graphics
Latest
AMD licenses graphics technology to Qualcomm
We first got wind of AMD's wishes to boost the graphical prowess of handsets way back in February of this year (and saw it reaffirmed in March), and now it seems that the firm is making it happen. Apparently, AMD has agreed to license "cutting-edge graphics core technology to Qualcomm" for next-generation chipsets. The deal will reportedly bring AMD's Unified Shader Architecture (introduced in the Xbox 360) to Qualcomm's Mobile Station Modem chipsets, which both firms hope will boost the adoption of 3D gaming and graphic-intensive applications on mobiles. Sadly, we're still left to wonder when we'll see a device actually take advantage of the horsepower, but at least it's in motion.[Via ExtremeTech]
Wii Warm Up: In comparison
We don't often try to fan the flames of rampant fanboyism around here, despite the name. Oh, sure, we may sometimes poke a little fun at other epic titles, but for the most part, we're all about letting everyone do their own thing, and we're even behind owning multiple systems! Loyalty is great and all, but so are options, amirite?But sometimes, we get a little tired of the remarks about the Wii's graphics, games, and output. We complain sometimes, but honestly, we've got it pretty good. Our system doesn't break once a month, and our flagship games are looking pretty sweet, unlike certain other super-hyped titles that failed to deliver (in all fairness, we're mostly dealing with long-running franchises, but still). We don't usually end up with a game that doesn't live up to certain promises, either. On top of that, our console is pretty affordable, and you can usually get just about anyone to play with you! All in all, we'd say Nintendo fans actually have it pretty good right now. How about you guys? Do you feel pretty good to be Wii owners?
Madden, Tiger Woods '08 now available on Apple Store
As a couple of you astute readers have noticed (thanks!), Madden NFL '08 and Tiger Woods PGA Tour '08 are now available on the Apple Store, just a little over a month after they were released for PC and consoles last August. A month isn't too bad for Mac ports-- at least the football season is still going on.I haven't played this year's Madden yet, but I can wholeheartedly vouch for Tiger Woods-- I've been playing the Xbox 360 version of it, and it is some good (if sometimes very difficult, read: frustrating) golf. If you do pick up either game, however, make sure to check your innards first-- neither game will work on Intel's GMA950 graphics processors, found in the MacBook and the Mac mini. If you're boasting a MacBook Pro, a Mac Pro, or a new iMac, you're in the clear, as they use higher end video cards.So there's what EA's got. id, you're next.
Intel teraflopping into high-end graphics with "Larrabee"
Intel's Paul Otellini IDF keynote shed some new light on the company's Larrabee processor, which is now set for a 2010 release and will compete against AMD and NVIDIA in the realm of high-end graphics. Paul says the chips will scale up to teraflops in speed, and be targeted at science and analytics in addition to graphics -- though he dodged questions about Larrabee potentially being a discrete graphics competitor for AMD and NVIDIA, and only reiterating that "Graphics will also be an area for the chip." Intel has so far stayed squarely in the realm of integrated graphics, but a move to discrete graphics would be quite a welcome shakeup to the current market, and teraflops would certainly make it all the more interesting.
Diamond planning HD 2900 XT-based 2GB VFX 2000 pro GPU?
Diamond is no stranger to packin' an awful lot of RAM onto graphics cards, and apparently, the forthcoming VFX 2000 Series Professional Workstation GPU will keep the legacy alive. According to Hot Hardware, Diamond is readying a 2GB (of GDDR4 memory, no less) professional card based on the R600 (now known as the HD 2900 XT), and reportedly, "the card's PCB has been modified from the standard HD 2900 XT reference design to support the workstation-class features inherent to the FireGL line of professional graphics cards." Still, there's no word yet on what frequencies the GPU and RAM will hum along at, but word on the street has this beast launching "in the coming weeks." Click on for another glimpse.
Sports to the power of ten
We're not sure about the idea that everything in Deca Sporta is controlled through simply shaking the remote -- maybe that's a shaky translation? -- but we do know that the screens from the title are looking pretty spiffy. It's all about the details here: the depressions in the sand, the clarity of the audience members in the closer basketball shots, and the rippling ad-banners. For such a simple style, things are shaping up quite nicely. You'll have to head over to Nintendic to check out the shots for yourself (and mind those enormous watermarks clogging up the works), but we think it might be worth the trip. [Via NeoGAF]
New iMac Video card stealth upgrade: mobility Radeon HD 2600 XT?
I'm going to mark this one rumor for right now, but there's an interesting thread going on over at MacRumors Forums that suggests that the new iMacs may have a stealth upgrade. When they were announced a lot of folks were disappointed with the included Radeon HD 2600 Pro graphics card, however, some people have discovered that (at least running Windows in Boot Camp) their machines appear to be reporting that the GPU is actually an underclocked mobility Radeon HD 2600 XT, which is a more powerful chip. This would not be the first time that Windows has revealed hardware that Apple wanted hidden, as several machines were discovered to have draft 802.11n wireless networking chipsets in that way before they were later activated by Apple. Many are expressing hope that some future update or some ATI specific tool might unlock the hidden power of the GPU, but at this point it seems to be wishful thinking.Thanks Marin!
QA glitch allows defective ATI Radeon cards to slip out
According to "sources" at AMD, the firm's official graphics card diagnostic and validation software was recently discovered "to have a bug that failed to detect defective ATI Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 graphics cards." The problem was actually discovered by various "channel vendors" who supposedly pointed out an error in the BIOS application process, and it was noted that Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte were all bitten by the mishap. Thankfully, the glitch can seemingly be rectified by "reapplying the BIOS," but now some 20,000 to 30,000 units are already being shipping back in order to be mended before reaching consumers' hands; interestingly, there's no mention of a remedy for the "small number" of end users that may actually own one of these marred boards. Nevertheless, AMD has responded by stating that this ordeal was simply "an isolated incident," and assured us all that "measures were taken to solve the issue as soon as it was detected."[Via TGDaily]
Revolutionary: Respectable Specs
Every Tuesday, Mike Sylvester brings you REVOLUTIONARY, a look at the wide world of Wii possibilities. Nintendo still hasn't confirmed any of the technical specs of the Wii hardware in detail, and we wouldn't recommend you hold your breath until they do. They don't want people making assumptions of what the system can or can't do based on arbitrary numbers and jargon. We do know that the Wii is much more than "two Gamecubes taped together." In addition to the revolutionary controllers, we get integrated Wi-Fi, 2 USB 2.0 ports, 48 MB more RAM, internal flash storage, an SD card slot, full-sized DVD disc capacity, and a new operating system and GUI that brings us software like Mii Channel, Photo Channel, Forecast Channel, and Internet Channel. Wii Shop and Virtual Console could not have been done on Gamecube, and with support for component output reintegrated, we can enjoy our old and new games in glorious 480p. That's a pretty long list of upgrades over the Gamecube, and it's in a smaller, more attractive package.
Orc shoulders being fixed in patch 2.2
For the many Orc players unhappy about the state of their shoulder armor, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that Drysc has confirmed that the fix for the shoulder armor graphics has made it into the upcoming 2.2 patch! And the bad news? Well, no one knows quite when the 2.2 patch is going to get off the PTRs and on the live realms, so you're going to have to live with those oddly-sized shoulders for a while yet...
New Nvidia drivers for Windows Vista may fix WoW problems
Reader Scott kindly dropped us a note (thanks!) that Nvidia released new drivers for Windows Vista on Tuesday, and hidden in the release notes is a note that the "low frame rates" within WoW have been fixed.So if you're running WoW in Vista, have an Nvidia graphics card (with one GPU), and still having graphical problems, a driver update definitely wouldn't hurt. Things seem to have calmed down on the graphics issues since a few patches have hit, but maybe there are still a few of you out there looking for a solution.As for us Windows XP users, looks like we're still stuck with an older driver version. If you've updated your drivers on XP and are still having problems, the best thing to do is probably just to let Blizzard know about it.Update: Whoops, Slashrude (and other commenters) point out what I missed: these are beta drivers, which means installing them may not be such a good idea. Update at your own risk.
More bugs than patches
By now you've heard of the Orc shoulder problem (and maybe you've even confronted Azeroth's Greatest Male Orc about it), but as MMO Champion shows, that was definitely not the only major bug that showed up in 2.1.3. There's a huge list of things going wrong-- Dwarf females' offhands are huge, Blood Elf males can walk through chairs, Cyclone can prevent players from getting their BG marks (!), and ghost wolves, when attacking, can now be seen carrying weapons. What happened?!The problem becomes even stranger when you consider the patch notes-- almost nothing got changed compared to previous patches. All we saw were a few graphical changes, an added interface option, and some high level raid tuning. As someone asked yesterday, how can all of this seemingly unrelated stuff be breaking? If all Blizzard is doing is updating the mail system, what does the size of shoulderpieces on male Orcs have to do with it at all?The answer is probably more complicated than we can know. As commenter Okoloth said yesterday, object-oriented programming (which Blizzard uses to code the game) is full of parent/child relationships, which means that a change in one class ("wearable items in the mail") can have strange effects all across the game ("Orc shoulders shrink"). And then there's the whole fact that even though the patch notes for 2.1.3 are small, that most likely doesn't mean Blizzard is slacking-- they could be implementing more subtle changes on the system (in preparation for future content that we don't know about yet), and those changes might be having an effect on the actual game we play.Of course, just because we aren't being told why these things are happening doesn't mean we should give Blizzard a pass on fixing them ASAP (in my opinion, they shouldn't wait until the next patch to fix my shoulder size, thank you). But just because seemingly unrelated bugs are popping up doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing.
One more roundup of iPhone wallpapers
Tons of iPhone wallpapers out now-- here's a last roundup of what we've seen so far. The good bloggers at BoingBoing are going iPhone wallpaper crazy-- they've posted this terrific Sad Mac wallpaper, as well as a collection of erotic wallpapers, if you swing that way. Oh, and hey, unicorns! Hypoxic has some good pieces in his DeviantArt. Artist Coop also has a Flickr set of wallpapers up (some of them NSFW). In that same realm, Andy sent us his own Flickr set of cool-looking retro toy wallpapers. And speaking of Flickr, the iPhone wallpapers pool is also filling up with all kinds of things. So there you go-- if you don't have something pretty on your iPhone yet, you're not looking hard enough. And if you need help getting these on your iPhone we've got you covered there, too.
Two sets of iPhone wallpapers, including SuicideGirls
iPhone eye candy (or should that be iCa... oh never mind) is starting to roll in.Wes (thanks!) dropped us this "very nice selection" of specially sized wallpaper. Most of it seems to be about birds, but there are a few cool non-bird shots included as well. And Sarah from SuicideGirls says she's a fan of TUAW (hawt!) and pointed out their iPhone wallpaper packs-- one is supposedly a pack of "PG13" desktops (they say it's work safe, but not if you work in a monastery), and there's a pack of R-rated desktops as well as a pack of SG logos which also, upon inspection, turn out to be R-rated. But they all look pretty good (if you like looking at geeky cool chicks), and of course they're all fitted for the iPhone.Also SG and iPhone related, Sarah mentioned that Rob Corddry (of the Daily Show and Frank Wrench fame) has also written a short piece for their site about his experience buying an iPhone, which turns out to be very NSFW as well. But hey, it's the holiday-- kick back and enjoy a little iPhone-related adult humor.
ATI ships out Radeon HD 2400 and HD 2600 graphics cards
While some of you may be holding out for a 1GB Radeon HD 2900 XT, those looking to spend a little less can get a bit of instant gratification. ATI has just announced that the Radeon 2400 HD and 2600 HD are now shipping to board customers, meaning that a few more DirectX 10 graphics cards will be hitting store shelves in the not too distant future. Both cards will also include the company's Unified Video Decoder (UVD), are based around a 65-nanometer chip, and will support HDMI and HDCP. Time to start scouring the neighborhood couches for spare change, eh?[Via TGDaily]
Diamond stuffs 1GB onto ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT
With leading-edge graphics cards getting more and more dedicated RAM shoved onto their PCBs, it's only surprising that it has taken this long for a 1GB single GPU card to hit the market. Diamond Multimedia has just announced the launch of its Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB, which packs a full gigabyte of GDDR4 memory, second-generation unified shader architecture, 512-bit memory interface, integrated CrossFire scalability, and built-in HDMI support. Moreover, it also includes ATI's Avivo display technology, dual-link DVI output, HDCP compliance, and DirectX 10 support. No word just yet on what kind of premium you'll be expected to pay for this momentary claim of superiority, but we'd wait for the benchmarks to see if it's even worth the extra coin.
Engadget Chinese gets hands-on treatment with Asus OCgear
You already knew that our Chinese brethren were tearin' it up at Computex 2007, but this one is of particular interest here in the US. Turns out that Asus' OCgear overclocking module actually doesn't have a graphics card integrated in, rather, it's simply an extra peripheral that will connect up to your card via USB or PCIe. Reportedly, a proprietary connector was initially considered, but the tried and true connectors proved quicker in the end. We have to admit, it certainly adds that finishing layer of geekness to the front panel of the PC, but why not hit the read link and view the gallery of hands-on snapshots for yourself, cool?
Resident Evil 4 comparison puts "two Gamecubes taped together" to rest
Turns out it's just one Gamecube! Either that or Capcom is lazy. The evidence to support either conclusion is found in this Gametrailers video, which compares the Gamecube and Wii versions of Resident Evil 4 side-by-side. Major spoiler: they look exactly the same. The sad part is, we actually don't know if the Wii can do better graphics than the original Resident Evil 4, because nobody has tried. Well, at least this version of RE4 has waggling. And it's not like the graphics were bad on the Cube or anything.
Graphics drivers updates for everyone
Just a quick technical note (thanks to WorldofWar for the heads up): both of the major graphics card makers have released brand new drivers for their video cards recently. Even if you're not technically inclined, all you need to know is that the newer the version of video card drivers you have running, the better your 3D videogames (of which WoW is one) will look.If you're running Nvidia cards, you can get the latest version right here. And those with ATI cards can find their new drivers over on their site. Just download the right file for your operating system, run it (you'll probably have to restart your system, so save your work), and then marvel at... OK, it probably won't look too different, but trust me when I tell you you want to be running the newest drivers possible. In fact, if anything will fix those graphical problems people have been seeing in the last patch, this probably will.But Mike, you say, what if I don't know what kind of card I have? For Windows XP, just right click on My Computer and go to Properties. Choose the Hardware tab, then Device Manager, and then look for the "Display Adapters" menu in the list-- that should tell you the build and brand of your video card. For Mac OS X, you don't have to worry-- Apple updates your drivers for you with Software Update. And for Linux-- well, if you're running WoW on Linux, I'll assume you already know what you're doing, because I sure don't (though you can probably find help here if you need it). And yes, you technically inclined and sharp-eyed ladies and gents, I do call my custom-built, lightning fast XP box "Refridgerator." Why? Because it's freakin' cool, man.
Bungie says players haven't seen final Halo 3 graphics
Bungie's Frank O'Connor stepped out for a quick break and said that what has been considered by some to be less-than-stellar graphics (especiallly when compared to Gears of War) in the Halo 3 beta are not what we'll see in the final build. He believes "folks will be happy with Halo 3's graphical polish come September." The controversy over the graphics dates back to the beginning of the Halo 3 beta where some people noticed that the upgrade from Halo 2 to Halo 3 was less than expected. There was even a comparison video made (also available in HD at GameTrailer's site). O'Connor points out that nobody is complaining about the gameplay and that nobody has seen the game in its complete form. He says at this point they are just polishing a game that is "largely complete." He says that Bungie learned some tough lessons from Halo 2 and they aren't looking to repeat them in this sequel. He says they focused on planning this time around it will mean "more features, fewer cuts, better polish and a more intensive test cycle." O'Connor could have just saved his breath and released an HD video of Halo 3's single-player campaign and put the whole thing to rest.
