evanweaver

Games are a medium for artistic expression but saying that 3D hardware was designed to improve art production, or that NVIDIA was first in market, is incorrect. The hardware was designed to improve the consumption experience of something that is a mix of programming, game mechanics (which are both math and psychology), and potentially various art forms including visual, music, and narrative. It all needs to add up to fun or it won’t find much of an audience.

Gamers aren’t primarily spending time or money for the art and neither was NVIDIA. I will grant that the hardware improvements did make the visual aspects more lifelike and detailed and that allowed for increased artistic range, but production costs generally increased accordingly.

The idea didn't spring fully formed from SGI. It was a natural extension of 2D graphics accelerators which were initially used for engineering (high value, small market) and later for business applications generally and games (lower value, large markets). 3D acceleration took the exact same path, but the utility for gaming was much higher than the general business utility.

Of course graphics hardware was also used for more creative purposes including desktop publishing, special effects for TV, and digital art, so you will find some people in those communities vaguely wishing for something better, but artistic creation, even for commercial purpose, was never the market driver of 3D acceleration. Games were. The hardware was designed for gamers first, game programmers second, game artists a distant third, and for nobody else.

The closest thing to an "art computer" around that time was the Amiga which targeted the design/audio/video production markets.

Yeah, this history is just wrong. What really happened is as so:

Early 90s: SGI invented OpenGL to make realtime 3D graphics practical, initially for CAD/CAM and other scientific/engineering pursuits, and started shipping expensive workstations with 3d accelerated graphics. Some game artists used these workstations to prerender 3d graphics for game consoles. Note that 2D CAD/CAM accelerators had already been in market for nearly a decade, as had game consoles with varying degrees of 2D acceleration.

Mid-90s: Arcades and consoles starting using SGI chips and/or chip designs to render 3d games in real time. 3DFx, founded by ex-SGI engineers, created the Voodoo accelerator to bring the technology down market to the PC for PC games, which was a rapidly growing market.

Late 90s: NVIDIA entered the already existing and growing market for OpenGL accelerators for 3D PC gaming. This was a fast-follow technical play. They competed with 3DFx on performance and won after 3DFx fell behind and made serious strategy mistakes.

Later 90s: NVIDIA created the “GPU” branding to draw attention to their addition of hardware texture and lighting support, which 3DFX didn’t have. Really this was more of an incremental improvement in gaming capability.

Early 00s: NVIDIA nearly lost their lead to ATI with the switch to the shader model and DirectX 9, and had to redesign their architecture. ATI is now part of AMD and continues to compete with NVIDIA.

Mid 00s: NVIDIA releases CUDA, which adapts shaders to general purpose computation, completing the circle in a sense and making NVIDIA GPUs more useful for scientific work like the original SGI workstations. This later enabled the crypto boom and now generative AI.

Of course, along the way, OpenGL and GPUs have been used a lot for art, including art in games, but at no point did anybody say "hey, a lot of artists are trying to make 3D art, we should make graphics hardware for artists". Graphics hardware was made to render games faster with higher fidelity.

I know people for whom the traditional way of building a web app is completely foreign. I am curious how you would describe the concept and tools to someone who has never encountered them before outside an SPA architecture.

Curious what makes a cache better to you.

I mean, yeah, this is why people stopped using this pattern. But these problems are getting solved, especially in Fauna:

1. Schemaless/document/schema-on-need databases like Fauna don't mandate the application breakage on every change that SQL does

2. It's hard to reason about if its not transparent, but it can be transparent now, see below

3. Fauna is a temporal database, which acts like version control on your stored procedures, so you can easily check and revert any change

4. Fauna is serverless and horizontally scalable without consistency/latency impact

5. This was definitely a problem when you were occupying precious CPU cores on a vertically scaled RDBMS with business logic, but compute in Fauna or in serverless lambdas scales horizontally indefinitely

Stored procedures and the integration database have come back for our users in a big way. It would be great to hear examples of how others are applying this pattern with other databases and APIs.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and benchmarks." - Mark Twain

What other methods does the community use for measuring distributed latency?

This is possible in Fauna. All documents are actually collections of document versions within the configurable retention period. If you ensure that every writer decorates the document with the facets you want to search by (ip address, etc.) then you can construct indexes on those facets and query them temporally. They will return event records that show when the document entered the index (when that ip updated it) and left the index (when a different ip updated it).

Map the index additions and their timestamps onto the documents themselves and you can retrieve the entire state of each record that the ip wrote at the time that it wrote it. If you want to know specifically what that ip changed, then diff it with the previous record, for example, to filter down to updates that only changed the email address.

Can you give me an example of the kind of query you have in mind?