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Comment Re:No 'Optimus' support in Linux (Score 1) 62

by Behemoth (#36288598) Attached to: NVIDIA Announces GeForce GTX 560M and GT 520MX Mobile GPUs

I'll take a look at it. I have no use for Optimus - I just need a laptop with basic CUDA support. The model I unwittingly got was an Inspiron, and there didn't seem any way to disable Optimus. I'd love to be wrong (no RMA until after the holidays so it's not out the door yet) but I saw no options in the BIOS. I'm used to not being able to use the bleeding edge features in Linux, I'm just not used to being shut out completely, at least by nVidia products.

Thanks m(__)m

Comment No 'Optimus' support in Linux (Score 3, Interesting) 62

by Behemoth (#36286458) Attached to: NVIDIA Announces GeForce GTX 560M and GT 520MX Mobile GPUs

Be wary on the Linux side of the 'Optimus' technology. I didn't do due diligence and impetuously ordered a new laptop from Dell with an nVidia card (GT 525M). Turns out that there was no way in the Dell laptop to turn it off, and Linux couldn't see the nVidia card, just the intermediating Intel card. The ‘automatic graphics switching’ is done in software only under Win7. End result - no OpenGL under Linux. End-end result, I sent it back.

There is a project to get Optimus working on Linux (https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee) but I really don't have time, and the switching has to be done manually at the moment.
PC Games (Games)

EA Shutting Down Video Game Servers Prematurely 341

Posted by Soulskill from the sixty-dollar-yearly-fee dept.
Spacezilla writes "EA is dropping the bomb on a number of their video game servers, shutting down the online fun for many of their Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 games. Not only is the inclusion of PS3 and Xbox 360 titles odd, the date the games were released is even more surprising. Yes, Madden 07 and 08 are included in the shutdown... but Madden 09 on all consoles as well?"
Businesses

Facebook Mafiosi Go To the Mattresses vs. Zynga 102

Posted by Soulskill from the concrete-galoshes dept.
sympleko writes "Zynga has the lion's share of traffic in Facebook applications, and Mafia Wars is one of their most popular social games. Collapsing under the weight of over 26 million users, Zynga has been scrambling to thwart hard-core gamers who reverse-engineer URLs or script the game to optimize their enjoyment. Many of the workarounds have annoyed users who were accustomed to various game features, and even worse, the hastily-deployed changes have resulted in many players losing access to the game, in-game prizes, or statistics. Fed up with a software company seemingly bent on discouraging people from enjoying their product, a number of tagged players have organized a boycott of all Zynga games. The first 24-hour boycott on Sunday 12/13 resulted in an 11% decline in Daily Active Users, and an emergency thread on Zynga's forums (from which most of the flames were deleted). The current boycott, extending Wednesday through Sunday is being supported by a 428K strong Facebook group. At issue is the social contract between software companies and their devoted user base, as well as the nefarious tactics Zynga has used to raise cash."
Businesses

Treading the Fuzzy Line Between Game Cloning and Theft 235

Posted by Soulskill from the welcome-to-the-world-of-policeactioncraft dept.
eldavojohn writes "Ars analyzes some knockoffs and near-knockoffs in the gaming world that led to problems with the original developers. Jenova Chen, creator of Flower and flOw, discusses how he feels about the clones made of his games. Chen reveals his true feelings about the takedown of Aquatica (a flOw knockoff): 'What bothers me the most is that because of my own overreaction, I might have created a lot of inconvenience to the creator of Aquatica and interrupted his game-making. He is clearly talented, and certainly a fan of flOw. I hope he can continue creating video games, but with his own design.' The article also notes the apparent similarities between Zynga's Cafe World and Playfish's Restaurant City (the two most popular Facebook games). Is that cloning or theft? Should clones be welcomed or abhorred?"
Graphics

DX11 Tested Against DX9 With Dirt 2 Demo 201

Posted by Soulskill from the shadows-with-shadows dept.
MojoKid writes "The PC demo for Codemasters' upcoming DirectX 11 racing title, Dirt 2, has just hit the web and is available for download. Dirt 2 is a highly-anticipated racing sim that also happens to feature leading-edge graphic effects. In addition to a DirectX 9 code path, Dirt 2 also utilizes a number of DirectX 11 features, like hardware-tessellated dynamic water, an animated crowd and dynamic cloth effects, in addition to DirectCompute 11-accelerated high-definition ambient occlusion (HADO), full floating-point high dynamic range (HDR) lighting, and full-screen resolution post processing. Performance-wise, DX11 didn't take its toll as much as you'd expect this early on in its adoption cycle." Bit-tech also took a look at the graphical differences, arriving at this conclusion: "You'd need a seriously keen eye and brown paper envelope full of cash from one of the creators of Dirt 2 to notice any real difference between textures in the two versions of DirectX."
PC Games (Games)

The Rise of Originality In MMOs 118

Posted by Soulskill from the there-go-my-chances-for-a-starcon-mmo dept.
Karen Hertzberg writes "Over the last half decade, gamers have been forced to wander through familiar worlds and universes. Studios have been licensing IPs left and right, grabbing everything from the Wheel of Time to Star Trek. Originality seemed to be a lost art, and although these worlds were fun to adventure in, many didn't hold the same sort of magical spell that original titles like EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot once enjoyed. But change is coming. Blizzard Entertainment revealed that their next MMO would be an original IP, and this year's E3 lineup featured more brand new games than titles derived from existing worlds. So, why the sudden shift? To answer that question, Ten Ton Hammer's Cody 'Micajah' Bye sent a number of questions to original IP development teams across the world."
Intel

Looking at Intel's New-ish Desktop Socket, LGA 1366 100

Posted by timothy from the odd-number-of-RAM-sticks-means-cognitive-dissonance dept.
Slatterz writes "LGA 1366 is Intel's first new desktop socket in four years. It uses the same ZIF design as the familiar LGA 775 architecture, but it incorporates many more contacts. These big architectural changes are backed up by some less visible advances. Until now, Intel's quad-core processors have been constructed from two dual-core dies, but now Core i7 brings together four cores on a single die. It's also Intel's first processor design to use an L3 cache, shared between all four cores."

Comment Re:Does it run on Linux? (Score 4, Informative) 173

by Behemoth (#17242042) Attached to: Microsoft Formally Releases Robotics Software
It may be a little off topic, but it seems worthwhile to plug to a nice GPL'd robotics package which runs on *nix, has built in simulators for 2D and 3D, and supports a lot of COTS robots (including Roombas):

Player/Stage: http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/

Probably not exactly the same target audience as MS's SDK, but we're all geeks, here, right?

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