Ignorant Tablet Discussions

[Dark_Phantom]

[ignorant reply]
So, I have used tablets before.  Simple games like Candy Crush, Angry Birds, and maybe Pacman are suitable and worthwhile (for free, not for pay, because I'm a college student and cheap most of the time).
I do not have a tablet personally because I like the feel of a computer better... seriously, what other machine can run all of my coding and modding stuff, school documents, powerpoints, Internet browsing and researching, and sticky notes (virtual) all at the same time?  Yes, in theory tablets can do this.  But they are nowhere as efficient as my (slightly aging but still good) laptop.  I actually wish I had a desktop with me but that is physically inefficient for a student.
Keyboard, mouse, screen.  Only the best gaming system.  Only the best for everything else virtually too (almost, anyway)

[goes off on a tangent]
This is why Windows 8 was a failure in my opinion.  It targeted users of tablets, thinking that everyone was moving over to that style of technology.  As you can see just by looking at this thread, there is a clear divide on the tablet vs PC debate.  I sit on the PC side, almost boycotting Windows 8 (I have used it.  It makes me want to destroy new computers).

[ends rant and waits for the Windows 8 lovers to refute his argument]

[SleepKiller]

I use Windows 8. (I wish I didn't have to.) I support your argument.

[RepComm]

i've always hated switvhing versions.. I want a return to normalcy, but i fear that will never happen.. i was kind of glad to get rid of XP, except for compatiblity issues with what I do.

[aeria.]

Is Crysis all that intensive on the CPU? You could probably run it off a high end ARM processor if you used all the cores. (And run the battery flat in a second lolololol) The GPU is more likely to be were the bottleneck comes in.

I haven't been following the high-end tablets... but they can probably run Crisis 1 barebones. Crisis 1's a crazy game. Took years before single-GPU cards were able to run it on high settings >60FPS. The game really was ahead of its time.

As far as iOS have been coming out, nothing stands out to that point with the exception of Real Racing 3. But then again racing games tend to excel in the graphics department.

[Gold Man]

Ah, Real Racing 3. Such great graphics, such poor gameplay. The only thing I hated about that game was the ridiculous waiting times you had for repairs. And even then, the money system in the game was extremely terrible. If you wanted to actually win the game you probably would've needed to have used in-app purchases a fair bit.

Enough of my rant though, apparently Apple's claiming the new iPad Air has "desktop-grade power" in it. I personally have a hard time believing it, but if it's possible then it won't be too soon until tablets do have the power of a PC in them.

[SleepKiller]

Enough of my rant though, apparently Apple's claiming the new iPad Air has "desktop-grade power" in it. I personally have a hard time believing it, but if it's possible then it won't be too soon until tablets do have the power of a PC in them.

I'll believe it when they front up all the specs of there chips.

How many floating point operations can the GPU pull off in a second? If the answer isn't at least 2 trillion then it is a long way off desktop power. What's it's texture fill rate? How many Vertex Shader units and Pixel Shader units does it have? What is it's clockspeed? How much VRAM does it have? These are all question I've never seen Apple answer. (You possibly can't find them out by doing some research, but you shouldn't have to do that. It should be presented clearly and easily for me to find.)

With the CPU same thing. What's it's clockspeed? How big is it's cache? How many cores does it have? How well does it handle juggling threads?

The point is the same as the Xbox One vs PS4 power. Microsoft claims they have just as good a device yet here's the catch. Sony since day one has been upfront about what the raw number crunching capability of there GPU (1.84 Teraflop/s) Microsoft hasn't been. Now a small difference of around .2 wouldn't matter much. But the difference must be quite substantial to know that it would be worse to say it than not to say it.

What was I saying? Oh yeah. Also consider this. Around 10-20 years ago getting a super computer that was in the gigaflop/s was amazing. Now consider this. The most powerful supercomputer now has around 33 Petaflop/s of power. (That's 33 quadrillion.) Your average consumer graphics card has anywhere between 2-5 teraflop/s. (trillion)

Do the math, tablets aren't catching up to desktops. To be able to the industry would need to be static which it is far from. It simply isn't possible. Tablets will evolve and get better. But so will desktops. Maybe one of them is evolving faster than the other and will win because of that. Who knows. Even then what is to stop GPU makers from sticking a whole bunch of tablet GPUs onto a single card and thus beating tablets yet again?

tl;dr version
As I've said in my previous posts tablet's aren't catching up to desktops. End of story.

/thread

[aeria.]

SleepKiller might be the only person in this topic that knows in depth about what he is talking about.

[BlackScorpion]

SleepKiller might be the only person in this topic that knows in depth about what he is talking about.

I know I haven't been in this thread yet, but... well, I know what I'm talking about. With the help of an engineer at my school, I was able to download RAM and SHEEP.



This thread was starting to suck.

[RepComm]

So much for "/topic"