Graham

So if Apple follow these rules to the letter, this then kills the Unreal Engine 3 for iPhone.

Epic are going to be thrilled!

Opera gets 100/100 on acid. (nudge nudge, wink wink :-)

@JesusFreak

This won't be free for games. I believe you will see very similar results to your PC, ie, nearly half the framerate.

Avatar: The game supports 3D output (on both the 360 and PS3) by rendering the screen in half (left half for left eye, right half for right eye). It can also render every other line for left/right, etc. So basically, it halves the resolution for each eye and draws everything twice. The other option is every other frame swaps left/right.

In the case of Avatar, I believe you have to manually set the TV to '3D mode' - although as I do not have a 3D TV, I'm not 100% sure on this.

This PS3 update will be adding support for the new HDMI 3D standards, which will mean the switch should be automatic.

The irony of all this, is that the PS3 architecture is far less suited to 3D games than the 360. Perhaps the biggest weakness of the PS3 is it's rather poor triangle setup rate. It's so bad, many, many PS3 games use the cell processor to handle a large portion of the vertex load. Now, with a half/half 3D output, your pixel load generally doesn't change, but your vertex load doubles.

On the 360, this is less of a problem. The hardware is designed for split viewports because of Tiling, and has a massively higher triangle rate to compensate for having to draw geometry multiple times. It even has predicated tiling, where it can automatically redraw geometry, perfect for 'automatic' 3D.

As expected, enabling 3D output in Avatar sees a *far* larger performance hit on the PS3 than the 360.

My understanding is the online connection requirement for XNA games is (somehow) related to the games being unrated (ie, no ESRB, pegi rating, etc).

For arcade games, an online connection is only required if your console doesn't have a license for the game. Ie, if you try and play on a different console without transferring the license then you need to be logged in to get the account's license.

127 grams is amazingly lightweight for a 5MP, WVGA touchscreen Qwerty slider with a 1,500mAh battery!. If it's built well then I for one would be all for it!

Just to clarify, the reason there are only 3 community games is because XNA 3.0 final isn't available to the public yet (XNA 3.0 Beta is the current version, which does not allow community games submissions).

So...

better quality for the same file size (pretty much equal to jpeg2000), a lossless option, *much* faster encoding (than jpeg2000 and png afaik), very fast decoding, support for multiple channels and colour spaces in the same image, transparency, differing compression per channel, high dynamic range (up to 32bit including floating point), no requirement for divide/multiply by the encoding/decoding hardware, constant work per-pixel decoding (I think), ability to decode rectangular sub-regions of the image without decoding the rest of the image, mipmaps.....

If I were a camera manufacturer I think I would like to support this format.

Now we just need HDR monitors.
:-)

This is sometimes known as a multi-resolution display. There are a number of products and research projects out there already.

I personally have seen this done twice, it's a smart thing to do with maps and other large image sets. An example I've tried was an LCD monitor in the middle of a projection screen (rear projection), this was in ~2005 I believe.

A very quick google brings up the following project as another example:
http://140.112.28.144/Excellence/Proposal%20Results/Sub_Project_3/OutComes2/2005/system/document_view
You can see a multires table display about halfway down.

I liked the bit with the charging rhino thingy :P

My sundials, let me show you them.