Sizzling Sequels & Fijian Ferocity

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“Green Eyes, Red Beard. Lay down your transistors, cast aside you texels, forget your ROP driven lust for revenge and let’s make a prequel that divulges every event leading up to the first ever 28nm GPU.

Red Beard (aka. AMD): “What? You mean in the way the Social Network chronicled Facebook’s technical rise and moral fall? Granted, there may be a movie in that.”

Green Eyes (aka. Nvidia): “I fancy that it would be as tiresome watching Steam’s progress bar and as pointless as filming yourself watching Steam’s progress bar.”

Red Beard: “What, just because the grotesque money sucking gravy train that was your odious Kepler failed to emerge before my vibrant and virtuous Tahiti?”

They’ll be time a plenty for pettiness later in the article. For now think practically. I don’t mean a picture prequel. I mean a physical one. An embodiment, something you could hold, install and utilize like any visually inclined device.

Green Eyes: “Nonsense. Even if it were somehow possible to amalgamate my Fermi flagships with his Cypress canoes to a create a tawdry silicone tribute, who would be interested in reminiscing over yesterday’s rendering?

A video card is designed, forged, ordered, delivered, torn open, then sentenced to a gruelling fate inside a gamer’s galley until its core is crippled and its memory massacred, whereupon it is ripped from its dusty manacles and cast adrift to make way for a more powerful oarsman.

The only time it sees light is when un-boxed. It is only ever glimpsed is through a lens and even though our loyalists love to savour factory freshness, handsome heat sinks and machined élan, frame rates are what perpetuate their profitable addiction.”

Come now, you sadistic narrow-minded curmudgeon, A world exists outside your jaded dominion. Are you seriously asserting one couldn’t capitalize on a lamenting a Quake veterans’ yearning to revive a little ancient Voodoo Magic?

Green Eyes: A Voodoo curse my friend, that I destroyed before its unspeakable evil could corrupt my faithful followers. Move on with your wretched musings.

The intrinsic elements of a sequel for the big screen are startlingly similar to those that propel subsequent generations of hardware and software to a house from a warehouse, especially in the case of action movies.

Once a film has evolved into a well oiled franchise, and a mobile phone into a stressed mother’s right hand, the “golden rules” that instigate each set of selling points are virtually interchangeable and akin to a lapsed Pilgrim’s Christmas list. Bigger, better, faster, prettier more of…..please Santa.

These certainties do not apply uniformly to every technological sequel. A combination of eco awareness, design ingenuity and an instinct to elude Moore’s law causes manufacturers to occasionally refrain on amounts, engineer smaller solutions, prioritize style over substance and vice versa.

Vista might have been prettier than Windows XP though few blessed with a brain would claim it was better. Conversely, those old enough to swoon at the mention of Cooler Master’s sublime ATC-110 would be ridiculed if they to declared it more thermally qualified than the brutish Stackers, Storms and Cosmoses that severed its legendary lineage. Intel’s Ivy Bridge-E housed close to half a billion fewer transistors than it’s elder, the Sandy Bridge-E and if anybody suggested the Enigma to be smaller than a Nuc, their sense of perspective would be the subject of grave concern.

There is however, one omnipotent variable that is in constant ascent throughout the evolution of all desktops, laptops, tablets and mobiles, and every key component they incorporate.

It’s name is Speed. In technology’s mercurial domain, no respected entity has ever wilfully designed a slower sequel, because to every one of them, any hint of a theory that slower could somehow be superior is as preposterous as insisting that a tortoise could win a race, despite what Aesop might tell you.

Which brings us, albeit scenically, to sequels of a decidedly graphic nature. Are we talking Aliens or Alien Resurrection? The Godfather Part 2, or Father of the Bride Part 2? Final Destination 4 or Fast and Furious 404, a movie so deplorable, it was never made. You’ll note that I have now resorted to alternately naming good and bad sequels for no apparent reason. The point being, in these particular “picture studios”, the “sequential” philosophy was all but redundant.

Their “productions” could be ugly to behold, extravagantly budgeted, grossly proportioned and have as many superfluous characters as the Civil Service yet still garner approval from the the fans, respect from the hacks and smash all Box Office records provided they were shorter than the director’s cut of Ghandi : The Nazi Years. Nvidia’s next sequel was always “better”, because it was always “faster”. AMD’s latest chapter could never be “worse”, because the ending never dragged, even if the projector didn’t support Freesnyc.

The question was, had Red Beard acquiesced to avarice and and embraced the same exorbitant pricing policy as his aquamarine adversary. How much would he charge for a ticket to an “HBM” screening of 3d Mark. Was the Fiji to yield the first solo captained vessel in his own fleet of “hyper flagships”? Would its rugged crew of rasters and streamers masterfully manoeuvre the canons upon its mighty 4096 foot deck and mercilessly maim the malevolence roaming the violent verdant abyss beneath? Or would a “Titanic torpedo” spiral from its icy depths and penetrate an otherwise impervious prow.

Can I really be bothered to tell you or should I just post a pile of links to reviews that use worlds like configurability and incremental, expressions such as “wholly implemented” and “perceived variance in probable percentile terms” and devote five yards of HTML to raving about yet another stupidly sophisticated dynamic over-clocking scheme designed to monitor temperature, wattage drain, air quality, case décor, radiation levels and psycho kinetic disturbances, before providing half a megahertz of core return based on the players height, weight, credit rating, marital status, medical history, Twitter profile, Steam reputation, daily calorie expulsion, sleeping habits and readiness to relate to chronically depressed GPUs.

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