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).
Parallelism is one of the more trendy topics these days. Our friends at RealWorldTech cover Hot Par 2010, one of the conferences aimed at software developers looking to get a bit more from all of the new, swanky, multi and many core beasts.
This is what happens when you combine a determined author, profiling tools and a controversial topic.
Mazatech have released the next major build of their OpenVG libraries, adding support for OpenVG 1.1 in the process as they consolidate the codebase. Software and OpenGL-based versions are available for a wide range of regular and embedded platforms, making it highly portable.
Terra Soft has finalized version 6.0 of its Yellow Dog Linux
distribution for Power platforms (Apple G4/G5; PS3), built upon the Red
Hat Enterprise-derived CentOS.
Hopeless graphics geeks that we are, it's always a red-letter day around the office when an upgraded version of a graphics diagnostic tool hits the street.
Beyond3D forum user Ike Turner has spotted that NVIDIA has acquired mental images, creators of mental ray. Whoa.
RivaTuner has made it to v2.05, supporting independent adjustment of the major clock domains in NVIDIA G8-series graphics processors.
The good folks over at gpgpu.org have made available the supplementary course material presented during SIGGRAPH this year.
Hardware.fr have published an analysis of NVIDIA CUDA, looking at the architecture of the first hardware, the software side, performance versus x86 processors running the same application on GPU and CPU, the role AMD plays in the GPU computing space and more.
In an interview with the magazine Develop, Joshua Williams, lead
developer at Carbonated Games, says that his company and the XNA team
are currently developing a toolset for XNA. This toolset main goal is
simply the creation of games targeted to the Xbox Live Arcade platform.
Consequences will never be the same. Really!
Beyond Programmable Shading -- the full-day graphics course taught at SIGGRAPH for the last couple of years -- has been fleshed out and is being run as a full class this year at Stanford, by AMD's Mike Houston and Intel's Aaron Lefohn.
TransGaming has just released SwiftShader 2.0, an highly optimized software rasterizer that supports DX9 and Shader Model 2.0 and scales with multi-core processors. It can run (albeit slowly) many modern games and it makes a dual-core Penryn perform similarly to the GeForce FX5600/5700 in 3DMark05.
Microsoft released second quarter earnings yesterday, beating analyst
expectations to come in at earnings of $0.50 per share on record revenues of $16.37
billion. Operating profits, also at a record for the quarter, came in
at $6.48 billion.
Beyond3D is very proud to present the first part of an on-going series featuring one man's thoughts and experience on modern engine development.
Intrigued by recent goings on in the ATI Radeon world regarding Linux and Open Source, we asked AMD for a pow-wow on the subject. John Bridgman from the Software Development Engineering Group stepped up to the plate to answer our questions. …
AMD recently released new versions of GPU Shader Analyser and The Compressonator, adding DirectX 10 support to both, and more.
Microsoft has announced XNA Game Studio 2.0, designed to let developers easily create games for the PC and Xbox 360, and due for release later this year.
NVIDIA has just released the first public beta of PerfHUD 5, its performance profiling tool for Windows.
NVIDIA has released FX Composer 2 RC1, which includes various bug fixes and minor improvements over the previous beta.