With the run up in AIB process due to the crypto-currency mining gold rush, and then the introduction of Nvidia’s Founder-edition RTC2080 Ti, at $1,200, several people have commented about the cost of AIB, and where will it end. Indeed, these prices are ridiculous. Especially when you compare them to the prices of AIBs a few years ago. So we … Read more
With the advent of large-scale integrated circuits coming into their own in the late 1970s and early 1980s, fueling the PC revolution and several other developments, came a succession of remarkably powerful graphics controllers. NEC introduced the first LSI fully integrated graphics chip in 1982 with the NEC µ7220, and it was wildly successful finding its way into graphics terminals … Read more
Forest animation rendered in realtime with Chaos’ new Lavina technology. The scene has over 300 billion triangles and 80,000 instances running at 24–30 frames per second with no rasterized graphics or reduced level of detail as might be used for game engine rendering. In this case, the render was performed on Nvidia’s Quadro RTX GPUs. Chaos Group showcased its new … Read more
The highly anticipated Turing GPU-based Nvidia RTC 2080-series AIBs were announced in late August at Gamecon 2018 and the top of the lines cards were promised for delivery in late September. They came out the week of the 17th, and everyone who could get their hands on one tested and compared them to the previous generation, the Pascal GPU-based 1080-series. … Read more
In our recent article, Remote graphics changing the landscape we mentioned Nvidia’s GeForce Now system and told you that through GeForce Now, you can access games you own on say Steam for example. The game is transferred from Steam to the Nvidia server. From Steam’s point of view, you are running on just another PC and it requires your normal … Read more
Nvidia’s introduction of the Turing processor reveals the seemingly endless extensibility of the GPU. We saw the integration of video decoders and then encoders, audio amplifiers and multiple spatial sound features, and the addition of special functions and filters, as well as memory management, and high-speed interfaces. With Turing, Nvidia added two new processor types, a matrix-multiplier they call the … Read more
Every year, Futuremark, now part of UL Labs and simply known as “UL,” added new benchmark tests to its iconic 3DMark. Each test was designed for a specific class of hardware or a particular API. Since 2013, they’ve added tests that use DirectX 12, tests that run at 4K, tests for notebooks, tablets, and smartphones, as well as new features … Read more
To the best of our recollection, HP was the first to offer a remote graphics solution that wasn’t based on X-Windows. In the Spring of 2004, HP came up with the idea to allow users of their workstations to share a view. They called it “HP Remote Graphics,” or RGS, and what it did was give a remote colleague the … Read more
Sony and Microsoft have formed the HDR Gaming Interest Group (HGiG) and have invited TV game developers, hardware manufacturers, and others to participate in an effort to improve the HDR gaming experience. The proposed initiatives will also change how a game console and TV interoperate, and could be extended to PC gaming, and maybe even mobile devices. The group entered … Read more
The original use and development for the GPU was to accelerate 3D games and rendering. The acceleration of the game’s 3D models involved geometry processing, matrix math, and sorting. Rendering involved polishing pixels and hiding some of them. Two distinctive, non-complimentary tasks, but both served admiralty by a high-speed parallel processor configured as a SIMD—same instruction, multiple data, architecture. The … Read more
Hector Ruiz, AMD’s second CEO after the legendary Jerry Sanders (who said, “Only real men have fabs”) sold off the company’s fab 11 years ago and introduced the concept of “asset light.” The former Dresden fab became GlobalFoundries with financial backing from the Mubadala Investment Company in the The United Arab Emirates. Mubadala invested more in GF, bought Singapore-based Chartered … Read more
In a world where much of the burden of smartphone differentiation rests on the quality of the camera, Google’s otherwise unremarkable Pixel 2 has been praised as one of the best cameras out there. This distinction comes in part from the inclusion of the Google-designed ‘Pixel Visual Core,’ a companion chip intended to “make it so your Snapchat pictures don’t … Read more
