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Submission + - $3000 GeForce GTX TITAN Z Tested, Less Perf than $1500 R9 295X2 (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: NVIDIA announced its latest dual-GPU flagship card, the GeForce GTX Titan Z, at the GPU Technology Conference in late March with a staggering price point of $2999. Since that time, AMD announced and released the Radeon R9 295X2, its own dual-GPU card with a price tag of $1499. PC Perspective finally put the GTX Titan Z to the test and found that from a PC gamers view, the card is way overpriced for the performance it offers. At both 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 (4K) the R9 295X2 offered higher and more consistent frame rates sometimes by as much as 30%. The AMD card also only takes up two slots (though it does have a water cooling radiator to worry about) while the NVIDIA GTX Titan Z is a three-slot design. The Titan Z is quieter and uses much less power, but gamers considering a $1500 or $3000 graphics card selection are likely not overly concerned with power efficiency.

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?

Comment Re:Why dribble about GPUs? (Score 4, Interesting) 91

by JoshMST (#45218545) Attached to: Next-Gen GPU Progress Slowing As It Aims for 20 nm and Beyond
Because GPUs are the high visibility product that most people get excited about? How much excitement was there for Haswell? Not nearly as much as we are seeing for Hawaii. Did you actually read the entire article? It actually addresses things like the efficacy of the Intel 3D Tri-Gate, as well as alternatives such as planar FD-SOI based products. The conclusion there is that gate-last planar FD-SOI is as good, if not better, than Intel's 22 nm Tri-Gate. I believe I also covered more info in the comments section about how there are certain geometries on Intel's 22 nm that are actually at 26 nm, so AMD at 28 nm is not as far behind as some thought in terms of density.

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 + - Multi-Display Gaming Artifacts Shown with AMD, 4K Affected Too (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: Multi-display gaming has really found a niche in the world of high-end PC gaming, starting when AMD released Eyefinity in 2009 in three panel configurations. AMD expanded out to 6 screen options in 2010 and NVIDIA followed shortly thereafter with a similar multi-screen solution called Surround. Over the last 12 months or so GPU performance testing has gone through a sort of revolution as the move from software measurement to hardware capture measurement has taken hold. PC Perspective has done testing with this new technology on AMD Eyefinity and NVIDIA Surround configurations at 5760x1080 resolution and found there were some substantial anomalies in the AMD captures. The AMD cards exhibited dropped frames, interleaved frames (jumping back and forth between buffers) and even stepped, non-horizontal vertical sync tearing. The result is a much lower observed frame rate than software like FRAPS would indicate and these problems will also be found when using the current top end dual-head 4K PC displays since they emulate Eyefinity and Surround for setup.

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.
AMD

Submission + - AMD licenses ARM CPU for Security - First step into a larger world (pcper.com)

Submitted by
Vigile
Vigile writes: "Today AMD is making an announcement that is the first step in a drastic transition for the company by integrating an ARM Cortex A5 processor on the same die with upcoming Fusion APUs. Starting in late 2013, all AMD APUs (processors that are combinations of x86 cores and Radeon SIMD arrays) will also integrate an ARM Cortex A5 processor to handle security for online transactions, banking, identity protection and DRM integration. The A5 is the smallest Cortex processor available, and that would make sense to use it in a full APU so it will not take up more than 10-15 square mm of die space. This marks the first time AMD has licensed ARM technology and while many people were speculating a pure ARM+Radeon hybrid, this move today is being described as the "first step" for AMD down a new road of dexterity as an IP-focused technology company with their GPU technology as “the crown jewel”. So while today's announcement might focus on using ARM processors for security purposes, the future likely holds much more these two partners."
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."
Microsoft

Submission + - New Xbox 360 S Uses Less Power, Less Noisy (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: Microsoft unveiled a new Xbox 360 S console at E3 this month and without delay the new machine has been dissected and tested. The most dramatic change is the move to a single chip CPU/GPU hybrid processor that is apparently being built on the 45nm process technology from GlobalFoundries, AMD's spun-off production facilities. With the inclusion of the new processor the Xbox 360 S uses much less power (about 30-40%) compared to previous generation machines and also turns out to be much quieter as a result of a single, larger fan. PC Perspective has photographic evidence of the tear down with comparisons between this Valhalla platform and the older Falcon system along with videos of the reconstruction process and noise comparisons.
Data Storage

Submission + - Western Digital Enters World of Solid State (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: The solid state disk market keeps crowding but the Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue SSD marks the first offering from a player that currently dominates the market of traditional spindle-based hard drives. It was a year ago this month that WD purchased SiliconSystems for $65m, a small enterprise level SSD vendor that has developed its own storage controller. Western Digital obviously made the move to prepare the company for the inevitable situation it finds itself in today: solid state has surpassed traditional media in performance and will likely soon become the mainstream storage choice for computers. PC Perspective has put the first consumer-level SSD option from one of the kings of HDDs through the wringer and found the drive to be a solid first offering with performance on par with the some of the better solutions in the market while not quite fast enough to take away the top seating offerings from Intel and others. Western Digital has seen the writing on the wall; the only question is when the other players in the hard drive market will as well.
Data Storage

Submission + - 'Limited Edition' SSD has fastest storage speed (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: The idea of having a "Limited Edition" solid state drive might seem counter intuitive but regardless of the naming, the new OCZ Vertex LE is based on the new Sandforce SSD controller that promises significant increases in performance, along with improved ability to detect and correct errors in the data stored in flash. While the initial Sandforce drive was called the "Vertex 2 Pro" and included a super-capacitor for data integrity the Vertex LE drops that feature to improve cost efficiency. In PC Perspective's performance tests the drive was able to best the Intel X25-M line in file creation and copying duties, had minimal fragmentation or slow down effects and was very competitive in IOs per second as well. It seems that current SSD manufacturers are all targeting Intel and the new Sandforce controller is likely the first to be up to the challenge.
Portables

Submission + - Optimus transforms notebook power, performance (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: Transformers jokes aside, NVIDIA's newest technology offering hopes to radically change the way notebook computers are built and how customers use them. The promise of both extended battery life and high performance mobile computing has seemed like a pipe dream and even the most recent updates to "switchable graphics" left much to be desired in terms of the user experience. Having both an integrated and discrete graphics chip in your notebook does little good if you never switch between the two. Optimus allows the system to seamlessly and instantly change between IGP and discrete NVIDIA GPUs based on the task being run including games, GPU encoding or Flash video playback. Using new software and hardware technology notebooks using Optimus can power on and pass control to the GPU in a matter of 300ms and power both the GPU and PCIe lanes completely off when not in use. This can be done without being forced to reboot or even close out your applications making it a hands-free solution for the customer.
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - OnLive Gaming Service Gets Lukewarm Approval (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: When the OnLive cloud-based gaming service was first announced back in March of 2009, it was met with equal parts excitement and controversy. While the idea of playing games on just about any kind of hardware thanks to remote rendering and streaming video was interesting, the larger issue remained of how OnLive planned to solve the latency problem. With the closed beta currently underway, PC Perspective put the OnLive gaming service to the test by comparing the user experiences of the OnLive-based games to the experiences with the same locally installed titles. The end result appears to be that while slower input-dependent games like Burnout: Paradise worked pretty well, games that require a fast twitch-based input scheme like UT3 did not.
AMD

Submission + - AMD Delivers DX11 Graphics Solution for under $100 (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: The new AMD Radeon HD 5670 launches today and it is the first graphics card to bring DirectX 11 support to the sub-$100 market and offers next-generation features to almost any budget. The Redwood part (as it was codenamed) is nearly 3.5x smaller in die size than the first DX11 GPUs from AMD while still offering support for DirectCompute 5.0, Eyefinity multi-monitor gaming and of course DX11 features (like tessellation) in upcoming Windows gaming titles. Unfortunately, performance on the card is not revolutionary even for the $99 graphics market though power consumption has been noticeably lowered while keeping the card well cooled in a single slot design.
Intel

Submission + - US FTC Sues Intel for Anti-Competitive Practices (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: And here Intel was about to get out of 2009 with only a modestly embarrassing year. While Intel and AMD settled their own antitrust and patent lawsuits in November, the FTC didn't think that was good enough and has decided to sue Intel for anti-competitive practices. While the suits in Europe and in the US civil courts have hurt Intel's pocketbook and its reputation, the FTC lawsuit could very likely be the most damaging towards the company's ability to practice business as they see fit. The official hearing is set for September of 2010 but we will likely here news filtering out about the evidence and charges well before that. One interest charge that has already arisen: that Intel systematically changed its widely used compiler to stunt the performance of competing processors!

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