Zuu111

SSD Caching and whether it is still useful

SSD Caching and whether it is still useful

SSD Caching and whether it is still useful

SSD Caching and whether it is still useful

Hey,
 
As one of those Kickstarter supporters, I was certainly unsure what to make of the announcement. But clearly, the folks at Oculus had to see some kind of logic here... beyond the money, presumably. They just released an announcement to Kckstarter supporters explaining their rationale. Here is an excerpt from that announcement:
 
"At first glance, it might not seem obvious why Oculus is partnering with Facebook, a company focused on connecting people, investing in internet access for the world and pushing an open computing platform. But when you consider it more carefully, we’re culturally aligned with a focus on innovating and hiring the best and brightest; we believe communication drives new platforms; we want to contribute to a more open, connected world; and we both see virtual reality as the next step.
Most important, Facebook understands the potential for VR. Mark and his team share our vision for virtual reality’s potential to transform the way we learn, share, play, and communicate. Facebook is a company that believes that anything is possible with the right group of people, and we couldn’t agree more.
This partnership is one of the most important moments for virtual reality: it gives us the best shot at truly changing the world. It opens doors to new opportunities and partnerships, reduces risk on the manufacturing and work capital side, allows us to publish more made-for-VR content, and lets us focus on what we do best: solving hard engineering challenges and delivering the future of VR."
 
Will be interesting to see where this goes, I think.
 
Should note too, that, whether wishful thinking or just being positive, others have been noting in other discussion groups that an infusion on 2 billion dollars sure could take VR places it could not otherwise have reached, and far faster, had this not happened. So, maybe a bit of fingers crossed and whistling past the general ick factor of Facebook?

It could have been a little better but you know people are mad when Hitler videos are being made.

Mark Zuckerberg must have dreams of being a real life James Halliday and building his own OASIS.

Well this weeks wan show is going to be intresting, slick rantage instead of linus rantage

This is absolutely awful. Dare I say it: VR is dead. 
 
EDIT: This thought just occurred to me, how do the Kickstarter backers feel about this?

SSD Caching and whether it is still useful

I might as well weigh in on this since I tweeted this as a discussion topic:
 
Mantle:
- Unproven
- Requires no new hardware if you already have a GCN (7000+) card
- Requires developer support (but we know that at least some is coming)
- Unknown performance improvement over non-Mantle
- Takes time to implement, limited compatibility with existing hardware and fragments market, which will be a major barrier
- No support for existing titles unless ported in after the fact
- Potentially makes Linux gaming more feasible
 
G-Sync:
- Requires Kepler GPU (600 series or better)
- Requires new hardware on monitor side of things (but not that expensive to implement compared to existing scaler hardware)
- Does not require developer support & supports pretty much your entire existing library of games.
- Proven performance. Holy crap does it ever make a big difference. I'd rather play 50FPS with G-Sync than 80FPS with tearing from what I saw. Seriously..
- Requires hardware manufacturer support (at least some is coming, but not from A+ players like Samsung. I saw Philips, ASUS, BenQ, and Viewsonic on the list...)-
 
I'll discuss this more on the WAN Show this week, but let me put it this way. To all of the folks saying any of the following about G-Sync:
- a useless features
- can't convince me that lower framerates can look better
- snake oil
 
You just don't understand the technology here fully. This is ABSOLUTELY game-changing. It makes a HUGE difference. Enormous. Earth-shattering. Not open for debate. End of discussion. Unless you've tried it, (I have, you haven't at this point unless you're another journalist that was at the event) then it's best to say nothing before you make yourself look like a fool.
 
The challenges for G-Sync have to do with adoption by monitor makers, NOT to do with whether it's a GREAT technology that ideally EVERY gamer would have. For me a key factor here is going to be the availability of monitors with G-Sync that don't suck. If you can't buy an IPS panel with G-Sync, you're going to have a hard time selling someone like me who games very little compared to doing real work on his PC on it.
 
Mantle has the capability to dramatically improve performance in the traditional sense, but doesn't address the same issues that every card has the way the G-Sync does. Mantle's success rides on the implementations we see from devs like DICE with BF4. If it's awesome, then it will drive more developers to embrace it. If it sucks and it turns out to be really hard to work with, it won't.
 
So here's the summary in my mind. They're both potentially incredible. The only difference is right now we KNOW that G-Sync is incredible, and Mantle has the POTENTIAL to be incredible. We still need more information about BOTH of them before I'd be willing to drop real money on either of them, though.

SSD Caching and whether it is still useful

So a few pages are reporting that AMD will be releasing their 8000 series GPUs, AND in the 3rd quarter of this year! The specs released really look like they are taking on NVidia's current salvos and will go head to head with the 780, 770, etc., with the flagship, the 8970, having 6 GB and a 1,100 MHZ CORE clock speed, and going for $599. These GPU wars seem crazy to me. I mean, the rapid to-ing and fro-ing are just goign to have Nvidia and AMD competing against their own products, eventually.
 
Oh well, here's hoping these wars translate to some incredible price drops for the lower end/older models by the Fall.
 
 
Here's the post at Maximum PC: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/amd_rumored_launch_radeon_hd_8000_series_third_quarter
 
 
Cheers,
 
Zuu111

Stupid non-disclosure agreements! Linus knows everything about the Haswell motherboards from ASUS and he can't tell us. I demand this information!

SSD Caching and whether it is still useful

SSD Caching and whether it is still useful