Re: [gentoo-user] Mantle Open source GPU engine

[Mark David Dumlao <madumlao@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 4:53 AM, Bruce Hill
<daddy@happypenguincomputers.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 04, 2013 at 09:20:43PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>> > computer gaming (yawn)...
>>
>>
>> Think again.
>>
>> What is the driving force behind all the super-duper performance
>> hardware you have right now?
>>
>> Gaming.
>>
>> What is the GPU capable of achieving when parallelized? Well, graphics
>> rendering is highly parallelizable and nowadays you see it in render
>> farms and Top500 supercomputers. But those didn;t fund it, so what did?
>>
>> Graphics cards sold to gamers.
>>
>> Graphics cards for gamers are probably the only thing left really
>> keeping the pc market as such going. Yes, there are still millions of
>> them on corporate desktops but that is a cut-throat market and at
>> what-tiny-number-of-bucks a pop? Bread and butter money, it keeps things
>> ticking over and pays the rent. But gamers pay for the bling.
>>
>> Almost ever awesome performance gain in the last 10 years at least that
>> you see in commercial products were driven in whole or in part by the
>> primary high performance market - gamers.
>>
>> Personally, I don't like games much and don't play them much. OK, I
>> don't play them at all. But the market they make up - that's different.
>> Those egg-heads are very important
>
> See previous reply in thread to James. This one was not threaded, but rather,
> a reply to the OP, so it makes it look as if you haven't read the thread.
>
> I played one computer game one day in 1990. Lost that entire day to that
> stupid game, and never played again. Except...one time for a few hours with a
> new friend the second year living in China. He wanted me to play NFS. After
> playing a few races with him, I explained that we do this with _real_cars_ on
> _real_roads_ in _real_life_ "back in America". It developed from the days of
> moonshining, and your car (and you as a driver) weren't anything if you
> couldn't outrun the local cops. ;)
>
> My gaming yawn was a poor, and needless, expression of disgust.

Next time you yawn that yawn, though, just remember

The reason Unix was written was to port a game.