The Perfect Setup....or how to lose a social life in 10 days

[Oshyan]

I haven't seen Vista being particularly unreliable, so I don't think I'm experiencing whatever issue you're referring to with the Q6600's (which I haven't otherwise heard of). I do find that they moved things around in Vista somewhat unnecessarily, in some cases seemingly just to be different from XP. They also added some potentially useful functionality while ignoring lots of other much more useful options. UAC is annoying and I just turn it off completely. There are other mystery issues, especially permissions problems and file sharing annoyances. The UI is also more demanding and the OS as a whole more resource intensive, which is annoying. Maybe it's just personal preference, but I think the general reputation of Vista may reflect otherwise...

- Oshyan

[janimal]

On the cuda question. It is not limited to graphics applications. Any processing which uses massive rasters (arrays) and matrix processing can benefit from CUDA because the GPU has highly optimised hardware functions designed to deal with these problems in addition to the massively multi core architecture.

It also includes hardware support for several optimisation algorithms.

However as PG said redesigning algorithms for massively parallel processing is a specialist arena.

In addition performance is only enhanced by those areas of processing that can actually benefit from a massively parallel solution.

There is however no doubt in my mind that TG2 would be well suited to a CUDA implentation. At a guess it could potentially provide a 30% - 80% speed gain for rendering.

The most important factor is whether Planetside have the time & resources to implement it. I don't think they currently do.

PS. XP64 FTW!

[lonewolf]

I got myself a new computer recently, Q9550 w/4GB 1000MHZ RAM, but no OS for $1200 AUSD (before the market trouble). Installed win2k because I had it, and TG2TP5 crashed randomly about every 5 min. But since the beta release I've had no trouble at all, very stable and quick.
I did a quick sunset scene, rendered at 1600x900 Q-0.85 AA6 ATMO/CLD Quality 32, rendered in 1h 19.
Very impressed I was. I was limited by budget, so I chose the best I could without any frills, ie big LCD, vista etc. As soon as I can, I will be getting winxp64 and another 4GB, that should do me for now.

Iain