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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • NVIDIA has been struggling in recent years to find use cases for their graphics cards. That’s why they’re pushing towards raytracing, because rasterization has hit its limit and people no longer need to upgrade their GPU for that (they tried pushing towards 8k resolution, but that’s complete BS for screens outside of cinemas). However, most people don’t care about having better reflections and indirect lighting in their games, so they’re struggling to get anywhere in the gaming market. Now NVIDIA is moving into other markets for their cards that don’t involve gamers, and they’re just left as an afterthought.

    I don’t think that this will ever change again. Games like DOTA, Fortnite and Minecraft are hugely popular, and they don’t need raytracing at all.

    I personally tried going towards fluid simulations for games, because those also need a ton of GPU resources if calculated at runtime (that was the topic of my Master’s thesis). However, there have barely been any games featuring dynamic water. It’s apparently not interesting enough to design games around.











  • It’s a bit more complex than that. Intel CPUs (to this day) boot in real mode, which is what DOS is using. In this mode, the system only has access to 640k of RAM. Windows 95 and later switch the processor to protected mode, where the system gets access to all of the RAM and also to memory protection features, so processes can’t real and write each other’s memory. However, in this mode it’s impossible to run real mode code, such as the one provided by DOS.

    DOS games had a trick where they briefly switched back to real mode to execute DOS functions (mostly reading and writing to disk) and then back to protected mode, but I don’t think that Windows 95 did that.