Trigger Finger

It’s amazing how hardware attitudes have changed. I remember somewhere around 1998 going into a computer shop to buy the Voodoo 1 graphics card with all it’s 4 mb of dedicated graphics memory.
The guy in the shop was basically ridiculing me saying that it was ridiculous to have such hardware as there was no need for it (remember the guys is supposed to be SELLING hardware to me). After about a 10 minute lecture on how computers were BUSINESS machines and finished off with something along the lines of “It’s crazy, next you will be telling me we need dedicated hardware accelerated cards for sound too!”
Well here we are some 8 years later already with graphics cards with 128 times the memory of that Voodoo 1 card (in fact we can even have two cards working together!), sound cards with multiple chips providing full 7.1 surround sound, and my current machine has 2gb of DDR400 RAM (the guy also scoffed at me at a later date for wanting a whole 128mb of RAM in my machine.
Now we have the prospect of dedicated chips, if not whole cards, dedicated to physics processing alone! It doesn’t surprise me, especially after seeing some of the staggering physics in FEAR which are even more enjoyable in the slow motion ‘adrenaline’ sequences. I’m almost tempted to drive the 40 miles to that shop and pester the guy for a dedicated physics card just to hear his reaction!

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