The traditional first-person shooter genre finally looks to have matured on the mobile platforms and Modern Combat 3, among the best we’ve ever seen on any mobile platform.

(click on images for fullsize screenshot from 720p HD Android phone)

Modern Combat 3 Fallen Nation and Frontline Commando arrived on Android, after being released on iOS. Definitely these games raise the bar for smartphone shooters.

Gameloft’s Modern Combat 3 Fallen Nation ($6.99) brings the Call of Duty experience to Android phones with nearly a GB of game data download post-apk installation.

Storyline
The storyline, thin as it is, follows that splinter extremist groups from North Korea, Pakistan and Russia have banded together to form the “KPR,” and somehow managed to take over a large swath of the United States. As a member of Phantom Squad, the player undertakes a variety of high-risk covert missions to help turn the tide.

Gameplay, Controls
Playing a FPS on mobile screen can be challenging. You would really need a large display like the one we used here was 5.3″ to make more room for controls and display. Overall, the controls are very sensitive but there is a lag that can make playing game a challenge in fast-aim-shooting scenarios. I think Gameloft understands this problem well, Touchscreens (~50-100ms) are not as fast as your joysticks or keyboards (~5ms) on desktops, and that’s why guns can auto-aim when your gun points close to the target.
We didn’t play much with controller settings, but we did get better results by reducing the sensitivity of controls. That way, we avoided overshooting the orientation.

Graphics
What the game lacks in originality it makes up for in sheer quality. But make no mistake, MC3 is extremely derivative and offers up virtually nothing FPS fans haven’t seen before. The game runs off a proprietary Gameloft engine and looks absolutely fantastic. More importantly, on dual core phones, and tablets, the action remains fast and silky smooth throughout. When playing on an Hummingbird processor or equivalent single-core 1ghz, experience is distracting.

I’ve to admit, this game has the best Physics, motion graphics ever delivered to a game on a smartphone. For our tests, Galaxy Note gave us a good framerate with high detail. We presume game doesn’t run on phone’s native resolution (~ 1280×800) but the graphics were Rich and detailed to the degree we can expect it to deliver a Rich FPS experience.

Audio
We tested the audio with out AudioTechnica M50 headphones. Audio effects in the game are realistic, the gun shots, the explosions, foot steps, everything was detailed to a level we can appreciate. The music and dialogues are clear and easy to distinguish. Audio did seem to use some sort of surround effect, like EAX that we’ve on desktops, but we can be wrong.

Official MC3 Trailer

Video: Modern Combat 3 Android Gameplay on Galaxy Note (1.4Ghz dual core, 1280×800 display)
Note: The video quality is no where near the actual quality of the game. Sorry for the injustice.

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From what we know about A5 from iPad 2, the embedded GPU is quiet powerful and beats dual core phones like Samsung Galaxy SII. SGS2 sports Exonys processor,which is not as powerful as Nvidia Tegra2. So, its pretty much to be seen if iPhone 4s’s A5 can beat Tegra2 GPU. Having played Tegra 2 games on my Galaxy Tab 10.1, I definitely feel Tegra 2 is quiet powerful with games that are designed exclusively for the Tegra platform.

However, Linpack benchmark gives us a totally different story: A5 on iPad 2 beats the hell out of Tegra 2 on Galaxy Tab & Xoom. However, in the real world Gaming on Tegra2 has that PC level feel to them, we hope to see the same in smaller form factor A5 device, iPhone 4S.

image credit: ars

In both CPU and GPU performance Apple’s A5 processor left NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 in the dust, performing at least 2x faster and sometimes even 5x faster. So, the answer to the initial question – Apple is not only able to compete with other chipmakers, but as of now they have the best ARM dual-core processor on the market.

Firemint is teasing us with their latest game designed for iPhone 4s: Real Racing 2. Other than superb graphics, it can streaming not just one device to your big screen, but four – four-player streaming over AirPlay. The apps’ upcoming “Party Play” feature lets an iPad 2 or iPhone 4S play host to up to three additional iOS devices running the game, piping the stream for all four to your boob tube via Apple TV. The update also promises to make the most of the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S’A5 processor, kicking the graphics up a notch.

Apple demoed Infinity Blade 2 at the launch event, the graphics look breathtaking. the dynamic lighting is one of the best we’ve seen on phones, so far.

Update: Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Tegra 3 vs A5 iPad2.

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Qualcomm is claiming that its next generation of Snapdragon chips would beat current generation of processors used in gaming consoles like PS3. That’s a big claim, but noting the facts laid out by Sony PS Vita, these look real.

S4 codenamed ‘Krait’ devices would launched by end of the year. S4 would be first 28nm quad core processors and run Adreno 225 GPU – Quad core cpu + Adreno 225 aim to blow away the fluidity of PS3 graphics.

Qualcomm S

There are four new tiers of processor, named S1 to S4. That “S” stands for “System”, with the number referring to how powerful the chip is.

S1 includes standard handsets such as the HTC Droid Incredible and Sony Ericsson X10i, S2 is featured in more powerful phones like the HTC Thunderbolt and LG Revolution, and S3 powers uberphones and tablets such as the HTC Sensation and HP TouchPad.

Portable Gaming & Future

Portable gaming is going to pave the way to future. Already Android and iPhone has together eaten the major percentage of mobile market and they would start interfering with consoles next year. Imagine this – plug your mobile to a TV and use it like a console or wirelessly stream video. If not in a year, you would see this in practice 2 years from now.

2012 is the year of Quad cores. Nvidia Tegra 3, Snapdragon S4, and Intel is jumping in too. Apple isn’t holding back either, iPad 3 (or iPad 4) and iPhone 4 are going to be A6 quad core too.

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Nvidia is now proudly showcasing the capabilities of its upcoming mobile processor with a new Glow Ball tech demo.Quad-core Kal-El processor, aka Tegra 3, shows it power with  a demo that involoves true dynamic lighting on mobile devices  along with some impressive physics calculations.

This would be a giant step ahead of static lights that we see on mobile games today, Tegra 3 can create light sources that responds realistically to its environment — all rendered in real time.

The demo was done on Honeycomb 3.1 at 1280 x 800 resolution and framerates clearly exceeded 50fps at all moments. All this was made possible using all 4 cpu cores and 12 core GPU thats embedded to Tegra 3 SoC. The production chip will be 25 to 30 percent faster than the one on display today.

Checkout the demo below:

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The AMD HD 6980 is the world’s fastest dual-chip graphics card for screaming-fast gamer PCs, which can be added to a computer and power as many as five displays at full resolution.

AMD had recently launched few new APU (application processor unit) which is a FUSION of CPU & GPU on a single chip.

AMD claims that the new dual-card graphics card can run 1.4 to 1.8 times faster than a card with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics chip. AMD claims you can achieve resolution upto 7680×1600 and still get outstanding speeds. And if you want more, put two of these graphics card ( equals four chips) you can double the performance.

There is a difference in strategy among the two companies: Nvidia typically has the fastest desktop graphics chip, while AMD can take the crown for the fastest graphics card with two chips in it. Its hard to say which one is a better strategy but gamers do get a choice.

AMD HD6990 graphics card, code-name Antilles, has two settings to make overclocking a child’s play. The card drains 450 watts of power, which is substantial but as far as the heat generation is concerned, the design enables each chip to dissipate the same amount of heat.

The total performance of HD 6990  exceeds 5.4 teraflops with each graphics chip having 2.64 billion transistors. It has 4 GB of GDDR5 memory and runs at 830 Mhz (overclockable to 880 megahertz). It has 3,072 stream processors.

AMD is also offering updates to its Gaming Evolved program, which supports open standards for gaming technologies, out of which main one is “Open Stereo 3D“,

AMD has now shipped more than 35 million graphics cards that are compatible with Microsoft’s DX11 graphics standard.

Dirt 2, a DX11 Game:

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The next PlayStation Portable will be a high-end portable equivalent of its next-gen home console, with rich games content to match. Sony has told licensees the device ‘is as powerful as the PlayStation 3′.

The PSP2 is expected to arrive within the Q4 period, perhaps as early as October, and includes a HD screen (720p) with twin-stick controls in the familiar ‘brick’ form factor. The point to be noted here is that this may not be actually be an android device, and rather a custom designed embedded gamer like original PSP. Sony might actually shift the focus of casual gamers to Sony XPERIA Play, an android based Gaming Phone. XPERIA play devices are essentially single core devices with some great GPUs. However, its quiet possible that PSP2 is actually an android device with Tegra2 Dual core processor, but nothing is yet sure about the device.

Sony has already been talking to Game developers, like EA, about launch timings and the first wave of games.

Sony is expected to teases these devices at E3, the big gaming conference.

‘PSP2′ would embed better ways to prevent game piracy by using a media format to make sure retail has a part to play in the console’s lifecycle by selling physical software. The device will also provide access to plenty of downloadable content, smaller games and apps via PSN – and maybe even incorporate a phone, but not as a primary function.

The PSP2 is targeting high-end games, and hardcore gamers. Even though the device will not be actually as powerful as PS3 consoles, they would look so on a smaller & lower res (720p) displays.

There are even some rumored PSP2 specs:

What has not been possible till today was to replicate behavior of very complex particle motions like granular sand flowing through virtual world. I’m sure supercomputers at MIT can do better, but for an end user experience, this is amazing. It’s the Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 engine, as developed by Thiago Costa, and essentially simulates real-life physics. Whether you’re a math geek like me or not, you might end up drooling a bit when you see this.

Particle physics framework that gives control over:

• High friction granular materials
• Incompressible fluids
• Elastic structures
• Plastic deformations
• Cloth flow simulations

More rendering magic on Costa’s blog.

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Top of the line codec performance is showcased by CoreAVC, that lets you play 1080p smoothly, even on low-end machines (1.5Ghz Dual core, low-end GPU).

The new VLC version i.e. 1.1 seems to address these issues. Here are the key features:

GPU-Based Decoding
This is the most coolest one. Technologies like CUDA are closed and limited to NVIDIA only, but VLC opens up the gateway to General Purpose processing using GPU with DxVA (DirectX Video Acceleration API) on Windows Vista and Windows 7, and VAAPI on Linux.

It works for few GPUs and reduces CPU usage pretty well, but on others might not. You can check the GPU compatibility list here. This should improve as we get near to the final version.

Extensions
WITH VLC 1.1, users will be able to write their own plugins for VLC, codenamed Extensions. The difference with other VLC modules consists in the language used to write these Extensions: Lua, a simple a lightweight scripting language, embedded inside VLC media player.

How to use Extensions:
Download the VLC and Lua scripts and copy them to your VLC scripts folder:

• Linux: ~/.local/share/vlc/lua/extensions/
• Windows: %APPDATA%\VLC\lua\extensions

Open the Plugins & Extensions dialog to reload the list of extensions.

New Media library
Till now, VLC was just a player with no library. This is going to change with v1.1. It will now have a searchable music/video database (based on SqlLite) for easy access and management.

New Playlists, MIDI Support
VLC 1.1 has added support for WPL (WMP playlist), ZPL playlists and MIDI sequences.

Windows 7 Integration
Starting from VLC 1.0.0.3, VLC started to feature Windows 7 Integration. VLC 1.1 plans to bring all the cool stuff that is available to Windows Media Player: Preview Thumbnails, recent media, jump lists, etc.

All New User Interface
The New UI will become a lot more prettier and intuitive.

New Visualizations
Milkdrop visualizations come to VLC using Opensource project projectM.

Desktop Wallpaper Overlay
Remember the cool Feature of WinAMP that enabled you to put videos on the desktop behind icons? Same thing is now coming to VLC.

Download VLC 1.1 Download

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Today, Nvidia announced new Mobile GPU GeforceGTX 480M – The Fastest Graphics on Laptops/Mobile.

the new graphics for mobile is a re-spin of its extravagantly overpowered Fermi desktop counter-parts. The chip, scheduled for release mid-next month, will bring whooping 352 CUDA cores and a 256-bit memory interface to up to 2GB of GDDR5 RAM.

In contrast with Nvidia’s current top of the line: 360M, this is a huge step ahead. However, to save on battery juice, the graphics processor speed is nearly halved from the desktop GTX 480, @ 850MHz, the RAM runs on 1,200MHz, and the graphics run at 425MHz. Normally, good GPUs are meant to be >500Mhz.

The Nvidia 480M has great tessellation performance of 897 gigaflops, stepping more than double from Nvidia 360M having only 470 gigaflops.

Nvidia 480M Benchmark

Its hard to give you an idea of the performance at this time, but as per the estimates, it should run games like Just Cause 2 in 1920×1080 Medium-High detail and anti-aliasing OFF around 55-65FPS.

Nvidia 480M GTX Specs

Here are the detailed specs:

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AMD Fusion was planned for 2011, but as per today’s announcement, they seem pretty confident that they would be able to deliver Fusion products to system builders within this year. No doubt, AMD has been talking about Fusion for years, and Intel has already taken the lead (only in time) to AMD by launching its Clarkdale Core i3 and Core i5 CPUs with integrated graphics, even though these use separate CPU and GPU dies combined in a single CPU package.

Related: Indepth Tech analysis of AMD’s CPU+GPU Fusion: Llano

AMD however, is determined to combine everything into one piece of silicon that does both General purpose CPU and Graphics. On being asked, How well is this going to be, AMD’s representative Bob Grim replies:

“I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that, if you look at the history of AMD, when we came out with dual-core processors, we built a true dual-core processor. When we came out with quad-cores, we built a true quad-core processor. What our competitors did was an MCM solution – taking two chips and gluing them together.

There was a fair bit of engineering work involved too, but we just have a tradition of building a piece of silicon from the ground up, in fact the only MCM (Multi-Chip Module) solution I’m aware of that we’ve ever done is on the server side with our 12-core product (the Opteron 6174). [Regardless], what we’ll be launching with Fusion is definitely all on one die.”

AMD believes (and which is logically true) that building a CPU/GPU hybrid chip on a single piece of silicon would yield significant speed advantages if not Tremendous. Apart from that, it should have power and performance advantages because it is done with latest 32nm manufacturing process. The Future is Fusion.

Read more about AMD Fusion

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Well, here is the solution- Get best of both worlds.

Asus’s upcoming AMD-based CrossHair IV Extreme motherboard would satisfy senses. CrossHair IV is the first motherboard to feature Lucid Hydra on Both Intel and AMD platforms and lets users mix and match their graphics cards from either Nvidia or ATI and shoot up the performance.

ATI’s CrossFire and Nvidia’s SLI, do respective multi-GPU systems to boost their graphics-processing power. The current generation of CrossFire, can handle up to four GPUs at once, mixing and matching both single-GPU cards like Radeon HD 4890 and double-GPU cards like the Radeon HD 4870 X2. On the other hand, SLI can support up to three compatible cards at once, or four GPUs with two dual-GPU cards like the GeForce 7950 GX2 or GTX 295.

Crossfire vs. SLI is always an un-solvable argument, no one has ever won the argument.

Lucids Hydra chip will try to solve this debate by supporting different combination of both Radeon and GeForce cards. Last year’s test system used a Radeon HD 4890 and a GeForce 260GTX card working together pretty nicely, the cards consistently performed better than either single card, and often slightly better than one of the dedicated dual-card setups.

MSI launched the first Lucid Hydra motherboard (called Big bang) for Intel chips in January and Asus now brings Lucid Hydra to both platforms with CrossHair IV things would start to look better.

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With GTX 480, NVIDIA is stressing that GTX 480 has a  superior tesselation benchmarked performance over the ATI HD 5870, but it was very levelled for most of the other tasks. Tesselation is all about the extra detail you can embed using DirectX 11 APIs and GTX 480 handles extreme amounts of tesselation pretty well.

Nvidia’s claims makes all sense but we will have to wait for the Real Game Benchmarks to conclude who’s better. But enticing  part in Nvidia‘s tech is the 3D vision, Which makes you jump into the 3D Reality world, which still needs time to mature on ATI platform.

More about: Nvidia Fermi Tesla GPU Insights

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However, now it’s possible to experience DirectX 11 PC gaming within your browser, via a new forthcoming plug-in Vision Engine 8 from Trinigy.

Plugin is called  WebVision, and  will be available for all the usual web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Opera. The idea is that game developers can access all of the advanced features in the Vision Engine, but then enable them in a web browser with “a few easy clicks.”

Using WebVision, game developers will be able to “quickly create stunning 2D or 3D browser-based games complete with animated characters, rich graphics, believable AI and physics.”

How it Works

WebVision consists of two core components: The browser frontend and the Game backend. The frontend is a lightweight browser pluggable addon that takes care of all the communication between the web browser and the game. It checks system requirements, downloads content and validates it before executing it, and handles versioning of critical DLLs. The backend, in turn, is built into the game itself, which is executed by the frontend after download and verification.

Vision Engine v8 supports new PC hardware features, Which includes DirectX 11 and Shader Model 5 features such as tessellation and soft shadows. v8 also can also utilize all the 12 processing threads available with Intel‘s upcoming six-core Gulftown processor.

It will also feature Havok physics that lets Developers simulate static meshes, terrains, rigid bodies and character controllers. The engine already supports Nvidia‘s PhysX.

This is opening a new era in Browser based 3D games  as it provides a fully-fledged game engine with high-end graphics features, extensive scalability, a comprehensive tools set, multi-platform support and interfaces that allow both development in native C++ code and the scripting language Lua.

Trinigy’s Vision Engine is already used by a large number of big-name developers, including Ubisoft, Firefly and Atari, and its engine also forms the basis of plenty of good titles.

The Vision Engine 8 SDK will see public developer release in April, 2010. Stay Tuned.

[courtesy of Thinq]

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Taking it further, Adobe is working on a new selection and masking tools for the upcoming Photoshop CS5. Adobe had removed “Extract filter” in Photoshop CS4, and now Adobe has had plans to bring its various parts back as built-in tools with all new sets of enhancements.

To begin with, Adobe has created a new selection tool that shows new smartness. The automatic selection in Photoshop is pretty accurate in grabbing the edge and smoothening the corners to show off very high detailed stripping for photos where color contrast is hard to seperate, otherwise.

Here is a demo:

Indeed, the tool is able to make a great-looking mask from a low-res photo of a cat and a baby. The detail is pretty high, especially the fur (soft edges) and the corners (hard edges). The user-customization makes it even better.

[via Adobe blog]

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Well, not really. They have been around since years but they haven’t lived up to user expectations. Nvidia will change that with their new Optimus technology (hopefully).

We are not talking about PowerMizer which only changes the clock (and that too is absent in Windows 7). It’s rather about switching between integrated and discrete graphics. Switching between integrated and discrete graphics started with physical toggles, which needed restarts, followed by Windows In-Tray utility that blanked your screen for a while.

Nvidia Optimus promises to make it all easier fro the end-user. When the system detects a 3D application, game or video, the GPU simply turns on. When its done, it goes back to the integrated GPU. There are no flips, banks or noticeable stoppages on the video.

You must be thinking, was it that tough to make this truly transparent all these years? Read on.

Previous graphics had multiplexers (MUXes) connecting both the integrated and discrete graphics to the display. This was costly, and required software to change the system’s rendering between the two graphics systems.

Optimus is a lot cleaner. When discrete GPU needs to switch, it powers up in a split second and copies the results of its frame-buffer to the frame-buffer of the integrated graphics chip over the PCIe bus. Because the system is technically always displaying the contents of the integrated graphics chip’s frame buffer, there is no flicker or blanking of the screen, and no series of MUXes required to connect them both to the display.

The other part of it is the software, which will detect the need and usage that relies on Nvidia’s drivers having application profiles for the games or applications. The technology will ultimately makes its way to other Nvidia driver features that require profiles, like SLI and 3D Vision.

Currently, Optimus supports pretty much all Intel notebooks: Core 2 Duo, Atom N4xx Pine trail, Core i3, i5, and i7. Optimus-enabled GPUs will be found in the GeForce 200M, 300M, Ion, and future-generation notebook GPUs.

Obviously, this not a revolution. This is something we expected to see already, but was absent. Ironically,  the average consumer assumes that switchable graphics already works the way Optimus does, so here we have a technology that finally delivers on customer expectations.

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The Evolution and Features that can mark Success for Windows 7 – Direct X 11 from dx10 and dx9

No doubt, Windows is the best platform for Gaming. Other platforms, due to lack of proper driver support and optimizations (Linux, Mac OS); never lived upto the competition. What we mean by Best platform is: If you have a good Graphics GPU and a great Processor, you can beat the performance of PS3 and Xbox 360.

Note: This article is part of Why Windows 7 series.

Prevalently, DirectX nowadays is a mark of success over the other standards. But, we tend to forget that a decade ago, war waged between Microsoft and Silicon Graphics in the field of 3D APIs has lived for years.  Part of it was to do with the success of the Quake engine, which paved the way to solid support for OpenGL for the makers of 3D cards in their drivers.
Microsoft was starting from scratch, and the learning curve was exponential. So, for several years, Direct3D’s capabilities were below the curve, with an API that many programmers found a lot more confusing than OpenGL’s. With each new version of Direct3D, it gradually began to catch up with OpenGL.

In Direct X8, for the first time, Microsoft’s API did more than just copy from SGI. It actually introduced innovations of its own like support for vertex and pixel shaders. With DirectX 9, Microsoft managed to strike a decisive victory, imposing its API on developers.
There’s a good chance that Direct3D 11 will prove to be a more important page in the history of the API than version 10 was. While Direct3D 10 was a complete revision, brining incompatibility,  Microsoft has now put enough distance between it and this new version to correct the problems raised by the first major overhaul of its API. So you could call Direct3D 11 a major update with potential fixes to new features in Dx10. It re-uses all the concepts that were introduced with Direct3D 10, and is compatible with the preceding version and with the preceding generation’s hardware. It’ll be available not only on Windows 7, but also on Vista. This widens the gaming horizon.

A typical game’s development phase is between 2 and 4 years. So by the time a game that is just now starting its development phase is released, Direct3D 11 will be already well established for PCs, since it’ll run on all PCs shipped with Windows 7 and work on the great majority of PCs running Vista.

The Difference is here:

The best way to praise Directx 11 is to compare it with previous versions. Here is a screenshot that gives you slight idea:

Direct x - dx9 vs. dx11

You might have to concentrate to see what’s changed between the two versions. Hint: It’s not about better shape and natural colors.

Dx10 vs. dx11

In that first shot with the swine flu guy, it seems the one on the right is a bit nicer looking, as in his head and mask don’t look as polygonal as the one on the left. The two vents in his mask are actually round instead of octagonal, and there are more details all around. and the one on right has more Natural colors than amplified ones on left.
The second shot, has more to do with Digital Vibrancy and detail. The right image gives a better lighting to the far off land across the gate.
In the stills, the difference will be minor, but it becomes much more noticeable while you are in the game.

Let’s have a brief look on the Core changes to DirectX 11:

Multi-threaded Rendering

One may ask, “We’ve had multi-core CPUs for several years now and developers have learned to use them. So multi-threading their rendering engines is nothing new with Direct3D 11“. Well, this may come as a surprise to most, but current engines still use only a single thread model for 3D rendering. The other threads are used for sound, decompression of resources, physics, etc. But rendering is a heavy user of CPU time, so why not thread it, too? There are a several reasons, some of them related to the way GPUs operate and others to the 3D API. So Microsoft set about solving the latter and working around the former.

Multithreaded GPU -via TomsHardware

After all, there’s only one GPU (even when several of them are connected via SLI or CrossFire, they create one virtual GPU) and consequently only one command buffer. When a single resource is shared by several threads, mutual exclusion (mutex) is used to prevent several threads from writing commands simultaneously and stepping on each others’ feet. That means that all the advantages of using several threads are canceled out by the critical section, which serializes code.

No API, today, can solve this problem—it’s inherent in the way the CPU and GPU communicate.
But Microsoft is offering an API that can try to work around it, if not solve directly. Direct3D 11 introduces secondary command buffers that can be saved and used later.

Direct 3D 11

So, each thread has a deferred context, where the commands written are recorded in a display list that can then be inserted into the main processing stream. Obviously, when a display list is called by the main thread (the “Execute” in the “Multi-threaded Submission” diagram below) it has to be ascertained that its thread has finished filling it. So there’s still synchronization, but this execution model at least allows some of the rendering work to be parallelized, even if the resulting acceleration won’t be ideal.

As one would anticipate, a large share of the workload was still on the main thread, which was already overloaded. That doesn’t ensure good balance, needed for good execution times. So, Microsoft has introduced a new interface with Direct3D 11: a programmer can create one Device object per thread, which will be used to load resources. Synchronization within the functions of a Device is more finely managed than in Direct3D 10 and is much more economical with CPU time.

Thanks to tessellation, the potential is enormous. It, now,  becomes possible to do without the normal map and implement a level of detail directly on the GPU, allowing the use of very detailed models (several million polygons instead of 10,000 or so with current games)—at least in theory.  Can Direct3D 11 cards avoid these pitfalls practically? It’s too early to say, but in any event not everybody is convinced, and id Software is working on solving the same geometry problem with a completely different approach based on ray casting with voxels.

Nvidia’s CUDA marked an evolution. Microsoft wasn’t about to let the GPGPU market get away and now has its own language for using the GPU. The model they chose, like OpenCL, appears to be quite similar to CUDA, confirming the clarity of Nvidia’s vision. The advantage over the Nvidia solution lies in portability—a Compute Shader will work on an Nvidia or ATI GPU and on the future Larrabee, plus feature better integration with Direct3D, even if CUDA does already have a certain amount of support. But we won’t spend any more time on this subject, even if it is a huge one. Instead, we’ll look at all this in more detail in a few months with a story on OpenCL and Compute Shaders.

Graphics will mark a new step with Direct X 11. Are you in ?

credits: Tomshardware, Gamefest, gizmodo

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In the past Quake 3, Doom and other gaming engines had been ported well to the iPhone. Unreal 3 engine powers modern DirectX 10 games like Gears of War 2, Unreal Tournament 3, now runs on an iPod Touch,  iPhone 3GS.

The game is fully playable using a modified Unreal Tournament level. Mark, the developer behind porting, has created a virtual thumbstick on the for providing screen controls and other controls like tap the screen to shoot.  In practice, the controls work well.

Check it out running:

Surprisingly, the frame rate was great, a smooth gameplay. The game uses OpenGL ES 2.0, the horsepower behind iPhone 3GS.

Epic games have no plans for porting this game officially, so expect this to be only a jailbroken app.

And it’s not just about iPhone support. Mark told anandtech that in CES we’ll see Unreal Engine 3 on another mobile platform, hopefully. Did he mean Nexus one? Running Unreal 3 Engine isn’t a platform specific thing, it’s about bringing Unreal Engine 3 to the entire portable market. For now, Mark is planning to license this gaming engine to general public based on the open SDK available. What we are not sure of is when and how Epic will expanding it’s UE3′s horizon to mobile market.

iPhone 3GS is the first step in mobile gaming with 65nm technology, Intel is coming up with its 32nm chips and Nvidia is pushing mobile graphics too, both targeting to squeeze size and hence increase capabilities. With UE3 on the iPhone, we will eventually see better games on almost every platform, expect the unexpected.

[via Anandtech]

At this year’s SC09 supercomputing trade show in Portland, Oregon, Nvidia unveils its plan for the next-gen Chip ‘Fermi’. Overall, the GPU co-processors aimed at personal supers and massive clusters were the stars of the show. This is something much more powerful than AMD’s Fusion.

The video card versions of the Fermi chips will be called the GeForce 300 M line. Nvidia  is keeping the Tesla brand for its next generation GPU co-processors for workstations and servers. The Fermi chips will be sold under the Tesla 20 brand.

Last month El Reg talked about the architecture.

The SM design contains 32 basic Cuda cores – four times as many found in previous generations of SM – each comprising one integer and one floating-point maths unit. It is able to schedule two groups of 32 threads – a group Nvidia calls a “warp” – at once. The networked cores connect to 64KB of shared L1 cache, also used by four Special Function Units (SFUs) which handle complex maths formulae such as sines and cosines.

One of the 32-core Stream Multiprocessors

image credit

Flavors and Specs:

As per Andy Keane, GM at Tesla supercomputing (Nvidia), the Tesla 20 cards will come in 2 flavors. Nvidia will sell co-processor systems that can plug right into HPC clusters and link to servers through PCI-Express 2.0 links – and at around 130 watts. Keane bristles at anyone who claims that a fully burdened heat budget for a server – not just a microprocessor, but its memory controller (if it is not integrated), its chipset, and its memory – will be any lower.

With the Fermi family of GPUs, Nvidia is adding L1 and L2 caches to the co-processors and is putting ECC memory scrubbing on internal GDDR5 video memory on the card as well as accesses to external server memory. This ECC support, as it turns out, is as important as anything else in the chip if you want to sell GPUs to nuke labs.

The Fermi chip has 512 cores, which is more than twice the cores of the first Tesla GPUs. The Fermis bundle 32 cores together into a streaming multiprocessor that has 64 KB of shared L1 cache. All 512 cores have access to a shared 768 KB L2 cache, and they support the IEEE 754-2008 double precision floating point standard.

In theory, the Fermi chip can address up to 1 TB of memory, but the Tesla C2050 GPU co-processor has 3 GB of GDDR5 memory and double precision floating point performance of 520 gigaflops, costs $2,499. The Tesla C2070 GPU has 6 GB of GDDR5 memory and is rated at 630 gigaflops, costs $3,999. The bang for the buck is best with the smaller unit, which weighs in at $4.81 per gigaflops compared to the $6.35 per gigaflops of the faster GPU.

On the higher Front, a 1U appliance with four of the faster C2070 GPUs delivers 2.52 teraflops of double-precision floating point performance and costs $18,995, or $7.54 per gigaflops.

GPU and Programming

There are two secret stuff in the Fermi GPUs that are going to get HPC freaks thinking about using GPUs.

First one, they will now support Nvidia’s C++ compiler (not just C).

Secondly, a set of new InfiniBand and Tesla drivers that InfiniBand chip maker Mellanox and Nvidia have got together to streamline the movement of data from the InfiniBand ports, to the CPU’s main memory, and then down through the PCI-Express bus to the GPU card.

The way it works now: Data comes in over InfiniBand, works its way into main memory and is copied; before it is moved down to the GPU, it is copied again and that copy is what is moved. The driver changes allow for the data moved into memory to be moved down to the GPU in one fell swoop. The improvements? They ahve been able to demonstrate a 30 percent speedup.

Finally, Nvidia this week released the beta of the CUDA Toolkit 3.0, which exploits the Fermi GPU’s features.

Availability

The Tesla 20 GPU co-processors & the appliances based on them will be available in the 2nd quarter of 2010. The GeForce graphics cards based on the same GPU chips will be seen around first quarter.

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AMD is claiming that this graphics card breaks several older records. Besides being the fastest, it’s the one of the first to provide support for Microsoft DirectX 11 and Eyefinity multi-display (that’s three displays at once) at a max resolution of 7680×1600. Talking about the Horsepower, it delivers approximately 5 TeraFLOPS of computer power (and up to 10TeraFlops when combined with ATI CrossFireX).

Inside DirectX 11 – Dx11

The HD 5970, by default, is capable of being Overclocked. And there is no need to worry much about heating, the advance onboard fan does cool the card pretty nicely due to the new vapor chamber technologies and a vented exhaust.

Radeon HD 5970 specifications

GPUs runs at 725MHz, that the graphics card has 3200 stream processors (2×1600) and that it has 2GB GDDR5 memory.
The rest of specification includes 160 texture units, 116 Gtexel/second texture fill rate, compute performance of 4.64 Tflops as well as 64 ROPs. Pixel fillrate is 46.4Gpixels/s, Z / stencil is at 185.6 Gsamples/s and the memory data rate is 4.0 Gbps.

Maximum board power is 294W, while the idle power is 42W. Let’s not forget that the card has two DVI ports and DisplayPort, something that barely anyone needs.

In celebration of their fancy new card and their 40th birthday, AMD is also sponsoring a contest, starting today, where participants could win one of 10 Microsoft Xbox 360s or one of 10 Wiis from Nintendo. You can enter by becoming a fan of AMD on Facebook.

Update: AMD has added a video to demonstrate the power:

The Radeon HD 5970 is now available for sale with a hefty price tag of $599. Gamers, game on.

ATi Radeon HD 5750 5770 brings Gaming on Budget

Cloud Computing started from the cloud based processing then expanded steps to storage and now comes the third contender: Graphics. Now, Nvidia will power cloud-based GPU rendering which can be deployed as server-farms.

Nvidia looks to be bringing 3D rendering to the cloud with the news it is to partner with rendering expert Mental Images to launch its RealityServer platform. The pair are hoping to develop systems for offering web-based 3D rendering via Nvidia’s high-end Tesla RS GPUs.

As per the plan, On Nov. 30, Nvidia will launch the RealityServer platform, featuring a hardware server based on the Fermi architecture with a minimum of eight GPUs, scaling to 32 and even 100. A developer edition of RealityServer 3.0 software will be downloadable free of charge, including the right to deploy non-commercial applications.

RealityServer is designed around CUDA general purpose GPU technology and features 240 individually addressable cores. The technology is quiet scalable considering the fact that a single implementation can feature a 100 or more Tesla GPUs capable of simultaneously rendering for thousands of users. This will allow for the creation of extremely realistic objects via a simple user interface – and can calculate complex graphics like shadows, anti-Aliasing, anisotropy and reflections swiftly.

The idea is quiet similar to what AMD had with it’s Fusion Cloud. Although, fusion is  more aimed at allowing games to be sold on a SaaS model than for professional graphics creation.

Thin-client Cloud Gaming: Makes Crysis on iPhone possible

Application: The initial target market for the RealityServer product is, of course, corporate – engineering, medical research, product development, and architecture.

The purpose behind RealityServer is fairly simple: change the way Graphics are produced (rendered) today. Most PC users are used to their PC rendering 3D graphics via a GPU. Animation/Movie studios and product development, faced with the task of rendering even more complex scenes, use a series of locally-networked servers or workstations known as a rendering farm.

RealityServer intends on taking the concept one step further by isolating those servers away from the user, across the Internet, in a cloud configuration.

If you wonder is it even practical? Here is a solid slap —  Google Earth uses a similar technique, caching a small portion of data on the user’s PC, then streaming additional data over a broadband connection as the user moves over the virtual map.

It does have one weakness, (as per Nvidia): The geometry of the virtual world is calculated using the local graphics engine, making impossible for some mobile devices from leveraging it.

Consider this: If the graphics are too simple, workstations and a user’s own 3D cards would make the RealityServer irrelevant. But the latency and bandwidth limitations imposed on cloud-based rendering would make rendering realtime video nearly impossible.

As a compromise, the RealityServer will render complex static images using ray tracing, a graphical technique that models the flight of individual photons as they reflect and refract across various surfaces and textures.

It will be up to customers, however, to provide the front-end software and applications to take advantage of the technology, such as a car manufacturer which uses the RealityEngine to render the latest roadster, using the software to dynamically change the color.

It has lot of potential, all we need is the right kind of application that could integrate client and the Cloud in a phenomenal way.

Next is what? Cloud OS: Chrome OS

What do you think ? Is it all worth ?

Magic of Cloud computing: VMware and RDP 6 client: Run Windows 7, Flash on iPhone – Wyse PocketCloud

Well, here is the solution- Get best of both worlds.

Lucid last year promised to develop a chipset that would enable any motherboard to work with any combination of GPUs and still able to get 100 percent of the performance out of both.

It took them more than a year to fight against laws of physics . Now, the company has unveiled its HYDRA 200 Parallel Graphics Chip, a tiny 65nm processor that, when installed on a motherboard or expansion card.

On the motherboard manufacturing and support front, MSI has eagerly showed interest, and they become the first company to sign up.  What’s even more interesting was to see their demonstration Intel P55-based Gaming Motherboard, offering a HYDRA 200 and three PCIe slots for some serious GPU power.

In-house preliminary tests show performance never seen before on MSI Big Bang motherboards running such popular game titles as Crysis, F.E.A.R.2: Project Origin, Left4Dead 2 and Bioshock.

The motherboard will be available in the stores for 2009 holiday season.

Here is the basics of How it works:

This device is capable of intercepting DirectX or OpenGL command stream before it hits the GPU, analyzing the data, and dividing up scene at an object level. Rather than rendering alternating frames, or screens split on the horizontal, this part is capable of load balancing things like groups of triangles that are associated with a single group of textures and sending these tasks to whatever GPU it makes the most sense to render on. The scene is composited after all GPUs finish rendering their parts and send the data back to the Lucid chip. Utterly amazing, no less than rocket science.

via [Anandtech]

Apple is Ready to bet on the work they have done with GPUs in and they claim they were the first one to have this insight in Desktop and Mobile Computing.

Apple’s support for OpenGL and new implementation of OpenCL  in GPGPU computing is going to change the industry trends.  The intent is to  weaken Microsoft’s proprietary drive to make DirectX/D3D the primary API supported by GPU hardware developers such as AMD/ATI and NVIDIA and rather encourage a more Open approach, OpenCL.

Is this the Secret of Success of Apple MAC OS X and shiny gadgets like iPhone ?

Image Credit:Tweaktown

Background

Apple didn’t woke-up to GPU power yesterday. They had long lived up to the dream of offloading CPU and use GPU for complexer graphics floating point calculations, there by increasing overall performance keeping the optimal use of hardware.

OpenCL, initially developed by Apple, is analogous to the open industry standards OpenGL and OpenAL, for 3D graphics and computer audio, respectively. OpenCL extends the power of the GPU beyond graphics (GPGPU). OpenCL is, now,managed by the non-profit consortium.

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, and other processors. OpenCL includes a language (based on C99) for writing kernels (functions that execute on OpenCL devices), plus APIs that are used to define and then control the platforms. OpenCL provides parallel computing using task-based and data-based parallelism.

Apple’s GPU support in Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard extends support for modern hardware with OpenCL, which lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications. OpenCL is based on the C programming language and has been proposed as an open standard.

The move toward greater utilization of available GPU resources, along with Snow Leopard’s Grand Central Dispatch architecture helps making it easy and transparent for developers to deliver. The effort doesn’t end here. It enables Apple to innovate in future hardware, investing in new acceleration chips of its own design and harnessing more power by including support for more of the existing GPU resources from vendors like Nvidia, ATI (AMD).

Talking about  OpenGL on other platforms, from the Wii to the PlayStation 3, it’s harnessed to extremes. Apple’s own  iPhone/iPod touch in mobile device computing, is no less than as compared to gaming consoles.

The story no longer holds good future for Microsoft’s established Business of “killing open GPU standards” and substituting them with Windows-only alternatives, will eventually evade.

Apple’s  approach to GPU

Apple realised the power of GPU way back in 1999 but applied it in proprietary Mac OS X’s Quartz Graphics hardware.

On the contrary, Microsoft didn’t get its own product with advanced, modern graphics compositing to market until Vista in 2007. And then failed to actually sell it to it’s users. On an average, approximately 20% of people migrated to Vista from XP. (not including forced new Vista PCs).

This power of GPU was not just realized for MAC. Apple extended the concept to iPhone. The iPhone uses an embedded “System on a Chip” which includes an ARM core along with with high performance, dedicated Graphics cores that Apple has fully exploited to defer interface-related processing to hardware, much like a video game system that we see in Windows world.

Currently, no one in the industry has taken full advantage of GPU on mobile devices. That’s why no one else has been able to match iPhone’s graphics, yet.

Windows was stuck in the old CPU driven architecture while MAC OS moved large parts of the code behind UI and rendering to those high power GPUs initially developed for gaming. It took 5 years or so from the mighty Microsoft to hammer its OS to adapt to this new computing paradigm and release Vista, and a better implementation in Windows 7, around more than a decade after Apple did.

“And exactly the same happened in mobile devices. Apple’s competitors were developing OS architectures initially built for menu driven UI’s in the times when CPU was the main processing unit. Effective use of the GPU will play an increasingly large role as devices get more mobile and as users’ expectations increase. Apple is ahead of the game both in conventional PCs and in mobile devices, with rivals such as Microsoft and Nokia just recently discovering the importance of focusing on the GPU to deliver the power needed to provide a rich, animated user interface.”

“What Apple needed to do was to downscale its OSX a bit and partner with Imagination Technologies to develop a powerful mobile optimized graphics core. Suddenly they could run an UI that required several multiples of processing power the traditional mobile computing platforms were able to deliver. But since iPhone used GPU to crunch the heavy parts of UI code Apple could do it. The rest is history.”

“There is a long list of other things Apple did right and assets they had, but without a great ‘inertia’ in mobile operating systems and this shift in mobile computing platforms they would have not been able to shake the market so greatly.”

By sharing technology between its iPhone and Mac platforms, Apple is building upon its lead in fully exploiting the latent power available in the GPU. That’s the exact reason why Snow Leopard is faster than previous generations OS. Snow Leopard specifically delivers a richer, subtly more animated user interface right out of the box and provides powerful toolkits to allow third party developers to wring the most performance from the hardware available, without overloading CPU much.

Sources: AppleInsider, Apple, TomsHardware

Zii Egg StemCell Computer is, at present, essentially a showcase for ZiiLabs’ innovative chip architecture, which runs either its own open Linux-based OS, dubbed Plaszma, or an “optimized” Android to exploit ZiiLabs’ processor technology. They call their technology Stem-Cell Computing

The Egg’s specifications are very impressive:

• 3.5” 320×480 capactive 10-point multi-touch display
• Up to 32Gbytes internal NAND flash
• 256 Mbytes RAM
• Support for 1080p HD output via HD Cable
• Two cameras: a forward facing VGA cam, and a rear-facing high def camera
• 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.1 + Enhanced Data Rate
• Hardware GPS receiver with antenna
• 3-axis accelerometer
• Full-size SDHC slot, which can take a corresponding card with up to 32Gbytes of storage
• Support for OpenGL ES, an open standard for embedded 2D and 3D graphics

All of that is packed into a case that’s 4.53 x 2.4 x 0.47 inches, and weighs just 3.8 ounces. That’s just slightly longer and thicker than Apple’s iPod Touch, but about 8/10ths of an ounce lighter.

The Egg also comes with the Opera Mobile 9.7 Web browser.

Many of those are features “not yet found on any Android device,” notes Gareth Myles, site editor with MobileTechAddicts. “Overall, it appears to top any Android gadget that has been officially announced.”

One of the biggest weaknesses of the Android platform is the current lack of advanced 3D support and games, which has nicely been overcome by this device.

what’s Bad – Both the Egg lacks a cellular radio, so there are no cellular voice calls, just like iTouch. And it seems equally straightforward to add a cellular chipset to the Egg. ZiiLab’s support for the Android smartphone OS is intended to make that addition attractive and feasible.

The Egg ships with the Plaszma software — An optimized version of Android can be loaded onto it, and the company plans to release shortly an “after-sales installer upgrade” to make that possible.

As an introductory offer, a 32Gbyte model of the Zii Egg is bundled free with the just-released development package, which includes the Plaszma OS, the companion SDK, and the optimized Android OS. The starter kit is $399.

Android was tweaked to exploit the core ZiiLabs applications processor, an ARM-based system on a chip, dubbed the ZMS-05 module. The module’s dual-core ARM subsystem handles most of the routine chores. But a separate “media processing array” handles all the 2D, 3D, video, digital signal processing and similar tasks. According to the company press release, this array consists of 24 floating point processors, with a total raw processing power of 8 GFLOPS. The company’s “stem cell” architecture refers to the fact that the chip module can rearrange these processors as needed for specific tasks, pulling in additional processors, or releasing them, as the type and amount of work changes.

The ZMS-05 modules will start volume shipments in September with a starting per-unit price of $75.

AMD has twisted the concept,  that takes the GPGPU idea and flips it on its head. AMD has announced the industry’s first OpenCL SDK for x86 processors. Coders can now write to the graphics API and run the resulting code on an AMD or Intel processor.

AMD has announced the release of the first OpenCL SDK for x86 CPUs, and it will enable developers to target x86 processors with the kind of OpenCL code that’s normally written for GPUs. In a way, this is a reverse of the normal “GPGPU” trend, in which programs that run on a CPU are modified to run in whole or in part on a GPU.

But why would some one want the reverse i.e. execute GPU instructions with x86 CPU?

One most evident reason that I see is Debugging – if you don’t have access to an OpenCL-compliant GPU. And for now, that’s essentially what it will be doing. Going further, developers will be able to write in OpenCL and target multicore x86 CPUs alongside GPUs from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. Of course, when you can write once and target a variety of parallel hardware types, the fact that Larrabee runs x86 will be irrelevant; so Intel had better be able to scale up Larrabee’s performance, because its x86 support will not be a selling point.

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