There’s ray tracing, and then there’s ray tracing Just like there are seventeenilon types of anti-aliasing, there are eighteenilon ways to do ray tracing. Some great ways, some really great ways, believe me, there are some really great ways to do ray tracing, the best ways. We’ve told you about Microsoft’s API extension DRX, and Nvidia’s accelerator for it, NRX, … Read more
Easter morning and things were quiet, so for fun I ran a couple of tests. One machine, an Alienware Aurora with 4 GHz i7-6700K with 16 GB DDR3, and an 8 GB Radeon Vega RX 64 (driving three screens, two-4k, and one-8k for a total of 50 Mpixels) with driver 18.3.4. The other machine—an Alienware Area 51 with a 3.3 … Read more
It will take a little longer for smartphones Nvidia demonstrated Microsoft’s approach to raytracing for games at GDC and again at GTC using their DGX station super computer through the DXR API. The $50,000 DGX contains four NVLink 4-Way interconnected Nvidia Tesla V100 add-in boards (AIBs). Each AIB has a 5,120-shader Volta GPU running at 1.46 GHz with 16 GB … Read more
A team of researchers led by Assistant Professor Daniel Smalley of the Electro-Holography Research Group within the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Brigham Young University (Provo, UT) is developing a means for “using light to print full color graphics into thin air.” Dr. Smalley has said their target was the famous holographic image of Princess Leia in Star Wars. … Read more
New data including in Market Watch and Add-in-Board Reports In spite of boost from crytocurrency mining, GPU shipments decrease in the fourth quarter of 2017. Shipments were -1.5% compared to the previous quarter. Year-to-year total GPU shipments decreased -4.8%, desktop graphics decreased -2%, notebooks decreased -7%. Over 363 million graphics units shipped in 2017. AMD has increased its market share, … Read more
At GDC, Nvidia and Microsoft made a joint announcement about the possibility of doing real time ray tracing, something the CG community has striven for since ray tracing was popularized by Turner Whitted in 1979. Whitted did it on big computers at Bell Labs, just before the PC was introduced. Since then, scores of papers and books have been written … Read more
FreeSynch on HDMI tears our tarring. Why should PC gamers have all the fun? Indeed. Just because you can get a beautiful, large screen 4K UHD monitor and drive it with a powerful GPU that is used in supercomputer, doesn’t mean folks who can’t afford that kind of rig, or people who want to sit back and game on a … Read more
If you’ve got the budget, these monitors can’t be beat I have something to admit; and I never thought this would come to pass. After a motorcycling crash UCL tear (thumb tendon injury) I temporarily and almost permanently became….a……a…….console gamer. There I said it as shameful as it is. Being able to sit back on my couch with multiple ice … Read more
Success with cryptocurrency-mining mother boards leads company to next step According to a report in Digitimes, motherboard supplier ASRock reportedly will enter the AIB market in April and focus mainly on supplying AMD-based products. The company has seen an increase in the shipment proportion of high-end motherboards and rising sales for its IPC and server products. It is suggested that … Read more
Beats the competition in 11 out of 12 tests We ran a series of tests on a new AMD 4-core, 3.6 GHz, Ryzen 5 2400G (in a custom built Cooler Master PC) and a HP ProDesk Intel 4-core 3.4 GHz, Core i5-7500 PC and in 38 benchmarks the AMD had an average gain of 207% better performance. AMD Ryzen 5 … Read more
Samsung and Portrait displays team up for HDR calibration in your home Portrait Displays announced its expanded partnership with Samsung Electronics for color calibration in TV displays through its CalMAN software. The auto calibration tool is expected to become available simultaneously with Samsung’s 2018 QLED TV lineup. Portrait Displays‘ CalMAN software is the video calibration solution used by most professional … Read more
More of a computing device than a graphics processor now? Khronos has just released version 1.1 of its high-performance GPU API, Vulkan. The heir apparent to OpenGL, and OpenGL ES, this thin and light API exposes the many features and benefits of a modern GPU like no other API and takes it into the GPU compute domain with a new … Read more
