Is he on again about the new formats?

Kosmo

I'm a good customer, I like to complain. Bitey doesn't care much, as long as he can sit on the couch and watch his precious roadrunner canrtoons and garfield he is one happy cat. But I, as the economical provider, I think about stuff like this. The year 2006, year the new formats (HD-DVD and Blu-Ray respectively) are supposedly come out, I am terrified to even think about the load of crap we as consumers are going to get poured on if we let ourselfs to be sucked in to the market game the companies are preparing the very minute. Well, I for one am not going to get fooled to believe the "technological advancements" come without an expense. I'm not going to put a single dime to the format warmachine because I know that every euro I put there is going to come back and steal me two. What me and Bitey are rambling about is that we are not sure if DVD is so "end of the line" as they have fooled us to believe. It's not even the dominant format in media distribution, so why we should abandon it as obsolete? We have had similar promises of brighter future if we adopt new technology, primarily coming to mind are digital television and UMTS, both of which are not so widely used and don't give us the advancements they promised to us when the market was open for new technology. Did I mis something important or why we can't use multiple DVD discs to present content like we did with CDs? Why all of a sudden we have to put everything on one disc? Why do we have to push HDTV (the main reason why HD-DVD and BLU-RAY are pushed to the market so agressively) so fast when the improvements it offers are not worth the extra cost it generates, I'm only going to buy HDTV when the choice between HDTV and a regular tv doesn't cost me a dime extra. But until then, I'm not the fool to put the extra costs on, if technology companies want to bring them in to the market, they should take the risks and pay the extra costs, as a consumer I should get the benefits but not be fooled to pay for their costs of adopting a new format that is not my choice in te first place. How did we get so dependant on a new format that we need so desperately that we are ready to adopt and accept a choice between to formats which neither of is actually ready and is still in development. The same damn thing can be seen every 6 months when ATI and nVidia release their most recent e-penis enlargers, the technology provided there is adopted several years behind, we are just now starting to use the full potential of Radeon 9800 series cards, but still we need newer and better cards? For what? The new format is a step forward and four steps backwards, we are in a VHS situation, the formats seem very large by todays standards, but if we just had the insight to wait just a tad longer, we would have had much better technology with longer lifespan, like in this situation, we could still use DVDs for three more years and by that time Holographic discs would be fully developed and we could adopt a REALLY advanced technology that far exceeds the current need for capacity. The capacity on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray seem big, but the media we put in them is equally as large. We have DVDs that can fit 8gigs of media inside, a movie is around 5-6gigs we can fit one movie inside and some extra content. Blu-Ray disc can store up to 50gigs of media inside with HD quality video can hog most likely up to 35-40gigs of space, so what actually changed? What changed, except the fact that we are paying MORE for this semi advancement from one situation to exactly the same situation, one movie on one disc and tad more extra material. With few years we could adopt a HVD with the capacity of several terabytes and transfer rates hundreds of times faster than Blu-Ray and we could store entire seasons of series in one single disc, an actual advancement and a different situation, compared to todays situation. I'm going to run a campaign to not spend a single dime to the new formats until the costs are not passed on to consumers and the technology is working with single format. I demand that when I buy HDTV, I don't have to pay for extra when compared to the normal price of a regular TV of equally advanced technology of it's time, so no hidden or extra costs when I buy TV, regardless of it being of different technology, and I also demand that as a consumer, I get the benefits from adopting a new technology and not the company that has the benefit of chanrging us more by introducing "better technology."

3stripe

Maybe this forum needs a 'Kosmo rants' category ;-)

Kosmo

Hell, I would need a blog.. tho I have one, but I can get more readers thisway :D

giginger

Well what's the blog address?

On topic: I agree with you. Whilst better picture etc is great, why not wait until they've developed something that's truly an improvement.

timberford

i agree as well. and isn't the playstation 3 adopting blue ray? this is a big gamble if that's the case. i've read that the xbox 360 is open to adopting either technology because of the way it would have to be an extension of the system.

Kosmo

PS3 is going to use Blu-Ray, it's Sony's own format so they are going to put their money in it no matter what. Xenon (Xbox 360) has the advantage since they are using the DVD format, but there has been talks about adding a HD-DVD extension, but they have said that it's only for movies, no game is going to adopt it. And I don't see MS going for Blu-Ray since they would have to pay Sony royalties for it. This whole setup is stupid, neither of the formats were even close to ready when they just thought that it would be good idea to make them the next gen formats.

WallPhone

This is all industry standard, as far as I see it. Remember Laserdisc? If you don't it was a record-sized disk with the resolution of a CD that you had to flip over half way through to watch the second half of the movie. Yes, this is all a game by the companies. They push obsolete technology simply because they are trying to make a buck. The reason they do this is to let the early adopters and/or those with cash to burn to pay through the nose. On the same token, you can't build a budget PC as cheap as Dell does. But price out a performance PC by Dell (or Alienware) and you will find that its cheaper to build yourself. Dell knows that those who pay for new technology are willing to pay more than everybody else. Nevermind the fact that new technology has large research and development costs that the companies are trying to recoup. I have only owned a DVD player for two years. Still don't have digital cable.

Kosmo

HD-DVD is the only standard out of those two, Blu-Ray wasn't even pitched to the DVD Forum, an organization that was created to prevent the abuse of customers with half assed mediums and broken promises. Sony just completely walked past it and just pushed it's product in to the market. If Sony wasn't such an ass of a company, we wouldn't have this kind of situation and propably HD-DVD would have had the time to properly be completed before launching it to the market, but now that both formats are racing to the market, they both will arrive incomplete, lacking features and costing more. I remember Laser Discs, those were great and all, but just like here, the format is not consumer friendly, it cost more to produce, it was large as shit, and the players were several times more expensive to make than those of VHS format. It was a format that had a superior quality but that didn't by any means mean that it was better than VHS was. Just like now, we shouldn't adopt a format like that over a format that is not obsolete and still is a viable today over a trivial quality bump that is not going to do us anygood if we don't commit to the whole system, which is to buy an HDTV to get most out of the HD format. It can be simplified to this, the goverment is going to replace all roads which is going to increase taxes, but to get the benefit of the new road, you have to change your tires, but the new type tires don't work properly on old model cars, and still, the road is going to be replaced AGAIN in few years because the goverment made a bad choice and took a material that didn't last long, and ofcourse the tires and the car have to be replaced once more. Utter bullshit when we could have been looking for a more long term solution.

Elliott Hird

That's it. Your rants are so good that I'm going to --force-- you to put them on a blog :P. I'll go and set it up, and employ elves to keep it clean and make you stay locked in a chamber making rants for me.... mwahahahahhahHhahahahahHAHAHAH. ...Err, what I meant to say is...

Bergamot

1. Format war begins 2. Someone makes a player that reads both formats 3. Someone makes a burner that will write to both formats 4. Everyone wonders what the fuss was about.

lech

Realize though Kosmo, while I agree with you fully on the entire HDTV as a new standard and all that, the rest simply falls into a tiny trail behind it. Given the fact that companies must recoop the research expenses for creating all of these "toys" for us is highly expensive. I understand the need for the them to push it into the market. But it's really up to us the consumers to decide whether it will actually become a true standard. Once again, this is BetaMax VS. VHS only 20 years later. And for those who don't know what BetaMax is, don't worry, you know the victor. As far as graphics cards go, I'll have to disagree to a certain extent. While Moores Law will eventually catch up to the GPU as it did the CPU, in contrast, GPU's are still a tad bit underpowered on the whole. Eventually they'll be on par and the systems of tomorrow won't have bottlenecks in the hardware for the most advanced games you want to run. But this is looking from a gamers perspective. The one thing that slightly bugs me about the newest hardware is that it's phasing out existing socket types (agp vs pcix) and introducing a whole new realm of hardware inconsistancies we're not yet ready to see. It's the pentium ramp-up of the 90's except the cpu's are now taking backseat for the rest of the hardware to catch up to them. As soon as that happens, we hit a brick wall for the hundreth time and everything is deadlock for a few years until someone introduces a means of exceeding the threshold without burning your office down. Back onto the blue-ray train, it's a hyped fad, not everyone can afford or buy into right away. I say let the die hards waste their money while they can. I'll only buy into it as a novelty (and that's a big maybe) when it costs just as much as the current DVD drive I have packed into my system now. Also look at it this way, out of all the people you know with computers, how many of them are actually utilizing SATA? If not many, there's another "enhancement" that's either going to die out, or bottom out in price when vendors start delivering for cheap.

Minisweeper

SATA is now as cheap (or in some cases cheaper) than PATA wherever i've been looking at drives recently?

Kosmo

Lech, few things to clear out, god knows I'm the one to make these while ath the same time I make myself seem like a total ass :P First, VHS vs. Betamax was something similar, like I said before (or did I) still the situation is completely different here. Technology and their advancements are generally accepted as necessary evil and people buy in to these fads. The public won't do a single thing to prevent it, since they are as blocked from information sources as a common serf was from movable type in the 9th century. And a thing about graphics cards, it's a common misunderstanding even in a modding community that the power of a card is measured by it's gpu and memory speed. The fact that UT2k4 applies less the shader units than HL2 while HL2 runs in faster fps speeds than UT2k4 in current generation hardware proves the point that arbitrary speeds of different components over the number of calculating units is meaningless. One more thing, the CPU is actually the mainl bottleneck in several applications and games that is the only thing slowing us down, the power in graphics cards is sufficient enough to run current games at breackneck speeds, only the CPU isn't powerful enough to keep up with it. And for what comes for SATA, it's the most widely accepted storage interface format in the history of computers, which means that SATA enabled MOBOs and HDDs are selling better than any other propietary hardware was in it's introducing time. Heck, even I have all four SATA II ports full of HDDs and I think I only have my Mac friends being the only ones NOT having a SATA HDD in their machine.

LoOkOuT

"my Mac friends being the only ones NOT having a SATA HDD in their machine." LOL! What have they got, Bondi Blue iMacs? I'll have you know, my PowerMac G5 has two SATA drives, you miserable git ;- ) Barring that one exception, I tend to agree with the gist of your argument, tho Bitey reaises some interesting points too. Where did he stand on the VHS/Betamax debates?

Kosmo

few who uses Powerbooks I guess two bought a Mac mini, and one who has brand new iMac so one of my friends is using a Sata HDD

lech

Quite frankly, UT2k4 ran like utter shit under my older gfx card compared to HL2 with the same settings. I suppose you're right to some extent that it boils down to which generation of hardware it's running under. However, the machine I'm running it under is fairly up to spec and still considered current. The only thing that was holding me back from cranking up the resolution and everything else was the gfx card. While the rest of my hardware remained the same, updating the graphics card from an ancient MX420 to a 6600GT made a world of difference. Before I could hardly play at 800x600 with everything on very low, now I can play with the settings maxed out at 1280x1024 :) UED in single window 3D mode is a charm as well in 1600x1200 :)

Kosmo

Knowing the insides of the games makes it easier to understand what parts of your computer has effect on it. UT2k4 and HL2 are great compare points, since their rendering engines work completely differently, and the fact that the other uses one of the most resource heavy physics engine and the other uses the most sophisticated physics engines out there. Generally the player models in HL2 have less polygons than the models in UT2k4 this is thanks to Normal Mapping, HL2 uses more vertex and pixel shaders than UT2k4 which takes alot of the load off from the other parts of the computer, also, HL2 has way higher memory requirements than UT2k4. Because of the high polygon counts and lower memory requirements UT2k4 is way more CPU heavy than HL2 is. But I would like to point out that while the CPU is a major bottleneck it only applies if the CPU and GPU are close to same generation, the compare isn't fair if you have a AMD FX-60 in your computer and your GPU is like a Voodoo 3. When taking the fastest GPU and fastest CPU the CPU will be a bottleneck in todays games.

lech

I'd actually beg to differ and say that UT2k4 is more GPU intensive than HL2, while you're right that HL2 does require more memory, it seems to manage GPU VERY efficently with the normal mapping in mind. As opposed to UT2k4 where you're seeing the same polycount at far distances along with anything else in your viewport. Also, UT appears to force a ton of content onto the GPU even tho the GPU itself or memory is slow or lacking. HL2 ran like a charm even at normal settings under 800x600, not major hitches in gameplay, altho sound quality (which would take up a ton of memory due to the many sounds played throughout) was lacking when you were facing away from talking npc's and other ambience. If you slapped an old MX420 into your current rig, you would be able to perceptualize it a little better as I did first hand. The gfx card upgrade really did do a number on fixing a ton of hitches in both games. But by far the biggest improvement was in UT2k4, even with just double the memory, a GPU upgrade did wonders. This is stepping up from an old MX420 with 64mb dram, to a BFG Tech 6600 GTOC with 128. While the ram is only doubled, and there's onboard DX9.0c support built in, it's amazing how much more you can squeeze out of it without having to fall back to pure software rendering.

Kosmo

Perception is fickle, since I know as a fact, from my own experience, from reading the official engine documentation, talking to several programmers coding for the Unreal Engine 2/2.5 and from the many mappers and industry employees that, Unreal Engine is CPU heavy engine and it utilizes it way more than the GPU and Memory heavy HL2 and it's physics engine that doesn't do that much innecessary CPU heavy calculations. My future job is in gaming industry, I have trained for it for my whole life, so even if I don't know much, anything and everything I say about technical stuff about games, you can count that it is the absolute truth.

lech

It's not just perception, but actually experiencing the gameplay under the two different setups. The current UT engine is far from perfect, and CPU-wise it's not that demanding. I've monitored the CPU/memory usage while in game and it rarely peaked over 25% here. Which leaves me to believe that it's more graphics dependant than anything. Especially if you're running under a card that doesn't support DX9 on the hardware. The older card supported up to DX7 so anything demanding DX9 was software rendered which taxed the rest of the system. Now that the card supports DX9 the CPU usage is nearly nothing.

Kosmo

UnrealEngine 2/2.5 are neither DX9 capable engines, and when your card isn't DX9 compatible, the game can't be played unless a separate library for using older shader effects was applied, the effects can't be software rendered. UT can be run with a card supporting DX8/8.1 (2k3/2k4) with the minimum of 32megs of vram, 64megs is recommended. The specs alone tell that it is not that GPU heavy game. The UT2k3/4 used the Karma engine for physics, which they admitted to be CPU heavy to be used in anything more than just the ragdolls. The game is not that intense on the GPU department, only thing that is demanding to the GPU are the particle effects and some very rudimentary shadow effects.