If you ever worked with combining multiple pictures or creating textures, most of you remember what royal PITA it was. But, with imageSynth utility from Luxology that became a thing of the past – and it didn’t stop there. Luxology just announced imageSynth 2, application that works either as plug-in for Adobe Photoshop CS3/CS4, or as a stand-alone application. Maker claims that imageSynth brings 10x speed increase over previous version, but we wonder how that could be if the company is not supporting GPU acceleration. Well…the secret lies in the fact that Luxology works hard on optimizing threading on all the CPUs, so a quad-core
ASUS goes for Dell’s jugular with four new FullHD LCD displays
If there was any doubt that two Taiwanese giants are going for Dell and HP, the gloves have come off. After ASUS establishing netbook market with its EEE PC and Acer overtaking HP in notebooks sales in EMEA region, both manufacturers are now complementing their line-ups with attractive add-ons. In case of ASUS, the company announced two 24″ and two 25.5″ displays. All four displays feature resolution of 1920×1200 pixels, 20.000:1 contrast ration, 2ms (gtg) response time, HDMI input and Splendid video engine. What makes this very interesting is the explanation what Splendid video engine actually is. It is obvious that Splendid is a name
New “nForce for AMD” chipsets take shape under GeForce name
Last week, Chinese site Expreview.com published a story about the new generation of nForce chipsets for AMD processors. We managed to find more details through course of the weekend. For starters, the lineup will consist out of three (not two) chipsets with various capabilities. MCP82-S1, MCP82-S2 and MCP82-S3 will round the lineup, all targeting their respective markets (high-end, mainstream and entry-level). The S1 and S2 will support SLI, while S3 targets lucrative OEM/ODM deals – our sources indicate that this variant will be pitched as a successor to GeForce 6150 line that conquered many Dells, HPs and Acers out there. MCP82-S1 targets the high-end, with
Spore and Warhammer Online rule the sales charts
I’ve been following NPD Sales charts for ages now, and it was always interesting to see how long can a title hold on them. Blizzard and EA/Maxis are long standing legends – in the past eight years, there haven’t been a weekly or monthly sales chart where at least one title from these companies didn’t occupy spot or two. NPD Group decided to combine their weekly charts into monthly ones, probably for easier tracking – and making annual reports will be much more easier. But getting back on the subject, sales results for North America are quite interesting: Top 5 PC Games for September 2008
Folding@Home team update, new stats page ;)
I’ve been a fan of distributed computing since late 1990s, with SETI@Home running on every computer that I ever had. However, the real attractive proposition to me was running distributed computing applications on graphics cards. GPUs are much more efficient in stream computing than any CPU you could find, and I’ve tried DC apps on computers with DEC Alpha, Intel Pentium onwards, AMD K6-II onwards etc etc., but biggest jump in performance was Folding@Home on ATI Radeon X1800XTX graphics card. With the launch of this blog and the new website, I’ve decided to launch a new group, number 69864. Current name is the name of
AMD reports $1.78B revenue, records first profit in years (non-GAAP)
On Thursday, AMD reported its Q3’2008 results and the company managed to “Experience Black” (marketing slogan behind 4870X2). When we look at overall (non-GAAP) numbers, AMD filed $1.776 billion revenue and a profit of 80 million dollars. This was the first filed profit in seven quarters, and in a way, Hector J. Ruiz kept its promise of AMD becoming profitable by Q3’08. However, the results that Wall Street calculates are GAAP ones, and without that one-time revenue of $191 million (selling equipment to JSC Angstrem, as I first reported here), the company filed a net loss of $67 million on a revenue of $1.56 billion.
Nvidia’s new drivers will finally fix 4 year old “bug”
One of key issues with multi-GPU configurations is the lack of dual-monitor capability. Now, this is not a new issue – ever since SLI and CrossFire came out in 2004/5, we were promised earth-shaking gaming experience omitting the fact that more users have two monitors than they have two graphics cards. So, if you were a high-end user and had for instance, GeForce 6800 Ultra or GTX 280 in SLI, result was unchanged – second monitor would remain blank. Same thing was the case with ATI’s CrossFire. All in all, “user-unfriendly” solutions. A while ago, I reported about Nvidia making Big Bang II drivers, drivers
How to name a SVGA projector today? It’s a Wii projector!
Going through dozens of e-mails can only lead to depression… or revelation. I’ve encountered a press release stating that BenQ is releasing two short throw DLP projectors: MP512ST and MP522ST. The former is targeting gaming market with quotes such as “ideal for playing the Wii”, while the latter should excel in business and education. Or so the press release goes. The fact of the matter is that MP512ST is geared towards the Wii because it sports a resolution of 800×600 pixels (SVGA), and if it stayed there, we would be happy. But the release continued quoting that an 800×600 projector is ideal for “PlayStation 3
nForce is dead: Zotac releases its GeForce 9300 motherboard
I saw first motherboards based on MCP7-series chipset back on Computex 2007. Yup, after a year and half nVIDIA is finally releasing MCP7 series to market, featuring GeForce 8-class GPU for Intel processors. It is hard to understand what kind of problems delayed this part for over a year, but one of theories could be that nVIDIA didn’t want to cannibalize the sales of GeForce 8400 and 8500 series, which is give-or-take the performance that you’re going to get with GeForce 9300/9400 chipset. Zotac is well known manufacturer of nVIDIA graphics cards, and also known as the company that produced highest clocked 8800Ultra, 8800GT and
The fastest growing FTTH market: US of A
Recently, I received a report from TXP Corporation about the growth of FTTH (Fiber To The Home) market in the North America. According to their report, US now has 3.3 million households that have access to the fastest Internet connection (25, 50 Mbps) in the North America. In the report, it states that the number of installed FTTH households grew by 33% between Q4’07 and Q1’08, with continuous growth between Q1’08 and Q2’08, and same pattern even increasing in Q3. Well, it was about time. I’ve checked these claims with my friends over at Verizon and who’d knew, US is actually moving to become a
Looking forward to Left 4 Dead
I just got news from Doug Lombardi that Left 4 Dead is available for pre-purchase. All that I can say is – YES!!! It’s been a while since we saw a good co-op game that will shake up small LAN parties (such as office brawls), and this game has everything that’s needed. I had the opportunity to play the game at this years’ E3 Summit in Los Angeles, and honestly – I was delighted. The game has everything that’s needed to be great: it is fun, fast-paced, survival horror themed game. Of course, Left 4 Dead has single player and multiplayer modes, but the real
Adobe ships GPU-accelerated Creative Studio 4, Flash Player 10
After reading countless previews and hearing the marketing buzz about some GPU-accelerated aspects of Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects and others, Adobe Systems announced immediate availability of whole CS4 package (Amazon.com still thinks these versions will be available in November). CS4 is divided into six new versions, as well as stand-alone versions. Adobe divided the packages to suit different content creators, thus package is divided into following: CS4 Design Premium CS4 Design Standard CS4 Design Web Premium CS4 Design Web Standard CS4 Design Production Premium CS4 Design Master Collection As you can imagine, these packages somewhat nothing else but “Premiere-in, Premiere-out” and so on. Professionals will
VP of networking company sees no future for WiMAX as we know it
In a presentation given by Dr. Albert Yeh, VP of OvisLink Corporation, some harsh words were spoken on the upcoming network standards. OvisLink Corporation is mostly known as the umbrella company for the AirLive brand, progressive networking brand that is gaining a lot of ground on emerging markets, thanks to innovative products such as WMU-6500FS, device more know as the pr0n box, “smart” hard drive enclosure that includes integrated BitTorrent, iTunes, e-Donkey and similar clients. Getting back on the subject, main aspect of the presentation was put on manufacturing ecologically sustainable devices. This should be achieved by using environmentally friendly and recycled materials. Talking about
EVGA completely moving to custom board design
One of largest Nvidia partners out there decided the time has come to turn the screw back on engineering, and reduce its dependency on current parts that are mostly built by Flextronics and similar ODM giants. The company acquired engineers from now-defunct EPoX and started working hard on creating products that are not of now typical “sticker stamper” kind. After introducing the 790i Ultra SLI FTW motherboard with own layout and features (digital power regulation, to name a few), EVGA is now coming to market with a series of own-designed graphics cards. Under a current plan, every product is slowly being upgraded to an own
Atom helps Intel to score a big one, beats expectations
In a stark contrast to conservative projections by analysts, Intel (stock: INTC) announced that the company achieved a revenue of $10.22 billion, beating the estimates. Chipzilla achieved clear two billion dollar profit in Q3’08, or 35 cents per share. The reason for this 12% jump in profits is no other than Intel Atom, chip that reportedly costs only $8 to make, giving Intel additional $200 million in its Q3 revenue. Without Atom and associated chipsets, their revenue would dip below 10 billion. This only goes to show that Intel executed properly and went for the segment of market that has just started to expand. Cheap
Congrats to Jadranko Jelavic
It’s been a while since we last met, but it is always to hear good news when friends earn respect in their businesses. It is my great pleasure to announce that Jadranko Jelavic became General Director of Sales for the entire distribution team at takeMS International AG. Prior to this role, Jadranko was responsible for Eastern and South East Europe. Thanks to his team effort, the company expanded to 25 countries in the afore mentioned regions, and the logical step for the takeMS management was to promote Jadranko to the role of General Director of Sales for the whole company. “We enjoy having won Jadranko
Microsoft abandons Vista name, welcome Windows 7
After Windows 2002 being named XP and Windows 6 becoming Vista, I thought Microsoft was thoroughly lost in the world of consumer naming. But luckily, the company decided to do a U-turn on naming convention and Windows 7 will become known as – “Windows 7”. In a newsletter send to members of partnering community, Microsoft stated that on PDC 2008 conference in Los Angeles, the company will give out pre-beta versions of their new operating system, “Windows 7”. This name was confirmed by Mike Nash, VP for Windows Product Management. You can read more on TG Daily.
OpenOffice 3.0 brings Sun servers to their knees
It looks like Sun has finally found a package that will bring its servers to their knees. The company just released OpenOffice 3.0 package of office applications and found their servers to barely handling heavy load from thousands of interested users. While loading www.openoffice.org, I was greeted with HTML 1.0 looking page and a following statement: “Apologies – our website is struggling to cope with the unprecedented demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org. The technical teams are trying to come up with a solution.” All in all, not exactly unexpected. OpenOffice 3.0 is the most popular office package after Microsoft Office, and it
