Over the next month or so, there are slated to be several new graphics cards released by both AMD and NVidia. Here is a list of the cards that we know about.
February 25 – AMD Radeon HD 5830.
March 11 – AMD Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 edition with 2GB of GDDR5.
March 26 – NVidia GeForce GTX 480 and 470. Rumor is that it is 5% faster than the Radeon HD 5870. Availability to follow in May.
March ?? – Trillian. This is rumored to be a cherry-picked, overclocked AMD Radeon HD 5870 to compete with NVidia GeForce GTX 480 and 470.
AMD has been executing nearly perfectly over the past five months ever since they released the Radeon HD 5870. AMD continues to be in the driver’s seat since they have DirectX 11 capable cards that span the price spectrum. They plan on raining on Fermi’s parade with Eyefinity6 and Trillian. Even if they lose the title of fastest graphics card, they can undercut NVidia by winning the price-to-performance ratio. NVidia is late to the game, with an expensive graphics card that is rumored to consume copious amounts of power, and is rumored to not scale well. That leaves NVidia in a bind, because it is the lower priced spectrum of graphics cards that sell the best, not the fastest graphics card. In NVidia’s favor is the large CUDA/OpenCL developer community. NVidia knows all of their strengths and weaknesses, of course, and already has a game plan. It will be interesting to see how they execute on that plan.
I already mentioned in my previous review, Strata Design 3D CX’s potential power for graphic designers. Typically they know their way around the Adobe Suite of programs but are looking for ways to expand their presentation punch into the third dimension and further.
For those among you that actually are looking to do exactly this, your search may have come to an end when you buy the Strata Design 3D CX with their companion module Strata Enfold 3D CX. What Enfold 3D CX allows you to do is prepare your presentation battle right there in Adobe Illustrator. Here’s how this works.
Read on to see the rest of Albert’s Review, as well as download a sample PDF with the 3D model embedded for your own interactive exploration!
Linden Labs and Second Life have just launched a new tool called a ‘browser’, that seems to be aimed at bringing the SecondLife and Virtual Worlds experience to a wider audience via simpler access.
This browser, called a “viewer”, will solve many of the ease of use issues Second Life had when it first emerged on the market. According to Linden Labs CEO Mark Kingdon, “The whole strategy is to break down the walls to make Second Life much more accessible to users and make it possible for all this incredibly rich content to travel outward—to travel to the web and be shared.”
Building43.com and Robert Scoble has a half-hour interview with Linden Labs CEO Mark Kingdon about the current state of SecondLife and this new product. This new browser, the ‘viewer’, borrows several UI elements from typical web browsers like an address bar and friends lists, but still keeps all of the advanced features like the build tools. In the words of Mr Kingdon:
Before we hit you with all the possibilities, and it was a bit overwhelming. Now we are trying to make the browser so that as you need new functionality, it can be enabled and experienced.
Definitely sounds promising. I didn’t hear any official release date, but it sounds imminent it was just announced on the SecondLife Blog.
PS: Is that Pooky Amsterdam sitting in Kingdon’s Office? Congrats!
Dr. -Ing.V.Sassmannshausen’s “Junior Extra Terrestrial” (JET) is not only the foundation of a massive tutorial series for MAXON’s Cineversity, but is now an accepted entrant into the Sedona International Film Festival, the International Family Film Festival, and the San Francisco Bay Area International Children’s Film Festival.
“I’m thrilled that JET has been so well-received, especially given that some festivals select from thousands of submissions,” said Dr. Sassi. “One of the best moments you can have as a filmmaker is to sit in on a festival screening and feel your work touch an audience, which JET does. You can only achieve that if you are able to breathe life into your characters, and that can only happen if your tools don’t get in the way of your creative flow. With CINEMA 4D, I had the creative options, the ease of use, and the rock-solid stability that I needed to stay focused on the content of the story.”
The short film is a labor of love from Dr Sassi, who created the entire film (except for the musical score) himself using MAXON’s Cinema4D. He is currently creating a series of 200 tutorials documenting the creation for Maxon’s Cineversity program.
Read the full press release and see some pictures of the project after the break, and see the Trailer for JET here.
With Fermi on the horizon, NVidia has published a new collection of programmer guides aimed at helping you get up to speed on the new technology. You can download them (or view them online via Google Docs):
Check em out, and let us know if you find anything new in there! I’m still digging through them myself. One thing to note:
Existing CUDA applications can prepare for upcoming Fermi hardware by using PTX versions instead of CUBIN. Make sure you have NVidia Drivers R195.xx or newer and use PTX JIT (with environment flag CUDA_FORCE_PTX_JIT=1).
“Everyone Ever in the World” is a limited-run art poster that offers a visual representation of the number of people lived versus killed in wars, massacres, and genocide during the entire recorded history of humanity. Maybe their explanation will help:
“Everyone Ever in the World” is a visual representation of the number of people to have lived versus been killed in wars, massacres and genocide during the recorded history of humankind. The visualisation uses existing paper area and paper loss (die cut circle) to represent the concepts of life and death respectively. The total number of people to have lived was estimated through exponential regression calculations based on historical census data and known biological birth rates. This results in approximately 77.6 billion human beings to have ever lived during the recorded history of humankind. The total people killed in conflicts was collated from a number of historical source books and was summed for all conflicts – approximately 969 million people killed, or ~1.25% of all the people to have ever lived. The timescale encompasses 3200 BCE to 2009 CE – a period of over 5 millennia, and 1100+ conflicts of recorded human history.
No? Me neither, as this chart seems soundly in ‘art’ rather than ‘science’. Sure there’s some math in the figures, but the representation leaves me wondering what they’re trying to convey. Some things to help:
The circular text lists wars.. The center is 2008, outer edges are BC.
No idea why some of the lines stop
There’s no relationship between the text & number of deaths (that I can see).
The dots at the top supposedly represent the increase in the number of conflicts, one dot for each millenia.
The Google Nexus One Android phone is the pinnacle of Android mobile handsets, and boasts one of the new OLED screens in use in readily available mobile handsets. However, just how good is the screen? The guys at DisplayMate took a very in-depth and scientific approach and compared it to various displays, mostly the iPhone 3GS LCD, and found it woefully lacking. This summary says it all:
OLED displays are at the leading edge of display technology – they are still under development and still being perfected as a production display for use in consumer products. That’s interesting, but they still need to be judged in comparison to LCDs, which are the dominant display technology in all current mobile devices. In that regard, if the Nexus One display were an LCD it would rank among the worst displays we have ever seen in a shipping product. Some of this is undoubtedly due to poor integration of the display hardware with the Android OS and software. Much of it, however, is simply due to very poor factory calibration and quality control, especially with the lack of any credible color and gray scale calibration
Their tests include details on the PenTile pixel arrangement in use, the color-depth, and image qualities. The tests are still underway, as well, so keep checking back for upcoming results on color temperature, gamuts, and color shifts.
OnlineSchools.com aims to bring important information in a wide variety of subjects to the masses, based on Gandhi’s famous quote “Learn as if you were to Live Forever”. In their “Life and Health” category, they have a new shameless infographic showing 15 interesting and important facts about Breasts. As a fan myself, I thought I would share. Some tidbits:
The average breast weighs 1.1lbs
Average size (in the US) is a 36C
In 2008, 307,230 Breast Enlargements were performed, the #1 cosmetic procedure
The average surgery costs $3,700
Unfortunately, the graphic seems skewed towards the cosmetic surgery angle, leaving out anything to do with breast cancer.
SabrePC.com has listed a XFX Geforce GTX 480 for pre-order for the amazingly low price of $679.99. You save $20 off the retail price of $699.99! What a deal! The Geforce GTX 480 comes with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. There is no picture of the card on the site, but then again, most graphics cards all look the same.
Do you ever wish we had more fuel efficient cars? Do you ever wish for electric cars that you could charge in just a few hours? Do you ever wish for cars that would not pollute the air we breathe? Would not it be nice if we could improve on the overall efficiency of the automobile so that all of these things were true. I certainly do. Good magazine has an article and an accompanying infographic that shows where the energy is wasted in today’s automobile. They also look at what is being done to make the automobile more efficient.
If you had to invent an efficient way to move a person from one place to another, you could hardly do worse than the modern automobile. After more than a century of refinement, even the most over-engineered slab of German perfection wastes 85 percent of the energy in the fuel we put into it.
Eighty-five percent of the energy is wasted! What can be done to fix that! Well, read the article and look at the infographic to find out.
Linden Labs and Second Life have just launched a new tool called a ‘browser’, that seems to be aimed at bringing the SecondLife and Virtual Worlds experience to a wider audience via simpler access.
Dr. -Ing.V.Sassmannshausen’s “Junior Extra Terrestrial” (JET) is not only the foundation of a massive tutorial series for MAXON’s Cineversity, but is now an accepted entrant into the Sedona International Film Festival, the International Family Film Festival, and the San Francisco Bay Area International Children’s Film Festival.
“Everyone Ever in the World” is a limited-run art poster that offers a visual representation of the number of people lived versus killed in wars, massacres, and genocide during the entire recorded history of humanity. Maybe their explanation will help:
The Google Nexus One Android phone is the pinnacle of Android mobile handsets, and boasts one of the new OLED screens in use in readily available mobile handsets. However, just how good is the screen? The guys at DisplayMate took a very in-depth and scientific approach and compared it to various displays, mostly the iPhone 3GS LCD, and found it woefully lacking. This summary says it all:
OnlineSchools.com aims to bring important information in a wide variety of subjects to the masses, based on Gandhi’s famous quote “Learn as if you were to Live Forever”. In their “Life and Health” category, they have a new shameless infographic showing 15 interesting and important facts about Breasts. As a fan myself, I thought I would share. Some tidbits:
VizWorld.com 
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