While social media has been the “new shiny toy” for some time, attracting the headlines and the VC dollars as companies and individuals try to monetize this phenomenon, another, related subject may be about to thunder and lightning. Yes, I’m talking about the “Cloud”.
For this hardcore audience, my question is: “Can you game in real-time from the cloud?”
DriverVer=06/10/2009, 8.630.0.0000
ONLY XP x86/x64 at this time
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KYXNVKC8
AMD has released a whitepaper that has been put together by AMD to showcase the importance of DirectX 11 and why it matters. They also gave us quick breakdown explaining that DX 11 is about efficiency.
* Improved Parallelism
* Improved Precision and Integer Processing
* Tight Integration between Compute Shaders and Rendering Pipeline
* Improved Ease of Programming and Better Memory Usage Efficiency
Arteria3D worldbuilder packs contain everything needed for you to recreate a time in history, whether it be real, or fantasy. Each pack contains over 20 buildings, faithfully recreated in the style they depict, plus interiors for your characters to go into, with animated doors for easy access. Also included are props, which could be outside objects including trees, streetlamps etc, plus interior props such as furniture items.
With no truly new cards coming anytime soon, Taiwan-based manufacturer MSI has decided on hyping up its current offer, more specifically, the models that feature the relatively fresh Military Class design. Basically, by using components like the Hi-c CAP, SSC (Solid State Choke) and Solid CAPs, MSI was able to make cards that comply with the temperature standard MIL-PRF-39003L of the US Department of Defense, and deliver improved stability over longer periods of time, even when overclocking comes into play.
A tutorial on High Performance Computing with CUDA was held at the International Conference on Supercomputing in Hamburg on Monday, June 22nd 2009. The tutorial included an introduction to the CUDA programming model and C for CUDA, along with details on the CUDA Toolkit, Libraries, and optimization. The tutorial also provided an introduction to OpenCL, and finished with a case study on Computational Fluid Dynamics by Dr. Graham Pullan from Cambridge University. Slides from the tutorial are now posted here on GPGPU.org.
We ... hope more developers will start making triple buffering the default option in their games, as it will deliver the best experience to gamers interested in both quality and performance. There are only a handful of games that include triple buffering as a built in option, and NVIDIA and AMD drivers currently only allow forcing triple buffering in OpenGL games. This really needs to change, as there is no reason we shouldn't see pervasive triple buffering today.
NVSG 5, the fifth release of the NVIDIA Scene Graph SDK, is a cross-platform, object-oriented programming library for software developers to quickly create interactive OpenGL applications having the highest degree of interactive performance and realism. Unlike most scene graphs, NVSG was designed around shader usage for applications requiring high image quality and the flexibility to share shaders via CgFX.
Autodesk has now announced that its Moldflow Insight 2010 software for simulating the injection molding process to predict the flow behavior of plastic, got a good dose of CUDA and is able to make use of Nvidia GPUs to perform various computing tasks faster than possible with CPU power. According to Autodesk, by using Quadro FX 4800 or Quadro FX 5800 GPUs, Moldflow 2010 users can expect to see a 2X performance increase.
... MediaShow Espresso is the first video transcoding application we've seen to boast support for both NVIDIA's CUDA and AMD's Stream technologies.
So, how well does MediaShow Espresso work as an application, and how quickly can it transcode video using both a power CPU and GPU acceleration? Well, that's just what we're here to find out.
We are please to announce the official release of DX Studio version 3.1.
The main focus for v3.1 has been on large environments and the engine now comes with an advanced terrain and shadow mapping system that allows you to create massive seamless outdoor environments. The design moves beyond the traditional height field approach and, due to the use of a freeform mesh based approach, allows for overhanging cliffs, caves and vertical terrain.
Hardware skinned meshes and shadows are also supported which helps DX Studio display large numbers of characters and dense foliage in the same scene without hitting performance.
Other new release features include an integrated web browser with Flash support, an expansion of the PhysX capabilities, new resource management and file sharing systems for larger projects and Wiimote support.
There are also some great new demos (including a large tropical island that has been split into two and joined with a cave network) and tutorials available on the wiki.
"We want to supply hardware to Microsoft and software developers so they can make DX11 games on our hardware first," Bergman told us, adding that it would put his firm in a good position for the future.
This installment presents some straightforward examples that demonstrate the use of texture objects with CUDA.
The Portland Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics and a leading supplier of compilers for high-performance computing (HPC), today announced an agreement with NVIDIA under which the two companies plan to develop new Fortran language support for CUDA GPUs.
HWiNFO™ and HWiNFO32™ are professional hardware information and diagnostic tools supporting latest components, industry technologies and standards. Both tools are designed to collect and present the maximum amount of information possible about computer's hardware which makes them suitable for users searching for driver updates, computer manufacturers, system integrators and technical experts as well. Retrieved information is presented in a logical and easily understandable form and can be exported into various types of reports.
This morning’s trippy maths-cleverness comes to us via Indiegames, where they flagged up fractal 3D space shooter in progress, Polynomial. It’s a beauty, although somewhat slow paced at the moment. The game contains “mathematically generated fractal scenery and models”, which can be created first hand using the in-game editor. The results are rather spectacular. And I particularly like the Mandelbrot Set as an Eagle nebula type skybox. It’s only a 3mb download, go take a look. And watch out for the dynamic reactor setting, apparently having that switched on can cause dizziness.
Game optimization tips, unlocking the secrets of new graphics architectures, unusual game-engine applications, a revolutionary custom tool for digital content creation, the visual effects that brought Attila the Hun to life, the happy musings of a digital artist—point and click and it’s yours in Intel® Visual Adrenaline
The second issue of Visual Adrenaline magazine explores the enhanced realism possible with the latest visual computing advances—in stereoscopic 3D, multi-player gaming, and CG animation. The alliance between Intel and DreamWorks, resulting in the InTru 3D™ brand, aims to bring bring incredible stereoscopic 3D experiences to audiences. Other topics highlight gaming development, the latest wrinkles in digital art, and bringing a benign monster to life.
The CUDA Toolkit and SDK 2.3 betas are now available to registered developers. They include the following features:
* The CUFFT Library now supports double-precision transforms and includes significant performance improvements for single-precision transforms as well. See the CUDA Toolkit release notes for details.
* The CUDA-GDB hardware debugger is now available for all supported Linux platforms and is included in the CUDA Toolkit installer.
* GPUs in an SLI group are now enumerated individually, so you can achieve multi-GPU performance even when SLI is enabled for graphics.
* New support for fp16 <-> conversion intrinsics allows storage of data in fp16 format with computation in fp32. Use of fp16 format is ideal for applications that require higher numerical range than 16-bit integer but less precision than fp32 and reduces memory space and bandwidth consumption.
* The CUDA SDK has been updated to include:
o A new pitchLinearTexure code sample that shows how to effeciently texture from pitch linear memory.
o A new PTXJIT code sample illustrating how to use cuModuleLoadDataEx() to load PTX source from memory instead of loading a file.
o Two new code samples for Windows, showing how to use the NVCUVID library to decode MPEG-2, VC-1, and H.264 content and pass frames to OpenGL or Direct3D for display.
o Updated code samples showing how to properly align CUDA kernel function parameters so the same code works on both x32 and x64 systems.
* The Visual Profiler (packaged separately) includes several enhancements:
o All memory transfer API calls are now reported
o Support for profiling multiple contexts per GPU.
o Synchronized clocks for requested start time on the CPU and start/end times on the GPU for all kernel launches and memory transfers.
o Global memory load and store efficiency metrics for GPUs with compute capability 1.2 and higher.
* The CUDA Driver for MacOS is now packaged separately from the CUDA Toolkit.
* Support for major Linux distros, MacOS X, and Windows:
o Fedora 10, RHEL 4.7 & 5.3, SLED 10.2 & 11.0, OpenSUSE 11.1, and Ubuntu 8.10 & 9.04
o Windows XP/Vista/7 with Visual Studio 8 (VC2005) and 9 (VC2008)
o MacOS X 10.5.6 and later (32-bit)
The need for a cost-effective, efficient generation and visualization of complex 3d virtual city models plays an increasingly important role in a wide variety of virtual reality related fields including computer games, virtual city guides, social networks, geographic information systems, urban planning, training simulators etc.
However, generating a urban environment of sufficient quality in 3D is still an extremely challenging, time consuming and costly process
