These new algorithms are developed for the calculation of illumination of the virtual space with the influence of multiple dynamic light sources. Modern algorithms for calculation of lighting illumination levels calculated for each pixel of the resulting image, which itself requires an enormous expenditure of computing power. The new algorithms use a much faster way, hoping to spot once the vector of the virtual world, and only then creating the final pixel image.
Algorithms for calculating lighting, designed Morgan McGuire, associate professor of information technology from Williams College, and Dr. David Luebke of the company Nvidia will significantly accelerate the speed of processing image data, which, in turn, will allow video games came close to cinematic quality, even with the use of graphics processors middle price range .
The problem with stuff like this succeeding is that NVIDIA is fighting hard to prevent PhysX from running with any ATI hardware. And this is yet another attempt at a proprietary technology; at the very least, it's another way to continue "The Way It's Meant to be Played" marketing.
The only reason PhysX and CUDA have come as far as they have is because they got their start when ATI was in a bad position with HD 2000. NVIDIA subsidized developers with cash, coders, and 8000-series hardware, and now PhysX and CUDA are somewhat common.
NVIDIA didn't stop with just game developers, either; they put CUDA into universities and every other slow-growing software community out there--which even though PhysX and CUDA will fail in a few years, ironically, that's the technology that will keep NVIDIA afloat until they recover from this 400-series fiasco.
It’s been a hot season for PC gamers, with the recent releases of games like DiRT 2, Modern Warfare 2, and Dragon Age: Origins. To get the most out of these games — to play at the best frame rates, at higher resolutions, and with the most eye candy turned on — a graphics upgrade might be in order, and, for some of your readers, that prospect may be a bit daunting.
Not to fear. For those who might find upgrading tricky, AMD’s here to prove otherwise. In fact, AMD thinks it’s so easy to install a graphics card that even a monkey can do it, and they brought in their primate pal Louie to show everyone.
So in the wake of a handful of product launches, CES, and the inevitable black fucking death that's running through everyone's veins, I'm pretty sure the reason not much news is happening is simple common sense.
Alright. You put a lot of miles on a mouse. Over time, they get quirks, and those are actually just little stress fractures and other flaws that you beat into them, and I don't just mean the body of the mouse. The feet are ablative and wear away, the plastic used to make the buttons go click gets rickety, and the wheel gets greasy and inaccurate.
The way cheap mice get around this is by using bulkier, thicker plastic and wheel-tracking optics that scan larger, lower-resolution areas. All that makes 'em last longer, but it makes it harder to click and scroll, and fucks with the relationship between your brain saying click and the computer hearing click. It adds inconsistency.
Using cheap input devices is like using bulk Bic ballpoints. Your lettering slides around and the amount of force required to overcome the ink's tackiness is also the amount of force it takes to throw the ball across the whole word.
And that's just the buttons. A cheap mouse sticks its cheap circuitry anywhere it fits in the body, where a good mouse levels the weight of the internals across the axises you use to move it around. That means that cheap mice pull and push in directions that even if you subconsciously correct for, track the cursor in directions your brain is opposed to.
The most noticeable change when using a good mouse is the tangible effects of the USB cable. The cheap mouse cable is designed to withstand, to resist change, and they do it by using thick plastic shielding. Good, thin shielding is expensive. But there's more to it than just inflexibility; a cheap mouse cable pushes constantly towards the front of the device. But a floppy cable will get tangled underneath, so the cable has to be rigid enough to supports its own mass but not impede or deflect the mouse's movement. And that means sticking knit sleeves between the insulator and the wiring, but without adding weight.
There's all this before you even begin dealing with latency and accuracy, and they're all real costs that make these devices more expensive. Macros? On-the-fly reprogramming? More than three chunky, finger-bashed buttons? These are all good things.
But the real test for using a good mouse is to then switch to a bad mouse. Like, you're helping a friend delete all the pornspam off his machine, and you do that swirly thing you do to calibrate your brain to someone else's sensitivity and acceleration, and then it hits you: this mouse is a piece of shit. I thought I knew you, man. I thought you were cool.
So what is it? Are you a good Mont Blanc owner, caretaker, secret lover? Do you only use Mont Blanc ink because you know to use otherwise violates not just the warranty, but the honor of your implement?
Or does it not matter. A pen's a pen, a mouse is a mouse, and they both smell like spit after a week, anyway...
The first step to solving this problem of limited inventory space is to use your characters as mules. In my game, every single character has a secondary weapon equipped. Every amulet and belt slot is used. Both ring slots are filled. Not necessarily because the character is going to use those items, but because it frees up slots in my backpack.
The second step is to shell out for the backpack expansions. These are an ingame money sink. They partly encourage you to visit various merchants to see if they sell one of the precious backpack expansions. But they mostly force hard decisions about how to spend your money.
But then there's the third step. It's called Warden's Keep and it'll cost you seven dollars to download. It adds a new party camp that includes storage so you can free up backpack slots when you're adventuring. Bioware claims this was created after early reviews complained about the lack of inventory space. But rather than fixing the game by giving everyone a storage locker, they opted to use the problem as a way to make more money.
Oh, everyone look shocked and then start an online petition. There has to be a way to show your outrage with you non-wallet. Because, you know, it's busy enjoying Dragon Age.
Not that I've played it; I'm skeptical about Bioware's ability to make a great game after they blew their wad on Jade Empire. Blah blah blah Mass Effect. I played Moon Patrol already, thanks. On a black-and-white television, even.
I'm guessing that the astounding praise is like when they give someone an Oscar for a shit movie, but five years ago, the guy did an awesome job but got passed over, and in this case, everyone's all nostalgic about Baldur's Gate because we all bought 4th Edition and didn't bother with it, and now it's just another box on the shelf.
Minsc wasn't funny then, and he isn't funny now, and space lesbians don't make games good.
A Philadelphia developer has rooted out an unfinished feature of Windows 7 that turns any laptop into a wireless access point, allowing other Wi-Fi-enabled devices to share the connection without special software. Nomadio, which specializes in military network consulting and development, used the new "Virtual Wi-Fi" feature in Windows 7 to create Connectify, a free application that it released as a beta last Friday.
PC Advisor reports that Philadelphia developer Nomadio has discovered an unfinished Windows 7 feature (Virtual Wi-Fi) that can turn a laptop into a Wi-Fi hotspot. That means other devices in the near vicinity can access the Internet without the need for special tunneling software. The company has now exploited the uncovered treasure and created a free application called Connectify, released just last week.
See, the enterprising high school geek will, in his head, use this as a lure to acquire the attentions of hot, Internet-needy ladies.
But that T shirt'll put an end to things, don't worry.
The picture above is after our Core i7 870 (LGA-1156) processor was overclocked up to 5.19GHz using our cascade with a -102° Celsius evaporator head temperature under full-load. Processor VCC power draw at these frequencies is around 160W (this is possible only due to subzero cooling), as measured with a clamp meter installed at the 12V EPS power lead. Study the pictures closely and you should notice something peculiar. Keep in mind it comes from a CPU installed in the same type of socket from a particular manufacturer.
If you noticed something weird in the pictures then you understand the title of our article. We have what seems to be a potentially serious issue with proper socket loading on several P55-based motherboards when overclocking to the limit. We are of course not the only ones experiencing the problem as several of our overclocking peers have run into the same problem.
Normally we do not worry too much about mishaps during extreme overclocking testing as they are typically caused by factors outside of the supplier’s control. The overriding concern is that we have damaged every motherboard in our possession for the P55 overclocking (extreme) shootout as well as two very expensive i7/870 processors. These problems are the cause of a single component and are repeatable. As such, we thought we would provide details on current problems and will provide an update once all of the motherboard manufacturers affected have had a chance to properly respond.
Oh yeah, this isn't good. I dunno, maybe Intel can spin it. For some reason, people keep buying those MacBooks, even though they seem to be as explosive as a microwave full of match heads and 7 Eleven hot dogs.
I'm not actually joking about convenient store hot dogs. Dessicated, powdered hots dogs are actually explosive.
Students from West Philadelphia High School have built a diesel-hybrid race car that goes from 0-60 in four seconds. While the car currently gets 60+ mpg, they hope to soon break 100 mpg.
Why? They are competing for $10 million in the Automotive X-Prize .
Called the Hybrid Attack, the car was built by kids from West Philly’s Academy of Automotive and Mechanical Engineering. And if that alone doesn’t make them cool, they are the only high school team competing out of 90 different teams from the U.S. and overseas.
I think the fact that high school students are involved points directly to outside influence. Because not only does it take supervision to make students build anything good, it takes supervision to prevent them from getting all... sticky.
When it's all said and done, though, this still isn't going to work; I'm not saying there's a conspiracy or anything like that, it's just, you know, diesels aren't popular. And who wants a car built by high schoolers? It all goes back to sticky.
Remember how Intel showed off its new, advanced optical standard -- Light Peak -- this past week on a Hackintosh? Well it turns out there's more to that story than you probably know, and it all leads back to some revealing facts about the connection... literally and figuratively. Engadget has learned -- thanks to an extremely reliable source -- that not only is Apple complicit in the development of Light Peak, but the company actually brought the concept to Intel and asked them to create it. More to the point, the new standard will play a hugely important role in upcoming products from Cupertino.
According to documents we've seen and conversations we've had, Apple had reached out to Intel as early as 2007 with plans for an interoperable standard which could handle massive amounts of data and "replace the multitudinous connector types with a single connector (FireWire, USB, Display interface)." From what we've learned, the initial conversations (and apparent disagreements) were had directly between Steve Jobs and Paul Otellini. If you were wondering about that Apple-blue motherboard we saw at IDF or the aforementioned Hackintosh demo, this should explain everything.
I like how the standard for Light Peak is the speed at which a Blu-Ray movie can be transferred. Isn't that illegal? Yeah, that's what I though.
Also, I'm pretty sure you can't read a Blu-Ray movie that fast, so what format's there, huh?
Technology: bigger, smaller. But will it ever be capable of love?
We spent a few hours with AMD today out in Sunnyvale, California looking at its next generation GPU. We can't tell you a lot about the video card since we are still bound by our Non-Disclosure Agreement until the product's launch date in a few weeks. However, AMD is allowing us to show you what is likely the most impressive feature this video card has to offer, besides the monster performance increase over current top end AMD GPU hardware. The demo system shown is utilizing ATI Radeon multi-monitor gaming technology.
What you are seeing below is a single air cooled AMD next-gen video card in a consumer ATX case powering six LCD displays. No tricks, no switches. Six 30" LCD panels with DisplayPort, and one "Evergreen" video card. This card is a future product that will likely be for sale around the holidays, but on launch day every card will support no less than 3 displays.
This was a good trip. I got to stand on the deck of an aircraft carrier, see Maverick's F-14 from Top Gun, and get brownies from brownie chick with the glasses. Brownie chick, I love you, just a little.
Oh yeah, and there was a computer running 24 simultaneous displays. You could look at a 20 megapixel photo and still have bars around the edges.
Anyway, if you get to spend any time in the Bay Area, I highly recommend Brownie Chick.
If there were any time for symbolism, the graphics guys at AMD definitely picked the right time and place. The initial batch of several tens of thousands of chips is now in the final stages of packaging and is about to be shipped to PC Partner and similar factories to manufacture the top-to-bottom line-up.
So, something special was definitely in order. AMD will hold briefings in EMEA and APAC regions prior to the North American event on September 10th, but the North American launch will be the date when a lot of details will go out in public. The company is preparing quite a spectacle, as it should be in order for a major product release - a lot is expected from DirectX 11 API, and in all of our talks with AMD staff about the Evergreen series, word "breakthrough" was mentioned a lot of times.
The location for the launch of ATI Evergreen series [which Far Eastern AIB vendors still label as RV870, RV840 and so on] is something truly special and the timing could not be better. USS Hornet aircraft carrier was built in 1942 and served all the way until 1970, when it was decommissioned. This carrier was the key piece for the Apollo space mission. 11 years ago, in 1998 the ship was turned into a museum and was opened to the general public.
If you're me and Kurtis, anyway.
Did you know that every aircraft carrier has its own zip code? And that the Japanese Hosho was the first aircraft carrier in 1922, although it was refitted from a tanker. The USS Ranger was the first US carrier to be designed and built as a carrier.
we've switched to using news posts for internal communications, which is why they're so specific. kurtis, don't forget to bring the business cards this time. and also, i just realized that i haven't uploaded all those case photos yet, i'll get to it here in a little while, and that i totally threw out my back humping your mom
I took this photo of a Kindle 2 hacked by Jesse Vincent at Foo Camp this past weekend. Apparently, aside from being a popular e-book reader, the Kindle is like Lego for Linux geeks. Here's Jesse's description of what we're looking at:
"What you see there is a Kindle 2 with the Ubuntu 9.04 port to ARM running in a chrooted environment. On the screen you see xdaliclock in front of an xterm with the remains of a "top" command and a few mildly embarrassing typos.
"To open up the Kindle, I used the USB networking debug mode Amazon left hanging around when they first shipped the Kindle 2, a statically linked telnetd and a cross-compiler to bootstrap myself. From there, I built a daemon that can convert DRM-free PDFs and ePubs into something Amazon's reader on the Kindle can deal with."
That's like porn for Linux geeks, what're you talkin' 'bout. It's also like porn for Kindle geeks. Although I suspect there's plenty of porn for the Kindle already.
While on the topic of Adult Entertainment, what's this about a SexBox?
Trademark hounds have discovered that Silicon Xtal Corporation, an integrated circuit manufacturer located in San Jose, California, has registered the name SexBox with the U.S. Patent Office. If the name doesn't indicate it's purpose, here's the patent description to provide a clearer picture: a video gaming console comprised of computer hardware with unique controls which plays Adult Only rated (AO) video game software titles. That's right, a game console that plays adult-oriented games and media.
I cannot image the casemods for such a device. Rather, I can, I choose not to.
Next week, AMD will reveal its top-to-bottom DirectX 11 lineup, with the top three parts heading out to the stores. As ATI Evergreen family of graphics cards is taking its shape as multiple parts that cover top to bottom of world's PC line-up. As it usually goes, the availability won't be on the same date, but ATI will do a multi-part launch targeting hard availability in the whole world for the each part.
We managed to learn some interesting details about the top-end, Radeon 5800 series. Unlike some inaccurate publications that toyed with the name "Radeon 7", the Radeon 5000 series is a natural continuation of trend started with X1K series.
The top dog carries the name Radeon HD 5870X2, and we are talking about single-PCB, dual-GPU card that will retail for cool $599. This is still $50 cheaper than GTX280 at the time of its debut [do you remember the outrageous $649?], but bear in mind that this is a top dog part.
No, I do not remember the outrageous $649, and how dare you insinuate that I should.
Software giant Microsoft Corp. is apologizing for altering a photo on its Web site to change the race of one of the people shown in the picture. A photo on the Seattle-based company's U.S. Web site shows two men, one Asian and one black, and a white woman seated at a conference room table. But on the Web site of Microsoft's Polish business unit, the black man's head has been replaced with that of a white man. The color of his hand remains unchanged.
you'd think i wouldn't be surprised by the number of nude images the search term "leaky" returns with, but there you have it. p.s. creative commons
I’m going to put this one squarely in the rumor category for now, but Sascha of NetbookNews.de has a source who is telling him that the upcoming Nokia Booklet 3G will sell for $799 in the US. Considering the machine will reportedly pack 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, A-GPS, HDMI, and other features into a 2.7 pound case and provide up to 12 hours of battery life, that figure might actually be somewhat realistic. But if Nokia were actually going to charge that kind of money, I can tell you, they wouldn’t sell very many of these netbooks in the US, where you can regularly get a mini-laptop with a faster processor and 8-9 hours of battery life for $400 or less.
I'd go for something like that in a pinch. If the rumors are right, the thing'll get 10+ hours of battery, that's about four times what my stupid cell's good for. Does Skype do voicemail? Not that I'm exactly famous for checking that particular inbox.
It's probably full. Lemme guess, it's probably full of "Hey, you're late, you know you're late, right?" "If you'd like to make an appointment, we sure do think your plasma is universally delicious," and "Hey, it's your dad. Are you dead? If you're dead, let me know. I need help with this laptop. It's jammed, or hacked, or pooned, or whatever you call it."
What do you get when you mate a phone dialpad with a gaming mouse? Razer's Naga MMO mouse, apparently. There's 17 buttons, as in sixteen candles plus one, minus the candles. Surprisingly, that's not the most interesting thing about Naga.
Not only can you program macros to Naga's 17 buttons however you want, but the mouse works with custom software extensions, called Add Ons, that actually add new interfaces to the game and allow you have to unlimited character profiles:
And just when you think it's safe to buy a kick-ass chunk of gaming paraphernalia, Logitech goes and announces their new schwag:
These two rodents are mutants as they don't have that tail but rather work over 2.4GHz WiFi and come with a Unifying USB reciever that can pick up up to six different peripherals at once. The best thing about the receiver is its compact size, which makes it ideal for notebook users. The full sized, right handed Performance Mouse MX is also rechargable while the ambidextrous Anywhere Mouse MX needs two AA batteries.
As I mentioned the other day, I have a whole lot of mini-laptops sitting on my desk at the moment. So I decided that today would be as good a time as any to do a little keyboard face-off.
I’d already kind of decided that of the netbooks I’m using this week the Samsung Go (shown in the bottom of the picture) has the keyboard that feels the best. I like the chiclet-style layout, the keys are comfortable and responsive, and their laid out quite nicely with a large right-side shift key and arrow keys below it. I’d also decided that the Gigabyte TouchNote T1028X (pictured at the top) had the worst keyboard, thanks to its extra-thin punctuation keys for the period, comma, and question mark.
But you know what? The typing test results told a completely different story.
That's unconscionable. The tools a person implements affects their performance? Next thing you know writers will start slugging caffeine, porn stars lubricant, and professional athletes steroids!
No, I just don't want to live in a world where people can type faster than they can... huh, I was looking for that texting contest where the octogenarian beat out that teenager with his mad telegraph skills.
That's a fully Mac-ified 16GB Dell Mini 9 (update: actually, it looks like a Mini 10v) on display there, boldly masquerading as a "Windows XP Home" model. It's easy to understand why Dell and Best Buy can't officially market netbooks as Hackintosh machines, but it's nice to see a Best Buy employee so attuned to the needs of his customers. The specific Best Buy location will not be included, so whoever did this–he was just being honest!–doesn't get immediately shitcanned.
View this graphic presentation offering a high-level demonstration of the process for manufacturing a central processing unit (CPU), which operates in every PC today. Here you can catch a glimpse of some of the amazingly sophisticated work going on daily inside Intel's cutting-edge silicon manufacturing fabs.
This set of 38 images from the presentation above illustrates the process of manufacturing a silicon chip. Hover over the image numbers to view them, click on the image numbers to download high resolution jpeg versions, or simliarly use the thumbnails.
When two engineers fall in love, the mommy engineer lays an ingot and the daddy engineer puts his high-K metal oxide layers on it, then God shoots the glass with his green ion beam, then nine months later, Newegg drops off a processor on the doorstep.
I also plan on writing a children's tale of morals called "Too Many Pyros!" because today I killed a sniper by headshotting him with his own arrow using the compression blast.
Modifying the Seagate 1.5TB Hard Drive: Unleash the Hidden Performance Within
As many of you know, recently Seagate released one of the largest consumer drives on the market: the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS . The drive’s capacity is 1.5 TB (1500 GB) or approximately 1.397 TB. The drive specifications are decent and Seagate itself announced that this drive will be able to handle 120 MB/sec sustained transfer rate. All of us know that these rates will not be across the whole drive and were most likely obtained under the best possible conditions. That being said, we still can not overlook the fact that a 1.5 TB drive’s speeds place it directly in the Velociraptor territory.
It's not like people go around leashing their performance, 'cept for those kooks over at Silent PC Review, you crazy underclockers, you, so, like, what's the whole deal with the myth of the leashing?
If I were to believe all the headlines and subject lines with unleashing, the only thing I think I'd lose my control over would be my wallet.
During the morning keynote, Intel Senior VP Anand Chandrasekher, started off with the usual internet on everything theme that Intel is so keen on. Atom is aimed directly at this, but Intel swore early on that the chips would be the anti-ARM, IE generalist and closed.
When ARM refused to roll over and die, then politely decompose, Intel had a fight on it's hands. The initial battle was framed as Intel's superior horsepower and horsepower per watt vs ARM's task specific silicon and accelerators. Would Intel's silicon advantage overcome the plethora of ARM devices aimed at every niche under the sun? Will the x86 decode overhead bite Intel at the lower end? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens to plow the field?
For the past few months, there were whispers that Intel was looking to do some foundry business. Feelers were being put out, and expectations gaged, but not much more. On the flip side, Intel was scouring the Valley for any silicon IP that might work well with Atom CPUs. Nothing definitive, just looking. If asked, no external IP was going into Atom. Ever. Really, they mean it.
Intel making their x86 architecture open for licensing is so fucking cool it resets the nature of cool. It's way better than chicks and booze and music and everything.
Wait, what am I saying. Holy balls, check out these swank chicks with Mario ink:
As a tattoo enthusiast and video game junkie, I always had the urge to get a video game tattoo. It’s an urge that I haven’t followed through on yet — I haven’t yet gotten a “perfect” idea on what to put on my body for the rest of my life (although I do have an idea for my foot, which for me, I think is a good spot for something whimsical like a video game tattoo). At the same time, I like to browse through tattoo pictures to see what kind of ideas others have come up with. One of my favourite sites to do this is BMEink, a site where anyone can submit their tattoo photos for all to see. Right now there are over 240,000 tattoo images to look at.
So what's the catch? First of all, AMD only made a few TWKR chips due to the extraordinary traits of of the product. So don't expect to find any at your favorite online retailer cause the TWKR is not currently for sale. At this time, they are distributed directly by AMD. Another disadvantage is the lack of warranty coverage on this product. Once its broken, that's all she wrote. At any rate, HotHardware recently got a chance to test out the TWKR and throw it on the test bench for some sub-zero overclocking.
They're not leaving everyone out. While a 42 might be out of the question, most people will probably be able to afford a Phenom X4 965:
Sampling is set to start on AMD’s fast new Phenom II X4 965 next week and we’re being told the new offering is 200MHz faster than the 955 at around 3.4GHz - straight out of the box.
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