Recent content by antlers

When you describe rendering the sphere the 2d way, you're describing rendering it as a primitive. You don't light and shade each consituent polygon, you light and shade the whole thing as a unit. The problem is that it's hard to render anything that's not mathematically simple to describe...

But multiplying objects can introduce bottlenecks other than physics where the Cell might not be able to help you. Again, it'll depend on the specific software.

Whether or not this is "cheating", it does mean the world is turned upside down. The game (UT, 3dmark) is the platform, and the driver is the app. Instead of the driver being a stable base against which different applications are coded, the applications are treated as a stable base against...

Let me add that homosexual orientation does not in itself limit an individual's reproductive success. Homosexuals can have heterosexual sex, even if they aren't inclined that way. If social strictures are tight enough, they will. Similarly, if the culture demands that male homosexuals are...

After searching a year and a half among the thousands of individuals who have undergone "reparative therapy", they found 234 individuals who have shown some change. That counts as a few to me. It seems like it's easier to train people out of left-handedness. Some people are repeatedly...

I'll be brief-- If homosexuality has a genetic basis, that doesn't make it "normal". If it lacks genetic basis, it doesn't make it abnormal (or a disorder). The two questions have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Because a very few individuals, with lots of therapy and lots...

The Bush Justice department has said publicly and repeatedly that the executive branch can hold an American citizen indefinitely, incommunicado with no access to counsel or any sort of judicial review, whenever they feel they have a good reason. If that isn't stamping on American values, I...

This might be a more interesting discussion when there is a chip that can run FP16 pixel shaders faster than ATI's can run FP24.

The only lawsuit I could see is a class action suit by shareholders of NVidia stock who bought after "benchmarks" for NV30 were announced. (For all I know, there is such a lawsuit; these shareholder class actions are really out of hand). If they can show that there was any fraud in anything...

FP32 might be good for a renderfarm replacement, but (judging from examples so far) FP24 is the best you can do with today's silicon at reasonable speeds. Since FP24 is 'good enough' for games (as opposed to renderfarm replacement) I can see why Microsoft picked it.

Some of you are arguing that the rich deserve what they have, since what they do/have done is more valuable--it was more valuable to the market, and thus must be more valuable to society. However, this assumes that the market values things 'correctly'. Perhaps it would if the market were...

In addition to CO2, respiration gives up a lot of H20. Lots of the water weight we lose goes that way. Elementally, our bodies are composed of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and less important amounts of nitrogen, sodium, phosphorous, calcium, etc. We shed carbon, hydrogen and oxygen through...

How about this: Everyone who wants to can go there. However, because of the way it is set up, it is unlikely that people who do not self-identify as 'gay' would want to go there. Does that still count as discriminatory?

Bloodshed Software Dev-C++ uses the gcc compiler, which is freely available for many platforms. gcc tends to be a little stricter than MSVC 6 about things like compliance with ANSI, so if it compiles with gcc it will probably compile with MSVC 6.

I think Sacrifice scales successfully. No card could run it with full geometry and texture settings when it first came out, and it looks damn nice now on my 9700. The characters do look better bringing all that power to bear, although the models aren't "realistic" so the scaling is made easier.