It's a bit late to the party, but can ATI Stream bring the heat against a refined CUDA technology?
Boffins at the University of Tokyo have developed 3D holograms that can be touched with bare hands Dubbed the Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display, the hologram projector uses an ultrasound quirk called acoustic radiation pressure to create a pressure sensation on a user's hands. This information is tracked with two Nintendo Wiimotes. It means that the user doesn't use any direct contact and so doesn't dilute the quality of the hologram.
Microsoft Accelerator v1.1 is a high-level data parallel library which uses a DirectX 9 graphics processor (GPU) to accelerate code execution. It is designed to allow easy development of array-processing operations such as those which frequently arise in domains like image processing and scientific computing.
EVER FELT LIKE your graphics card was twiddling its digital thumbs while you're not gaming? Here, we'll be looking at a new breed of applications that exploit the untapped processing power of your graphics card to accelerate a variety of non-gaming tasks.
Intel has announced Threading Building Blocks 2.2 (TBB), a high-level C++ library that abstracts threads to tasks to create portable and scalable parallel applications. Version 2.2 is available in both the commercial and open source releases. These are built from identical sources -- the only real difference is the license and support offerings.
Intel TBB's pipeline can now perform DirectX, OpenGL, and I/O parallelization by using the new thread_bound_filter feature. There are certain types of operations that require that they are used from the same thread every time and by using a filter bound to a thread, you can guarantee that the final stage of the pipeline will always use the same thread.
We recently had the opportunity to speak with Neil Trevett, who fills positions as both the Khronos Group's President and Nvidia's VP of Embedded Content. Consumers might not hear the Khronos name too often, but the organization is responsible for setting and updating a number of key standards: among them OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and most recently, OpenCL.
Unlike Nvidia, which has yesterday released its first OpenGL 3.2 drivers, AMD is taking its time with support for the API while claiming it is still very committed to providing drivers compliant with the latest OpenGL versions. AMD is not yet tackling OGL 3.2 but is promising to have a Catalyst driver providing OpenGL 3.1 support for its ATI FirePro cards on August 12.
Topower, a leading manufacturer of gaming and mainstream power supply systems, for desktop workstations, servers and Laptops, introduced today, and are proud to announce the Topower Tiger 1200 Watt Quad graphics card power supply.
PCGH: Does BRINK still support Windows XP? If yes: When do you think game development will be at a juncture where it's more viable to put all the effort into one rendering-path using only DirectX 11 (with downlevel-paths) and drop support for XP?
Arnout: Windows XP is still a very popular operating system so it doesn't make any sense for us to not support it. Being an OpenGL game it is arguably easier for us to still support this platform while making use of newer hardware features - all it needs is a new extension to be exposed by the driver and it can be used on any of the supported operating systems.
Rather than worrying too much about API transitions, we tend to focus on hardware capability transitions. For example, since geometry shaders are not available on all cards, we would have to split our rendering pipeline to support these down one branch. But since we only split for this newly developed hardware feature, the more standard resource management for textures, geometry data, etc does not have to be reworked at all.
Does a pair of mid-range boards, for instance, really deliver better performance than a single high-end card, for instance? What about the law of diminishing returns as you go beyond two GPUs? Moreover, have we reached the stage where either or both of CrossFire and SLI have become truly reliable?
Don't get me wrong, DX10 was a massive improvement... for programmers. The change in memory model and multitasking ability that made things like Aero possible was a huge improvement... which users couldn't see. So it's not that surprising they were reluctant to buy this resource heavy OS with what looked like just a few shiny bells and whistles. Now that XP is fading and Windows 7 is looking to give a real reason to upgrade (or at least fewer penalties for doing so), they'll move to DX11.
Dr. Dobb's: James, what is ray tracing and why is it important?
JM: Ray tracing is a method of using "virtual light rays" to determine visibility between two points in a geometric scene. This allows for the modeling of physically accurate lighting phenomena such as reflection, refraction, soft shadowing, and global illumination, just to name a few.
Dr. Dobb's: How does ray tracing differ from rasterization?
JM: As I mentioned earlier, ray tracing can allow all of the objects in the scene to interact with each other by casting light rays between them. These complex interactions create the difference between visually pleasing images and images that are obviously "computer generated". For example, light that bounces off of a red book on a shelf can produce a reddish tint on a white wall behind it.
Rasterization, by contrast, streams all of the geometry through the pipeline one object at a time. This means that the red book has no way to know that it should tint the white wall, and the white wall has no way to know about the red book.
ArcSoft, Inc. announced today that its in-house upscaling technology, SimHD, now supports ATI Stream. This collaboration simply brings standard-definition video to near high-definition quality in real time with an unsurpassed speed.
ATI Stream technology enables graphics processors (GPU) to work seamlessly with the central processor (CPU), to accelerate applications. The result is balance enhanced platforms capable of running demanding computing tasks faster than ever without sacrificing performance.
"The complicated calculation conducted during real time upscaling has always been challenging," said George Tang, ArcSoft Vice President and General Manager of Video and Home Entertainment Group. "With ATI Stream, SimHD is able to take advantage of GPGPU, performs much faster during playback while presenting the ultimate video quality to users."
AMD's Developer Relations boss Richard Huddy explains the mode of operation of Ambient Occlusion - the DirectX 11 Compute Shader is said to provide up to three times the performance possible with direct 10.1.
Using a Compute Shader path in DirectX 11 could offer up to three times the performance possible with DirectX 10.1, mentions Richard Huddy, AMD Developer Relations, in an interview with Pc Games Hardware. And even in DirectX 10.1 modern Radeon cards with their Fetch4 feature are able surpass pure DirectX 10 devices like the current Geforces.
Inno3D, known for their lovely products, recently launched the GeForce GTX 295 Platinum Edition, a product that is both classy and feature rich when it comes to the bundled items. This however is revision two of the GeForce GTX 295. The first model was based on two PCBs (two cards) inside one package. It was a very expensive product to make and with the current economy... well something needed to be done. NVIDIA went back to the drawing board and designed a single PCB capable of housing two GPUs.
