Archive for July, 2008

Shark 3D v5.3

World Machine 2: Next-Gen Terrain Modeling

World Machine 2 is a complete terrain generation solution for artists, game developers, visual effects studios and other visualization professionals.

Download the Basic Edition (free) HERE.

[Geeks3D-Test] ForceWare 177.79 vs 177.39 – OpenGL Side

Expreview has published a post about performance improvements of ForceWare 177.79 versus 175.19. From the results, it seems the release 177.79 brings a small 2% of improvement. That’s cool but how the release 177.79 is positionned with another 177.xx, what’s more in OpenGL?

I did the test: ForceWare 177.39 versus ForceWare 177.79 and I benched with oZone3D.Net OpenGL benchmarks. Some of these benchies are rather old (soft shadows and Surface Deformer and we can’t change the benchmark resolution). My rig is: Core 2 Duo 6600 (default clock), 2Gb Corsair DDR2 667 (default clocks) and a GeForce GTX 280 from EVGA (default clocks).

As soon as possible, I will update SofShadows and SurfaceDeformer with the same interface than FurMark.

NVIDIA CUDA: One Year After

The hardware.fr staff has been invited by NVIDIA to make a point on CUDA. Since this exellent article is written in french, I’ll try to highlight the interesting parts.

One of the new thing in CUDA 2.0 is, according to hardware.fr, the adding in the CUDA compiler of an optimzed profile for multicores x86 CPUs. Currently, CUDA code is splitted in two parts: one part processed by the CPU and the other one by the GPU via the CUDA compiler.
The new thing is that we can now compile the GPU code explicitly for the CPU in order to take advantage of multicores capabilities of the latest CPUs.

Another new thing is Tesla Series 10. NVIDIA has equiped all Tesla 10 products with 4Gb of graphics memory by GPU (recall that GeForce GTX 280 has 1Gb of memory). This boost in memory amount is useful in situations where dataset to be processed are very large.

The article shows also some practical cases where CUDA is used: financial analysis, medical imagery (3D scans) and password recovering.

Quake 2 Running on the Pandora

This video shows Pandora devboard @ 600MHz running some Quake2 demos. The game is rendering to 320×240 (scaled to fit screen) in pure software mode.

Thermaltake Thoughpower 1500W Power Supply Unit Review

[English]Thermaltake V1 CPU Cooler is a Masterpiece[/English][French]Le Refroidisseur CPU Thermaltake V1 est un Chef-d’Oeuvre[/French]

Advanced Overclocking Championship 2008

Dragon City in Hong Kong: Advanced Overclocking Championship 08

The competitors will have to make use of hardware modifications on the supplied hardware, their knowledge of liquid nitrogen cooling and software tweaking to aid them in their course (or discourse) during the event. Goal: break the 3DMark score by overclocking to the max CPUs and GPUs!

For the complete report, jump HERE

NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT Review

PC Perspective has published a review on the latest GeForce, I mean the GeForce 9500 GT. This level entry card aims at replace the old GeForce 8600 GT and to compete with ATI’s Radeon HD 3650.

The GeForce 9500 GT card has a simple single-slot cooler design that is not at all noisy and no power connection is required other than the power provided by the PCI Express bus.

Jump to the complete review HERE

GeForce 9500 GT’s features:

• based on G92 technology
• built on a 65nm process technology
• 314 million transistors
• 32 shader processors
• core clock: 550 MHz
• memory interface: 128-bit
• 256Mb of GDDR3
• 8 ROPs
• 16 texture units

Force3D Radeon HD 4850/4870 Accelero Twin Turbo

Turbo3D announces its Radeon HD 4850 / 4870 equipped with the Accelero Twin Turbo active cooler. Feel the Breeze, Feel the Power as Force3D says… I’d like to see how these cards will react with FurMark

- Press Release.

John Carmack Loves its iPhone

John Carmack loves his iPhone and wants to make a game for that device that would be a graphical tour de force (I like this kind of french expressions in english sentences). I guess, given the limited hardware features of the iPhone, Carmack likes this kind of challenge. So let’s prepare for the next accelerometer-controlled Doom-like…

Read more HERE, HERE and HERE.

Related links:
- Carmack says iPhone is “more powerful than a Nintendo DS and PSP combined”

NVIDIA Scene Graph (NVSG) 4.0.6.0.7 Update

Acer AL2002W 20-Inch WS LCD Monitor Review

Galaxy GeForce 9500 GT Review

Galaxy’s GeForce 9500 GT reviewed at Guru3D. The GeForce 9500 GT has the following features:
- entry card level – low budget
- G96 GPU
- 32 shaders processors
- core clock: 650MHz
- shader clock: 1650 MHz
- DirectX 10
- OpenGL 2.1
Read the complete review HERE.

The Verdict:
Fact is that not everybody can spend more than a 100 USD on a graphics cards to play games. A lot, seriously a LOT of people will play games at 1024×768 or 1280×1024 while refusing to spend more than 100 bucks. Products like these simply offer good value.
…
With this product Galaxy definitely set a new standard in the budget range of products though. Never have I seen a product in this price-category so pimped up. Excellent clocks, good overclockability, sound and excellent PCB design.

NVIDIA ForceWare 177.79

And another new set of graphics drivers for our GeForce-based graphics cards is available. I tell you guys, NVIDIA gets crazy! Anyway, here are the download links at Guru3D:

• ForceWare 177.79 XP 32-bit
• ForceWare 177.79 XP 64-bit
• ForceWare 177.79 Vista 32-bit
• ForceWare 177.79 Vista 64-bit