So it seems, according to numbers gathered by CNet, that the new “Slim” version that use a refined design of cpu and gpu and overall components will consume around 75 watts while idling (not in game), and around 95 watts when playing a game, slightly less or around 80 watts when playing a blu ray movie.

That’s much better if you remember the previous numbers of 157 watts in usage and 130 watts of the first 40Gb revision (there have been other silent revisions since then) or the original PS3 that came out with a 200 watts power consumption while in use !

Also for a simple comparison, I’ve got a HTPC (Home theater PC) at home, that I’ve built with power usage in mind that plays Blu ray movies for around 50 watts (and 41 watts while idling on desktop). Of course the comparison may not be fair as it is less adept at playing games than a Playstation and it’s also a less streamlined experience.

The thing is that most of my media appliances (TVs, consoles, media pc) are usually turned off when not in use, and they are actually physically off the plug (via a switch) so that they cannot have any “stand by” or phantom consumption (my other work and home PCs are another matter unfortunately). So the impact of having a console being turned on a few hours at best per day is usually limited (compared to the air conditioning or some of my other appliances being always on). Anyway, it’s not like you time your buy of a console based only on power consumption and replacing an old power hungry one with a new one may not be cost effective (unless you expect the price of energy to go through the roof in the lifetime of the console).

So for commenters and lurkers : Is the power consumption of a device (any device) an important part of the decision to buy it ? Do you think a device that is occasionnally turned on would matter on your electricity bill ?

Thanks for visiting !

The idea is to keep the price in check, so we’re not going to compete with the Surface or any other multi touch projects, but to try to see how we can cleverly gather existing and relatively affordable piece to have a convivial place with the old style arcade gameplay. It should be okay to have to do a bit of self assembling and programming though not too much is preferable (as time and skill is in short supply).

The table would be a wood or metal object with a glass top. The glass top is obviously important since it allows people to look at the screen while the object can still be functional as a coffee table to put drinks, foods and not let the components exposed to any bad spill. The type that opens to let people see the screen might not be practical enough. I’m sure there are enough existing coffee table designs with glass top that could be repurposed (our current coffee table already has a glass top but I doubt it could easily be repurposed).

CRTs or cathodic tubes sound a bit outdated, and a LCD screen or other type of flat screen would ensure a slick profile. The view angle of some LCDs is limited, that would be disastrous if from one side of the table we can’t see anything on the screen : we can’t justify to have people look from over the screen but also from the side. The advantage of LCD is that they are ubiquitous, we could even imagine salvage a laptop or something, how cool that could be I don’t know, plus cheap laptops come with even cheaper LCDs with bad viewing angles, bad contrast and so on. Organic LED (OLED) are probably way too expensive and hard to come by in large dimensions. Projection would be possible with a depolished medium on one side of the glass but would limit severely the sleekness of the design (or from the top but that would be obscure by objects between the projector and the table). Plasma may have good viewing angle but I don’t know if they would stand very well the type of display we will have there (lots of static imagery may result in a burnt plasma). I think the fight would be between a cheap (but with good viewing angle) LCD and a CRT with a flat surface and that can be fit under a coffee table.

Since the idea is to make some sort of arcade machine, the controls would be traditional arcade buttons. We would imagine putting either two sets of control in front of each other or four sets of controls around the table.

Unfortunately, this disposition would be another big problems in itself. Most games of arcade type we would find easily are not playable in this fashion. Some are thought for the multiplayer but with two players facing the screen most likely. Would we have to program the games ourselves ? Such as a pong clone, or gauntlet but without any main orientation. Or modify the existing games slightly to display themselves in a mirrored organization to face each player ? Programming games to take advantage of this is a dreadful prospect for an amateur endeavour with not enough time and those would be projects of their own (though we may tackle some quick and easy gameplays as proof of concepts that may not justify the total investment or to make your guests suffer through it). Modifying existing games might be feasible but might involve work too unless there exists a quick hack to do it..

Of course if we have a arcade machine in a coffee table and that allows two to four people to play together we need to have players that will be motivated enough to do something with it. Once again a big investment if you’re not going to use it (though some may find the construction itself a hobby as good as another one).

PC components can be cheap. A salvaged machine may even do. The less sophisticated the components are, the less maintenance and issues we should see hopefully. No big fans to dissipate heat, no powerful but overheating components : something that was cheap and sturdy even the day it got out. Plus if we have simple arcade games with no 3D, physics and the like there’s probably stuff we can do with a not so powerful and cheap machine. We expect most will be paid in the actual furnitures, the external components such as joysticks, buttons, the display (if we can’t salvage anything), and time. Software is an unknown.

Real-Time Rendering, Third Edition is the new reference for you people out there that want to learn how real time graphics is done. Read more after the jump.

So I finally received my copy of Real-Time Rendering, Third Edition : Thank you Eric ! There are so many books out there about 3D and real time, but there’s only few that are actually worth buying and that contain so many informations about how graphics is done in a modern graphic hardware and in modern applications. Actually if there’s a new hire at our company, that’s probably the only book I would recommend (well I used to recommend the second edition) especially if they’re new to graphics and don’t have first hand experience with graphics hardware (yeah that’s what we do). So what can you learn in this new edition :

• Case studies from the XBox360 GPU, PS3 RSX, Mali 200 and future hardware
• A primer on graphics pipeline, performance investigation and optimization technique
• Survey on collision detection techniques and acceleration structures, as well as linear algebra refresh
• Texturing, shading, lighting, shadowing, antialiasing, high dynamic range, and much more

So basically if you’ve been visiting In a coder’s mind, and found the articles interesting then that book is probably made for you !

The experiment I ran was to add something to the form that would use the fact that most robots are not human and so don’t read or understand labels (and humans do, at least I hope my readers are in this category). So I decided against Captcha because I don’t really find it an exhilarating experience having to decipher captcha every once in a while (but I understand the reason to). I thought that for my small audience website, spammers would not want to spend time to tailor their robots to decipher labels and so I just put the default label of the contact form to be “Just spam”. While the text on the contact form and the label make it hopefully self-evident that you should NOT use this category, bots don’t read/understand those.

As a result, Drupal my web script is redirecting form requests based on the label to my catch all spam address or my regular website contact address.

I realize all the shortcomings of such a method of course. I haven’t had false positive (yet), but somebody not reading instructions or not understanding english well could be fooled. Also if such a method becomes widespread (I hope not), it will become less efficicient than captcha or heuristic based anti-spam mechanism (and less costly to circumvent). So I may just buying me time, but since it is so low tech and the cost of implementing this was near zero, it may be worth it for now.

Please add your comments and tell me what spam circumventing methods you added to your website.

Now what does it matter to me ?

Well Tron was one of those movies that imprinted my mind when I was a child. It really gave us a glimpse of the future of graphics and by a set of coincidence (or is it ?) here I am some 20 years later working in a computer graphics related field.

Now the original movie didn’t pan so well according to some reports, even though it gained kind of a cult status, considered a precursor by people working in the field opening the road of the likes of Pixar, yet it had a weak script, a kind of unbelievable story, some cheesy 80s designs, but the magic was there nonetheless. I remember buying the novelization and staring at the pictures taken from the movie they were so incredible to me :).

So can you continue to impress so many years later ? With a bit of a chance the film will be given a proper script, and the many people who finally saw it through the reruns, the vhs and dvd releases will talk their peers into seeing it, etc so it might be a win or a big expectation for Disney this time. Of course computer graphics in movies are now the norm, so much that it’s worth mentionning today when a movie features some old school effects like stop motion, animatronics, prosthetics or any of the visual tricks that were used before.No matter what the work they put into the film it’s hard to see how the renewed graphics will impress the younger crowd. In the worst case scenario, Disney will use the movie as as way to push toys and video games. But we’ll see.

Now back to the trailer.

The teaser more exactly opens as a blue guy in the famous tron looking environment is being chased by the yellow guy.The game arena seems to have been upgraded to feature transparent grounds, as well as being now three dimensional, with many ways to pass each other. The blue guy seems to have an upper hand for a while but suddenly, the yellow guy manage to jump from a cliff, land just before him and close his path with a yellow wall. The blue guy crashes in slow motion and lands in a very difficult spot. The yellow guy approaches now off his vehicle, we see his face some kind of holographic projection in his suit, and as the blue guy says “Ok you win, it’s only a game !”, the yellow guy tell him “not anymore” and delivers a blow..In between the scene we see glimpses of what seems the real world where the familiar face of Jeff Bridges (Flynn in the original movie) looks at the scene from his desk. Fade to black, TR2N logo (see the image above).

The teaser while taken with a shaky camera in a very bad spot, is being chased down anyway by the Disney lawyers so you need to apply some search foo to be able to see it but it may be worth it if you were a fan of the first movie. Next images will not arrive before another year !

Stay tuned !

I had been looking for something like that for a long time, some hard data on the power consumption of the new model of Playstation 3 (40GB that was released in November 2007)

So here it is : New revisions of Playstation3 and Xbox

The summary, it will go up to 157 in usage, and stay around 130 at minimum usage. It is a definite better looking deal than with the previous models that could end up to 200 Watts power consumption under load. Yet you still have a lot to gain to turn it off whenever you don’t use it.

How does it compare to everything else ? A rather mid/high end desktop computer such as the one I use in my home (geforce 7800 GT, amd64 dual core cpu, mid tower, a 21″ CRT) would be close to 200 Watts in charge including the CRT monitor. Of course assuming you didn’t go crazy with SLI, quad cores and the like. My current laptop is closer to 50 watts in charge, 20 watts idle (dual core intel cpu, geforce 8500 class gpu, integrated LCD). So whenever I’m not doing anything computing power hungry like typing this note, I would use my laptop and shut down my desktop computer.

Anyway a PS3 is still closer in consumption to a mid end desktop computer than an electronic appliance (if for example you bought it to watch blu ray discs). Hopefully they will still work to improve that in the future with the introduction of the 65 nm or less versions of the chips that would consume less energy (the current 40GB still uses 90nm chips).

The Wii from Nintendo is still unbeatable in term of power consumption, but of course if things were just interchangeable the world would be simpler..