Software

AMD’s FidelityFX super resolution

AMD has added hardware acceleration and scaling to their GPUs and AIBs to enhance and speedup gaming and make it a realtime operation. The company has offered the enhancement to developers in an open-source manner via its OpenGPU program. That will make it useful for any GPU, of almost any vintage. AMD has branded it FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). Raster-scan … Read more

What’s Blender been doing these days?

Blender has been right on the verge of its V3 release and guess what happened. It released 2.93, which has been pretty much according to plan. As the company says Blender 2.93 LTS marks the end of a series “twenty years in the making.” It’s a big release but the developers say it’s solid. Therefore, the Blender 2.93 release is … Read more

Siemens acquires Nextflow Software to build-out CFD in Simcenter portfolio

Nextflow Software, headquartered in Nantes, France, was founded in 2015 as a spinout from HydrOcean when that organization was acquired by Bureau Veritas (BV) to form their Marine & Offshore Solutions Group. The technology was originally developed at the Ecole Centrale Nantes (ECN) and the Bureau Veritas group continues to support research at ECN. Siemens notes that ECN and the … Read more

Khronos 3D Viewer Program

Khronos announced their 3D Commerce Viewer Certification Program. 3D viewers are software engines that enable users to display and interact with 3D models. Viewers are used by retailers, social media sites, and brands to create experiences on e-commerce storefronts, search engines, ad platforms, and in native applications.   Khronos says their Viewer Certification Program enables 3D viewers across the industry … Read more

Katerra Kaput

Katerra spent big to realize its vision of a vertically integrated design construction powerhouse. Unfortunately, it wasn’t able to see it through. (Source: Katerra)   Katerra, founded in 2015 by former Flextronics CEO Michael Marks and Fritz Wolff of the Wolff Co. in Menlo Park, recently notified its employees that it did not have sufficient funds for payroll. News site … Read more

Cesium opens more doors for Unreal into AEC

The arrival of the Cesium for Unreal plug-in is fairly recent. It was announced last March and became officially available in April 2021, but the ability to work with large geospatial models in the Unreal game engine is a snowball rolling downhill. The alliance between Cesium and Unreal means that the Unreal Engine supports the open format 3D Tiles pioneered by … Read more

Graphisoft joins the Omniverse community

In its first implementations, Omniverse is most useful for enabling designers to create renderings of their work. (Source: Nvidia’s Graphisoft Connector Site)    The future is in the ‘verse and Graphisoft has opened its own door into it. Nvidia and Graphisoft have announced the availability of a connector for Archicad 24 to Nvidia’s Omniverse. Omniverse is a 3D development tool now in … Read more

Dell’s upgrades for workstations promise more connection and collaboration

Reflecting a trend in attitudes and awareness, Dell’s latest PC and workstation updates are directed at creative artists with the same enthusiasm that it traditionally had for designers, engineers, and scientists. This is not exactly new. Dell and HP always battled for the high end of creativity—movie makers, VFX, video production, and audio engineers but the tech industry has come … Read more

Imagination shows the way to ray tracing

A ray traced version of Imagination Technologies’ headquarters building     Imagination has had ray tracing capabilities since 2010 when they acquired the boutique ray tracing company Caustic. Caustic had developed a hardware accelerator which Imagination turned into an RTL core and added to their stable of IP accelerators. The company has built out their ray tracing SDK and, in the … Read more

Tinkercad celebrates its 10th birthday

Tinkercad was born of a desire to extend 3D CAD and along the way 3D printing to the world. Original founders Kai Backman and Mikko Mononen were determined to break the logjam that has grown along with interest in 3D design. They could see that there was huge interest in 3D design to enable 3D printing, create rendered visualizations, and … Read more

Pico VR snaps up the dragon

Source: Pico   Beijing-based Pico Interactive has released its Pico Neo 3 Pioneer Edition VR All-in-One headset with a 256GB SD. The HMD uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 XR2 (the same processor used in the Oculus Quest), and there is optical tracking interpupillary distance adjustment. It offers Wi-Fi 6 streaming VR. The company’s Pico Store has over 400 apps, including … Read more