On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 4:53 AM, Bruce Hill <da...@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.
