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If you would have actually read the ars article, he was talking about “time insensitive” computational tasks, not time sensitive rendering tasks.

about 21 hours ago on Future proofing: Xbox One to support 3D and 4K content

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What you are talking about is completely inapplicable for video gaming. An example of where it would actually be used is in visualization/vr labs to view massive data sets. This is in real time, but the output is still on site. The compute cluster is still going to be connected to one or more high bandwidth video interfaces. Another place it is used is to speed up the creation of extremely high quality pre-rendered content (think Pixar). This doesn’t happen in real time. Either way the cluster is going to have high bandwidth pathways between the actual nodes, usually a combination of system busses and optical interconnects.

I have a background in CS, and domain knowledge in Comp E. I’ve written OpenCL / CUDA programs for scientific computation on stream processors and understand how they work. Don’t condescend with references to Wikipedia articles about fields you don’t understand.

1 day ago on Future proofing: Xbox One to support 3D and 4K content 1 reply 1 recommend

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They were talking about data computation, like what mmos do now with events and AI being driven server side, not graphics. There is a massive difference.

There is no way to break apart the graphics rendering pipeline to do part of it in one place and part in the other. The bandwidths involved are greater than the of the wifi or Ethernet you will connect the Xbox to your home network with, not to mention to the Internet.

1 day ago on Future proofing: Xbox One to support 3D and 4K content 1 reply 1 recommend

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Also, HDTV providers use lossy compression to save bandwidth. There are going to be noticeable artifacts when comparing broadcast 720p video to a lossless recording.

1 day ago on Future proofing: Xbox One to support 3D and 4K content

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Offloading graphics computation to servers is simply not possible. On the front end of the pipeline we’re talking about hundreds of gb/s of data. On the backend, uncompressed 4k is 6gb/s at 30 fps.

1 day ago on Future proofing: Xbox One to support 3D and 4K content 1 reply 1 recommend

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A GTX 680 is twice as powerful and a single one of them can only get 60fps on modern AAA games in 2560×1600.

There is no more “direct-to-metal” coding in a Xbox then on your average PC, they’re both going to be using DirectX as an intermediate layer. You are also vastly overestimating the performance gains of 32mb of eSRAM.

1 day ago on Future proofing: Xbox One to support 3D and 4K content 1 reply

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Doubt it, seems a little over-complicated to be running VMs. They probably all run native.

4 days ago on Microsoft Xbox One: everything you need to know 2 replies

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What would be immoral would be paying more taxes than absolutely necessary, since that would harm shareholders. Apple is a public company, their highest obligation is to their shareholders. We’re not talking about human rights violations here, it’s simply using the law in its existing format to save your shareholder’s money. It’s unfair to hold corporations to the same kind of social contract obligations that you would an individual, unless you are a believer in the “corporations are people” nonsense.

5 days ago on Senate probe accuses Apple of avoiding billions of dollars in taxes with offshore havens 1 reply 1 recommend

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A hand squeezing a sponge.

12 days ago on Is One World Trade Center really the tallest building in the West? 1 recommend