10/02, 5:35pm
NVIDIA Fermi with Snow Leopard in mind
The just-unveiled Fermi graphics architecture will find its way into Macs and play an important role in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, NVIDIA chief scientist Bill Dally said today. While it's expected that NVIDIA would continue to play an important part of future Macs, the researcher drew a particular connection between the new GPU design and Apple's new OS, expecting that it would provide a significant boost for those apps that implement OpenCL. Windows 7 will also get support through DirectX 11 and DirectCompute.
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09/25, 11:00am
NVIDIA GeForce 300 at tape out, due soon
Despite a report of NVIDIA's 40nm GeForce 300 series GPUs facing a possible delay until 2010, the card is currently at the tape out (initial silicon production stage), Fudzilla reported on Friday. Codenamed GT300, it was was originally believed to be going on sale in October and may still reach the target if all goes smoothly during testing. The DirectX 11-capable card has already been seen by key industry people, and if the tape out began in early September, it could be shipping by middle or late October.
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08/24, 2:25pm
ATI Radeon HD 5800 Leak
AMD's major video chipset update this fall has had its feature set and release date uncovered thanks to a slip of information Monday. The ATI Radeon HD 5800 series should be fronted by the 5850 and 5870, both high-end cards that could be the first to support Eyefinity, a technology that not unlike Matrox cards will support three displays on a single card. They are also to be AMD's first graphics cores to support DirectX 11 and OpenGL 3.1 visual effects in hardware.
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12/01, 5:20pm
WARP10 software graphics
Windows 7 promises to bring with it a pair of programs that will enable users to process Direct3D 10 graphics on Direct3D 9 hardware as well as processing Direct3D 9-level graphics with no hardware at all, according to an MSDN article. The former feat is made possible with software called Direct3D 10 Level9, while the latter comes courtesy of Direct3D Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP10). The new standard is a high-speed, fully compatible software rasterizer that has already shipped in beta form in the November 2008 DirectX SDK.
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11/07, 1:00pm
NVIDIA Quadro FX 370 470
NVIDIA on Thursday announced the release of two new entry-level graphics processing solutions for workstations with its first Quadro FX 470 integrated mainboard GPU and the Quadro FX 370 Low Profile standalone PCIe card meant for use in small form factor desktop PCs. Either GPU is certified for CAD and digital media apps by software makers that include Autodesk and Adobe. Both new NVIDIA products feature 128-bit precision graphics processing and 32-bit floating point precision, filtering and blending, along with advanced color compression and early z-culling. They have full-scene antialiasing capabilities as well and support OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 10 for 3D work.
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10/31, 4:55pm
OCZ intros 15" DIY laptops
OCZ on Thursday announced the introduction of its first 15-inch Gaming Notebook based on an Intel Centrino 2 platform. As with the company's previous DIY (Do It Yourself) products, the idea is to let users spec their own systems for their own applications. All of the new 15.4-inch, 1280x800 notebooks include an ATI Radeon HD 3650 GPU with 512MB of dedicated memory and DirectX 10.1 compatibility. There is also a choice of optical drives, ranging between a dual-layer DVD drive or a slower multi-drive that includes Blu-ray support. CPU support includes Intel's range of Core 2 Duo and Extreme processors, ranging from 2.0 GHz to 2.6GHz.
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09/10, 7:45am
AMD Radeon HD 4600
AMD started off Wednesday by setting a new relative ground floor for performance and hoping to beat NVIDIA's GeForce 9500 cards. The Radeon HD 4600 series is claimed to outperform both the 9500 GT and AMD's own earlier Radeon HD 3650 by including all the hardware optimizations of the 4800 series and still keeping 320 stream (visual effects) processors. It's also one of the least expensive graphics chipsets to support DirectX 10.1 and newer OpenGL 2.x visual effects, such as more precise lighting.
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07/23, 9:45am
DirectX 11 with GPGPU Tech
Microsoft's next version of DirectX will have its own alternative to the OpenCL standard proposed by Apple, the company revealed yesterday at its GamesFest conference. DirectX 11 will have support for "compute shader technology" that allows modern, more generalized video cards' effects processors to perform tasks other than rendering video, including physics calculations and other chores that would normally be handled by the main system processor.
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