as being adequate enough. The problem was FP16 was NVIDIA's only fallback for the FX series, which NVIDIA had assumed would get DX9's support, and they didn't equip the architecture with enough resources to make FP32 performance acceptable.

The GTX 480 also has a major feature NVIDIA is counting on to (eventually) propel it ahead of the competition, by way of the parallel geometry processing architecture. Not so much a conflict of standards as just a huge strain on chip production, the very complex geometry design banks on the idea that developers will make huge investments in tessellation use, so much so that without such a design, performance will be greatly hampered. But just as before, because of their belated launch, developers have had to look to the competition as their hardware standard for implementing new DX features, leaving NVIDIA with a party nobody's showing up to. At least this time around, it's only a matter of too much performance rather than too little, which is rarely a bad thing in this field, but the payoff may be too long in coming to be of much relevance, and considering the delays it caused, it might have actually been more of a hindrance.

Architectural complexity aside, NVIDIA can't get all the blame for this botched launch. Too be sure, it is a failure of a launch, no two ways about it, and most of that rests on the chosen price point, but TSMC had more than a helping hand influencing the ultimate outcome here. I'd wager they shoulder an equal share of the failure, and in the grand scheme of things, potentially much more of a failing towards their overall business than anyone else. I'll write more about that in a later rambling.

The bottom line is, I have to buy a new graphics card. The cards are now on the table (ha), and reluctantly I must change sides for the first time in years, and go with the 5870 as so many other people ended up doing. Indeed, what was ironically supposed to be an event that provided a lot of publicity for NVIDIA may end up just being a huge sales boost for AMD, and more of one than AMD could have ever achieved with any marketing ploy of their own. Undoubtedly there will still be true-blue fanboys who flock to the new cards regardless of their disadvantages, but this self-proclaimed fanboy can't allow himself to be that stupid. Besides, I can still sell the thing down the road when NVIDIA finally gets its shit together.

iPass

2010-01-28T02:35:00.002-05:00

There's a lot to love about the tablet concept. People are moving towards smaller computers, and that means desktops are getting replaced by notebooks. And since notebooks are hot, bulky, and lose their charge real quick, they must be replaced with something that's easier to tote around. Netbooks are much easier to carry, and have good battery life, but you still need a place to put them when in use. Then you have smartphones, but generally they're too small to get any real work done.

So then the concept of the tablet comes in. Let me first say that I'm not talking about those laptops with swiveling touchscreens...hell no. I'm talking about the convergence of the strengths of smartphones and laptops into one device that's as easy to carry around the house as it is to carry around world. Anand describes the idea well. It's a Star Trek-like device (as he puts it) built for a totally new and emerging usage model. Like him, it's the sort of thing I've been waiting a long time for. So when Apple announced the iPad, my interest was piqued.

And then it was killed in almost the same instant. The damn thing is an overgrown iPod Touch. It has all the same features the Touch has, except, you know, it won't fit in your pocket. Apple's expressed intention is for this device to be a netbook replacement. Yeah, that's a great idea, except that's not what this is. First of all, it uses the iPhone OS. That means it has all the limitations that an iPhone currently does, except the device can't be used to make calls. Now I'm all for a sleaker, slimmer mobile OS for smaller devices like these, because God knows Windows is a bit much for a pint-sized computer. But at least my pint-sized netbook can friggin multi-task!

Here's the thing: For $500, at minimum, you get a device that has no camera, it has no wall charger, it has no expandable storage, it has no SMS, it uses an internet browser that doesn't support Flash, and it's on an extremely tightly closed platform that's more akin to a gaming console than a computer. Apple's treating this "netbook replacement" like they do their iPhone and iPods, thinking they can just sell it based on the merits of iTunes and the App Store (and now the eBook store), where you have to plug it into your computer to sync or even just charge the damn thing. Only one problem, Apple: you only gave the damn thing 64GB of memory, at most, with no way to supplement it. And you know, it's a little big to be tethering to your PC.

The price is its biggest failing, but that's no surprise considering who made it. Apple made a big deal about how they engineered the iPad to hit the lowest possible price point, like $500 is supposed to be chump change. Maybe if it was the cheapest computer Apple has ever offered, but you can hardly call it a computer. More like a really expensive media player. Even if it had the functionality of a netbook, it still costs too much. Just like Apple to pretend the competition doesn't exist.

Now, obviously Apple's had plenty of success with or without competitive features. The iPhone became monumental based solely on the hardware design and the UI, with only a couple features no one else had, and lacking a whole lot of other ones. Later they added the missing features, plus the App Store which pretty much solidified its place in the market, overpriced contracts and all. Granted, some of the iPad's issues can be addressed later with software, like multitasking, or SMS (at the very least, you can use an App). But people aren't going to wait for a second or third revision of the iPad for it to recieve the necessary features, unless it brings something to the market now. The primary reason why the iPad is generally believed to be a failure, even before it's released, is because it serves no purpose, it has no niche. It does nothing better than anything that has come before.

So Apple tries to invent a market that this might appeal to. They give it the iWorks suite, in hopes that it might attract some office professionals or something. How you're going to get any serious work done on such a small screen with only one free hand is beyond me, but whatever. I guess that's what the stand/keyboard accessory is for, but then that kinda defeats the purpose. Then they market it as the ultimate eBook reader, except it sucks next to a real one. So at the very least, they tout the handy internet browsing experience, again, without Flash.

There are a few things it does right. It's got a nice design, and it uses an IPS screen. It uses multitouch to augment the keyboard-less drawback of the tablet form factor, which is something I've been hoping for in such a device. It would be nice if it was 16:9 widescreen, but oh well. The 10" size is perfect, in my opinion, for a tablet.

It's also got good battery life, owing to the new Apple A4 SoC employed in its hardware. It's based on ARM, which is interesting if only because it's a slap in Intel's face. It's like a sign that if ARM can't make it in the netbook/smartbook game, they always have a good shot at tablets. Supposedly it's using Cortex A9, which puts it above things like Qualcomm Snapdragon that are stuck on A8s. That actually brings it closer to NVIDIA's Tegra 2, in raw performance.

Except Tegra 2 is better. Graphics, video encoding, full HD...if anything the ideal tablet of the future should be using that. ICD gets pretty close but they miss the 10" sweetspot. If nothing else, the iPad might spur others on to create something better, and if in the off chance it sells decently, it could really explode the tablet market like never before, and that's something Apple's always been good for, wherever they venture.

Updates, updates...

2010-01-08T02:35:00.006-05:00

So CES is this week. Palm launched new stuff. Intel launched new stuff. AMD launched new stuff. More importantly, NVIDIA launched new stuff.

NVIDIA has succeeded again in releasing another SoC that everyone wants. Hopefully they succeed this time at actually delivering it to everyone who wants one. Last time Tegra's only notable design win was the Zune HD, a largely forgettable media player that...well, everyone largely forgot about shortly after its release. But that was all it had. Earlier at the start of this blog I had gushed at the possibilities of its use in smartbooks, only to be disappointed at the close of the year by the absence of said smartbooks. Turns out Mobinnova (and others) was simply waiting for Tegra 2, and for good reason. Packing two out-of-order dual-issue FPU-enabled ARM Cortex A9s, it beats the shit out of Tegra 1. Every demo of a tablet (I guess some are calling those "slate PCs" now) or smartbook using Tegra showed a sluggish running system. The thing was simply not meant for full-sized computing endeavours, and let's face it, we're not even talking full-sized demands here. But Tegra 2 should have no problem handling any Firefox-browsing aspirations, and hell even some HD media and gaming on the side. Cooler still, it's built on 40nm. Usually side products like this--chipsets, bridge chips, NVIO, whatever else NVIDIA makes that's not a GPU--get second class manufacturing, but not this time. I guess it's a sign NVIDIA's really taking this seriously, and if worst comes to worst, I think they're banking on supporting themselves on this little "side product" if at all possible. Apparently they see the mobile SoC market as being worth billions, overshadowing any other market they've ever been in, so it could very well be the next big thing for them. Well, the only other big thing for them aside from GPUs. For now let's hope Tegra 2 makes it into some kickass products that we can actually buy.

OK so there are other things this week. AMD's got their DX11 mobile shit, rubbing it in the face of their competition who's going stagnant by the minute. Google's got their new phone, giving the iPhone the ol' "me too!" treatment that everyone else is giving it, and decidedly not blowing the smartphone market away. Intel is showing off some Moorestown stuff, beginning their encroachment of ARM's market. They're also showing off some wireless HD stuff, which isn't real wireless HD, in the way that it's not home theater material. It's more a video streaming thing for PCs, similar to StreamMyGame, only not shitty. It's costly though, since it requires custom hardware for the TV, and a new computer with the technology. Palm is talking up their Pre Plus, whose claim to fame seems to be expanded internal flash (whoopi), and migration to the Verizon network. It'll still be more interesting if (when) iPhone makes the move to Verizon, as at least when iPhone gets an upgrade, it's a real upgrade. Palm is also talking up new apps and games, but while it's nice gaming is being taken more seriously on cell phones now, until they work on framerate issues, up the ante in quality, and figure out a decent solution for controlling them, they'll still be clunky and irrelevant. But Palm gets the homebrew nod, and that's a pretty big deal in Apple's face.

What else...oh yeah. They demo'd Fermi, as promised, and it was just as much a letdown as feared. I suppose we should be impressed that it's functional at this point, and that it supports DX11. The only tidbits we get is more confirmation of the Q1 release timeframe, and that it's "ramping up hard", which sounds like some sort of innuendo. They also announced 3D Vision Surround, which is pretty much the realization of what I mused about in my rambling about the 5970. Then I talked about Eyefinity and 3D Vision getting together, but this is even better, because it's real and will actually work. All except no one cares, because they can't even get full HD monitors out with 120Hz support, or hell, they can't get the two or three that are out down to a reasonable price. So who the eff is going to have three of them? Oh well, more gimmicks to use up that excess GPU power, just like 32xAA and PhysX and whatever else they've got planned. Oh, and there also this pretty cool gaming netbook from Alienware, called the M11X. It's got a better GPU than Asus's UL80v, also CULV-based, so if it's priced the same, it should actually be a pretty interesting product, long as you can choke down the chasis design. Over $800, though, and it'll price itself out of the market.

CES isn't over so maybe there will be something more interesting in the next couple of days.

I don't like L4D

2009-12-30T00:24:00.002-05:00

Left 4 Dead does a lot of things right. In fact it nailed the zombie survival idea in gaming form perfectly, most would say. I haven't really watched any zombie movies, but I understand their appeal, and I "get it" when I see all the film-like details added to the game series, such as the film grain, the movie posters on the load screen, and the end credits. There might be specific film references in the levels themselves and those I wouldn't be able to catch for obvious reasons. I recognize the fact that for what the L4D franchise sets out to do, it accomplishes brilliantly, in a way no other game has been able to do, almost creating a sub-genre all on its own.

The idea is most of the population has turned into zombies. They have an animalistic sense for living flesh and are able to seek it out, so naturally wave after wave of them are going to be swarming towards you. Other survivors have gone before you, and have laid clues for getting out of buildings, forests, and other environments and into safehouses. You go around finding whatever health kits, weapons, ammo, pipe bombs and other items that might be scattered around, and the intent is for you to ration things out, help each other, and make do with what's available. You can't kill the entire population, even the local ones, with just your bullets, so your only choice is to simply live long enough to get to the next objective, be it a safehouse or a ticket out of the area.

The whole premise makes sense. The execution of that premise is flawless. There's no questioning why things are done the way they are, or what should be changed. And I don't like it. I understand I'm not the first person to say so. I'm among a small contingency of people who are the same way, and many would scoff at those people and me for our taste in gaming. Indeed the core idea seems foolproof: kill wave after endless wave of zombies. Bathe in the shower of blackened blood and half-decomposed entrails, and generally bask in the glory of gore. One of my favorite levels in Painkiller is the zombie level in the Ye Olde Village, so naturally I assumed I'd be joining the mass acclaim for this series with open arms. I willingly bought into the hype for the original L4D, albeit with some hesitation due to the price tag. But once it hit $25, I jumped right on it, and expected to be swept away in the tides of joy and entertainment bliss. But I wasn't.

My main problem, as I believe is the case with most critics of the games, is the AI director. The AI director's task is to shake things up, a job it does admirably. If you're too bunched up together, it tries to break you apart. If one gets too far ahead, attempts are made to overwhelm him or her. If things get too dull, some special zombies are thrown in, and on and on and on the challenges continue. It's a brilliant solution to the problem of campaigns getting repetitive and predictable, and it encourages lots of replay. The problem seems to be that whenever I enter the fray, the gods of gaming hell seem to possess this AI director, and what should be a walk in the park for an experienced FPS player on normal mode is a chastising shitstorm of assrape eviscerating my insides.

Now mind you, this can happen to anyone who doesn't know what they're doing. The game isn't very kind to noobs (though not the most unkind game ever) and unless you've been through each campaign at least once, you're going to have a tough time. But almost every time I've played I've played with my friend (the only source of encouragement to get me back into it) who is experienced at all that the story mode has to offer. Despite talking me through it, maintaining good communication with the group, I've had one wipe right after another where even he was baffled. Just my luck, I guess.

Never has a game frustrated me so much. One tank isn't enough. Two, three, or fucking four tanks in a row seems necessary. And I kid you not, but for the longest time in L4D2 if I was ever being disemboweled by a hunter, I was also bathing in spitter acid like the two went hand-in-hand. When it rains, it pours, I suppose. It's cheap, is what it is. That's the problem. When is a game most frustrating? Not when it's hard, no, because if it's a good game you know where you can improve and you do, and the game rewards you for it. It's when the game deliberately takes all control out of your hands to do anything about a situation, and it's simply out to get you. Can you stop a bad sequence of special zombies from happening? No, it's a crapshoot. Can you better protect yourself when it happens? Sure, if there's always someone there to help you. But relying on online gamers has never been an easy thing to do, and when the game gives you no chance to help others, or for them to help you because they're ALSO caught up in some mess of their own, all you can do is throw up your hands and curse at the heavens.

You know, one of the fun things about most shooters is the feeling of power. When I look back at other games, especially ones where you're fighting off waves of enemies, the best parts are when you've got a kickass weapon, loads of ammo, and are just going to town wiping them all out. The sense of accomplishment comes when you're able to endure and survive everything that's thrown at you, that you can take on all comers. You're the biggest badass in the world, and there isn't shit anyone can do about it. But what you get in L4D instead is a feeling of helplessness. You're vulnerable to the whims of destiny, your fate hangs on the throw of a die. You can't possibly kill everything, you never have enough health or ammo, so your success depends on your teamwork. Even then, teamwork itself, even with the best execution, is challenged at every turn, unraveled by unsympathetic changes in the odds, and compromised by the luck of the draw. When I can't win, and there's nothing I can do about it, then I have a hard time liking the game I'm playing.

The Plight of Highend Graphics

2009-12-15T14:51:00.007-05:00

This rambling is kind of a response to a blog post by Antony Leather of bit-tech. The question posed is that of the effect of Crysis on the PC gaming industry, more specifically on the consumers whose burden it is cope with the demands of the game on their home computers. Is (or was) it a trivial matter, perhaps even a positive influence on PC gamers and the market, or was it such an unreasonable expectation on the target demographic to affect a movement of consumers away from the PC into the user-friendly arms of the current console generation?

Interestingly, a recent article on Fudzilla uses similar language in its last sentence: "No wonder gamers are turning to consoles in droves." Both entries were published the same day, and it seems unlikely that one influenced the other.

This idea that people are actually leaving the PC in favor of a more simplified gaming experience strikes me as a misguided notion. It would seem to me those who have stayed with PC gaming up to this point and for any reasonable length of time have come to terms with the fact that PC gaming involves certain obstacles and considerations that go beyond that of mainstream gaming. With gaming on a platform of superior visual fidelity, freedom, and control options, the price is that you know a little more about the technical underpinnings of the the hardware and software that you're dealing with, and yes it might require some upgrading sometimes. But Crysis didn't introduce this idea anew to the market of PC gaming. When was the last time a game pushed the envelope to such levels?

Hmmm, the last time I remember something like this happening was... I dunno, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion? But hell that wasn't really a stretch to run, was it? It might have put the sweat on the brow of your average flagship graphics card at the time, but there were plenty of other reasons to buy one of those anyway. Before that there was perhaps FEAR. But the really standout year where all hell broke loose on upgrading had to have been 2004. How many people beefed up their systems in preparation for Doom 3, or Half-Life 2? Hell even Far Cry pushed the limit of what computers could do back then. It was one game after another that really required additional expenditure on the hardware we were running. I don't remember a lot of people complaining about that though, in fact most people were happy to upgrade, if it meant ushering in a new era in graphics and gameplay.

But then you might say, "yes but the argument is that Crysis couldn't be satisfied. There was nothing that could max it out at the time, or even a couple years after its release!" Well that's true. I can think of a couple other games similar to that, where their graphics settings were created with the future in mind, beyond what current systems were capable of, namely the Everquest series. But it seems rather funny to me that PC gamers would be high-tailing it in droves over one little game that makes unreasonable demands on current-day technology, even though that was the expressed intention of it, and to compromise with slightly lesser settings was hardly compromising in the grand scheme of things, when "medium" looked better than anything else out there. Furthermore in 2007 and especially the following year, the price for really good performance graphics took a nosedive, to a level hardly seen since the Radeon 9500 Pro and dare-I-say the Voodoo days of old, with the 8800GT and 3850 cards released that generation. And if you did pony up for the most expensive model, that model (the 8800GTX) kept its value for much longer than virtually any card before it, unflinching from its $600 price tag for at least a year after it launched. Spending money on an upgrade at the time, even if it was for just one game, hardly seemed to be much of an sacrifice, especially when taken into the context of previous years.

And what else was pushing the envelope like Crysis did? Nothing, that's what. You might get a European game here and there (Stalker) that used some of the newer bells and whistles, but the vast majority of the PC gaming library since the launch of the current generation of consoles has been games that could run on the most modestly-priced of graphics cards. It has never been cheaper and easier to be a PC gamer, so why stop now? Are PC gamers such ninnies as to be disheartened that easily, where all the other advantages and merits of the platform are quickly forgotten over one instance of frustration?

If anything, we should be thanking Crysis for doing us a favor. PCs used to be the centerfold for innovation and cutting-edge technology, but no one seems to be interested in that anymore. Here comes a game that shows what PCs are really made of, taking us back to a time when no other machine could do what a home computer was able to accomplish. How many people dropped their jaws when they first saw Doom? A handful of us remember those days, and retain a passion and love for the technology behind the game as much as the game itself. If it weren't for Crysis, what would those people have to look forward to?

Graphics is my favorite subject

2009-11-18T21:48:00.003-05:00

So the HD 5970 is out. I like the name. No suffixes whatsoever. Simple, clean, elegant, gets the point across. There's a prefix but that's just to denote the boarder range of GPUs it's a part of. Better than NVIDIA's prefixes, which are really suffixes just moved to the front.

I read a few reviews, and obviously the thing pulverizes the competition, but the competition is a dead horse anyway. Something frustrated me about most of the reviews though: the game selection. It can't be helped, I suppose. Almost all of them are console ports (some with minor enhancements) that never had any problem running in the first place. What's the point benching those games if absolutely no one would be basing their purchasing decision on them? Nobody's thinking "oh man, I need to start doing research for a card that can play Borderlands". Fucking anything can play Borderlands. $100 cards used to be shit but now that'll buy you a 9800GT or equivalent. That's like nothing for a video card budget, and we're talking a card just a smidge under the flagship performance of 2006 (which would normally make it pretty old, but not anymore). So yeah, anything north of toilet paper will run Borderlands, or any of the COD games... or Far Cry 2, or L4D2, or Resident Evil 5, or Batman: Arkham Asylum, or whatever the hell else.

Some people even stopped benching Crysis. Why? I mean yeah, OK, everyone's played through it (except me because I want to do so in its full glory), but it's not like it's irrelevant graphically. People may not care about Crysis performance in particular, but that level of graphical quality hasn't yet been matched, and it's the only game that new graphics card releases can still strain at. The only other games are the badly optimized Call of Juarez DX10 edition, and STALKER games (not as badly optimized but still bad). Maybe, just maybe, something else might come along in the near future that actually strives for IQ at that level, and then we might have a clue what card is more capable when the shaders are really being pushed. If nothing else, Crysis 2!

So the conclusion most places are coming to, unsurprisingly, is that the HD 5970 is overkill. Not even max MSAA is a challenge, if the game supports it (thanks consoles for ever calling that into question). So then there's the extremely limited super-sampling method, or if you're feeling like throwing a big bonfire of money, you can get a few monitors for some Eyefinity action, which much like NVIDIA's 3DVision doesn't work right half the time. They should get both those technologies together for the ultimate in immersion. It might only work for like two games, but it would make those two games the best ones ever.

Will there ever be a card better than the HD 5970? Usually you'd say "of course, that's the natural progression of technology", but I'm not even sure anymore. How would AMD (or NVIDIA) justify it? It costs $600+, it already hits the ceiling of PEG power output, it's damn near the longest card ever, and again, it's freakin overkill for current games. I expect through the usual process shrinks and such that they'll fit its performance into a single chip one day, but I think physical limitations in chip manufacturing and the logistics in the consumer world are slowing down advancements drastically, while game devs simply don't care to blow their budgets putting them to good use. It'll be a while before NVIDIA can release another dual-GPU card, no doubt beyond 2010. Fermi is so large, so complicated, so problematic for its creators to produce that it may well be the last monolithic GPU they make. It's just getting to be too much to maintain these days, and while NVIDIA will probably move their primary source of revenue towards the professional and HPC markets, whose margins may well pull them out of the financial sinkhole of making gigantic chips, I can see them coming to the same realization that AMD has. Smaller chips are just all around better to deal with, and mean all around better margins anyway.

Especially if Fermi ends up being the next FX. If they can't hit their clock targets, and if it doesn't end up being at least 30% faster than the 5870, then combined with the grotesquely late release, they'll have failed this generation completely. Not even their mainstream stuff will save them, because they're already even more behind there.

ARM's Ascension

2009-10-23T19:55:00.003-04:00

NVIDIA hopes to grow their Tegra business to eventually make up 50% of their revenue. By scoring a win with the Zune HD, possibly ending up in the future Nintendo handheld and Apple products, and countless other media, phone, and computing devices, it's no wonder why their expectations might be high. SoCs have always been very popular in the ultra-portable scene, and Tegra is among many leading the way for the future of this technology sector. With hardware accelerated flash, video, graphics and audio support, the capabilities of such SoCs has grown to the point of surpassing the form-factor of just smartphones, to encompass a vast array of devices extending all the way up to notebook-like devices, dubbed "smartbooks".

It's for this reason that ARM is becoming better positioned to take the computing world by storm in the near future. With their recent partnership with the newly formed GlobalFoundries manufacturing company, it's clear they intend on increasing the capabilities of their chips beyond the scope of what they're best known for today.

Right now there's a pretty large gulf between the major electronic devices that we use everyday that separates the two major forces in the computing industry. They are Intel and ARM, and both companies are seeking to cross this gulf at an increasing rate these days, extending their businesses and eeking into each other's markets. While ARM is best known for the popularity in cell phones, their expansion into the smartbook category thanks to Qualcomm's Snapdragon and NVIDIA's Tegra is just the beginning. Intel is doing similar things, extending their x86 standard used in larger PCs into MIDs, and soon smaller devices through their Atom product line. Intel has a long way to go if they hope to get Atom into the next big smartphone, and similarly ARM has a long way to go if they want their chips used in full-blown computers.

Arguably ARM has the bigger challenge. While Intel needs only to continue to shrink their Atom architecture into smaller and smaller sizes, ARM not only has to contend with performance considerations, but also software ones. Thanks to the Linux persuasion, a lot of the most popular applications we use are not necessarily tied to x86, but most of them are. Particularly Windows, the biggest application of them all. Windows CE hasn't received much attention from its parent company Microsoft, and lags far behind in the features x86 Windows users, and any other major OS user is accustomed to. That leaves Linux variations, but again we go back to the software support issue. It's not enough if an OS can browse the internet and play media fine, it has to be able to run the software your typical computer user is used to.

Both companies have to deal with the tight market penetration that the other has. ARM enjoys a much more open and versatile business structure that plays much more friendly with the demands of small device makers. Intel, by virtue of the fact that they are such a large company, isn't quite so nimble, and while their x86 standard plays such a role in the computing world that it should probably be stripped of licensing restrictions, Intel will still try to hang onto their IP with all their might. And while ARM gets all the software support, with all the money Intel is able to throw around, undoubtedly that won't be much of a problem for them, especially given their typical strong-arm tactics. This, too, will work in their favor when it comes to courting the device makers themselves. ARM, on the other hand, has no such money reserves, and while it's unlikely they'll ever be performance hounds, just getting into the general computer market with Intel opposing them will be a nearly impossible task.

ARM does have a few advantages though. Because they are so open, a lot of different companies can make designs with their instruction set, leading to diversity and intense competition, which should help to push performance. Their instruction set is generally evolutionary, meaning they'll likely benefit from a great deal of software back-compatibility, a trait they share with x86. It is for this same reason that many software developers (the smaller ones, at least) are eager to move away from the x86 standard. x86 gets a lot of blame for holding back innovation, and its the same reason why many don't think it has much chance in the ultra-mobile market. The biggest question Intel faces in getting their x86 into these smaller form factors is....why?

Why, indeed? An old standard that has grown bloated with age being positioned to enter a mobile market that favors slenderness and adaptability? And what about the other parts that make up an SoC? Do we really want what Intel considers graphics acceleration in even more of our devices? ARM & partners have the slick designs to get the job done in a space smaller than Intel has been able to manage. The only question is, do those slick designs scale upwards?

Before we can even answer that question, another question arises: Would Intel let them in, even if they do? The answer to that may be coming, and the opportunity for ARM to get their foot in the door is already here. Smartbooks may just be the beginning. Then it's "nettops", and bigger notebooks, and pico-ITX-based computers, and as the popularity continues to grow, so will the software support, and with the backing of many large electronics corporations, the expansion of their manufacturing and growth of their designs, who knows what the future will be? The bell for the first round between ARM and x86 is about to sound. Anyone wanna place their bets?

Now if they could just declare x86 as public domain, things will really get cooking.

NVIDIA's Fermi

2009-10-03T05:24:00.004-04:00

Fermi is the name of the architecture for NVIDIA's next gen (DX11) cards. Fermi was announced ahead of actual card announcements or even just information about gaming features. All that was talked about, in fact, was Tesla-related shit, but despite that I've read all kinds of bullcrap from people jumping to all kinds of ridiculous conclusions about it.

Once again, this was an announcement for Tesla. Companies looking to make large investments in new servers and HPC systems need a lot of lead time to make decisions, and NVIDIA was trying to appeal to them, as well as investors and stock holders, proving that Fermi is real and that there are some really cool things to look forward to about it. AMD released their shit, so now NVIDIA wants to make some sort of response, even if it isn't actual hardware. This was an announcement to gain mindshare, nothing more.

You know, with the impending stagnation of the graphics market at hand, I kind of thought the whole fanboy wars thing would more or less die off, as it really didn't matter anymore who you chose. But no, I was misguided. It seems that as performance has become adequate for almost all games now and in the foreseeable future, the graphics card market has become much more an exercise in the politics of sports than it used to be, with fans rooting for their "home teams", more out of senseless preference than anything else, because, after all, you can buy any card and still play any game you want.

Now I'm not without my biases. As I've stated here in the past, I have an affinity for NVIDIA. PhysX may not be God's gift to gamers, but it's the only GPU physics being used in games, and that's becoming important. Also, there are some driver features I'd be reluctant to leave behind. Like, for instance, being able to have automatic game profiles without friggin having to download ATITool. Come on ATI! No one's going to assume you're cheating because you make your drivers more intelligent and convenient. They already assume you're cheating, at least to some extent, however minor, just like it's assumed of NVIDIA and everyone else! What's the rationale here? This isn't 2003 anymore.

Plus the fact that CUDA has actually taken off to a much greater degree than any other equivalent is a plus for NVIDIA. Sure, one has to admire AMD's push for open standards, but unfortunately this is still 2009, not 2011, and we have to deal with the realities that affect us today. NVIDIA has paid more people, pushed more people, and just gotten more people to use their standard, and with future software tools like Nexus (or Nexem? or whatever), this will only continue to expand. It's not as though such a thing is unheard of, just look at x86. That's really what Fermi is all about. Seizing whatever opportunities NVIDIA has or has created for themselves in the general purpose world. That was their emphasis during their launch this week and should be the focus of enthusiasts, but unfortunately, that's not how things have turned out.

People are jumping to all kinds of conclusions, as I've said earlier, and the biggest one of all is the assumption that with Fermi NVIDIA is actually deemphasizing gaming at the same time they're expanding GPGPU. Really? A company who, even admitting so in their keynote, has made their success on gaming, is making strides to abandon that market? Could it be, just maybe, that it only seems that way because this launch was focused on Tesla and not on gaming? That we've simply only heard about one side of this architecture in a deliberate effort to not hurt existing sales or give their gaming competition a heads-up? How about this, why don't we instead come to such conclusions after they've talked about the gaming side of Fermi, hm?

Then there's the performance speculation. This part I actually enjoy, because it's almost detective work, digging through sparse details and trying to make some deductions, but the important thing to keep in mind at all times is that this is what it is: speculation. Assumptions. Conjecture. It's all about people's opinions. It's not hard to see why this is happening; I mean how long has it been that we've actually gotten new architectures? Seems like forever. Again, the market is stagnating, us enthusiasts are hungry for the old days of cutthroat competition and month-by-month developments. We're starved. This is all we have to feed on. NVIDIA has teased us, but that's it. We have nothing concrete, and the only people that can derive anything are application programmers interested in GPGPU stuff.

It can get frustrating though. Discussions go from civil to juvenile in a heartbeat, and I have my own guilty moments of getting sucked into it. I'm just like the rest of them, and yet I'm only just mature enough to see what's the matter with that. One thing's for sure: Fermi is a new architecture, it's more efficient and complex than anything NVIDIA or anyone has done before. It's the closest thing to a CPU a GPU has ever gotten, and what that translates to in the gaming world we can't know, until the day of the final product launch. There's too many contributing factors, and too many questions to draw any conclusions on performance. We've been thrown a bone, and all we're left with is an even greater hunger.

NVIDIA PhysX

2009-09-21T15:45:00.002-04:00

PhysX has always been met with skepticism from all sides of the gaming industry. From its roots as a $250 add-in card to its current incarnation as the forefront of general purpose GPU processing for use in games, the value proposition has been one that few have been able to grasp despite all the promises and possibilities.

Now, admittedly I thought PhysX really had a new lease on life when NVIDIA took hold of it a few years ago. I mean it went from an overly expensive piece of useless hardware to a free feature upgrade for existing NVIDIA card users, something virtually unheard of in the industry. The wonderful thing about GPGPU technology is that as long as you can program it with the given language, you can give people anything you want with it, and have it run on any piece of hardware that supports it. Its one of the advantages touted by Larrabee, and at least that card has the potential of no longer being bound by hardware-based DirectX limitations, as, in theory, the software renderer can adapt to whatever new DX generation comes out, with the only limitation in the future-proofing prospects being raw performance (which is a big deal, of course).

But despite the dramatically increased install-base that moving PhysX to CUDA afforded it, developers were still sheepish about supporting it. I mean after all, it's a PC-only feature when the industry these days develops their games centered around consoles, and if you have to do anything more than increase the size of the textures and put in an option to change the resolution, it hardly seems worth it to them. But NVIDIA has built many of their successes by throwing money around, and TWIMTBP program is a great way of getting PhysX in the hands of gamers. Yet even then, the technology seemed reserved for only the most frivolous of enhancements, be it extra sparks or shrapnel coming off of objects when you shoot them, or pieces of cloth or paper shifting around pointlessly. It's all well and good as a free addition for those with the compatible equipment, but as a key selling point, it was less than spectacular.

NVIDIA seemed to be in denial for a while, touting PhysX as one of the key advantages of their hardware for many GPU releases to come after its introduction, and the public, press, and generally those with good sense simply weren't buying a word of it. Add to that in some cases it killed performance such that any significant amount of PhysX effects acted more as a detriment to the gaming experience than anything else. I keenly remember the special PhysX levels in UT3, and the free crappy multiplayer shooter Warmonger. A couple stuttering levels and shitty games weren't going to garner it much attention.

So then NVIDIA got more aggressive. They started pursuing not just the crappy games as they had before, but anticipated PC ports of popular console games. It was in these ports NVIDIA saw a golden opportunity, because as the developers and publishers needed their help to lessen the burden with adding special support for the higher PC standards without cutting into the cash-in prospects that porting to a new platform brings, NVIDIA could add in their own optimizations, and more importantly, insert their goldenboy marketing feature in the process. For PhysX to be the performance-topping, table-turning ace-in-the-hole they needed it to be, they had to spread it out as fast and as wide as possible to every game people may or may not give a damn about. It had to be the one thing the competition did not have that they could tout, even when all other aspects of their technology fell flat.

It started with Mirror's Edge, a game that was to be NVIDIA's second chance after Unreal Tournament 3 proved to be a no-go for getting PhysX off the ground. While the added effects enhanced the immersiveness in ways PhysX hadn't really done yet in past tacked-on efforts, the game itself wasn't such a commercial and critical success as to carry the technology with it to the great heights NVIDIA aspired towards. Undeterred, NVIDIA pushed forward to the next game, one that was quickly gaining recognition and excitement in the gaming community in a way no other game of its kind had yet.

Batman: Arkham Asylum was to be the first modern Batman game that truly wasn't crappy. With fan favoring decisions like the casting of popular voice actors and choice in villains, the combat system that seemed effortless and seamless, the refined stealth elements and the highly appealing art direction and high-fidelity graphics afforded by the Unreal Engine 3, the game was poised to deliver on all the promises gamers could ever hope for in a comic book hero game. The game was set for simultaneous release on all the gaming platforms worth a damn in this current generation, but in an incredibly risky move, the game was delayed on the PC thanks to NVIDIA convincing the publishers it would be worth it to go all-out on the inclusion of PhysX effects. NVIDIA knew they needed a true, blue killer app for PhysX unlike anything they've had yet; one that both critics and consumers could agree on. So was it worth it?

Just recently my attention was brought to this comparison video showing the differences with and without PhysX. Now I've seen similar videos like this before, but nothing that went into the game with as much depth as this one, and because of that there are quite a few spoilers for the locations and enemies you'll be facing. The results are actually pretty spectacular. Huge clouds of debris swirl around in the air, bouncing off giant enemies and crumbling off of walls and structures. Fog fills rooms and environments, covering the floor and enhancing the spooky factor of some of the areas. Paper, not just a few being kicked around on the floor, but rooms engulfed with it, blowing around, encircling your character and environment in all directions like nothing seen before. Little things like cobwebs, sparks, broken tile, and trash that would have once been considered the best that PhysX has to offer, now play second-fiddle to the gigantic graphical spectacles that I mentioned earlier. PhysX has finally found its killer app, just as NVIDIA has always wanted. This is the game to finally show what it can do, how it can really add to the immersiveness of a game in a way not done before. A purely graphical effect it may be, but like HDR and anti-aliasing before it, it creates a level of realism and a visually captivating experience that sets the bar beyond what's been done thus far. This is the next level of graphics, folks. The next frontier. If you can watch that video and say you'd enjoy the game just as much without those effects, then the world of graphics technology and innovation mean precisely squat to you.

As much as the PhysX additions impress in Batman: AA, I can't help but wonder if it really advances the importance of PhysX and what it can do for the future of gaming, or if it really just shows the potential for GPU-based physics in general. PhysX, as it is right now, is still a proprietary standard supported on just one set of hardware made by one company. Once DX11 takes hold, a similar approach could be done with GPU compute programs supported by that API, and thus supported by all DX11 cards no matter their maker. Intel has a lot to gain by keeping Havok to themselves, so it seems to me that the days of both Havok and PhysX are numbered, and its only a matter of time before a third option, more flexible and more widely supported, rises from obscurity to truly herald a new age in physics processing. One thing's for sure though: GPU-based physics is here to stay, one way or another.

On the precipice of battle, DX11 approaches

2009-07-27T20:01:00.003-04:00

Sheesh, last time I complained it had been ten days since the previous rambling. Now here I am damn near a month later before I'm updating again.

It's almost August. Windows 7 has gone gold. In four months, on October 22 of this year, it'll release to the hungry masses, bringing with it the next DirectX generation, DirectX 11. To correspond with the new API update, new graphics card generations will be released, as they've always done. Since Intel is still at least a year off from debuting the hard launch of Larrabee, that leaves two graphics card companies to think about: AMD and NVIDIA. It has been a long time since the last generation first launched. Both GPU designers, the public, and the press are absolutely aching for the next battle.

Already it seems that NVIDIA is lagging behind. AMD has already showed off working DX11 silicon at this year's Computex, and the rumor mill is talking up the problems and delays NVIDIA is facing with their own hardware. The problem seems to revolve around the new 40nm process, and while both companies have already launched 40nm hardware, it's a whole other matter when dealing with flagship products where transistor budgets are challenged and clockspeeds are of great importance. While some are saying NVIDIA will have to push the launch in the first quarter of next year, others, particularly Fudzilla, are holding steadfast to the idea that it'll make it out by the end of this year.

The latter Fudzilla article does mention the possibility, however, that we could be seeing something more akin to a paper launch, or at least a launch in very limited quantities. This makes sense as some are saying AMD could have their DX11 stuff out over a month prior to Windows 7, and NVIDIA doesn't want to lose any mindshare in the upcoming fight. Both companies know that as the first new generation launch in over a year, and one heralded by the launch of a new OS, this launch is extremely important as a means of setting the tone for the rest of the generation. NVIDIA in particular knows how high the stakes are. Last year they were beaten in price and margins and, as much as they tried to downplay it, feature-wise too with DX10.1. NVIDIA eventually backtracked by adding support for it with their first 40nm cards, and arguably the first mainstream versions of their updated GT200 architecture. But everyone recognized that raw performance still went to them, and even if history repeats and the GT300 is larger, hotter, and hungrier for power than the competition, they'll still top all the benchmarks at the very least. I do think they'll play things more conservatively on the price front though, because the price-drop fopaux they experienced two weeks into the launch of the GTX 200 series generated bad press and sour feelings towards them from both partners and consumers.

Fudzilla goes on to say in a later article that the RV870, AMD's highend DX11 chip will simply be an update of the RV770. That same article points out that the GT300 is expected to be a radical change, one that some even call the first "cGPU". That got me thinking. Even if AMD makes it to market first, NVIDIA would need only release details of their upcoming chip to motivate people to wait. Obviously to the enthusiast crowd a totally new architecture is a lot more interesting than a simple update on a preexisting architecture. The last thing people are craving right now is a rehash of the same old, same old. NVIDIA is especially guilty of rebranding, and while AMD creates actual new GPUs to fit different price segments, their architecture hasn't changed much from the original R600 some three years ago, which itself was built on the then-well-documented Xenos GPU used in the Xbox 360, which again used a great deal of the principles from previous architectures all the way back to the R300, the ideas behind which were purchased from ArtX by ATI beforehand. In fact I'm not sure ATI-now-AMD has ever done anything truly fundamentally new with their graphics architectures on their own in pretty much ever. OK there was the R200, I'll give them that one.

The GT300 could very well have some very compelling advantages to cause enthusiasts to want to wait for it, as few others are really eager to upgrade since current cards can already play the most demanding stuff available on the PC now and in the foreseeable future. Aside from future Crysis installments I'm not sure there really is anything else to look forward to that'll push the envelope, so the excitement behind these cards is likely only generated by a very small niche in the market, a shrunken niche compared to an age when graphical leaps were as easily identified as the difference between night and day. The MIMD stuff is probably only really interesting to developers even still, but it matters more when it comes from NVIDIA as it would anyone else because their CUDA interface is the current king of the market, proprietary as it is. Comparisons between it and AMD's Stream initiative are often extremely lobsided, and it doesn't look as though they're all that aggressive in wanting to fix that. Until OpenCL takes off, an event whose arrival is anyone's guess, NVIDIA has the only real answer, and as I keep buying more seasons of favorite television shows and ripping them to my computer, a fast general purpose GPU, rather than my CPU, will continue to become increasingly appealing.

A congratulations is in order for AMD, regardless. Rumors aside, it seems pretty well evident that they will in fact beat NVIDIA to the market with a new DirectX generation for the first time since the original DX9. No doubt their products will also be extremely sleek designs, priced very affordably, and performing admirably (though I'm betting no more than 50% over current offerings). NVIDIA will again shoot for the moon, having not really learned their lesson from last time, except that they shouldn't grow too content or overconfident with where they stand. Their GPU will be huge, it will be hot, it'll consume a lot of power, just like last time and the time before that, but unlike last time, their execution seems already doomed to be inferior to the previous generation, as at least then they still beat AMD to market. The only thing they can hope for now is that technology-wise they'll hold all the cards without question, and it's only a matter of time before we find out if it ends up being the greatest thing since the dawn of GPUs, or if it'll fall flat on its face. I'm not counting on there being an option in between.

I love Amazon Prime

2009-06-29T02:35:00.003-04:00

You know there's a lot more confessing my love of things and a lot less bitching than I expected to do in this blog, but oh well, appreciating things sometimes is good for the soul. It's been ten days since my last post, and I have to write about something.

Amazon Prime has been a godsend for me. Anyone who's jumped on the bandwagon knows what I mean. For a single person it'll cost you a deterring $80 to start up an account, but the catch, the good kind of catch, is that it's open to up to four members of your family. What people end up doing is splitting the costs between each person, and claiming each one as a blood relative, whoever they are. The result is a closeness with your friends you've never known, as you begin to think of them more as brothers....or cousins...or in-laws....or uncles.......nephews............male mistresses.

But aside from white lies, there is the closeness you feel because they helped you gain access to something that will drain your bank account utterly in the year to come, all while filling your sense of happiness to ridiculous levels. Afterall, for only $16 (Paypal keeps a bit for themselves), having free two day shipping for anything Amazon ships themselves for 12 months is a pretty damn good deal. And as popular as this scheme is, I'd find it hard to believe that Amazon isn't privvy to it. Hell to let it go on for this long seems almost supportive of it, and they'd have to have known when they formulated the terms of the service that this sort of thing might take place.

So for every paycheck I recieve, I find myself buying something on Amazon. This has become a ritual going on for months now. I figured I'd use it often enough, but I'm pretty astonished about just how much I find myself using it. It's practically an excuse in and of itself to splurge on something. Of course it also means I don't even give any other online shop a second glance, at least when it comes to multimedia, which is no doubt something Amazon is keen on, and probably why they haven't killed the four-member family loophole, or raised the price for membership.

Of course I've spoken a couple times about my newfound love for collecting Blu-Ray movies, and...well this is a good reason why it's taken off like it has. If you don't have an Amazon Prime account, I suggest you find four people on the internet that you intimately trust, and get yourself set up with it. Otherwise, you might as well just buy all your stuff from local places, because paying taxes on purchased goods is just as obsolete as paying for shipping is now.

The internet is a curse and a blessing

2009-06-17T04:32:00.004-04:00

I've been tempted lately to write something not related to technology, but instead more personal, which is something I promised myself I'd never do on a blog-like site. Since I've never really explained my reasoning here, I'll briefly say that it stems from the public nature of blogs and the private nature of things that happen in your personal life, and the inappropriate mixing of the two for what I can only imagine are questionable motives. Journals and diaries were always meant to be private, and if you have to do any sort of suppressing of your thoughts and feelings because you're mindful of prying eyes, you're not dealing with those issues. But I digress as this isn't a problem with the internet I wish to address today.

The problem I wish to address relates more to the speedy nature of the internet, and the endless fountain of information accessible through it. The internet is like the fast food restaurant chains and the introduction of the automobile before it: it allows us to get what we seek faster than ever before. I was watching TCM this evening and it had a short segment on the introduction of cars, then began to play the Orson Welles flick The Magnificent Ambersons. In both the short and the beginning of the movie, they address the growing pace of life, and how, seemingly miraculously, people seemed to have time to do just about anything in the old days despite having a slower time getting to them. Picnicks, visiting, tea parties, and my mind immediately started to add things: reading, writing, exercising....living. Things I have more of a problem with personally, so the nature of this post is very irregular for this blog, but I find the need to talk about the negative effects the internet has had in taking up my free time and leaving me with pretty much nothing with which to do things I keep putting off, rather than just taking the time to finally do them.

And that's the real problem, isn't it? Taking the time to do things. I always feel there's just never enough time...never enough time...that life's a big hustle. I'm always so busy using the web to feed answers to any little question that might arise from my rushing stream of thoughts--reading feeds and constantly refreshing forums to see if there any new posts to respond to. I get so frantic that I never even finish reading each little news article or thread, I'm rapidly switching between tabs, reading a paragraph here, jumping to another page and reading a paragraph there, switching to another tab and reading a post, and then to another tab to see the latest feed that just arrived, and then back to the article I had been reading again. I'm ADD of course, and I'm sure watching a lot of TV as a very young child didn't help that, but it seems I can't sit and take the time to actually absorb things, I have to experience things in little bite-sized pieces at a time, before one subject gets too old and I have to switch to another one right away. It's getting obsessive and crazier as time goes on I fear, and I don't think I'm the only one who's affected by this, as there are many young people these days who can't simply sit and watch a movie for instance, without looking down at their cell several times to check Twitter or respond to a TXT message.

In fact it was thanks to a rather nasty thunderstorm today that knocked out our internet service for a short time that I was able to sit down and actually watch some of the Orson Welles programming TCM was showing, and was surprised to find out about all the movies he made that I wasn't even aware of. Alas I only made it through the last half of Citizen Kane (a movie I've seen a few times already and love), Lady From Shanghai (which I hardly knew of), and the beginning of The Magnificent Ambersons before having to get up and do something else. But considering I hardly even sit through movies at all lately that's quite an achievement, especially since these movies in particular are old, and therefore slow-paced and dare I say "boring" compared to modern Hollywood affair. TCM gets far less viewing time outta me than I'd wish because of that, even though it's one of the best stations on TV right now. I guess that's another reason I like Blu-Ray so much, because with the superficial appeal of the HD goodness I've actually sat through more quality movies lately than I have in...probably even years. But that's getting off topic.

There's a lot more I wish I'd do than watch movies, and a big part of that is creative pursuits. I have a lot of creative talent in me if only I'd have the patience to fully pursue them. I'd love to do more writing, and the only time I find I'm able to type out an entire blog post for this page is when I'm sitting quietly in my bed with my netbook. If I'm on my desktop, that's when I'm a Tasmanian devil whirling through tidbits of information, and juggling in a little TV on top of it.

What I'm really doing is not giving myself any time. I'm not being patient with myself, exploring myself--my interests and my personality--and fulfilling my greatest desires. All that I'm left with then is a bad case of information overload, and an empty feeling at the end of the day as a result of truly doing...nothing. So if there's anyone that actually reads this blog besides me, I encourage you to just take a moment, ten minutes, thirty minutes, as long as you can stand to just put down the iPhone and pull yourself away from all the online crap and the information age to do something you've been wanting to do for a long time now. I guarantee that you'll come away from the experience feeling more fulfilled than you have in a long time.

I love Blu-Ray

2009-06-08T23:20:00.006-04:00

That really says it all. I'm really not historically a big spender when it comes to media, typically adopting new standards late in the game, but with Blu-Ray (apparently officially abbreviated "BD", even though I hate that) I find I'm suddenly drawn to rabid consumerism with a level of ferocity not wholly apparent with any other medium in the past. Since buying a BD-ROM drive for my computer and thus correspondingly acquiring my first BD movie player, I've been hitting the format hard, getting every film available for it I most desire. Since I got the drive in late-April, I've purchased about 17 movies (I say "about" because The Ultimate Matrix Collection has The Animatrix and feature-length Matrix Revisted which could practically count as movies on their own), which may not sound like much since I'm quickly approaching the two-month-mark but given my lowly income and the fact that I felt the need during that intervening time to upgrade my monitor almost solely to accommodate the demanding BD image quality, I find it to be an astounding pace for someone like me.

I guess what captivates me the most about Blu-Ray is the sheer joy I get in collecting only the most interesting or favored movies available. In other words, movies I enjoy watching that especially warrant the fantastic quality on offer. I even have a consolodated list of my collection available for viewing here (note: the Rambo set I got mostly because it was cheap).

And while much has been said about the quality of Blu-Ray, I can't help but mention that both audibly and visually I've been swept away by what I've seen. My screen (even having been upgraded) isn't much to write home about compared to more expensive HDTVs these days, but the image, not just the detail afforded by a higher resolution, but the color and depth makes some older DVDs unwatchable by comparison. I certainly wasn't expecting the audio to be such a jump in quality either. With a quality set of speakers (in my case, some rather expensive headphones and high-grade sound card), you can hear a fullness and richness in the sound that doesn't so much reveal itself with increased detail over older formats, but more as a lessening of the brittle digital harshness, where the icy, flat trebly sound is replaced with a balance that gives greater weight to all other sound ranges and extends further from top to bottom, and with greater dynamics. The separation is downright amazing, too. Even though I don't actually have a surround-sound system with a speaker to dedicate to each channel, the Dolby Headphone simulation does an excellent job of revealing just how much greater utilization and effect is achieved with surround sound on Blu-Ray.

I was gonna stop at 17 for a while and focus on buying other things, but I find I'm still craving more. I wanna start getting some of the kung fu movies on my wishlist, and begin diving into some of the Bond movies. There are a few other movies that I put off before because they weren't ones I held in the highest regard, but now I'm wanting them just because I know I'll enjoy them more on Blu-Ray than I ever did before. I'm really looking forward to the LOTR trilogy, and eagerly await word of Back to the Future releases, plus tons of other favorites too numerous to name here. It's all been way too much fun.

On a completely unrelated note, it seems to me that the Bioshock movie is the first video game to cinema transition that truly has a chance at greatness. Hell I'll settle for just being good.

NVIDIA cards are overpriced

2009-06-06T03:54:00.005-04:00

I think most people who've been following the industry will take one look at that title and think "duh". I admit I haven't been keeping up with graphics card prices lately, because I've been trying hard not to shop for one, even though the 8800GTX I'm using right now doesn't do Crysis enough justice by my standards, and it's because of that I've yet to beat the game, or buy the standalone expansion to it.

What brought on this observation was an investigative article on Anandtech that came across my feeds the other day about GTX 275 overclocking. I felt it was a relevant article to read at the time because shader VS core scaling has been an interesting issue with NVIDIA cards since the G80, and also because I was bored at the time. The article pointed to a preceding article that investigated the same topic with the 4890, and I decided to look over that one as well since I hadn't been keeping up with that card. I was surprised to find that the 4890 actually keeps toe-to-toe with NVIDIA's current fastest single-GPU card the GTX 285, in the most intensive games (read: the only games that matter to those shopping for a new GPU right now). But then it seems you can overclock the 4890 higher than the GTX 285, percentage-wise. Well then I got curious about where they stand price-wise.

I found out NVIDIA cards are overpriced. I mean, they are REALLY fuckin overpriced. It's ridiculous. On NewEgg I found most GTX 285 cards to be nearly $100 more expensive than a basic HD 4890! Why isn't there a bigger deal being made out of this than there is? When's the last time either company has been so grossly out-performed at any price point? For years they had been maintaining utter parity with one another, with one company hardly able to sneeze without the other saying "achoo". It's like the graphics market is moving so slow people have become disinterested in what's been happening. And who can blame them? "New" releases have been nothing more than rebrandings and price adjustments. At least the 4890 is a slightly tweaked core, NVIDIA sure as shit can't even claim to have done that much. The most they've done was a die-shrink of the GT200 and they made at least four new cards out of that. It's been overplayed, and it's old news now.

Even the GTX 275 is typically more expensive than a 4890. I guess that's supposed to be the real competitor to the 4890 but I don't see it. I guess it only shows during gameplay evaluations but it's a whole 'nother story with canned benchmarks. Which do you believe? Then there's the HD 4770 which is a new GPU that kicks the utter crap out of the latest G92 reincarnation, the GTS 250. If you can find one in stock it'll only run you around $100, but the GTS 250 is typically a good $20 more expensive, with the virtually useless 1GB version costing about $10 extra on top of that. It may not sound like much but we're talking about something like a 30% increase here. Slim price differences mean everything in the sub-$200 market. NVIDIA's closest competitor price-wise is the aging 9800GT.

Although hard to believe from the tone of this rambling, I'd actually describe myself as being a near-fanboy of NVIDIA. Normally I don't seriously consider AMD cards because I just don't like their drivers compared to NVIDIA's. I also find the underlying technology NVIDIA uses in their GPUs more interesting, but right now I'm not seeing what justifies such a disparate price difference between their stuff and AMD's. Maybe they wanna point to PhysX and crap but I don't buy it. The latest flagship game to support PhysX is Cryostasis, which is a mediocre game according to most reviews. Before that was Mirror's Edge, which hardly saw night-and-day differences with the feature's addition. So you're not selling PhysX yet NVIDIA, and at this rate it looks like you probably never will. No one is going to pay $100 more for a power-hungry chip that hardly performs better than its competition, especially when overclocking is considered.

What I find the most funny out of all this is how AMD supposedly stopped caring about the highest-end performance range a couple years ago. But even with a smaller chip, look at what they ended up accomplishing, all because the market's been stagnating and NVIDIA's been twittling their thumbs. Most people are just bored to tears right now over the whole thing. Man I can't wait til GT300....

A busy week

2009-06-04T01:27:00.008-04:00

Everyday when I wake up I turn on my computer and look at my feeds. There is a modest twelve subscriptions right now, and I find going through those on an average day to be laborious enough. I do it though to stay on top of things, because I've found that if there's one thing I enjoy, it's staying up-to-date with all the tech.

This week however has been an especially difficult one as far as that task goes. Two very major events are going on in fields I'm especially interested in: Computex, and E3. A lot of interesting gadgets and games have been revealed as a result of these two shindigs, but one device that I keep coming back to is this little thing.

I've always been a big fan of netbooks, even when they used to be called "subnotebooks". When I finally got a job last year, the second thing I saved up for after building my new desktop was an Asus EEE PC 1000HE (used to type this blog post). It was my second computer, and my second laptop, after the first one I won from a school auction back in junior high. The thing was ancient, even then, but technically that old laptop was my first computer. My dad and I even attempted to use the internet with it, but the 16MB of RAM and flakey onboard dial-up modem proved problematic. I knew later on that my first modern laptop would have to be a simple affair, to not try to eclispe my main desktop. I needed something ultra portable that I could IM with and browse the web, and if I needed anything performance-demanding, that's why I had the desktop. Netbooks turned out to be the perfect solution.

The 1000HE is an awesome netbook, undoubtedly one of the most popular ones out right now, because it's a good $50 cheaper than its competition, has a great keyboard, and excellent battery life. But I knew it wouldn't be my last netbook, because there were still basic tasks it struggled with, such as complex flash animation and video. If that were not the case, I might not be so interested in keeping up with new netbook releases. That's usually how it goes.

The NVIDIA Tegra netbook (I'm not even going to try to type the particular model's name) I found out about from Engadget intrigues me because it's extremely low power, but has a whole bunch of dedicated acceleration hardware inside that it makes most tasks doable despite the low performance. It can play HD videos (the 1000HE can only do 720p, and that's only on certain players, and still not all the time), it accelerates Flash (at least the video part), and it even has a half-decent 3D component to it. Only question is the Windows CE part. I'm not up on application compatibility for that OS, so I have no idea if I could get AIM or Firefox on there (might have to look that up), but it has an interesting interface (video here), and it's a new alternative to the Linuxes, Moblin, Android, and XP/7 OSes we keep seeing on such devices. I just wish Tegra integrated a more robust and modern ARM CPU, but oh well.

I had made a blog post on IGN pointing out the fact that Intel likes to pretend they can dictate where netbooks are going to go, probably because they feel it's just a smaller laptop. Microsoft is like that too, forcing strict XP restrictions and working with Intel to do the same for the cheapest version of Windows 7, which is so parred down it makes XP look like a breath of fresh air. But they keep underestimating the market. At such an entry level category, the performance and functionality necessary is leaving the market open for all kinds of newcomers, and before Intel (and Microsoft) know it, their antics are going to come back to bite them in the ass. In my original blog post I said this:

A huge storm cloud is brewing over the netbook hardware realm and Intel has chained themselves right underneath it. By this time next year the sameness we see with netbook specifications will all but vanish as at least two other major competitors step into the ring in a big way.

And wouldn't you know it? As we've been seeing this week, that's all coming true much sooner than I thought.

EDIT: A new video is out now showing Firefox running on the Windows CE OS, and Flash (not just Flash video) running smooth. So this thing is looking even more sweet by the minute.

A new home

2009-06-03T21:20:00.000-04:00

Long ago, there was a page of the utmost simplicity in which I formed on the premise that I could say whatever I wanted and didn't care to hoot who saw it. It was a webpage, I adored it, and it adored me. We lived happily together for probably over a year. It was simple, not because I'm simple, but because my skills at the coding of HTML were of such limited breadth that I could not strain for complexity out of the necessity of keeping things enjoyable for myself. I made articles for it, resembling blog posts, but with such overdrawn length and crude language that I preferred to call them ramblings. I generally confined my topics to those relating to the tech industry. I lamented blogs for their personal nature, and the idea of publishing such personal insights to the view of the public with the purpose of having others read them. I was content with the way things were, and updated quite infrequently at the pace of leisurely detachment. Then, all at once that page was gone. Attempts to unearth any remnants from Google's colossal archive of cached webpages proved fruitless. There was no hope of it coming back. My host had booted me out, and though it was free, I cursed at thee, and mourned the passing of my private little nook on the internet that I had all to myself.

Now, I find my fingers aching for the keys again, and a platform to launch the fruits of their rhythmic typing which is as clean and private as my old webpage was. At first, I turned to the network that fuels much of my wasted time on the internet, IGN. They have a blogging system, but it's of such a simple and cluttered nature as to be rendered woefully unappealing. So now I turn to this one. The most popular blog site there is. It is here I will dump all forthcoming run-on sentences, cheesy adjective-chaining, and overall brutishly executed grammatical stylings that I can squeeze from the lowest bowels of my intellect. I am now, in fact, the biggest fucking hypocrit I could ever be.