Userland programmers should not worry about the implementation i.e. plumbing work.
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As I said, there's nothing wrong with having APIs for user mode and still having standardized hardware on I/O port/memory-map level so at least kernel mode software can be written to take advantage in best possible way.
>A boat anchor.
It doesn't have to be just the basic VGA-- entire SVGA/XGA/SXGA could have been standardized at hardware level; but it wasn't so you have to live with the method of accessing them through APIs.
>...To maximise performance, GPUs usually take a clean design approach i.e. applying the latest micro-architecture paradigm on a given transistor count.
Because they are already assuming now that they only have to write for APIs. Also, it's cheaper for them to start fresh. But it's better to have both. If some video card company had maintained hardware standards at I/O level throughout their history, it would be pretty popular and useful since it would work with all OSes (DOS, Windows 3.x, XP, Vista, Linux, etc.) and would allow for direct programming. I know ATI even has like 10 different I/O port locations on various cards that do the same thing.
>1. Geforce 8600 GT/8700M GT/9500M GS/9600M/9650M GT has four of these processing elements i.e. 32 SPs with 32768 32bit registers.
>2. Geforce 9600 GSO has eight of these processing elements i.e. 96 SPs with 98304 registers i.e. these values are stored next to actual execution cores.
>Notice the register count differences between examples 1 and 2.
Yeah, but given they are only accessed via APIs, they could change the GPU and register sets. However, if they had known that many applications are writing directly to the hardware, they would have to maintain APIs and be backward compatible from hardware perspective.
>I was referring to variable of movement compared to on-off nature of a digital joystick. >Anyway, my mouse has an optical scanner i.e. it has a DPI resolution and it doesn't have a mouse ball. It has A-to-D conversion.
Most games on PCs use analog joysticks but they could just as well have been written with digital joysticks. Yeah, a few games need the analogicity, but why should most of the games suffer because of it.
>I wasn't referring to marketing point of view i.e. refer to real world cars. Xbox 360's RS's replicates (player's POV)'s head movement changes.
I have played Pole Position on Atari 800 and Atari 5200 and it works great with digital joysticks and analog sticks although latter has centering issues/calibration issues.