it seems to have helped path tracing by a lot.

not that it was an awesome product, but certainly it was flexible.

a good (albeit tiny) demo of that is that vquake has the same wobbling water distortion of the software renderer quake but rendered entirely through the gpu. Perhaps with some interpretation this could be called the "caveman discovered fire" of the pixel shading era.

intel support has been mild to non existent in the VR space unfortunately. Given the very finicky latency + engine support i wouldn’t bet on a great experience, but hope for the best for more competition in this market. (even amd has a lot of caveats comparing to nvidia)

Footnotes:

* critical "as low as it can be" low latency support on intel XE is still not as mature as nvidia, amd was lagging behind until recently.

* Not sure about "multiprojection" rendering support on intel, lack of support can kill vr performance or make it incompatible. (the optimized vr games often rely on it)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboCache

(Not the same thing 1:1, but worth the joke anyway)

i had brainstormed a bit a similar problem (non world aligned voxels "dynamic debris" in a destructible environment. One of the ideas that came through was to have a physics solver like the physX Flex sdk.

https://developer.nvidia.com/flex * 12 years old, but still runs in modern gpus and is quite interesting on itself as a demo * If you run it, consider turning on the "debug view", it will show the colision primitives intead of the shapes.

General purpose physics engine solvers arent that much gpu friendly, but if the only physical primitive shape being simulated are spheres (cubes are made of a few small spheres, everything is a bunch of spheres) the efficiency of the simulation improves quite a bit. (no need for conditional treatment of collisions like sphere+cube, cube+cylinder, cylinder+sphere and so on)

wondered if it could be solved by having a single sphere per voxel, considering only the voxels at the surface of the physically simulated object.

I can see this could be a weaker spot in the durability of this device, but certainly it still could take a few years of abuse before anything breaks.

an outdated study (2015) but inline with the "low end ssds" i mentioned.

https://techreport.com/review/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-t...

source: https://www.twitch.tv/claudeplayspokemon

this could go into a sagan's "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

for someone bad at naming things that gives me an idea! a software named gdb ?

we had a "historic bad solarweather" a bunch of years ago and i talked with a cyber cafe operator that "you could have more computers bluescreen on this week than usual".

to me it got really weird when he said later he really did, but honestly its 50/50 that could had been just incidental.

in another note there are some "rather intense" discussions when someone speedrunning a game gets a "unreproducible glitch" in their favor, some claim its a flaw from ageing dram hardware, but some always point that it could be a cosmic ray bitfliping the right bit. (https://tildes.net/~games/1eqq/the_biggest_myth_in_speedrunn...)

Something around that, they used the build engine as a starting point but "hacked it to oblivion". On the very least it reuses the same level editor (maps are vanilla build editor compatible) and it does keep many of the old bugs, like "killer doors".

semi random source: https://forums.duke4.net/topic/9513-release-zero-hour-resour...

incidentally the predecessor "duke nukem 64" is already more akin to what gzdoom is by using polygons instead of 2.5 rendering for walls and floors and they decided to push for polygons in the actors too for "zero hour" release.

the parent comment mentioned:

> Yup, they're sitting on millions of hours of work because of some nefarious business logic. Probably they determined that making old games available would negatively impact the sales of their new products, at least enough to be a problem. Whatever the reason, a shame.

so he replied with "yeah, id software did that and people forgot about doom" exactly because that gave new life to the old game and the franchise probably has better health today due to the community involvement. (not a great analogy, but has a point)

my personal pet peeve is the idea that "AI is better than humans" instead of "AI is useful as a tool", LLMs have too many caveats to be the last line of decision making in pretty much anything, but under supervision they are an amazing force multiplier.

100% guilty here, ouch.

also never saw a 8P8C "keyed, real rj45" connector in person.

unironically that would mimick a bunch of existing hardware out there. I owned a PC motherboard that always reported a -65535c in a non existing sensor.

my guess is some sensor described but non existing, probably reporting an infinite value of resistance of some unused pin...

they conduct blind trials were users submit a prompt, and vote on "best answer".

grok holds a very good position in its leaderboard.