> That's rather perverse though. Are you telling it you need "at least 2 GB 
> RAM" to run M$ Office smoothly, but 1/8 of that is just fine for running 
> extremely intensive game software?

Well almost, I know that just double the PS3 RAM would be enough to run 
Vista + Office smoothly.  But then Vista does 842434 more things than the 
PS3 OS does, so I think it's allowed to use up half a gig more if it wants 
to.

> Now that you mention it, if I Alt-Tab out of TF2, my PC locks up for about 
> 30 seconds. (As in, I get a black screen for 30 seconds.) Then Windows 
> comes up - possibly in the wrong resolution. Switching back to TF2 is 
> similarly slow. Go figure...

Of course it is up to the game writer how they handle Alt-Tabbing, and of 
course it will depend how much RAM your machine has and how much of it is 
used for other stuff.  I imagine the mirror of the GPU data gets paged to 
disc first, as it's not used until you Alt-Tab back to the app.  But it 
would be a silly game design if it had to reload and uncompress all the game 
data each time you alt-tabbed back to the game.

> As I understand it, technologies like CUDA allow you to run arbitrary code 
> on a GPU. So no need for convoluted trickery to convince the GPU that your 
> proplem is just like texture mapping, just feed it the actual calculations 
> you want it to do. (Of course, it runs arbitrary code, that doesn't 
> necessarily mean it runs it *fast*.)

I suspect that the clever bit about CUDA is how it translates your arbitrary 
code into operations that the GPU is capable of carrying out.  And I also 
suspect, that to get decent performance you need to have a pretty good 
understanding of how the GPU actually works, and write your code 
accordingly.

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