Beyond3D Featured ContentClassic: Real-Time Ray Tracing: Holy Grail or Fool's Errand?
This article by Deano Calver, former Lead Programmer for Heavenly Sword, was published in October 2007 as a counter to the raytracing hype sponsored by Intel that was going on at the time. It also spawned an extremely interesting discussion thread on the matter (which was lost in a database failure but revived almost completely with the help of the community).
IBM today made formal the announcement of an HPC-targeted variant of the Cell B.E. processor, given the name PowerXCell 8i. Featuring re-engineered SPEs with enhanced dual-precision performance and improved memory addressability, the processor is capable of ~102 DP GFlops and support for up to...
Yesterday, Imagination Technologies announced that Samsung had acquired a license to manufacture "certain POWERVR SGX graphics and VXD video IP cores". Apple instantly came to everyone's mind, and AppleInsider is partially confirming it. But they don't realize just how massive the implications are.
AMD has finally released the Phenom X3 outside of the OEM market, with reviews already available at all major hardware websites, including The Tech Report. But is it good?
It's official: the iPhone's future CPU will have a TDP of 25W! Or so mindlessly speculate Forbes and a variety of other websites following Apple's stunning acquisition of P.A. Semi, a manufacturer of power-efficient PowerPC-based CPUs. [UPDATED 4X]
French website PC INpact broke the news of an upcoming GPU-accelerated supercomputer, ordered by France's CEA for delivery in early 2009 from Bull. The cluster's performance confirms that GT200 will be rated at 1TFlop and that Nehalem/Bloomfield will clock up to at least 3GHz.
Rage3D have taken a look at the PC version of Assassin's Creed, a game I've been into for a long time on 360, to check out what's new when you run the game under Vista SP1. You'll remember that SP1 brings D3D10.1 support. Alex checks to see if the two…
IBM announced Monday that the semiconductor research alliance led by the firm had successfully demonstrated significant process advancement through the incorporation of high-k/metal gate (HKMG) in test silicon at its East Fishkill fab. Anticipated originally for the 45nm node...
STMicroelectronics and NXP have decided to 'merge' their wireless business by creating a joint venture. As Bolaji Ojo at EETimes.com poiints out though, it's really more of an acquisition. And a much smarter one than the proposed merger of ST, NXP and Infineon.
Introduced by Toshiba last September, the Cell-based SpursEngine co-processor has begun shipment in the form of a single lane PCI Express add-in board.
Icera Semiconductor, the UK-based semiconductor startup which has secured the most funding in Europe, has just announced that they were merging with Canada-based Sirific. The two companies worked on 3G baseband and RF technology respectively. Why is Beyond3D reporting this? Read on to find out...
The good folks at the Tech Report have taken their usual thorough look at NVIDIA's latest core logic for AMD processors, and it looks like a winner.
It turns out TSMC's 40nm general-purpose process will be even more impressive than previously expected: we knew it was going to sport 2.35x the gate density of 65nm, but now it turns out it'll deliver 60% higher performance too for a theoretical 3.76x perf/mm² boost. The big question now? Power.
For many months, researchers and marketing fanatics at Intel have been heralding the upcoming 'raytracing revolution', claiming rasterisation has run out of steam. So it is refreshing to hear someone actually working on Larrabee flatly denying that raytracing will be the chip's main focus.
Fudzilla is claiming that NVIDIA's G96 (aka GeForce 9500), which is a direct shrink of the GeForce 8600, will only be released in June (instead of May, we presume) because of excess inventory of GeForce 8400s and 8600s. NVIDIA would be in possession of 2 and 1.5 million G86/G84 chips respectively.
Intel and AMD revealed their first-quarter earnings last week and there were also some interesting tidbits in the conference calls. So given the lack of noteworthy news today, let's quickly analyse all of this along with the new CPU rumours that are swirling around the web.
Firmware 2.30 has been released for the PS3, bringing with it heavily anticipated support for DTS-HD MA lossless audio decoding in Blu-ray films. Long viewed by A/V enthusiasts as the most conspicuous absence in the PlayStation's otherwise impressive media capabilities...
We missed a couple of news-worthy tidbits in recent days and weeks, so here's a quick news post with links to each of these things and a tiny bit of individual analysis. First on the list: 3DFX releases the Voodoo Graphics 3D accelerator! Oh right, let's skip that one then...
Stanford University, with assistance from AMD, have released a version of the Folding@Home client application for discrete R6-family ATI GPUs, from R600 all the way to RV670.
AMD has just confirmed that they will layoff 10% of their workforce amid lower than expected Q1 sales in all categories; they now expect revenue of $1.5B while analysts were forecasting $1.62B. Lower sales will also reduce fab utilization and thus gross margins, further compounding losses.
TransGaming has just released SwiftShader 2.0, an highly optimized software rasterizer that supports DX9 and Shader Model 2.0 and scales with multi-core processors. It can run (albeit slowly) many modern games and it makes a dual-core Penryn perform similarly to the GeForce FX5600/5700 in 3DMark05.