Recent content by TomW

What we need is a way to turn that excess heat back into electricity.

Yes, it's bad company strategy to let details of your next generation products leak out too soon, since that stops in their tracks sales to enthusiasts who must have the best. Tom

The original demos were on Radeon 9800s of some kind I think (Pro, XT?), and I suspect that the new demos are on something like a single 6800GT or 6800 Ultra, hopefully not SLI. After all, UE3 is meant to run ok on a single 6600GT according to the Gamespot article. Tom

Yup, as high as you like, including Sun bright (as long as you are willing to accept retina damage!). I'm starting to think of A Clockwork Orange, unfortunately. Tom

All free stuff: Firefox Avast Antivirus (nicer than AVG IMHO) AdAware scans once a week Kerio firewall (more powerful than ZoneAlarm non-pro I think) XP SP2 firewall Shut down unnecessary Windows Services Get all Windows Security Updates The firewall is the most important.

http://www.freeprogrammingresources.com/cppide.html lists a few, but I'd go with Ostsol's suggestions (both of which I've used). You might also be interested to know that Microsoft's compiler can be downloaded for free. http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/. I don't know whether...

It remains to be seen what benefit early adoption of SM3 will bring. It may turn out that the NV40 implementation is not good enough for the next gen engines, or it may turn out that NV40 provides decent enough performance. If my 6800GT runs the UE3 engine and future D3 engine games well...

But speculation is fun! Although most will be inaccurate, the odd nugget does turn out to be correct.

Is the next generation of Nvidia cards likely to be delayed due to PS3 (due to diverting all of their resources onto that)? Perhaps they will skip a generation, and release their PS3 generation technology on PC graphics cards some time closer to the release of the PS3...

The Source engine does have some kind of HDR lighting (look into the sun or walk out of a tunnel in HL2). It isn't OpenEXR though, the format that CryTech's engine and NV4x supports.