Beyond3D Featured ContentIt's Dead Jim - a debate about the future of the graphics API
Love them or hate them, standardised IHV agnostic(-ish) graphics APIs have changed the landscape in a mostly positive way. Yet some bear them ill will. We set out for the truth about their future fate, hoping that we can handle it.
As any 3D application developer will be acutely aware, intimate knowledge of your target APIs and hardware will only take you so far down the development path. Hardware and software bugs and quirks will forever conspire against you, throwing mini spanners in any 3D works; APIs can get in the…
Unveiled at a pre-keynote meeting by Phil Harrison yesterday evening,
Sony showcased some of its soon-to-be-announced online plans to a few
selected journalists and industry insiders. One of these is Sony's plan
to create a social network in order to form a stronger bond between
consumers and the Playstation brand.
The folks at VR-Zone have noticed
that new ForceWare drivers are now sporting a reference to an "NVIDIA
GeForce 8800 Ultra". This would appear to be the green team preparing
to fight the appearance of AMD's upcoming R600 GPU. The more
interesting question is what will its…
Recently we reported that the PCI-SIG has finalized a standard for external PCIe connections, and the likely implications for graphics. Now comes word that the folks at HEXUS have scored a picture
of an early engineering sample of AMD's "Lasso" implementation of the
concept. We…
Multiple reports hit the net tonight reporting that at today's San Francisco launch of their new 690G chipset AMD decided it was also time to talk a little turkey publicly regarding
their recently delayed R600 GPU. Taking advantage of press presence,
AMD publicly demoed two R600s…
In another twist of events, Sony has further clarified the situation
concerning the lack of hardware emulation for the PAL version of its
PS3, scheduled to launch in Europe on March 23rd, on its unofficial blog threespeech:
While the Emotion Engine has been removed, the graphics chip (Graphic…
In a surprise press release
made by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe earlier today, it was
revealed that the European version of the PlayStation 3 - set to launch
March 23rd - would also be the first hardware revision to feature a
greater reliance on software emulation for achieving…
Just moments ago AMD released this months update to the ATI Catalyst
drivers, bringing the Radeon powering software up to version 7.2.
Along with the usual bug fixes, ATI has reported significant performance improvements for OpenGL under Vista for X1K family users with gains of up to…
Along with the usual bug fixes, ATI has reported significant performance improvements for OpenGL under Vista for X1K family users with gains of up to…
The graphics world has been atwitter in recent months over swirling
rumors and indications of a re-entry by Intel into high-end graphics.
Speculation has centered around the so-called "Larrabee group", which
recently was identified on Intel's own pages as their "Visual Computing Group". Now, courtesy of a couple…
Talking yesterday to reporters,
Yutaka Nakagawa, Executive Deputy President of Sony's semiconductor and
component device businesses, revealed their ambition to reduce
significantly the company’s semiconductor related expenses. He didn’t
predict any specific number, but stressed the costs related to Sony's
semiconductor operations would be much lower than the…
Some time ago, we reported that we believed NVIDIA likely had won the Sony PSP2 contract, given that they were apparently working on an EDRAM design, but that none of their manufacturing partners (excluding Sony, at…
Microsoft has issued a press release indicating that the XBox LIVE Arcade (XBLA) game size limit is to be increased from 50MB to 150MB, effective immediately.
A primary driver for the previous…
A primary driver for the previous…
Geomerics has announced that they will be demoing their Enlighten technology on the Xbox 360 at GDC 2007. According to their website,…
NVIDIA dropped us a line to say that they'd be releasing a new Vista driver in the next few days that adds SLI support for GeForce 6 and 7 hardware, including 7950 GX2. The driver also supposedly offers OpenGL performance improvements, improved 8-series SLI performance at high resolutions, and a myriad…
Since its introduction, CrossFire, the multi-GPU platform from AMD (formerly ATI), has only been available on certain AMD core logic, along with Intel i975X and P965. HKEPC is now reporting that AMD may…
Digitimes is reporting AMD "Fusion" tea leaves that appear to be worth stirring around. This would be fourth hand reporting, as Goldman Sachs told a Chinese newspaper which was picked up by Digitimes and is now analysed…
Our sources confirm that AMD's next generation R600 GPU has been further delayed to Q2 2007 and, sadly, they didn't mention April 1st as the likely ETA. In fact, our understanding is that we're likely looking at late April as a minimum here. Other reports on the net, as of the time of writing, also…
Making good on a prior promise for WHQL-certified Windows Vista drivers for their G80-based products, NVIDIA have them available for both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of said OS.
Nab the 64-bit version of Forceware 100.65…
Nab the 64-bit version of Forceware 100.65…
The guys and gals of the NVIDIA demo team have released a DX10 demo, and those of you with Vista, a GeForce 8800, and the newest 100.64 drivers can have a go here. At a svelte 168MB, we hope you have broadband as well.…
Yesterday NVIDIA released an updated set of ForceWare drivers for
Geforce 8800 users who jumped on the Vista bandwagon. The drivers
primarily add support for the 8800 GTS 320MB, but also feature a few
game and control panel fixes, among other things.