According to a post on Linkedin, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) is hiring CPU engineers to work on optimizing the CPU side of its Catalyst driver packages.

AMD is seeking someone to work on multi-threader optimizations to write code to cut through CPU bottleneck and work with software vendors to optimize drivers for their titles.

Compared to the competition, AMD’s drivers are considered to be somewhat bloated and CPU intensive. AMD’s Mantle API, which offers the ability for developers to code close-to-metal is a partial solution to cut through the driver bloat but not everyone wants to implement it.

Most likely these engineers would be working on developing the drivers for AMD’s upcoming Radeon R300 series, which has been the subject of numerous rumors both founded and unfounded. Perhaps this card will leapfrog past Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) in the driver game.

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While at Pepcom-San Francisco we met with Kington’s David Leong and Shealyn Johnson. They introduced us to their HyperX Cloud gaming headset. Kingston developed the Hyper X Cloud headset with the assistance of Qpad, a peripheral company based in Sweden. Qpad has helped others launch their headsets. That immediately raised our expectations because of the positive reviews for the Qpad QH-90. The Hyper X Cloud headset is aimed at price conscious “pro” gamers. Pricing has a wide range from $80 at Amazon to $114 at Tiger Direct. BSN* considers the price point something that made us want to take a closer look.

The packaging has a colorful format in English and several Romance languages with the features listed on the back.

HyperX Cloud Headset Shelf Boxing

The specifications, as expected, are better than a lot of lower priced headsets, starting with closed ear cups, 53mm drivers, and frequency response range of 15Hz to 25,000Hz.

Slide the outer box off of the inner matt black box and you notice it has the stylized HyperX logo. Kingston put time and effort into showing that this headset is going to be special.

We lifted the lid of the inner box and found an introduction letter by HyperX General Manager, Anres “G8V1k1ng” Willumsen. Under the letter is a foam pad covering the parts. The inner box is also foam padded and at one end is a cover, again with the HyperX logo, which hides the carry pouch and a collection of cables. Software to control volume and tone was missing.

G8V1k1ng Introduction to HyperX Team

Under the foam pad are all the goodies in their own plastic bags. Kingston really did themselves proud in packing this product.

The detachable microphone has its own slot inside the black inner box as does the control box which has a one meter braded extension cord. The airline adapter has its own spot in the upper corner of the box. Additional cables are inside a black mesh padded bag.

All the parts in full view

A volume control wheel and a multi-function button are on the side of the control box. The multi-function button can answer or hang up a phone call when attached to a smart phone and pause music when attached to a music player. The Y-cord, two-to-one adapter that lets you use the headset with a smartphone or tablet.

There is a two meter extension cord with color-coded male ends, and the airline seat’s sound adapter. The Y-cord, two-to-one adapter plugs into the dual-prong airline adapter for those long overseas plane rides.

The Kingston HyperX Cloud is a well-built headset. The aluminum head band has foam padding and is covered in stitched soft leather with the HyperX logo. The headband is flexible, yet has a gentle clamping on your head. Several different people tried the headset and it accommodated sizes from youngsters to full-sized football player. The headband connects the closed ear cups with a hinge and there are braided cables to each cup.

There are optional soft velour cups for the headset. They will change the sound because they are permeable. One problem I had was it took me nearly an hour to switch from the leather ones to the velour and back to the leather ones. I would not recommend trying this just before you sit down to play a game or listen to music. The slot for slipping the elasticized edges of the cups back into the cups slot is a really tight fit which is good for listening, but difficult for changing out.

The microphone has a foam windscreen cover with a flexible six-inch boom. In the photo below you see the small plug that can be inserted into the left ear cup where the microphone plugs in.

How does music sound? Everybody hears sound differently. Younger people have better hearing than us older folks. Also how much variation in musical styles you are familiar with will affect your expectations.

When I first tried the Kingston HyperX Cloud headset, I plugged it into the ASUS A55M-AUSB motherboard. I found that neither the treble highs, the bass lows, nor the volume matched my expectations. Next I tried the ASUS F2A85M Pro motherboard which was only a small amount better. Finally, I switched to the MSI A88XM-E45 gaming motherboard and I got the performance I was looking for. I immediately noticed the difference in symphonic music with the clear separation of the orchestra’s instruments. Then I switched to hard driving Jimmy Hendrix feedback guitar solos from Woodstock turned up all the way. The headsets didn’t distort.

I tried a couple of different movie DVDs and the actor’s speech was clear over the background sounds. Explosions were distinct and didn’t fuzz out like some inexpensive stand-alone speakers do. Jet engine aircraft sounded like they do on the runway tarmac. Next I plugged them into an older Onkyo receiver and DVD changer using the Y-cord, two-to-one adapter. The response range was very good to my ears. I even dozed off wearing them and awoke without any pain from having them on for a long time. The HyperX Cloud headset uses 60ohms and is capable of 150 watts input. The 53mm drivers are capable of driving sound levels that can be painful. Overall, the sound was bright and BSN* recommends gamers use a proven gaming motherboard with this headset. When I had the velour ear cups installed, although cozy, I noticed a considerable drop in volume and the highs and lows were just not there.

The microphone worked well for Skype and passed the compatibility testing for Dragon’s Naturally Speaking speech-to-text application . The latter can be a problem for some so-called gaming headsets. If as a gamer, you want that ultimate 3D surround-sound experience, you will have to double or triple the price of Kingston’s HyperX Cloud headset. If you play mainly story driven games and isometric games, this headset will do the job. The Kingston HyperX Cloud headset build quality is very good and the comfort level is excellent. It is a very good quality audiophile headset that is being sold to the price conscious gamer.

BSN* recommends Kingston get our value award.

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ARM today announced its latest graphics IP which includes three new GPUs as well as new video and display processors. With the introduction of ARM’s new Mali 8 series graphics IP, the company put a bigger focus on power efficiency and is looking to target products across a broad spectrum of capabilities and power envelopes. ARM’s announcement today introduces the Mali-T860, Mali-T830 and Mali-T820 GPUs as well as the Mali-V550 and Mali-DP550.

The new Mali graphics IP, as shown above, is part of ARM’s effort to make their graphics solutions even more efficient than their predecessors. This includes the ARM Mali-T800 series which is a successor to the currently available Mali-T700 series. The first of this graphics IP, the Mali-T800 series is designed to be more for the mid-range of devices as opposed to the high-end, however, ARM did state that the ARM Mali-T860 is still a high performance part.

The Mali-T860 is, according to ARM, a much more efficient GPU than the previous generations stating that it is 45% more efficient at certain tasks than the T628, which was the company’s high performance part before the T700 series cam out. It also has 16 scalable shader cores, meaning that you don’t have to fully implement all cores in the design, but I suspect most that choose to license it will go for the 16 core design.

ARM also claims support for 4K, which very likely means the ability to display 4K pixels and maybe 4K UIs without much more than that. Because realistically, no mobile platform is really capable of 4K gaming right now unless they upscale 1080P content. Additionally, the GPU will support OpenGL ES 3.1 and OpenCL 1.2, but no Open CL 2.0. There is also going to be DirectX 11.1 support, but no DirectX 11.3 or 12.0 support. And last but not least, they also will support renderscript compute for all of the Android implementations. The lack of OpenCL 2.0 may be due to the fact that these are designed to be more mainstream or because OpenCL 2.0 is so new, but the lack of DirectX 12 is a bit interesting since this GPU will be in products sometime next year, which is around the time of Windows 10 (and DX12) launch.

That brings us to the Mali-T830 and T820 which are ARM Mali’s even more power efficient GPUs designed for the mainstream performance. These GPUs essentially carry many of the same capabilities of the T860 but with only four shader cores and no 4K support. They also lack an advanced tiling unit, which the T860 has. With these ARM Mali graphic chips, the company claims 50% better areal efficiency and 55% faster performance over the T622 generation of ARM Mali graphics, which preceded the current T720 generation of Mali GPUs.

Last but not least, are ARM’s Mali Video and Display processors which are designed to bring ARM’s goal of efficiency all the way from the GPU to the display processor. The way that they achieve this is with their new Mali-V550 and Mali-DP550 processors each designed for high efficiency operation in conjunction with the ARM Mali 800 series GPUs.  As you can see from the slides below, the Mali-V550 also brings HEVC (h.265) encode and decode capability to ARM’s video processors and brings the ability to support multiple standards. The V550 also scales from doing 1080 at 60 FPS with a single video care to 4K at 120 FPS with 8 video cores and it supports multiple simultaneous encode and decode streams.

The Mali-DP550 further enables a lot of what the T860 and V550 can do with improved power and memory efficiency as well as the ability to scale to 4K resolution. ARM is clearly ready to hop aboard the 4K bandwagon, with Qualcomm leading the charge. They also support 3rd party display differentiation which allows for 3rd party/SoC vendor IP into the Mali display pipeline.

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Today’s announcement regarding Mantle is probably the biggest announcement AMD has made around Mantle since they talked about it at GDC in March. Back then, AMD was talking a lot about Mantle’s capabilities and games with Mantle, but they didn’t talk about the expansion of the program much, even though that was probably their most captive audience. In fact, making today’s announcement about the closed beta should probably have been done at GDC as that would have been their target audience and they could have even spoken directly with most of the interested developers. Alas, it was probably not ready yet for a beta release and they waited until today to make the announcement. Either way, you can now head over to an actual beta page for Mantle and access the NDA SDK if you are given access by AMD. In all honesty, Mantle has technically already been a closed-beta program for quite some time and this announcement doesn’t really seem to change much other than create a public page.

You still have to email mantleaccess [at] amd [dot] com in order to even get access to the page and/or SDK and you have to supply them with the following info:

• Name of company
• Name and email of contact point for Mantle access
• Game title(s) or codenames for which you are interested to evaluate Mantle for
• Reasons for requesting Mantle access

Once you’ve emailed them at that email address with that info you MIGHT get access to Mantle and you COULD start developing with Mantle, but there simply aren’t any guarantees since AMD is still selecting who they do and don’t want using Mantle. AMD claims that they’ve already got 40 different developers using Mantle  with this new beta program and are looking to expand it further, even though we don’t exactly know how many developers AMD can really support simultaneously and still do it well. I want Mantle to be successful and to be broadly accepted, but in the end it is still a proprietary graphics API which means it will only work on AMD’s GCN cores and nobody else’s and I’m not sure how many developers are going to want to develop games for both Mantle and DirectX 12.

The post Mantle Goes Beta, Still Not Quite Open to All… appeared first on VR World.

Big Bang II Roadmap, as of May 24, 2008 - beside release date, everything else is inside

A while ago, I reported about Nvidia making Big Bang II drivers, drivers that were supposed to be released during September-October timeframe. With Nvidia releasing 178.24 this week, it is obvious that the era of 170 drivers is coming to a close and that Big Bang II missed its Sep/Oct time frame,
Friends over at VR-Zone got their hands on Forceware 180.10, and guys discovered that Big Bang II is all that Nvidia promised a while ago.

SLI II is actually just SLI+older GeForce acting as PhysX GPU, but check these monitors - photo courtesy of VR-Zone

Besides four year old SLI multi-monitor nuisance,  Big Bang II brings out “SLI 2″ (a.k.a. using an older Geforce card for physics), various performance improvements and will be the first WHQL-ceritified driver to OpenGL 3.0 API.
Of course, unless ATI brings OpenGL 3.0 support with their regular monthly refresh for November,  Catalyst 8.11.

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