VizWorld.com

A new physically-based renderer is on the scene called Luxrender.  What separates this one from the others, you ask?  This one is GPL, Open-Source.

LuxRender is a new, open-source, free software rendering system for physically correct, unbiased image synthesis. Rendering with LuxRender means simulating the flow of light according to physical equations. This produces realistic, photographic-quality images.

You can download it from their site, v0.6, with plugins for Maya, Blender, XSI, and Cinema4D.

via Lux Render.

Graphics, Science luxrender, software

We reported earlier about the Sapphire 4890 that would run at 1Ghz, making it the first 1Ghz card on the market.  Seems that isn’t just Sapphire’s honor to hold, and AMD has announced a whole line of 4890′s that will be factory overclocked to 1GHz.

What AMD has done is that it has taken an ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card, which normally runs at 850 MHz, and overclocked it to 1 GHz at the factory – air cooled – and voila, you have yourself the world’s first shipping 1 GHz GPU part.

Cards should be available from several vendors shortly, including Asus, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, Gecube, Gigabyte, HIS (Hightech Information Systems), ITC, Jetway, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, Sapphire Technology and XFX.

via AMD/ATI Beats Nvidia to the 1 GHz GPU Milestone – Tom’s Hardware.

Hardware amd

nailgun recently created a new promo for the ESPNU, the college sports-lover version of ESPN.  The centerpiece of the clip is the updated logo, stylized as a photo-real 3D animationl

Imbued with youth and energy, the ‘hallmark’ spot begins with a shot of a richly colored sunset. The camera quickly tracks backward revealing all of the subtle details of the campus — 3D animated sidewalks, signage, stadiums, athletic track. Halfway through the spot a stream of animated balls from different sports soar through the campus as if propelled by a tremendous gust of air. It ends with a shot of a dramatically lit ESPNU logo bathed in stadium lights and flurrying tickertape.

You can see the spot here, and read the full press release after the break.

Read more…

Graphics commercial, nailgun, vfx

A post at the New York Times talks about the Map/Reduce toolkit, and how they’re using it with Hadoop to analyze some of their website log statistics.  They’ve got some brief code examples showing it in use, and links to where you can download the toolkit for yourself.

We’re making this toolkit available as an open-source project. If you’re already using Hadoop, the toolkit provides a quick and easy way to do small and medium-size projects. If not, the toolkit comes with a way to run the map/reduce programs without Hadoop. It’s very easy to download and install a single-machine version of Hadoop and start experimenting with it. The MRToolkit applications you write can run without modifications in the stand alone environment, on the single-machine Hadoop, or on an actual Hadoop cluster of any size.

via Announcing the Map/Reduce Toolkit – Open Blog – NYTimes.com.

Science mapreduce, nytimes

ASUS’s Matrix video cards have always been pretty top-end cards, and FiringSquad has their new ENGTX260 on the table for some benchmarks.  Their final result:

Considering that Republic of Gamers is supposed to be ASUS’ flagship offering, we’d like to see ASUS at least clock their Republic of Gamers cards at the same clock speeds as their factory OC’ed TOP boards. Historically ASUS’ TOP boards have shipped with the fastest clock speeds ASUS offers, but they often rely on the stock ATI/NVIDIA cooling units also. In our opinion, Republic of Gamers Matrix boards should offer the best of both worlds: top overclocking performance, mixed with the very best cooling and software utilities.

Right now ASUS’ Matrix boards only deliver on two out of three of these categories.

Even with that, they still give it high praise and a 95%.

ASUS ENGTX260 Matrix Quick Take Review.

Hardware asus, benchmark, nvidia

ModiFace Inc, developer of several facial and body simulations for user-uploaded photos, has today announced the launch of “ReShapr.com”, a breast augmentation visualization site.  Simply upload a picture (or use their supplied sample), mark 4 points on each breast to specify the starting size, and then select the desired implant size.

ModiFy also has WeightMirror.com, a weight-reduction visualization, and LiftMagic.com, a face-lift visualization website.

See their full press release after the break.

ReShapR: The world’s most advanced online cosmetics visualization suite.

Read more…

Science biomed

Supermicro is jumping on the GPGPU bandwagon with a new 1U dual-GPU server architecture.  They’re calling it the “Supermicro Server Building Block Solution”, and offer a 1U/2GPU, 2U/4GPU, and 4U/4GPU version.

“To address the requirements for this emerging high-performance highly-parallel computing segment Supermicro has developed the world s first truly optimized GPU servers ” said Charles Liang CEO and President of Supermicro. “Advancements such as multiple x16 non-blocking native Gen2 PCI-Express connectivity highly reliable thermal optimization and industry-leading power efficiency establish Supermicro as a global IT hardware leader in architecture performance and green computing. These platforms feature new Gold level 93 efficiency power subsystems and deliver breakthrough performance-per-watt.”

No word yet on who’s supplying the GPU’s (Nvidia or AMD).  See the full press release after the break.

Read more…

Hardware gpgpu, supermicro

Kitware has an announcement on their website that ParaView 3.6 should be released later this month, along with their InfoVis tool “OverView“.  New in this version:

• Python API overhaul
• Save Trace as Python Scripts
• Experimental support for CGNS, Silo, and Tecplot data
• Tabular data-structures like CSV
• New Statistical Analysis tools
• Completely redesigned charting/plotting components

And more, including the usual bugfixes and usability improvements.  The whole list is on their site.

Kitware – News.

Science kitware, paraview, software

Oktobor has put their latest commercial for Asia Pacific Breweries’ “Tiger Beer”.  “Winning over New York & The World” is the tagline, and it’s shown via constructing some of the classic New York monuments and showing them shape the Tiger Beer bottle.

See the commercial on their site.

Oktobor / Work / latest / Tiger Beer – New York.

Graphics commercial, oktobor, vfx

As if to prove that AGP isn’t quite dead yet. Powercolor has quietly released a new Radeon HD4770 card that’s AGP compatible.  From ExPreview:

Based on 40nm manufacturing process, PowerColor AGP HD 4770 features core/memory clock of 750/800MHz (DDR 3200MHz), and supports ATI CrossFireX. Since ATI Radeon HD 4770 chip doesn’t feature native AGP support and Powercolor uses a special bridge chip to enable support of AGP interface, end-users have to ensure that the card is actually compatible with their motherboards and systems.

The Radeon 4770 is the first 40nm card, and has been burning up benchmarks all across the net.  Whether or not the same performance is visible on AGP is unknown, but I’ld have to believe that the slower bus speed would cripple it significantly.

Amazon.com: Powercolor 1A1-G000004992 ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB GDDR5 AGP Graphics Card: Electronics.

Hardware agp, ati, powercolor