Archive for July, 2008

Video Game Top 20 Publishers 2008

MSI GeForce 9500 GT Passive Cooling

MSI 9500GT is coming. This graphics card uses TSMC 65nm GPU. It features 512Mb memory, DirectX 10, Shader Model 4.0, OpenGL 2.1.

Unity 2.1

Microsoft’s Surface-like Sphere

A new product from Microsoft Research. The Sphere comes from the same Microsoft Researchers that developed the Surface, aka “PlayTable”.

Equalizer 0.5.4 – OpenGL Parallel Rendering

The new release of Equalizer is available. Equalizer is an open source project providing a minimally invasive programming interface and resource management system for parallel, scalable OpenGL applications. It allows an application to run unmodified on any visualization system, from a simple workstation to large scale graphics clusters and multi-GPU workstations.

Links:
- Equalizer 0.5.4 release notes
- DB (sort-last) load-balancing

The following video shows volume rendering using three GPUs and dynamic 2D load-balancing. The tiling is adapted each frame automatically and transparently to the application by Equalizer. The data set has 256^3 voxels, and is rendered using 2560 slices using the eVolve scalable volume renderer.

BFGTech GeForce GTX 280 OCX Review

BFGTech’s GeForce GTX 280 OCX reviewed at [H]Enthusiast. This GeForce GTX 280 is compared to the stock-clocked GTX 280 as well as ATI’s best offering.

Read the complete review HERE.

The Verdict:
BFGTech has put out a solid product in the GeForce GTX 280 OCX, and they have made great progress towards bringing it down to a reasonable cost now. We do think that it is however a bit too expensive for the value it represents. The GTX 280 OCX does not game considerably better than a reference-clocked GeForce GTX 280, which costs a bit less.
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The biggest problem right now for gamers is the games; we simply need more demanding games to see the kind of performance that the OCX branding is capable of. We don’t really have any games, except for Crysis to challenge these video cards.

16-GPU Monster!

MIT Artificial Vision researchers recently assembled an impressive 16-GPU monster composed of 8 x GeForce 9800 GX2 donated by NVIDIA.

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GPU Folding Guide

You have a powerful video card and you want to fold at home but you aren’t sure how to do it. Then just read this guide:
GPU Folding Guide @ [H]ard¦Forums.

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VGATrader.com

VGATrader.com is a new user-to-user computer video card trading site. Users can sell computer graphic cards to each-other at no charge. So guys, if you have an old GeForce or Radeon, think of VGATrader.com!

One Trillion unique URLs for Google!

From Google’s blog, Google has indexed 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web!

We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

ECS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra Water-cooling

ECS reveals the latest GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra Pack to meet the requirement from performance-hungry gamers. With two N9800GTX+ -512MX-W graphics cards, ECS Hydra Cooling System, and plenty of accessories bundled in a package, unprecedented gaming performance is now available via the power of multi-GPUs.

NVIDIA ForceWare 177.73

A new set of ForceWare graphics drivers is available at laptopvideo2go.com.
laptopvideo2go.com also offers the modded inf files for your laptop!
- ForceWare 177.73 XP 32-bit
- ForceWare 177.73 XP 64-bit
- ForceWare 177.73 Vista 32-bit
- ForceWare 177.73 Vista 64-bit

Unreal Engine 4 for Next-Gen Consoles

XFX GeForce GTX 280 1GB XXX: Enough to stop the competition?

At one point of time, the NVIDIA GT200 was thought to be a formidable chip that noone could touch, but it ended up getting tamed by ATI’s RV770. With ATI’s R700 coming round the corner and the current Radeon HD 4870 512MB making the GeForce GTX 260 896MB look ordinary, there are only two options: overclock the current GT200, or shrink it (GT200b).

VR-Zone has reviewed an overclocked NVIDIA GT200-based GeForce GTX 280 card from XFX, the XFX GeForce GTX 280 1GB XXX. You can read the complete review HERE.

The XFX GeForce GTX 280 1GB XXX has proven itself to be the fastest single card on the market at present. It ran flawlessly at its factory overclocked speeds of 670/1458/1250 without problems. Power consumption was just a little more than a reference GeForce GTX 280, coming in at a peak of 410W from the readout of our wall socket power meter. Temperatures were also kept in check, with the card idling at 46ºC and peaking at 79ºC during our load test. The XFX card’s fan behaviour was similiar and not any louder compared to the reference GeForce GTX 280.
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For enthusiasts who find that the card still isn’t fast enough, there is still some headroom for overclocking, which by doing so, can rival a CrossFired ATI Radeon HD 4870 setup. As a general rule-of-thumb, make sure you have good cooling to ensure stable operation.

NVIDIA Big Bang II – OpenGL 3.0

NVIDIA Big Bang II is the code name for release 180 of NVIDIA’s graphics drivers. R180 has five bullet points: 10-bit displayport support, OpenGL 3.0, SLI on multi-monitors, transcoding on the GPU, some performance ‘optimisations’ over R177 and they come autumn.

- Nvidia Big Bang II @ forum.beyond3d.com