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SIGGRAPH Day 3
Aug. 10th, 2004 11:16 amWell, the only session of interest right now has too many people for the room so I couldn't get in. Hopefully my boss made it in--yesterday was a session I got in and he wasn't able to due to space limitations. For some reason, many people are interested in sessions of ice and smoke special effects. Go figure.
Did a quick run through the exhibit hall. Ironically the only things of real interest to me at these shows are the dead-tree media folks. Not a lot of books of interest this year, but a few of them I'm considering picking up after I make sure it isn't about the same on Amazon.com. The rest of the hall has the usual assortment of art creation tools, video editing suites, expensive plug-ins, training and duplicating services, and hardware vendors.
The video board industry continues in the same really low level of decorum set by ELSA years ago... ATI and nVidia are busy competing more on whose demo chick has the tightest ass and sexiest hair than they are on price-point. I'm annoyed that they sell so much crappy OEM hardware and charge such a premium for cards that don't suck. Trying to scale support across so many generations of hardware is the real bane of a PC developer's life, and the corners those guys cut to get cheap cards into the channel make life really difficult. I guess somewhere along the line the phrase "compelling demo content" was defined as "something I can masturbate to with my $500 video card that is only really needed by one game."
Anyhow, I exchanged my ticket to the Electronic Theater to go tonight instead of last night--my coworkers are going tonight. There is an IGDA meeting this afternoon, and I'm proctoring one of the HLSL workshops as well.
Did a quick run through the exhibit hall. Ironically the only things of real interest to me at these shows are the dead-tree media folks. Not a lot of books of interest this year, but a few of them I'm considering picking up after I make sure it isn't about the same on Amazon.com. The rest of the hall has the usual assortment of art creation tools, video editing suites, expensive plug-ins, training and duplicating services, and hardware vendors.
The video board industry continues in the same really low level of decorum set by ELSA years ago... ATI and nVidia are busy competing more on whose demo chick has the tightest ass and sexiest hair than they are on price-point. I'm annoyed that they sell so much crappy OEM hardware and charge such a premium for cards that don't suck. Trying to scale support across so many generations of hardware is the real bane of a PC developer's life, and the corners those guys cut to get cheap cards into the channel make life really difficult. I guess somewhere along the line the phrase "compelling demo content" was defined as "something I can masturbate to with my $500 video card that is only really needed by one game."
Anyhow, I exchanged my ticket to the Electronic Theater to go tonight instead of last night--my coworkers are going tonight. There is an IGDA meeting this afternoon, and I'm proctoring one of the HLSL workshops as well.
