History of Computing

The transition from 2D graphics to 3D graphics was rough, ugly, and drawn out. Early 3D games that were praised for their cutting edge visuals seem painfully ugly by today's standards. The amount of polygons required to draw a realistic looking image was a daunting task for early consoles and it wasn't until the early 2000s with the PS2 and XBOX that 3D visuals would look like anything more than a mess of pointy blocks.  Original Tomb Raider was something else Today's modern graphics are the result of years of cutthroat competition between ATI (later AMD) and Nvidia. If it wasn't for the technological arms race these companies underwent, we wouldn't have computer graphics as we know them. That's not to say that just gaming that has benefitted from the explosion in power of graphics processors. With CUDA and other similar technologies the GPU is poised for rapid growth in areas it wasn't originally intended for. One of the more obvious places to lo...

So last week was about the glorious PC master race. As it turns out, most people are dirty console peasants. But why? For a long time I gamed on PC by necessity because my parents were vary of violent video games corrupting me. Naturally they saw no problem with me buying a laptop with a discrete GPU and linking their credit card to my steam wallet. Not. A. Single. Problem.  One of the bigger impacts this had on me was that I missed basically every "big" game of the 2000s when they came out. I didn't experience titles like the Mass Effect and the Bioshock trilogies until years after they were released. For every game I experienced years after the fact, there were 2 more console exclusives I would never get to play. When I finally got to college and had disposable income (and reddit to inform my opinions) I decided that in addition to my PC, I wanted to experience console exclusives. It began with my 3DS, which I used to finally play a proper Zelda game for the first...