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).
The track notes from the Beyond Programmable Shading course at SIGGRAPH this year are now available.
NVIDIA have released a beta driver supporting most of the new OpenGL 3.0 specification. Sadly, it's Windows-only.
Multi-GPU has come a long way since NVIDIA resurrected the idea with SLI and NV40 back in the day. Today's implementations get significant driver engineer hours spent on them, and the form factor has evolved to where two-GPU boards are expected parts of the product stack.
NVIDIA have released a new beta of Cg 2.1, and the highlight is the toolkit supporting Cg shader translation to D3D10 HLSL, letting your shaders run there. There's a new runtime lib for D3D10 to support that, doc updates and the usual performance improvements and bug fixes.
ATI have announced a new line of workstation-class graphics accelerators, which they're calling FirePro. ATI position FirePro underneath FireGL in terms of the relative levels of performance that the products offer, marking them as the company's entry level professional accelerators.
NVIDIA, in email communication with the Tech Report, has denied it is leaving the PC core logic market after a news report by Digitimes claimed it was.
NVIDIA has released another set of beta Forceware drivers to the Geforce 8, 9, and 200 series owning masses, bumping the version number to 177.79.
Sony rounded out the manufacturer press conferences at E3 yesterday, surprising the public with a new Playstation 3 SKU and the launch of its video service.
The first of the major console manufacturers to hold their press conference at this years E3 gaming expo, Microsoft took the stage Monday to deliver several significant announcements for the XBox 360.
Lucky media outlets web-wide have had some time to spend with R700 in Radeon HD 4870 X2 form recently. While full analysis of the hardware is yet to break cover, the first looks from ATI's favoured media partners shows that it's pretty much what you'd expect from single-board Crossfire with…
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has admitted to underestimating the strength of ATI's recent product launch lineup in its most recent financial conference call.
Develop has scored an interview with Aaron Coday, Manager of the Visual Computing Group EMEA, on Larrabee, Intel's upcoming x86-based graphics architecture.
After nearly a year, Khronos unveils the OpenGL 3.0 specifications.
The Tech Report have taken a look at AMD 790GX, an integrated graphics offering for performance-oriented and multimedia folks. The main difference compared to 780G is support by the IGP's memory controller for on-mainboard graphics memory: the board they tested uses a 1Gb DDR3-1333 chip.
QuakeCon 2008 is coming to a close so we decided to recap all the major news that have come out of the event. Spicy John Carmack comments on consoles, Rage details, and engine characteristics.
At last month's International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, NASA presented the results of an internal study exploring the suitability of the Cell BE architecture towards accelerating key aspects of climate modeling.
PerfHUD and PerfKit have been the pinnacle of real-time 3D graphics performance tuning on the PC for some time now. PerfHUD 5.0, released in September 2007, brought support for Direct3D 10 and Windows Vista, and the new 6.0 release builds on that foundation with some compelling new features.
The second of the console giants to present at E3, Nintendo used their press conference this morning to discuss a strengthening market position and to introduce several new games and products.
NVIDIA has put ink to paper to seal a deal that'll see their nForce 200 logic be the backbone of SLI support on Intel's upcoming desktop computing platform.
In a surprise announcement Nintendo of America unveiled the best kept secret so far of this year's E3: An add-on for the Wiimote, enabling "more comprehensive tracking of a player’s arm position and orientation".…