>> ^L0cky:

Real Time Reflections!
Mandatory staple of graphics demos since bump mapping retired.


It's odd that reflections aren't used everywhere. I seem to remember that Duke Nukem 3D had reflections. It's certainly nothing new but even many new, high spec games still use silly silver surfaces. I suspect it's not that it's hard to implement, but that it's so expensive in terms of CPU,GPU and VRAM requirements that it's not worth the fairly marginal visual quality improvement. Hopefully CryEngine does this cheaply enough so it can be used without sacrificing much else.

If I was posting this on Bluesnews someone would blame consoles and they may have a point - when you're try to make ever prettier graphics using the same 5 year old hardware, something's got to give.

Sort of a non sequitur, but I saw Nvidia's new GPU in action... Pretty freaking awesome. It blew me away.

>> ^djsunkid:

According to the wiki entry on the cray has roughly half the processing power of an Xbox.


"On May 24, 2011, Cray announced the Cray XK6 hybrid supercomputer. The Cray XK6 system, capable of scaling to 500,000 processors and 50 petaflops of peak performance, combines Cray's Gemini interconnect, AMD's multi-core scalar processors, and NVIDIA's many-core GPU processors."

A Cray ain't no xBox anymore...

http://fractal.io

WebGL based fractal creation

"WARNING: it is possible to create GLSL fractal shaders that will lock up your GPU requiring a hard reboot if pushed too hard. Use at your own risk!"

It's only 36^52 if the attacker knows there must be 52 characters, which seems fairly unlikely. Instead, assuming 52 is the longest likely password, you have to add up 36^52 + 36^51 + 36^50, etc...

In any case, this password is fairly secure. The brute force GPU methods another poster mentioned are currently viable against 9-10 character passwords, but only if we have the hash, and only if the hashing algorithm is very simple. The complexity of a hash would be something that we would expect to scale with processing power, so in terms of addressing this problem we could effectively assume that the resulting computer in TNG time would be about the same effectiveness as a current one (in terms of hashes analyzed per second).

Unfortunately, this password is about 10^62 times as complex as the largest viable brute force candidates. That is a large number.

Yeah, some of them are very gpu and or CPU bound - Fairlights particle based rendering in particular are a strain on most systems - but to be fair most demos are designed to work with medium hardware - the trick is getting a lot out of it without resorting to 8 CPUs 3 GPUs and a tonne of memory

(this demo runs just fine on a 260GTX for example - this demo is GPU heavy)

most of the time the demos will run just fine without you needing up to date HW etc

DirectX10 is what we use (it, amongst other things has less dependancy issues than DX9)

you should definitely have a look at some of the newer stuff from last year and this year, so good demos

>> ^TheGenk:

They are still pushing. And I'm sorry that you missed the glorious demo years of the 2000s
I, sadly, lost a bit of an interest when my computer could no longer handle the processing needs of demos a year ago.
>> ^VidRoth:
Wow, Demo comps are still going on? I used to love these things back in the '90s when they were pushing the limits of pre-hardware-accelerated graphics.

@Matthu
@hpqp

So, after putting on my detective hat and going through advanced searches for a while (can you tell it's a Saturday and I'm happy to be at work?) here are the precedents I discovered.

Videos of the exact same event taken from different angles (same audio)

Wind Turbine Self-Destructing
http://www.videosift.com/video/Windmill-Destroyed-By-Wind (original)
http://videosift.com/video/Wind-turbine-self-destructs (potential dupe)

In this case the majority (6-4) barely decided it was not a dupe and it stayed.

Window Adjusts Lighting
http://videosift.com/video/Philips-Daylight-Window-Concept-Presentation (original)
http://www.videosift.com/video/Ambient-window-adjusts-lighting-hue-and-patterns (potential dupe)

In this case, kronosposeidon conceded the extra camera angles added nothing and left it up to Farhad2000 whether to declare it a dupe or not. Farhad apparently graciously decided not to.

Mythbusters paint the Mona Lisa with Paintballs
http://videosift.com/video/MythBusters-CPU-vs-GPU-or-Paintball-Cannons-are-Cool (original)
http://videosift.com/video/Mythbusters-Paint-the-Mona-Lisa-with-Paintballs (potential dupe)

In this case, the original garnered far more votes than the dupe, so there wasn't much controversy. Consensus seems to be that it is a dupe. However, to this day it remains Sifted.

Mentos and Diet Coke Explosion
http://www.videosift.com/video/Record-breaking-Mentos-and-Diet-Coke-Explosions (not sure)
http://videosift.com/video/Mentos-and-Coke-Light-World-Record-Attempt (not sure)

In this case, Maatc and Ant came to an amicable agreement in which they agreed to put links to each others' videos in the descriptions.

Suggestion

Precedent seems to be that the same event captured with different angles but containing the same audio is not a dupe. However, precedent also seems to suggest that most Sifters are gracious to each other and try to spread the votes around fairly. So, maybe each of you could put a link to each others' vids in your description and hopefully people who vote for one will go and vote for the other. Sound fair?

If not realtime, would not put it past having acceleration using a GPU with todays hardware.

When nVidia put out the first physX for GPUs there was a realtime softbody demo, slow... but proved the principle on now 4 year old hardware.

It's the same rendering engine they are using for games, but a game has a lot more going on (AI, Player Input, Physics, and Animation Blending to name a few) that sucks up cpu/gpu usage. It will be awhile before games can display this quality and do everything else while maintaining a high framerate.

I don't think we're too far off from getting this capability with games on PC's, but I wouldn't expect it until the consoles have a new generation or two.

I think that is grossly inaccurate. GPU manufacturing is currently at 40nm (32 is around the corner), a large chip like the geforce 480 and 580 run 3 billion transistors.

The chips in the video only have 29m (ultrasparc III I think), and I imagine they were using a much much larger fab process. Also the video seems old.

So nothing we have is fitting 3 billion transistors into a grain of anything yet.

>> ^maximillian:

Also, This doesn't really look like a computer motherboard, more like a generic, custom circuit board.
Still cool though.

It's defiantly not a standard board, double-sided mating surfaces for interconnects, integrated cpu, gpu, and onboard prom and ram chips probably means it's for a notebook, eeepc, or some type of tablet.


One thing I miss working in the industry was the smell, there's something unique about the smell of a freshly coated board just having been hot-soldiered. Of course now with all the whining they've switched to lead free. Wonder what the failure rate based on hot-flexing and tinning is. If it's under 15% I'll be surprised. I'll say it's at least 10%, which is a miserable failure.

I mean come on, it's not like people chew on motherboards. Replacing a tried and tested technology with something inferior and without proper testing is setting you up for failure. Well I guess we can blame environmentalists and insane politicians for that one.

Hm I guess on a truly empirical scale I would only rate about a 7. I do have to say Carmack would be a 10 though. How much more depth of understanding of "computers" can you have than John Carmack? The entire GPU industry takes cues from him, and GPUs are more complex than CPUs in many ways!

surely this has nothing to do with AMD , i mean anny more than anything else as thiswill surly work with anny gpu.


HAHA LOL the power piont , i mean so stupid tranistoin effects are like the most uselss stupid anoying thing that makes you look like an idoit if you use them. where gpu should be used ( and probably is used) in poweer pionts is if you are imbedding a video.

the most effective talks using power piont are ones with a good speeker and slides that are simple to the piont and just give a foot note to what the speeker is saying. ( or images for them to piont out specifc things)

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Again, conflation- I think you'll find that Flash does in fact run on Mac OS X- I wouldn't have started this site without it. And I actually had a little LOL when you said that Steve Jobs is keeping Direct X off of Macs. Really - is he keeping it off of Linux as well? [sigh]

I know it's very cool to hate on Apple at the moment - they are the victims of their own success. Apple as a fashion is very passé and hipsters gain cool points for dissing the Man, Steve Jobs - but I use Windows every day at my day gig- and I will give up my MacBook when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

>> ^ForgedReality:
>> ^dag:
I think you are conflating two different platform arguments. The Mac is not the iPad. If you're saying that OpenGL does not have direct access to the GPU on Macs- that's incorrect.
It's actually kind of funny that for you - the Mac is a "closed platform" for using an open standard like OpenGL compared with Microsoft's VERY proprietary - DirectX.
But yeah, Apple's all closed and shit - boo, Steve Jobs.
>> ^ForgedReality:
>> ^dag:
I'm finding Portal to be fast and good-looking on my MBP. >> ^ForgedReality:
At first, I was like, "OH LOOK! MACS CAN PLAY STEAM GAMES NOW! WOOHOOO!"
Then I was like, "Fuck. This is slow as shit! I'm going back to playing on my Windows PC."


Perhaps for a Mac, but the problem is, it uses OpenGL, which Valve's games are not as well-optimized for. A Windows machine with similar specs could run at higher settings with much improved framerate, and better visuals.
Last time I played an OGL game (which, granted has been some time), there were quite a few extensions that could not be ported over from DirecX, as there just was no OpenGL counterpart. I'm sure things have improved since then though.
But the problem is in Apple's clenched fist. It's a shame that Ol' Steve-o has such an extreme closed-platform mindset, because, really, all it does is harm his users' experience. Except, of course, where his concern is, when it causes problems such as incompatibility for his users. But really, were he more open to outside influence, any such problems could easily be worked out in short order, since Macs generally have a fairly standardized set of hardware.


Hehe.. No no no. I never suggested that OpenGL does not have access to the GPU, I said that the games recently brought to the MacOS via Steam are not optimized for OpenGL, and that, hopefully, with time, they would start to run better on the Mac.
Also, by "closed," meant that Steve Jobs wants the Mac to run the way he wants to run it. He has an interest in "protecting" his users in ways that PC users are not protected. He seems to have an almost paranoid obsession with having a major say in what users are able to do on their systems, as he has to "okay" every technology brought to the OS.
This is why he doesn't allow DirectX or Flash.

>> ^dag:

I think you are conflating two different platform arguments. The Mac is not the iPad. If you're saying that OpenGL does not have direct access to the GPU on Macs- that's incorrect.
It's actually kind of funny that for you - the Mac is a "closed platform" for using an open standard like OpenGL compared with Microsoft's VERY proprietary - DirectX.
But yeah, Apple's all closed and shit - boo, Steve Jobs.
>> ^ForgedReality:
>> ^dag:
I'm finding Portal to be fast and good-looking on my MBP. >> ^ForgedReality:
At first, I was like, "OH LOOK! MACS CAN PLAY STEAM GAMES NOW! WOOHOOO!"
Then I was like, "Fuck. This is slow as shit! I'm going back to playing on my Windows PC."


Perhaps for a Mac, but the problem is, it uses OpenGL, which Valve's games are not as well-optimized for. A Windows machine with similar specs could run at higher settings with much improved framerate, and better visuals.
Last time I played an OGL game (which, granted has been some time), there were quite a few extensions that could not be ported over from DirecX, as there just was no OpenGL counterpart. I'm sure things have improved since then though.
But the problem is in Apple's clenched fist. It's a shame that Ol' Steve-o has such an extreme closed-platform mindset, because, really, all it does is harm his users' experience. Except, of course, where his concern is, when it causes problems such as incompatibility for his users. But really, were he more open to outside influence, any such problems could easily be worked out in short order, since Macs generally have a fairly standardized set of hardware.



Hehe.. No no no. I never suggested that OpenGL does not have access to the GPU, I said that the games recently brought to the MacOS via Steam are not optimized for OpenGL, and that, hopefully, with time, they would start to run better on the Mac.

Also, by "closed," meant that Steve Jobs wants the Mac to run the way he wants to run it. He has an interest in "protecting" his users in ways that PC users are not protected. He seems to have an almost paranoid obsession with having a major say in what users are able to do on their systems, as he has to "okay" every technology brought to the OS.

This is why he doesn't allow DirectX or Flash.