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).
Sony Computer Entertainment introduced Playstation 3 firmware 2.40 yesterday, bringing with it the long awaited capacity to access the system Cross Media Bar (XMB) while in-game.
Another year, another Tesla. So, what's new? What does performance look like when only the shader core matters? And does the FP64 implementation make any sense? We touch on this and much more in the first part of our Tesla coverage... [more on Tesla & RV770 within the next few…
The Khronos Group, an organised collection of interested parties that collaborate to push and develop open standards for certain classes of computing, have announced what they call the Heterogeneous Computing Initiative.
It's finally there: GT200 is the chip NVIDIA is pitting to dethrone its former 18 months old champion, the G80. We won't look into real-world performance just yet, but we've got our usual brand of architecture analysis up right away with more coming in the next few days and weeks.
You'd think a new, cheaper quad-core from Intel would be bad news for AMD. However, it turns out that Intel is going so soft on pricing and performance that this might actually turn out to be good news for AMD compared to most alternative scenarios.
This week, the world of computing officially entered the petaflop era with the announcement that the Los Alamos National Laboratory's 'Roadrunner' had become the first supercomputer in history to cross the psychologically significant threshold of a thousand-trillion calculations per second...
There has been an incredible number of rumours on the upcoming 3G iPhone, but little proper analysis of the likely component choices, their technical specifications, and their consequences on the end-product. We hope to fill in that gap with this article, and deliver some useful information to...
The Tech Report just published a quick recap of AMD's Puma platform for low-end/mid-range notebooks yesterday; so if you haven't kept up with with all that or don't even know how many power planes Griffin has (gosh), just go ahead and read the piece.
Starting in August, part of the shroud of mystery around Larrabee is going to dissipate: A paper called 'Larrabee: A Many-Core x86 Architecture for Visual Computing' will be presented at SIGGRAPH by its authors, which include Doug Carmean, Tom Forsyth, Michael Abrash, Pat Hanrahan and many others.
In today's edition of yesterday's news, we look at NVIDIA's two latest purchases, P45, GDDR5, Intel's CPU pricing, NV's CSX, and AMD's stand on the 450mm transition.
In these last two parts of our Tesla coverage, we quickly interview Andy Keane as we look at the adoption & deployment aspects of GPGPU, and then we look into real-world CUDA applications and the related financial and competitive aspects in-depth...
Early this morning GMT saw AMD officially set free a new generation of Radeon products based on a brand new GPU. Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 go head to head with refreshed and new G92 -and GT200-based GeForces from NVIDIA, and the GPU used to create the new Radeon products is an absolute stormer.
AMD have announced a new FireStream product based on their upcoming RV770 GPU, with some seriously impressive single and double precision peak rates.
Since the rest of the internet is still at the stage where they're all excited about Larrabee being presented at Siggraph (hint: you guys are ten days late), we thought we'd let you know it will also be presented at Hot Chips, presumably with more of a hardware perspective.
We published an article analysing the likely components of the 3G iPhone, and we stand by just about everything we said now that Apple made the announcement public; however, there is one big exception: the application processor. It looks like it's actually the exact same as in the 2G iPhone. Hmmm!
A couple of companies producing software solutions that target the GPU and CPU for general purpose programming acceleration have announced partnerships with AMD.
Microsoft have released the latest update to the DirectX SDK, for all you Windows games programmers.
AMD launched the ATI XGP today, an external graphics solution for notebooks. It was formely known under the codename of 'Lasso', and features a HD3870 512MiB connectable via a special eight-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface to select AMD Puma notebooks. There's more at The Tech Report, so read on...
A couple of months ago, NVIDIA acquired both Ageia and mental images, companies specialized in physics and offline rendering respectively. Now two new aspects of how they plan to benefit from these moves have come to light...
NVIDIA executives talked at the JPMorgan Technology Conference on Tuesday, and several interesting tidbits came up, from their ambitious market share expectations in Intel chipsets to the technical reason for G92 yield problems and the revelation that G92/G92b will last another '6-8 to 12 months'.