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.
Rumours are swirling around the web that NVIDIA's upcoming MCP79 chipset will be compatible with VIA's Isaiah processor. The deal makes perfect sense, so the real question is: will MCP79 or MCP78 also be compatible with Montalvo's upcoming processor? Meanwhile, Intel's G45/P45 seem to be delayed...
A few months ago we published an article on IDT's DisplayPort efforts and the standard in general, and today IDT has unveiled its new PanelPort product line. We took the opportunity to ask a few technical questions on DisplayPort and got encouraging news on the cost benefits of Direct Drive.
According to HKEPC & Digitimes, AMD will launch the 128-bit HD3830 for $119-129 in April/May with 320SPs/16 TMUs/16 ROPs; so the cost saving lies in its memory controller redundancy and lower PCB costs. It's basically a HD3690 but won't be limited to China. At the same time, The Inq claims…
According to The Inquirer, AMD employees have been informed that 5% of the workforce is being cut across all segments of the company. Rumours seem to indicate an upcoming quarterly earnings miss is responsible for the move; AMD's fiscal Q1 ends on March 31st and results are announced in mid-April.
According to Digitimes, NVIDIA and VIA already discussed a potential merger (why am I not surprised?) but the two couldn't agree on a price (why am I even less surprised?) - although given VIA's deteriorating financial position, Digitimes expects the talks to eventually resume.
AMD displayed wafers of its 45nm Shanghai chip at CeBit, and Hans de Vries took the opportunity to create a comparison picture between Shanghai and Nehalem. Surprisingly, their die size is just about identical, so AMD doesn't have the previously expected die size advantage. Or do they? Fudzilla claims that…
G94 broke cover a little while ago, showing up as pretty much a G92
with half the clusters. The 256-bit memory interface is the same, the
video hardware is retained, PCIe 2.0 is there, and there are no
per-cluster changes compared to G92 bar some tweaks to the scheduler and…
AMD have been busy on the graphics front, releasing not only Crossfire X and the 3870 X2 recently (review soon), but a new IGP for their processors, raising the bar on what can be expected from an integrated 3D part in terms of performance.
Havok, now part of Intel, announced yesterday at GDC08 that come May
2008 it will offer the PC version of its renowned physics and animation
middleware solution, Havok Complete, free of charge for non-commercial
use.
Following a string of devastating news for the HD DVD format, Toshiba
announced today that they will officially cease all HD DVD-related
development.
If Intel isn't your bag, you should probably take a look at the new B3-based brains behind Spider, the AMD enthusiast platform. These new Phenoms, when paired with a nice 790FX mainboard and one or two HD 3xxx Radeons, means that Spider doesn't look half bad for the gamer.
TSMC unveiled their 40nm process yesterday, and seem to have confused a bunch of people in the process. So let's try to quickly set the record straight and see how this ties in with our earlier reports on TSMC's roadmap.
NVIDIA just released two new ultra-high-end products: the G92-based GeForce 9800 GX2 and the nForce 790i [Ultra] SLI. The Tech Report has reviews for both online (see links), and while we won't be reviewing either ourself in the near future there remains a few things that are worth pointing out...
SlySoft, makers of optical media ripping software, announced today that the latest version of AnyDVD HD will include support for stripping Blu-ray discs of BD+ protection.
EETimes published a nice piece on what media coverage got wrong regarding Intel's new Atom platform (based on Silverthorne) earlier, it's well worth a read - but other points may also be worth discussing, from Intel's roadmap to others benefiting such as Imagination Technologies (PowerVR) and Icera.
The guys at SuSE (and other collaborators on the open project) have released a new RadeonHD drive revision in the last couple of weeks that adds better support for RV6xx variants and some other tweaks here and there.
Time to get back on the horse and sort this front page out, starting with a link to TR's analysis of Crossfire X, how it works, how it can scale and what platforms make for attractive Crossfire X systems.
This year’s Game Developer Conference (GDC), was the stage ARM chose to
roll out its latest 3D middleware solution, Mali-JSR297, for the mobile
platforms powered by its Mali series of embedded graphics processors.
In a surprising turn of events, Sir Sam McGrath - founder of Project Offset - announced yesterday on the official company website
that he and his team were now part of the Intel Kingdom.
As if NVIDIA's chipset roadmaps weren't confusing enough already, VR-Zone now claims that the firm's competitor to AMD's RS780M for notebooks sports 22xPCIe lanes and 15xUSB ports. And that it's coming in March. Errr, what?