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).
Yesterday saw the launch of a new round of Macbooks, and with them a new GeForce 9-series IGP from NVIDIA. The chip is brand new silicon, and is also showing up in Intel-based mainboards from a few vendors.
Want good graphics performance but don't have the hundreds of dollars required to grab the fastest solutions from ATI and NVIDIA? Tech Report have just the article for you.
Sony today made available their "Life with Playstation" service, developed in partnership with Google for the Playstation 3 to serve as an overlay/replacement to the existing Folding@Home user interface.
NVIDIA have imbued the GeForce GTX 260 SKU with an extra enabled cluster of SMs, and around a 60 buck markup, in order to strengthen their lineup a little bit. And confuse consumers. What was wrong with GTX 270?
AMD have launched a couple more Radeon HD SKUs today, using a new chip called RV730. A relative of RV770, the chip packs the same number of shading ALUs as RV670, in a die about 75% of the size.
After a relatively short public beta period, NVIDIA have gone gold with 2.0 of CUDA, their C-based programming environment for their recent graphics processors.
Lucid have demonstrated working first silicon at IDF this year. For those unfamiliar with their technology, it's a combination of hardware and software that intercepts graphics calls to the API runtime, before performance workload division to affect performance scaling.
The track notes from the Beyond Programmable Shading course at SIGGRAPH this year are now available.
NVIDIA have released a beta driver supporting most of the new OpenGL 3.0 specification. Sadly, it's Windows-only.
Multi-GPU has come a long way since NVIDIA resurrected the idea with SLI and NV40 back in the day. Today's implementations get significant driver engineer hours spent on them, and the form factor has evolved to where two-GPU boards are expected parts of the product stack.
In a move that has been worked on for more than a year, AMD has now divested its foundry operations as a separate company. It will be owned 55.6% by ATIC, a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi government. In total, AMD's liquidity position will improve by $2.4B while massively reducing capital expenditures.
Rage3D's Alex Voicu has taken a game-performance-led look at ATI's Radeon HD 4870 X2. The analysis confirms that the product is the fastest single-slot graphics product ever made, and goes into good detail to tell you why.
ATI have released new drivers for their Radeon products, bringing the first shot at OpenGL 3.0 support since the Khronos Group took the lid off the new standard at SIGGRAPH recently.
Real World Technologies have taken an in-depth look at NVIDIA GT200, to get to the bottom of how it does the job of pushing everything but pixels.
After a hugely successful launch of RV770-based SKUs to retake the performance graphics crown, AMD are set to release RV730 and RV710 shortly to apply the same perf/area madskillz to the lower ends of the GPU market. HEXUS have pictures.
Broadcom has announced that it has purchased AMD's DTV business, including staff and design centres
The folks at AMD are up to their monthly Catalyst shenanigans, with version 8.8 available today for Vista, XP, and Linux.
Highligts include new Avivo features, including Dynamic Gamma/Contrast correction for the HD 4800 series, optimized video presets (though we must note that one man's "optimize
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has admitted to underestimating the strength of ATI's recent product launch lineup in its most recent financial conference call.
Develop has scored an interview with Aaron Coday, Manager of the Visual Computing Group EMEA, on Larrabee, Intel's upcoming x86-based graphics architecture.
After nearly a year, Khronos unveils the OpenGL 3.0 specifications.