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.
This week's forum roundup includes a spectacular thread on anti-aliasing, anecdotes from developers about their first jobs in the game programming industry, and an update on Beyond3D_Team's Folding@Home efforts. Read on for the goodies.
NVIDIA have released ForceWare 97.94 for Windows XP (all flavours and both x86 variants), for users of their GeForce 8800 products. The release notes are light on details, but Beyond3D forum users report that the notes don't contain the whole story (sadly) and that fixes are in there for more…
A fairly extensive interview with AMD's Henri Richard, Executive VP and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, was published at HardwareZone yesterday. It mentions a variety of subjects, and some answers could certainly be deemed quite interesting. At roughly the same time, TG Daily also published another interview with NVIDIA's Rob…
EETimes recently published an interesting article on the rapidly rising costs of semiconductor fabs, process R&D and chip design. The comments in the article, by an employee of Synopsys and an analyst of VLSI Research, echo previous predictions made by TSMC's Chairman and Founder, Morris Chang. Basically, at the 45…
AMD have released their GDC 2007 presentations via their developer website. Highlights include AMD coding superstars Natalya Tatarchuk and Guennadi Riguer presenting alongside Crytek's Carsten Wenzel in the D3D-led sessions (which include a good chunk of D3D10 content), and Natalya presenting again with DICE's Johan Andersson on Frostbite's use of…
On monday, Intel finally confirmed its plan to construct a new fab in China, at the northern city of Dalian. The company wants to have the fab operational in 2010, and they plan to use new technology and ideas to make it their cheapest fab operation in existence. The catch? It'll…
Yesterday, PeakStream released a public beta of its PeakStream Workstation application for Windows XP. This version of PeakStream Workstation is a set of APIs for C and C++ to enable GPGPU progrmaming and a Visual Studio 2005 plugin for profiling and debugging...
According to Anandtech's teardown of the Apple TV, as well as an analyst which had the good idea of doing the same, the products' components are very PC-like. Indeed, the primary parts are a 90nm NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300 (G72) for rendering and video decoding acceleration, a 1GHz ULV Pentium…
NVIDIA CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, has testified for his company in their case against 3dfx's creditors, in a case brought by that body. San Jose Mercury News reports that Huang puts no stock in the creditor's assertion that NVIDIA valued 3dfx engineers at USD $1M a head at the time of…
Finally the newly revised Playstation 3 model has reached the shores of Europe, but the revision turned out very differently from what everyone expected. When Sony first announced its plans to cut the Emotion Engine (EE) from European units, everyone expected that the Graphics Synthesizer (GS) would be connected to…
SiS just released their monthly revenue information for March, while VIA had done it a few days ago, and both exceed expectations, with significant month-on-month increases; +76% for SiS and +39% for VIA. In both cases, it should be noted that February is traditionally a weak month, because…
DisplayPort, the competitor to the HDMI standard prevalent in the consumer electronics space, has just seen its 1.1 version ratified by its founding organization, VESA. The standard is described as being "free to use, open and extensible", which marks some contrast with HDMI's…
The Street is reporting that NVIDIA will launch a brand, similar to its GeForce and Quadro brands of cards, specifically for GPGPU apps. This follows AMD's launch of its Stream Computing line, based on its R580 chipset.
NVIDIA is now silently introducing the nForce 650i Ultra, and it should be available shortly. The motherboard will use the same chips as the nForce 650i SLI (C55+MCP51, while the 680i Series uses C55+MCP55) but will be substantially cheaper while the physical layout will only sport one x16 PCI-E…
Intel, in a conference call with various members of the online technology press, have revealed some key details about their upcoming 45nm processor families. Penryn encompasses the evolution of the Core architecture on Intel's latest production process, while Nehalem is brand new, taking things…
Digitimes is reporting that pilot production for TSMC's 55nm process by NVIDIA and AMD's graphics division has started, and that actual products will likely be available in early 2008. It was previously rumoured that NVIDIA's MCP79 single-chip IGP for Intel platforms…
The folks at AMD have delivered the monthly installment of their long running Catalyst saga. Judging from the release notes, both the new features and fixes for Vista and Linux look to be on the tastier-than-usual side.
Today the veil that was sort of casually placed in the near vicinity of Microsoft's new Xbox 360, codenamed Zephyr, has been lifted to reveal the black Xbox 360 Elite, a new $479 SKU that will sit alongside the standard $399 Xbox 360 and $299 Xbox 360 Core SKUs.
Following the launch of their ultra high-end core logic offering for Intel processors, nForce 680i, NVIDIA have introduced a variant today that cuts some features and ability in the name of cost, to bring the basics to more potential customers. Given the high price of many nForce 680i offerings from…
As the trial pitting 3DFX creditors against NVIDIA was about to begin, the judge in charge of the case decided to lift the case's exceptional NDA. This move follows complaints by press and plaintiffs that this secrecy was both unjustified and potentially unconstitutional. As such, the majority of…