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Neat, but they really need to repeat what's said in the video in the text. Currently it's not amenable to obtaining a quick understanding.

Oh, don't pretend you haven't become fabulously wealthy with all those 4chan passes.

How many of those do you sell, anyway (if you don't mind me asking)?

On a related note, does anyone know of any studies of monospace vs. proportional fonts on reading speed/comprehension? I can find a number of examples for reading on older, low-DPI computer screens, but not much for high DPI screens or high-resolution print.

The insult seems a little snide and uncalled for, IMO.

DrawQuest might be interesting to you: http://drawquest.com/

I do wish there was an Android or PC version.

>This is a bit like one of those archaic laws like how in Staten Island, can only water your lawn if you hold the hose in your hand. No one actually gives a shit, and no one even knows that this was illegal in the first place.

Probably water conservation, as it prevents sprinkler use. My city had a similar bylaw as recently as 10 years ago, until a new reservoir was built.

Would syntax for choosing between 64-bit intermediate vs. 32-bit intermediate be appropriate?

The problem is that if the low quality render differs in any appreciable way from the high quality one, there will be flickering. So the low quality renders have to be extremely similar to the high quality ones, in which case why not just use the low-quality ones all the time?

Though come to think of it, there is one example that almost does what you describe. Dynamic resolution scaling has some artifacts, but is being used in some games (and is notably used in Dead Rising 3). Though one has to decide before the frame is rendered what resolution to use, so you still get frames that take longer than 16.7ms or whatever your target is.

One could do something similar with render quality, but it has the same drawback that you have to decide beforehand what quality you want to use. One would also have to ramp up and down the quality slowly, which is difficult as the complexity of a given scene can vary wildly over the space of a single second. It also wouldn't help with spikes in rendering time.

I'm glad to see others have been working on this. I'd been batting the idea of Hz-less displays around in my head over the past few weeks. I was actually going to write a blog post about the idea, as I was surprised that it seemed to have gone unimplemented.

I don't see much info about partial screen updates. I hope the eventual standardization of this sort of thing in DisplayPort will provide for Hz-less partial screen updates. It would be nice to be able to run a 3D application and a movie at the same time, providing 24 or 30 updates/second for the movie, and a dynamic rate for the 3D application. It also allows for cleaner implementation of 3D applications that aren't running fullscreen. Generally, partial updates seem like a more flexible, more natural evolution of the Hz-less display idea, particularly with "panel self refresh" and "partial frame updates" already in DisplayPort.

The obvious downside is that you've got a classic example of resource contention, this time in the case of bandwidth. If you've got two areas that want to be redrawn at the same time on different parts of the screen, only one (or a portion of one) can be sent at a time. This leads to jitter or (depending on how you decide to deal with it) some other visual problem. But let not the enemy of "good" be "perfect": it's still a very useful feature.

The best half-solution to the bandwidth contention problem (IMO) would be to push all the decision making as to who gets access to the "pipe" to the OS. It can decide which application (if any) gets a jitter-free experience (perhaps with user preference taken into account), it can provide hints to applications about when the pipe will be free, etc. The OS really has to manage it in order to provide a good experience.

What you are suggesting could lead to horrific flicker. If you render one frame in low complexity follow by another frame at medium complexity, followed by another frame in low complexity... etc., you'd get flashing as (for example) shadows appeared and disappeared repeatedly.

>I ask again, what is so impossible about just rendering the 60fps, and then not rendering any more?

There seem to be two ways to interpret your question:

>1.) Why can't games render 60 frames per second always?

Because some scenes are more complex than others. Rendering a complex scene can longer than 16.7 ms, and there is no way around that.

>2.) If a game comes far below the frame completion deadline (e.g., completes a frame in 0.5 ms, where the deadline is 16.7 ms), why doesn't it simply stop doing anything until the deadline has passed?

I do not know the answer. But I can say that many games actually do this. It is usually referred to as a frame cap.

The end of the article states that he plans on doing a Catalyst vs. Mesa comparison this weekend.

Hopefully with a larger selection of cards as well.

Eagle Mode (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6yPQKt3mBA) uses the zoomable UI concept and takes it to an extreme.

I would truly love to see a new form factor appear that's designed for large heatsinks that vent directly to the outside. It's always seemed terribly odd to me that GPUs often consume more power than CPUs, yet have tiny heatsinks and loud blower fans.

I think the best thing they could possibly do is provide a wide swath of benchmarks for each machine sold. The user can quickly see if the machine will provide performance that they deem acceptable. Require it to be displayed in a standard format.

The trouble is in getting unbiased results. I doubt Valve would want to test each model themselves.

How would use of the JVM "ruin" a device?

AFAIK, the stylus on the Surface Pro is significantly better than ones for the iPad/tablets with regular capacitive sensors.

According to http://www.techspot.com/news/54134-amd-launches-mantle-api-t...: "We've been told at the GPU14 Tech Day event that the Mantle API is open, so theoretically Nvidia could purpose the technology in their GPUs."

How feasible that is in reality is of course up for question. And I doubt that nVidia would be willing to implement an AMD-controlled API.

I believe they changed it so that the height limit now depends on a single variable in the code, making it easy to build a copy of Minecraft with a different limit. Minecraft as distributed by Mojang still has a 256-block height limit, however.

The SteamPipe name is already used for their content distribution system: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamPipe

My primary frustrations are with things that I didn't use in their earlier incarnation. The fixed position headers in Google+ take up screen space, giving almost a sense of claustrophobia for negligible benefit. Google Groups is painfully slow, and performing an advanced search (e.g., if you wish to search a certain date range) is currently not possible. Blogspot has a loading page.

For things that I have used, there are real, identifiable problems: the instant search results break the back button. Link tracking on search results means you cannot copy an URL.

I feel that there is a definite trend towards poor UI, irrespective of the user's prior history with the products.

Yes. He's answered a number of questions about it in the reddit thread.

After going through a few of those examples, the performance really isn't that good. For example, in Chrome my computer struggles to run "The Isle of Yosemite" in 1650x1050 at 30fps when looking at a fair bit of geometry. Yet I can easily play Battlefield 3 or Natural Selection 2 at 30fps, and the gulf in image quality, how much is in a given scene, and how much game logic there is is enormous.

Thus far, HTML5 games seem more like a replacement for basic 3D flash games more than anything. Whether that will change at some point in the future I don't know, but at this point I have not really been wowed by anything.

I've come across browser games a number of times that wouldn't work in my regular browser, requiring me to switch to another one I have installed. Your analogy is not very apt.

>That's the function of the period,

This breaks in the case of "Mr. Jones went to the store. He enjoys buying things." The spacing after 'Mr.' should be less than after 'store.'. If two spaces are prohibited, you have the following options, neither of them particularly satisfactory:

-The user must input some form of special Unicode space character after 'Mr.'

-The display software must include a list of all words that, when followed by a period, should not include extra space (e.g., "Mr, Mrs, Messrs, etc, e.g, i.e" and so forth).

Would automated security updates be an appropriate item to include in this?

I've found that the biggest problem with DisplayPort is that even if it is technically superior (unfortunately I'm not qualified to know whether it is or not), active DisplayPort/HDMI/DVI adapters are incredibly expensive.

Since HDMI and DVI came first, this limits the use of DisplayPort; manufacturers are unwilling to create a device that requires a $100 adapter to work with what most people own.

Somewhat unrelated, but out of curiosity, does anyone know of a site that lists — for all popular languages — various libraries/code snippets/routines which one can use to correctly (according to the RFCs) check the validity of e-mail addresses?

If not I may be compelled to create one.

Jolla might interest you, though I have no idea about their current state.

Google has Motorola and the Nexus line. As for Microsoft, their spectacular failure with the Surface suggests that having control of both hardware and software does not necessarily result in success.