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Submission + - AMD R9 290X "up to 1GHz" tests like 727 MHz (base), 850-880 MHz (boost).

Submitted by Phopojijo
Phopojijo writes: The recently released AMD Radeon R9 290X has an advertised shader clock rate of "up to 1GHz". The card brought formerly $1000-level performance down to a $550 price point. Its benchmarks tend to fluctuate wildly, however, based on the card's ability to maintain an intended maximum temperature of 95C. By analyzing across a variety of fan speeds, AMD's default settings are characteristic of a 727 MHz base clock with an average boost to 850-880 MHz. At these defaults, the card will not maintain 1GHz for more than a couple of minutes (or less).

Submission + - Battlefield 4 DRM Locking Part Of North America Out Of Its Release Date.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On the whole, Battlefield 4 had a reasonable launch. The have clearly learned from their past experiences with Battlefield 3 and, more notably, SimCity. Still, some customers are unable to access the game (until presumably October 30th at 7PM EDT, 39 hours after launch) because they are incorrectly flagged by region-locking. Do regional release dates help diminish all the work EA has been putting into Origin with their refund policy and live technical support? Should they just take our money and deliver the service before we change our minds?

Submission + - AMD Radeon R9 290X Fixes Pacing with New CrossFire

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: AMD is releasing its fastest single GPU graphics card today, the $549 R9 290X based on a new, 6.2 billion transistor GPU called Hawaii. The brand new part has 2,816 stream processors and has a peak theoretical performance of 5.6 TFLOPS. PC Perspective has done a full round of testing on the card to see where it stacks up and it does in fact beat the GeForce GTX 780, a card that costs $100 more. In fact, it also compares well to the $999 GTX TITAN flagship. Maybe more interesting is the completely redesigned CrossFire integration that no longer uses a bridge and fixes the CrossFire + Eyefinity/4K pacing issues that have plagued AMD for some time. As it turns out, with this new hardware, 4K tiled display CrossFire appears to be corrected.

Submission + - Next Gen Graphics and Process Migration: 20 nm and Beyond (pcper.com)

Submitted by JoshMST
JoshMST writes: So why are we in the middle of GPU-renaming hell? AMD may be releasing a new 28 nm Hawaii chip in the next few days, it is still based on the same 28 nm process that the original HD 7970 debuted on nearly two years ago. Quick and easy (relative terms) process node transitions look to be a thing of the past with 20 nm lines applicable to large ASICs not being opened until mid-2014. This covers the issues that we have seen, that are present, and that which will be showing up in the years to come. It is amazing how far that industry has come in the past 18 years, but the challenges ahead are greater than ever.

Submission + - ASUS PQ321Q Monitor Brings Multi-Stream Tiled Displays Forward (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: While 4K displays have been popping up all over the place recently with noticeably lower prices, one thing that kind of limits them all is a 30 Hz refresh rate panel. Sony is selling 4K consumer HDTVs for $5000 and new-comer SEIKI has a 50-in model going for under $1000 but they all share that trait — HDMI 1.4 supporting 3840x2160 at 30 Hz. The new ASUS PQ321Q monitor is a 31.5-in 4K display built on the same platform as the Sharp PN-K321 and utilizes a DisplayPort 1.2 connection capable of MST (multi-stream transport). This allows the screen to include two display heads internally, showing up as two independent monitors to some PCs that can then be merged into a single panel via AMD Eyefinity or NVIDIA Surround. Thus, with dual 1920x2160 60 Hz signals, the PQ321Q can offer 3840x2160 at 60 Hz for a much better viewing experience. PC Perspective got one of the monitors in for testing and review and found that the while there were some hurdles during initial setup (especially with NVIDIA hardware), the advantage of a higher refresh rate made the 4K resolution that much better.

Submission + - New Apple MacBook Air features next generation ultra fast PCI-Express SSD (pcper.com)

Submitted by boxgamex
boxgamex writes: Apple may have only mentioned improvements to battery life for the Haswell-based MacBook Air at the WWDC Keynote on Monday, but that isn't all that has improved with this machine. Initial testing reveals Apple has switched to PCI-Express based SSDs for this new Air, which at over 700MB/s read speed outperform the theoretical maximum bandwidth of SATA. After digging into the hardware, it seems this may be just a preview of what is to come from M.2 NGFF SSDs, which are expected to come be released for PC platforms this Summer.
AMD

Submission + - GPU Frame Capture Performance Testing Clouds Multi-GPU Results (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: A month ago for the release of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan a new GPU performance technology was introduced called Frame Rating. While at the time only a single game and single instance was tested, PC Perspective has since circled back with a full set of results on both NVIDIA and AMD high-end graphics cards in single and dual-GPU configurations. By using an external hardware-based capture system that can record uncompressed data at 2560x1440 @ 60 Hz and then post-processing software that analyzes the data after capture, the new performance results paint a startling different picture of multi-GPU scenarios, especially from AMD's CrossFire. PC Perspective has also included slow-motion captured video of the games in question for side-by-side comparison and information on how Vertical Sync can affect the results for these new test methods.
AMD

Submission + - Hardware-based capture measures GPU performance in a new light (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: A new system for testing performance of graphics cards that has been in the works for over a calendar year is being fully unveiled today, called Frame Rating. This technology uses hardware-based capture to record the output from the graphics card and GPU directly and then uses post processing to measure performance and experiences as the user would see them, not through basic logs recorded on the gaming system itself. This much more accurate representation of performance has revealed some interesting highs and some unfortunate lows for graphics vendors already. AMD's CrossFire and Eyefinity technologies take the brunt of the damage: Frame Rating proves that in many games adding a second GPU to your system will result in essentially zero improvement in performance, frame rate or animation smoothness. PC Perspective has detailed the new testing methodology and posted the first sets of data across several PC titles.
Censorship

Submission + - Will Windows RT Be the Future? (pcper.com) 1

Submitted by
Phopojijo
Phopojijo writes: "Microsoft might be on their way to removing legacy support from future versions of Windows. With the recent announcement from Bill Gates that Microsoft intends to evolve Windows Phone and Windows 8 into a single platform, there could be a time where the Windows Store becomes our only way to install applications on our PCs. Would this mean a government could request for Microsoft to block and remove encryption applications or games which discuss same-sex relationships from your PC? At some point will we be reliant on open-source operating systems to preserve personal computing?"
DRM

Submission + - Video Games Do Not Want to Be Art? (pcper.com)

Submitted by
Phopojijo
Phopojijo writes: "Art of the past only persists today because they were based on timeless platforms such as canvas and inks. Fans want their medium to be art and will fight any critic who refutes the artistic merits of video games. These gamers also ignore community-supported platforms in exchange for proprietary and often intentionally disposable ones such as consoles and DRM in the name of simplicity and fear over piracy or used sales. If video games are intrinsically valuable art – shouldn’t we be fighting for it to be accessible forever like all other art mediums by using platforms like Linux or BSD?"
AMD

Submission + - HSA Foundation founded by AMD, ARM, Ti, Imagination, and MediaTek (pcper.com)

Submitted by
Phopojijo
Phopojijo writes: "To wrap up his “The Programmers Guide to a Universe of Possibility” keynote during the 2012 AMD Fusion Developer’s Summit, Phil Rogers of AMD announced the establishment of the HSA Foundation. The foundation has been instituted to create and maintain open standards to ease programming for a wide variety of processing resources including discrete and integrated GPUs. Founding members include ARM, Texas Instruments, Imagination, MediaTek, Texas Instruments, as well as AMD. Parallels can be drawn between this and AMD’s “virtual gorilla” initiative back from the late 1990’s."
Intel

Submission + - The Decay of the Atom Processor (pcper.com)

Submitted by
Phopojijo
Phopojijo writes: "It is easy to pass judgment on the netbook form factor but the problem was always its processing ability — the form factor just inherited the blame by association. Low-voltage adaptations of mainstream architectures will soon collide against ARM and leave low-power x86 architectures with no legitimate room to exist: “Intel is likely to continue on with Atom in computers, but only because it will be easy to offer the fruits of its smartphone endeavors in desktop and laptop PCs. There’s no particular reason for Intel to kill it but – in regards to laptops and desktops – there’s no reason for Intel to make it better.”"

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