In an interview with the Gaming Business Review, an online site ran by M2 Publishing, Tim Sweeney detailed recent developments in Epic Games, as well as his visions of the future.

The interview obviously took place during Game Developer’s Conference 2015, which is traditionally held in San Francisco, CA. We highly recommend that you head there and read the whole interview, but we could not miss out on a question that is shaping the industry right now:

GBR: How big do you see virtual reality becoming over the next five to ten years as a business?

TS: Virtual reality and Augmented Reality will literally change the world. They will be the next computing platform.  There’s a market for billions of these devices because everybody who has a smartphone today will — perhaps in as much as decade from now — much prefer entertainment in a completely immersive experience that takes advantage of your entire field of view and has full body input through miniaturized cameras and other technologies.  But we’re in the early days of it now.  Let’s be clear, everything is in the development kit stage.  It is for early adopters and what we’re seeing now is really just the Palm Pilot to the platform that will evolve into something iPhone-like in its quality.

There’s no point in denying it, after seeing billions of dollars earned by 3D movies which rely on ‘cheap tricks’ to achieve depth (try finding animated feature movies without 3D being the ‘default’ option), next step will bring us technologies such as Microsoft Hololens, production versions of Facebook-owned Oculus VR (John Carmack keynote) and second-generation Google Glass, which is developed in near-secrecy by the search giant and a practical monopoly in glasses, Italian giant Luxottica.

After operating for almost 20 years as an independent studio, Epic Games made waves across the gaming and development community when they accepted an investment from Tencent Holdings (HKG:0700) last June (2014). The Chinese powerhouse paid up $330 million for 48.4% of the company, setting the valuation just a bit below $680 million.

Tim Sweeney continued to be the CEO, while his lifelong business partner Mark Rein still continues as in his role of Vice President.  Not selling themselves outright like idSoftware did with ZeniMax Media, Epic Games continues to be independent studio, consisting out of product (games) and technology development units. Their recent announcement about making Unreal Engine ‘free’ opens a path for even more ‘premium freemium’ titles which base their revenue model on microtransactions.

The post Tim Sweeney: Virtual Reality will Literally Change the World appeared first on VR World.

ATI’s poor performance in Folding@Home client was mostly due to different hardware capabilities of Radeon X1K, Hd2000, HD3000 and HD4000 series. But after couple of months of hard work on code optimization, ATI managed to crack into the big league, performance-wise.

Today we received the answer a lot of Folding enthusiasts awaited for so long… after making multi-GPU possible on Catalyst 9.2, the latest 9.3 version brings new version of ATI Stream and AMD Display Library SDKs, significantly raising the performance of F@H client.

If you fold and use an ATI card, don’t think – go and download them. If you are enjoying yourself with Windows 7 Beta (for some odd reason, version 7033 works better on my system than RC 7058 – why Microsoft, why you always have superb betas and then SNAFU the final verson?), you’ll be pleased to hear thatas of this month, Catalyst for Windows 7 are entering monthly refresh schedule.

Now, if there is one person who believes Microsoft that Windows 7 is coming out next year, wake up and start preparing for this summer. ; )

The post Catalyst 9.3: ATI now loves Folding@Home appeared first on VR World.

GTX295 naked. Picture courtesy of TechPowerUp!

Yep, you’ve read if correctly: Nvidia’s partners sold thousands of GTX 295 boards, and at the price of 520-550 bucks per card (or Euro), we’re talking about millions of USD/EUR. One can only wonder what is going on in Graphzilla’s head… there is an alleged recession going on, their quarterly results dropped by 50% to less than 500M USD a quarter, and they fail to deliver already sold boards – backorders.

We wonder what kind of excuse will nV come up with this time, if the company misses its own sales estimates. They succeeded in selling thousands and thousands of GTX295 boards, but their backlog is staggering.

UPDATE – March 14, 2009 12:51 CET – I have uploaded the wrong picture…previous picture was the picture of 9800GX2. Apologise for any confusion, this is the right image of naked GTX295. Thanks to all readers that noticed that something is “off” with the story…

The post UPDATE: Nvidia owes millions of $ in GTX295 backlog appeared first on VR World.

It would be really cool if the company would put special markings on these gaming systems, and sell them to the unexpected owner, making up for another PR stunt. But given the Nintendo way, we doubt this will happen. Sony and Microsoft were more likely candidates for such a promotion. This achievement puts Nintendo firmly on #1 spot as, followed by Sony with its 45.86 million PSP and 20.88 million PS3 units. Even if we count all the PS2 consoles sold from the introduction of Microsoft Xbox 360 onwards (first next-gen console to launch), Sony cannot over take Nintendo – since 2005, Sony sold 30.2 million PS2 consoles.

Nintendo consoles are the kings of the digital entertainment hill...

Table for current-gen hardware sales is as follows:
1)    Nintendo – 147.23M
2)    Sony – 66.74M
3)    Microsoft – 29.01M

This is a majestic feat, Nintendo owns 60.5% of overall current-gen gaming systems, Sony holds a 27.4% share, while Microsoft sells only the home version, and takes in 12.1% of the overall market.

If Sony didn’t mess up with the dual-Cell design and had Nvidia on the side from day one, if Microsoft held to x86 console architecture of the first Xbox, kept binary compatibility and didn’t rip its own customers by overall savings that resulted in Red Rings of Death, if this, if that… and if only Nintendo didn’t made such fantastic “essence of gaming” products, this table would look different.

But for this generation, Nintendo is the King. And that fake Wired interview has a glimpse of truth – Nintendo certainly chew Microsoft to an “also-ran” category. What a twist of fate.

The post Nintendo ships 150 million current-gen gaming systems, sells 147 Million appeared first on VR World.

Second big winner is LED-backlight panel. This type of displays jumped from 2.3 million in Q3’08 to 3.7 million in Q4’08, or 62%. Furthermore, market share of LED-backlit panels is expected to reach 24.1% in the current quarter, up from 13.4% in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Recession or not, shipments of higher-quality (more expensive) displays isn’t stopping anytime soon. Both 120 Hz and LED-backlit panels should make for majority of shipments in Q1’10.

The post 120Hz LCD, LED-backlit panels gaining market traction appeared first on VR World.

G92 chip now spans across four product generations – GeForce 8800GT/GTS512/GSO, 9800GT/GTX/GTX+, GTS240/250 and GTX260M/280M. The decision Nvidia obviously made can constitute as “deliberate misleading naming for confusing of consumers” and is making this company potential for not just consumer (private class-action/consumer watchdog) action, but also legal wrath from consumer protection agencies in the US, and several countries in EMEA region – Germany, Sweden and UK being prime examples.

If Nvidia labeled their mobile parts as GTS240/250, nobody would notice – because it would be a case of rebranding (in all honesty, ATI isn’t a saint there either, branding some Mobility Radeon 2000 parts as 3000 series and then rebranding some 3000 chips into 4000). But in this case, the company is deliberately naming GTS240/260 as already shipping desktop parts – GTX260 and 280, both based on GT200 chip.

Will the real GeForce GTX 280 please stand up?

The list of differences doesn’t stop there – we have a GTX280 consisting out of 128 shader processors (GTX280M), or 240 (the original GTX280), different memory controllers (256-bit vs. 512-bit) and the list goes on.

The potential legal part lies in the fact that if consumer types something like  “GeForce GTX 280 notebook” in “accepted way of finding information relevant to consumer” such as search engines – consumer will find information and glowing reviews about desktop parts and potentially form a wrong opinion/expectation about the product itself.  This is a slippery slope that none of IT companies slipped on, but as computers became a commodity, you can expect more and more watchdogs looking into the land of (rebranded) silicon.

Just like all birds in trees know, GT200 chip is in whole another league compared to G92 architecture, and this is nothing else but deliberate misleading of consumers. In case G92b is really named GTX260M/280M, expect a PR disaster and potential legal issues.

Sorry Nvidia, but according to conversations I had in the past 48 hours, it looks like Intel chipset license war won’t be the only court meeting. This branding exercise can lead to a class action lawsuit on behalf of consumers and worse of all, an official inquiry is possible in four states (that I know so far). Biggest damage would of course, be a stock downgrade from worried investors.

The post Legal and PR trouble looming for mobile GTX260/280? appeared first on VR World.

If I recall correctly, a while ago AMD claimed world’s first OpenCL demo, but it was done on a single core (and then scaled up to all four) on a Phenom II X4 CPU. If this video is correct, Nvidia gets the pole position for being the first company to demonstrate OpenCL working on a GPU, which is “usage as intended”.

Judging from the video, Nvidia showed Nbody simulation changing following parameters: point size, velocity damping, softening factor, time step, cluster scale, and velocity scale. The company used a laptop equipped with Quadro FX 570M graphics card, e.g. GeForce 8600M after a “GL” tune-up. As far as the official debut of OpenCL go, KHRONOS Group launched the API on Siggraph Asia 2008 in Singapore, from where both AMD & Nvidia videos came from.

But don’t expect OpenCL drivers until both companies supply drivers to Apple. It looks like Snow Leopard will be the beginning of OpenCL on a PC platform and Windows Vista is sitting on backburner… that’s what Microsoft get for botching OS development and sucking up to allmighty Chipzilla.

The post Youtube video shows OpenCL running on Nvidia GPU appeared first on VR World.

How Nvidia came into the Intel chipset market is another story – at the time, Intel was seriously hurting with its Prescott marchitecture and didn’t had anything to show in gaming and enthusiast segment. The company was playing around Nvidia and in the end – Nvidia launched “nForce 4 SLI for Intel” chipset (famous for the fact that it didn’t work with low-end Pentium D 820 processor) and started to pave way for the creation of “Axis of Evil” (comment by former ATI PR manager): Intel Core 2 CPU + GeForce 8800GTX + nForce 680i.

Also, this wasn’t the first time Chipzilla asked for help. When the company got struck with Rambus RDRAM gremlins in infamous Caminogate, Taiwanese VIA Computer skyrocketed to a shocking 60% worldwide chipset market share (for two quarters). Lack of confidence in Intel’s chipsets was proven with the launch of Intel-based workstations from Silicon Graphics. Imagine my surprise when I opened up my flashy Visual Workstation 550 (an $8,000 machine) featuring 2GB of PC-133 memory, Intel Pentium III 1.0 GHz processor, first Quadro card and VIA’s Apollo Pro 133A chipset. You will probably agree it was a very weird experience. Intel pushed VIA from the market with lawsuit regarding Pentium 4 license. By the time trials came to an end, VIA was less than also-ran in the Intel-chipset arena.

Coming back to Core 2 architecture, Nvidia enjoyed its success with 650i/680i and didn’t invest in the platform (780i was nothing else but 680i with PCIe Gen2 chip). At the same time, Intel grew stronger, releasing P35/X38/X48/P45 series of chipsets and Nvidia was no longer needed. Thus, it is logical that the company wants to squeeze out pesky Santa Clara neighbor for its Core i5 and i7 series.

Ultimatively, this is a battle that customers will lose. Regardless of what court decides, incertanties are costing both companies money. Truth to be told, we saw interesting papers about the actual financial situation in Intel, and it is no wonder that the company is now attacking everybody. But to play around with chipset licenses and patents – ultimately, this is a losing game. Once that you hit the “lawsuit-trigger”, path of innovation takes the backseat and development begins to be closely monitored by legal departments.

All I can conclude here is that Nvidia has patents that could block a lot of Intel’s products. AMD could stop Intel’s CPU production, so could Intel stop AMD. And then there is a case of 3rd party companies that nobody takes seriously, yet they can change the landscape of IT industry for good. When I spoke with couple of engineers from IBM, I was told that Big Blue could block Intel, AMD, Freescale, Motorola, even Texas Instruments – “in a jiffie”.

The post Intel’s license attack on Nvidia is an old “Thank You” appeared first on VR World.

The latest entrant to the alternative-cooling material market is Sparkle Computer Co. Ltd. Engineers at Sparkle experimented with various graphics cards and earlier today, the company officially debuted Diamond-like Carbon (DLC) radiator for graphics cards.  In order to apply DLC material to the already existing aluminum or copper heatsink, Sparkle used Plasma Enhanced CVD (PECVD) technique, but in order to make this technique more consumer-friendly, marketing came up with the term Diamonds Sputtering technology (DS).

This puny cooler showed great promise. We wonder what will happen once that DLC is applied to a large 2-slot cooler...

Now, to clear any potential confusion, DLC is not a replacement material for aluminum, carbon or something similar. DLC is used as a coating on existing material, and it will enhance its thermal properties. Achieved results are quite interesting – according to Sparkle, their conventionally-cooled GeForce 9500GT heats up to 88C. After Diamond-like Carbon membrane was applied to the same radiator, temperatures dropped by five degrees Celsius, down to 83C. Now, to make things more interesting, heat is not the only issue that DLC effectively deals with. Apparently, this super-hard carbon coating also increases resistance to bending and scratches, making this material very desireable for copper fins, that just “love” to bend after just looking at them.

It will be interesting to see future GeForce graphics cards coming from Sparkle, since now the company can use its Diamond Sputtering Tech on regular Nvidia-supplied coolers as well, manufacturing DLC-clad graphics cards from their launch onwards. If price premium is not an issue, this technology is one interesting newcomer to watch.

The post Sparkle moves beyond heat-pipes, introduces Diamond-Like Carbon appeared first on VR World.

Confirmation came in this Valve’s monthly update to their hardware survey, probably the best statistics about gaming hardware out there, touching “only” 16+ million people. This survey shows that the Christmas shopping season smiled nicely on Intel on the CPU side and both ATI and Nvidia on the graphics side.

15% of all users dropped single-core processors between June and January...

Roughly 50.000 people who used Intel’s integrated graphics subsystem bought ATI and Nvidia GPUs, reducing Intel’s share to 5.07% (5% too much, if you ask me). ATI now owns 27.25%, while Nvidia marginally increased its share to 64.72% of all graphics cards used. Big losers were also owners of multi-GPU configurations. As users are selling their 8800GTX SLI and 9800GX2 cards, most of them opted for a single graphics card, such as GeForce GTX or Radeon 4800 series. Less than 300.000 Steam users own a multi-GPU setup, yet everybody in the industry state that multi-GPU setup is the future?

On the CPU side, things turned quite interesting for the eternal battle between AMD and Intel. As you could read in the title, 0.43% of all users use Intel’s 8-core Skulltrail platform, while Phenom X3 has marginally higher market share (0.49%). 8-core Skulltrail beat 3-Core Phenom by almost four times, and by survey for March 2009, Skulltrail will probably overtake 3-core Phenoms in terms of overall share. Rough estimate would be roughly 70.000 Skulltrail systems out there, and 80.000 Phenom X3 systems. Who earned more money?

My take is that a certain ex-ATI/now-AMD is now chewing his hat of, because it was his decision to kill FASN8, AMD’s Barcelona-powered dual-socket gaming system.
In case you missed, this also proves that a certain Voodoo-empowered HP executive was wrong in his column about the end of high-end gaming machines. A lot of workstation users bought Skulltrail machines, but this statistics applies to people who installed Steam on their computers. And as we all know, it’s not that Steam is used for distribution of AutoCAD, Maya, Adobe CS4 and other professional software packages.

This month was also big on DirectX 10 – almost 25% of all users now use DirectX 10 on Windows Vista. Then again, percentage of owners of DirectX 10 hardware and DX9 operating system (Windows XP) jumped to 27.28% (up by 2%) as well.

All in all, Steam Hardware Survey once more provided us with an invaluable insight into the world of gaming hardware. I am personally surprised with the success of Skulltrail platform, given the state of economy and prices of Skulltrail systems. Then again, it is a living proof that Francois Piednoel and his team at Intel knew what they were doing when they created V8, followed by Skulltrail.

On a side note, I can’t wait for Nehalem-EP based Skulltrail… codename Skullcrusher? Greyscull? Or again back in the car world with Bugatti-like V-16 (two 4-core CPUs feature 8 threads each, thus 16 cores visible in task manager )?

The post STEAM: Intel 8-core Skulltrail almost outsold 3-core Phenom X3 appeared first on VR World.

The post Nvidia unlocks SLI technology for everybody appeared first on VR World.

Fast forward to January 2009, and we have SP performance at 933 GFLOPS, while achievable DP performance dipped down to 78 GFLOPS. This figure is roughly half of what Nvidia boasted about at the time of launch, and sheer evidence that both manufacturers like to overstate the performance of actual parts. What makes things interesting is the fact that Tesla GPGPU boards aren’t even most powerful parts in the Nvidia line-up. That “honor” goes to newly introduced GTX285 and 295. In professional line-up, Quadro FX 5800 has more “oomph”, thanks to higher shader clock. but even FX5800 will remain below 100 GFLOPS in dual-precision operations… making this GPU “just” 2.5x faster than quad-core Xeon processor.

Then again, if you activate parallel execution, CPU will drop to sub-10 GFLOPS values, while the GPU will remain at 78 GFLOPS for DP and 933 GFLOPS in single precision. At the same time, ATI’s architectural concept of “emulating” the DP units by pairing more processing units in one cluster resulted in actual peak performance of 900 GFLOPS for the 4870 part (claimed performance: 1.2 TFLOPS) and 250 GFLOPS for the Dual-Precision formats. This is an impressive difference, showcasing ATI’s lead from the architectural standpoint. Extractable performance is a bit different, since some ISVs managed to extract that performance, such as ElcomSoft password cracker, while some hit different walls and could not get better performance.

The real dilemma now is to wait and see what kind of computing performance lies with upcoming 40nm GPUs.

The post Nvidia’s discloses its DP performance limitations appeared first on VR World.

Leo is on course for being late the whole year...

According to original plans, AMD’s platform challenge was consisted out of Spider, Leo and Python. When K10 (Barcelona/Agena) hit delays, AMD introduced Dragon to the roadmap, combination of 790FX/GX chipset with DDR3-compliant Socket AM3. When AMD realized that they are unable to launch Phenom II with DDR3 at first, Dragon was named 7-series chipset, Radeon 4000 series GPU and Phenom II – thus putting AM2+ chipsets in the frame as well. “Original” Dragon platform debuted yesterday, with the introduction of AM3 processors, and our sources were implying that AMD is doubtful about launching the Leo platform in time.

According to the story mentioned above, motherboard makers were skeptical with a reason, since AMD decided to postpone Leo to Q4’2009. This is a slippery slope, because there is inherit danger that Leo misses the design phase for HP, Dell and others – all those Windows 7 powered computers for Black Friday/Cyber Monday and Christmas may go without AMD Phenom II + Leo if company misses the boat. In 2007, AMD missed the Q4 design window and decided to launch Phenom+Spider in channel alone, limiting the platform’s potential. In 2008, everything was about fixing the Phenom II and chipset guys couldn’t finish Dragon platform because the CPU was missing out, and it looks like 2009 is a year of issues on the chipset site. We wish AMD all the best and hope that for once, every piece of the puzzle will fit in place with Leo or Python (Bulldozer+DDR3+DX11). AMD needs to get following right for Leo:

• New Phenom II processors
• DirectX 11 GPU – mainstream and high-end discrete parts
• RD890/SB850 – update the SB with USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 spec

This would be a money maker for AMD. If they get 3 out of 3, AMD can be forgiven for being a full year late with Leo.

The post AMD delays Leo platform to end of 2009? appeared first on VR World.

Every time Nvidia was given the choice of reducing the cost of manufacturing, the company opted to look the other way. With the resurgence of ATI, who chose to optimize its designs to the maximum, Nvidia’s bubble bursted spectacularly and the profit margins were gone. Enter 2009 – when designing the 55nm parts, the company decided to aggressively reduce the cost of manufacturing. First changes came on professional Quadro CX/FX boards, followed by 55nm GTX260 and GTX285. GeForce GTX295 will probably go down in history as the most complexed part that the company ever manufactured, since you can expect that even a dual-PCB GT212-based part will be less complex, even if 512-bit memory controller would be used. Chinese site Expreview.com came up with a story detailing further refinements of the design on GeForce GTX 260 parts, but the same procedures are being implemented across the line, from cheapest to most expensive 55nm and 40nm cards. Under the condition of anonymity, insight of the design of 40nm performance and enthusiast parts was disclosed to me. According to this manufacturing expert close to the company, complete 40nm line is being designed with cost-effectiveness and scale of economics in mind. Number of PCB layers went down even on the GT212 part, and late P8xx and early P9xx designs are a clear testament of changes that are going on in Nvidia’s engineering departments in APAC region and of course, in the US.

Many designs are finalized and are now in the process of refinement, but this should lead to dramatically lower cost of manufacturing, thus giving flexibility in pricing. On the example of upcoming performance part, we were cited 20% cheaper cost of production. 20% is a large number given the fact that Nvidia will implement GDDR5 memory, but this is a normal result – the moment Nvidia started to think with their wallets, instead of ego – improvements were under way. So, we will have GT212 with more complex memory controller than ATI’s RV790 and RV890, yet cheaper to produce due to all the advantages of GDDR5 memory combined with the optimized design of the PCB itself. We’ll see if that will be enough or not.

Nvidia's tyre bursted in 2008... what brings 2009?

In a way, Nvidia’s A.D. 2008 was identical to Ferrari’s 2005 – they believed in being unbeatable and got their arses handed to them. We will see will 2009 end for Nvidia like Ferrari’s 2007 or 2008.

The post Nvidia’s 40nm high-end cards production up to 20% cheaper? appeared first on VR World.

Auburndale and Havendale were multi-chip modules featuring two hyper-threaded cores and integrated graphics chip. According to a diagram above, Auburndale/Havendale consisted out of two pieces of silicon: CPU part with two cores sharing 4MB of L3 cache memory and a separate graphics core connected by using Quick Path Interface (QPI).

Auburndale was supposed to debut on market as 35/45W mainstream and business notebook processor, while Havendale was the desktop versions, consuming as much as 75W (higher clocks). But, the economic crisis played its part and Intel isn’t so interested in keeping the 45nm production alive for these two parts. 45nm production will be kept in place for Pentium and Core 2 Duo/Quad processors for the mainstream crowd, and Core i7 for those on higher end of scale.

But, this is not the end of Fusion concept in Santa Clara. Intel is going to replace Auburndale/Havendale with their 32nm die-shrink, known as Arandale. Arandale was originally supposed to debut for Back to School season 2010, alongside 32nm quad-core and sexa-core Westmere processors (Core i7 die-shrinks). But now, Arandale core has been brought forward by six months to Q1’2010. The debut is set probably for March (can you say CeBIT?) timeframe. We don’t have any piece of information on Arandale, besides the fact that it is a die-shrink and will probably feature larger L3 cache, probably somewhere in the range of 6MB, just like current 45nm Wolfdale processors (6MB L2 cache).

If you are wondering what’s going on with AMD’s Fusion processors, don’t think that this cancellation of 45nm parts will give AMD much needed breathing space, since AMD delayed its own Fusion CPU+GPU chips from Q3’2008 (yes, last year) to 2011! Then again, at least we’re talking about completely new CPU core, quad-core Llano and dual-core Ontario.

The post EXCLUSIVE – Intel cans 45nm “Auburndale” and “Havendale” Fusion CPUs! appeared first on VR World.

When Intel announced project Moblin in 2007, Microsoft frowned upon Intel, given the effort the company put in gearing its next gen OS “Vienna” (aka Windows 7) towards netbooks and MIDs. The love-hate relationship begun with Intel frowning on Microsoft in the case of Xbox 360 and AMD’s 64-bit instruction set “x86-64″ (AMD64). But with the Moblin V2 Core OS coming to life, Intel is threatening Microsoft for the very first time on Microsoft’s home turf – software.

Our sources claim that upcoming Windows Mobile 6.5 is just a preparation for Windows Mobile 7, OS that will cover smartphones, GPS devices and MIDs from the lower end segment, topped with Windows 7 Embedded Edition for the higher end spectrum of GPS/MID/Netbook market. The company that gave Microsoft a helping hand is no other than Nvidia. Bear in mind that it was ATI Technologies that worked hand-in-hand with Microsoft on Windows Mobile 6, 6.5 and 7, but AMD’s leadership (should we write, lack of?) sold that part for small change to Freescale and Qualcomm. This is for the second time in two years that AMD walked away from the market it helped create (OLPC and netbooks were the first), and Jen-Hsun is probably the luckiest guy in the world. All he needs to do is watch what markets AMD is investing in right now, and then walk right in as soon as AMD starts to walk out. Personally, I just don’t understand AMD – the company spends millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man-hours developing projects that the company will walk out from, loose brilliant people in the process, and then nobody will point a finger when a company melts down with more than $3B losses in 2008 alone.

Getting back on the story, I was surprised to hear that Nvidia works hand-in-hand with Microsoft on that level. Previously, my MSFT sources always mentioned Intel and ATI/AMD, but now, the company that is most spoken of is Graphzilla from Satan Clara. Oddly how world turns. That also answered my question why Nvidia shunned Nokia’s offer and sold hundreds of millions of Tegra chips to this Finnish giant. Jen-Hsun thinks Windows Mobile is safer bet than Symbian OS. Looking from this perspective, he might even be right.

Even in prototype form, this nPhone dev platform showed great promise. Time for limelight is approaching...

Even though the 1st gen Tegra (APX2500) or 2nd gen Tegra (600/650) didn’t exactly showed up in smartphones when we expected them, it turned out that first and second generation were nothing but Trojan horses for Nvidia in the handheld market. Tegra 600/650 is based on GeForce 6 chip, while Tegra 700(?) is looking up for a debut this year with CUDA-capable and OpenCL-capable GeForce 9 core. 3rd generation Tegra is the SoC that will have Microsoft backing, so nPhone isn’t a concept, but a reality. Windows Mobile 7 + Tegra 700 should be the winning combination for Microsoft in the mobile space, as a payback to Intel.

In fact, don’t be surprised if Microsoft decides to give Nvidia’s Ion a helping hand by offering Windows 7 and Windows XP deals on MIDs and netbooks on Intel Atom+GeForce 9400, and shunning Intel’s integrated graphics parts. When this scenario comes to life, don’t be surprised if you read “Wintel is dead” comments from bloggers and editors on their respective networks.

Just remember where you read it first

The post The End of Wintel saga…beginning of Microvidia and nPhone? appeared first on VR World.

Five bucks cheaper if you buy in quantity ;-)

If you’re into multi-GPU setups, we’re approaching the level that it is better to buy 2x 4830 than a single 4870, given the number of shaders and good overclocking modes.
On the other hand, ATI released Catalysts 9.1… frankly I can’t remember when did ATI wait for the last days of month to release their monthly update but nevertheless, this is an impressive feat. 9.1 represent first Catalyst revision of the month, ninth year in a row (nine years since the launch of Radeon series? Darn, I am old ).

The post ATI slightly cuts prices, releases new drivers appeared first on VR World.

On the other hand, Novafora is a company headed by Shlomo and Zaki Rakib, successful engineer and enterpreneur who worked together at Terayon Communication Systems. Their vision is to create products to video content processing for the Internet era. With this acquisition, there is little doubt that companies such as Qualcomm, Freescale, TI, Philips, Nvidia and others are getting some competition.

Only time will tell how Novafora will pan out, but there is some serious engineering talent in Israel, and being backed by funds that have over 1.3 billion USD just might result in a new star on system-on-chip market.
Last great architecture to come from Israel was no other than Intel Core architecture, also known as “Chip that saved Intel’s bacon”.

The post Israeli-backed company completes acquisition of Transmeta appeared first on VR World.

Courtesy of legendary German site 3DCenter.Org, we can see what Matrox is actually… manufacturing these days. Fellow journalists spent some time with Matrox M9125 graphics card, and compared it to graphics cards from ATi, Nvidia, Intel and S3. Five-vendor GPU test… when was the last time you saw something like this? Agree, trip down the memory lane…

Note the "Golden Finger" on the upper left side of PCB. No, this is not for Multi-GPU mode, but for connecting to specialized perihperal cards from Matrox.

Anyways, the boards that this card tested against were Radeon 3450, X4500, GeForce 7300GT and 8400GS and for final, Chrome 430GT. If you want to see how Matrox scored against these “monsters”, head over to 3DCenter and check it out.

The post Germans test latest Matrox hardware appeared first on VR World.

RV740 and RV790 should be considered as a trial run for TSMC’s 40nm process, currently “the most advanced manufacturing process” on Earth. Yes, it is plain bulk silicon, thus it is not High-K/SOI and this claim can be disputed. Then again, Intel always bangs the drum of numbers, and only numbers will count when the company regains the lead. When it’s following TSMC, then it is usually talk about materials such as brilliant implementation of Hafnium for High-K process.

40nm GPU will overthrow Intel and AMD as makers of most advanced chips on the market, with their respective CPUs being manufactured in 45nm. Intel will briefly recapture the crown with its 32-nm processors in Q1’2010, but Nvidia and ATI will launch 28nm chips in Q2’10. When ATI/AMD GPG moves to The Foundry Company, Nvidia will remain sole proprietor of TSMC’s most advanced lines and is set to continue GPU lead over CPU manufacturing.

Both parts are taking advantage of the fact that 40nm process gives tremendous power-saving and cost-saving (size of the die) and putting additional architectural improvements. According to Hardware-Infos, who managed to acquire sample cards through mysterious ways, RV740 should be considered as die-shrink of 55nm RV730, but the fact of the matter is that number of Shader processors doubled to 640 Processors (4600 features 320 SP). Memory controller remained at 128-bit, connecting to 512-1024MB GDDR5 memory clocked at 800-900 MHz (3.2-3.6 GT/s, “GHz”), resulting in memory bandwidth of 51.2-57.6 GB/s. Number of texture units is staying at 32, but the number of ROP units is now set at just eight, e.g. just eight pixels leave the GPU per clock.

RV790 features unknown number of Shader Processors, but given the fact that the company decided to keep the GPU clock on the same level as Radeon 4800 series (750 MHz), you could put a wager of 1200 or even more units. Currently, RV790 samples are floating around with 1GB GDDR5 memory from now-defunct Qimonda at 900-950 MHz in QDR mode (3.6-3.8 GT/s). Combining that memory with 256-bit memory controller will result in 115-122 GB/s of available bandwidth. A lot of rumors are flying around what the final specs are, but you can expect that AMD will keep the fixed-function AntiAliasing hardware that worked so greatly with Radeon 4800, offering true “free” 8xAA.

New line-up is expected to debut during Q1’2009, most probably on CeBIT – according to our sources in executive ranks, organizing a dedicated press event at troubled financial times is considered a waste of money. Still, PR department is fighting for their budgets, because at the end of the day, dedicated press event is believe it or not, the cheapest way of getting the message through, putting all execs together at one spot and achieving the maximum effect.

We’ll see, but one thing is for certain. ATI wants the crown back from Nvidia, and the company isn’t going to remain silent.

UPDATED February 1st, 2009, 00:24AM CET – According to a story on Planet 3DNow, AMD GPG decided to brand their 40nm chips as Radeon 5000 series. Apparently, the company changed its mind when it comes to marking their products. Originally, ATI’s products went up as they would implement newer versions of DirectX, but that is now changed and tied to manufacturing process and the architecture itself. I wish to thank Sysfried for this link.

The post UPDATE: AMD prepares Radeon 5600 and Radeon 5800 appeared first on VR World.