What would happen to your gaming performance if instead of running in SLI in x16/x16, you instead ran in SLI at x8/x8? [H]ard|OCP answers that question in their latest graphics article. The answer was, to me at least, somewhat surprising. It appears that PCIe bandwidth, at least for games, is not that big of a deal. I wonder if the same holds true for GPGPU applications?
If you are running on a 30″ display at 2560×1600 or below, an x8/x8 SLI or CFX configuration will perform the same as a x16/x8 or x16/x16 configuration. The only time that you should even be slightly concerned about running at x8/x8 is when you move up to a multiple display setup. When we pushed the GTX 480 SLI at 5760×1200 we saw up to a 7% difference in performance between x8/x8 and x16/x16, in favor of x16/x16, but that was in one game only.
Vejle is not only the name of a city in Denmark, it is also the codename of the new processor in Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Vejle is a combination of a compute processor and a graphics processor onto a single chip. By combining the two onto one chip, Microsoft and IBM are able to reduce the power, reduce the cooling needed, and to make it less expensive. VentureBeat has published an article on this new hybrid chip.
Redesigning a game console is important even though the redesigns do not make the game consoles faster. The console performance has to stay the same in general because it allows game developers to target a stable platform. But it’s important to reduce the costs, power, and size of the consoles because the rival console makers are in a constant battle to lower their prices and make their machines more appealing to gamers.
Speedwedge has released a nice iPhone app called IOD calc to aid in computing the various numbers needed for stereoscopic photography and video, including focal lengths, interocular distance, and more.
- Calculates the inter-ocular distance needed for each camera setup based on measurements from set. - The sliders are logarithmic so you get finer control at the short end. - Suitable for Motion Picture and Stills work, Film or Electronic cameras. - Best of all it’s fast and intuitive.
The IOD Calc is an essential tool for film-makers taking on the latest 3D revolution. IOD Calc features include: - Handy sliders and nudge buttons to set the distances to the nearest and farthest objects in the scene, as well as the desired convergence point – whether or not you converge in camera or post. - Computes roundness factor so you can match the apparent depth from shot to shot even when changing lenses and setup. - Calculates the foreground and background divergences as percentages and actual distances for your chosen screen size and limits the background divergence to prevent hyper infinities. - Operates in metric and imperial.
It’s a bit pricey at $60, but probably one of the more functional and “professional grade” apps out for this function.
Our own Tiago Veloso is the subject of VisualisingData’s second “Visualization Insights” article, discussing his own interest in infographics and data visualization without any formal training or background in the subject. It’s a great view of the field from someone without the usual design or scientific background that traditionally has dominated the field.
No doubt that there are big differences, both in design style and in the use of data-visualization, as far as an “amateur” can appreciate. Even someone who’s not a designer can see that the cultural and social environment plays a tremendous role on the way information is designed and displayed. I think South American designers, especially in Brazil, have a much more “freestyle” approach, innovating with a mix of vibrant colors and detailed illustrations, without polluting or hiding the information.
And I also believe that it has a lot to do with the editorial vision of the magazines and newspapers. Here, it just feels like the text and the infographic are one, as opposed to a “little picture to illustrate the news”.
And what do you know, VizWorld even has a mention toward the bottom :)
One of the most controversial issues today, involving the internet, is, without doubt, the Net Neutrality, that we can see very well explained on the infographic made by MBA Online. And things are moving so fast, that sometimes we forget how it all started. Like, for instances, the telephone. Pow Wow Know takes us on a trip trough the evolution of one of the most important inventions in the History of Communications. We then move on to a look at the state of Consumer debt in America, provided by Credit Loan, and an interesting 60-second guide to getting out of debt, found on Anixa2010′s Flickr. Finally, Nerd Wallet teaches us how to make the most of Frequent Flyer Miles.
The Huffington Post points us to a fun TED talk from David McCandless about new ways to mash up and merge data into fun and useful visualizations, and slyly throws in a plug for his book The Visual Miscellaneum.
McCandless’ genius is not so much in finding jazzy new ways to show data — the actual graphics aren’t the real innovation here — as in finding fresh ways to combine datasets to let them ping and prod each other. Reporting the number of drug deaths in the UK every year is interesting; but mapping that data onto the number of drug deaths reported by the UK press, broken down by drug, is utterly fascinating (more deaths by marijuana were reported than in fact occurred, by a factor of 484%). McCandless contributes a monthly big-think graphic to the Guardian’s Data Blog, and makes viral graphics for his blog Information Is Beautiful.
Just gonna toot my own horn here a bit and let you know that I just released a new version of the PLY Importer Plugin for Autodesk’s 3dsMax. The new version fixes a bug I ran into with datasets from Okino’s PolyTransfrom this PLY Exporter script (they use ‘vertex_index’ instead of the standard ‘vertex_indices’ property name), as well as adds working support for vertex-normals.
This is a plugin to enable import of Stanford PLY models into Autodesk’s 3D Studio Max. It works for both the 32 & 64 bit versions of Max, and handles both Binary & ASCII PLY models. This plugin uses the PLY code provided by Greg Turk. Unlike the PLY import plugin from HabWare for Max8, the memory leaks have been fixed and now several hundred PLY files can be imported at a time without incident.
It works for 3dsMax 2010 and 2011. Special thanks to Jen at Wunderboy.org for helping out with the Vertex Normal support :)
NVidia has just announced that the Georgia Institute of Technology, not to be confused with that other ‘git’ thing, has just joined the exclusive ranks of the “CUDA Center of Excellence” universities.
“Georgia Tech has a long history of education and research that depends heavily on the parallel processing capabilities that NVIDIA has introduced with its CUDA architecture,” Vetter said. “This award allows us to focus, what is now a large amount of activity across 25 different research groups, under a single center, which will significantly amplify our research capabilities.”
In particular, GIT is responsible for the Ocelot project we brought you back in December. Does this mean a future version of CUDA will run on CPU’s as well at GPU’s? Only time will tell.
NVidia has published the specifications for the new Tesla M2050, M2070, and M2070Q cards online. They looks like they’ll do a pretty good job at setting a new bar for GPU computing benchmarks, both being powered by Fermi and boasting many of the same features you get in the newly released Quadro 5000 and Quadro 6000 packages.
One interesting little tidbit about the M2070 and M2070Q. You look above and may wonder, “Why is there a M2070 and M2070Q?” The Q is actually the answer to an interesting question a few readers brought up after my Quadro 5000 review. If you’ll remember, there was a noticable (very noticable, some would say ridiculous) difference in the performance between the GeForce cards and even the 3-generations back Quadro. The Quadro cards excel’ed at the type of OpenGL operations typically undertaken in visualization and CAD packages, which is exactly what they are supposed to do. However, several large research labs have begun deploying visualization clusters with Tesla’s on board, because they don’t need the video output anyway. The Tesla offers workstation-level quality, but a slight drop in power consumption and eliminating the unused ports that makes large deployments attractive. However, how does the Tesla perform in graphics? It is a Quadro or a GeForce?
I’ve asked NVidia, but haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer. First it was “Like a GeForce, since they aren’t tuned for Graphics”. Then it was “Like a Quadro, because they are both Workstation grade”. Then it was half-and-half, depending on the generation. The M2070Q solves this definitely, as the Q is for “Quadro”, meaning it contains the same graphics optimizations used in the Quadro.
Now, typical usage in such an environment may make the whole thing unnecessary. Unlike a real video card that will be connected to a monitor, Tesla’s in such clusters are almost exclusively used in a “readback” buffer mode, where frames are read back into main memory and then transferred to another system (a remote display over the network, a texture buffer on another card, perhaps several of them are combined into a single Ice-T style buffer). Do the Quadro enhancements help there? I honestly don’t know. I suspect they help a little, but the overwhelming majority of your performance hit goes into the readback, which won’t be any different.
Our own Tiago Veloso is the subject of VisualisingData’s second “Visualization Insights” article, discussing his own interest in infographics and data visualization without any formal training or background in the subject. It’s a great view of the field from someone without the usual design or scientific background that traditionally has dominated the field.
One of the most controversial issues today, involving the internet, is, without doubt, the Net Neutrality, that we can see very well explained on the infographic made by 
Just gonna toot my own horn here a bit and let you know that I just released a new version of the PLY Importer Plugin for Autodesk’s 3dsMax. The new version fixes a bug I ran into with datasets
NVidia has just announced that the Georgia Institute of Technology, not to be confused with that other ‘git’ thing, has just joined the exclusive ranks of the “CUDA Center of Excellence” universities.
VizWorld.com 
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