Archive for May, 2008

GPU-Z 0.2.3

GPU-Z is a lightweight utility designed to give you all information about your video card and GPU.

- GPU-Z 0.2.3 Download

Changelog:
* Fixed NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260/280 (GT200) support. Everything is working and tested now
* Removed bogus 190°C PCB temp sensor on various NVIDIA cards
* Added fan speed monitoring for NVIDIA
* Fixed crash when switching devices during sensor refresh
* Fixed ROP/Shader count on NVIDIA G72
* Fixed graphs spilling over their client area
* Fixed a number of other rare crashes
* NVIDIA device ID 0×00F3 now correctly recognized as NV43
* Improved crash reporting module

Mark Rein On Unreal Engine 3 – The State Of Epic

Unreal Engine 3 is the dominant game engine in the next-gen marketplace – but what’s in the future for it and its creator Epic Games? Gamasutra talks in-depth to Epic VP Mark Rein on Unreal Tournament III, engine licensing, and the state of the market.

Read the interview HERE.

S3 Graphics Announces Chrome 440 GTX Graphics Cards

S3 Graphics, a leading provider of graphics and visualization technologies, today announced its latest S3 Graphics Chrome 440 GTX desktop cards.

The S3 Graphics Chrome 440 GTX outperforms the current market leader in its class by over 15%(1) in 3D benchmarks and rendered frames-per-second in the most popular DX10 and DX9 games.

Links:
-Chrome 440 GTX< Homepage
- S3 Graphics Press Release
- source of this news!

NVIDIA Gelato Pro Now Freely Available

NVIDIA announced NVIDIA Gelato Pro 2.2 rendering software, the Company’s advanced GPU-accelerated rendering software for professionals, is available as a no-cost download at gelatozone. Well suited for rendering of 3D digital content and design, Gelato Pro software now replaces the basic version of Gelato software, which was previously available directly from NVIDIA.

ShaderMap

ShaderMap CL is a free command-line tool for converting textures and photos to normal maps, height maps, specular, and dudv maps. It is useful to convert large sets of textures using Windows batch scripts. ShaderMap CL is free for non-commercial use. A commercial version is available for $19.95 and includes a graphical user interface and version updates.

NeoAxis Engine 0.56 Released

Four 9800 GX2 Video Cards in a System

Researchers at the University of Antwerp in Belgium have created a new supercomputer with standard gaming hardware. The system uses four NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards, it costs less than 4000EUR to build and thanks to NVIDIA’s CUDA technology it delivers roughly the same performance as a supercomputer cluster consisting of hundreds of PCs!

The guys explain the eight NVIDIA GPUs deliver the same performance as more than 300 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz processors.

Another interesting note is that this system doesn’t need SLI, their application uses the NVIDIA CUDA programming model which makes all eight GPUs work in parallel.

NVIDIA GT200 die photo

The die of the GT200 GPU posted at Beyond3D forums:

Related news:
- Nvidia GT200 Die Shot Exposed – Some technical details
- GT200 to be big, hot; die shrink already on the way
- Nvidia GT200 sucessor tapes out

Game Technology Helps Drive Military Training

“With the gaming industry now spending more to develop user interfaces than the Pentagon, the Army has begun putting all that R&D to good use in weaponry and training. Reversing the traditional role of games attempting to simulate real life killing machines, it is now the weapons makers using gaming technology to make their products more effective.”

Read more:
- Why the Military Needs the Gaming Industry
- -source-

NVIDIA illustrates HD movie transcoding capabilities of GPUs

We already knew NVIDIA is going to heavily promote the HD movie transcoding capabilities of its GPUs through CUDA but here are some very specific numbers. According to the slide it takes a 1.6GHz dual-core CPU 10 hours and 22 minutes to encode a 2 hour long HD movie while a 3GHz quad-core processor finishes the job in 5 hours in 33 minutes.

The same 1.6GHz dual-core system with a GeForce 9600 GT will be able to complete the job in only 49 minutes! That’s more than 12x as fast and the GeForce 9600 GT isn’t even a high-end part. I can imagine that faster GPUs like the upcoming GeForce GTX 280 will be able to do it much faster.