VizWorld.com

Well that didn’t take long.  Over at Guru3D they took a pair of the new GTX580′s and put them through the wringer in SLI configuration, with screaming results.  With such amazing performance in 1 card, two cards winds up bottlenecking the CPU which can’t feed them fast enough.  When all is said and done, what’s the result?  Well, first off you’re gonna need some serious wattage to pull this off:

Power consumption then, well it is high. When observing Crysis Warhead, which really is tremendously GPU intense, we notice power draws well over the 700+ Watt.  You do need to be aware of that, each GPU has a 242W TDP, that’s nearing 500 Watt already. Then add a nice spicy processor, likely overclocked a little drawing say 175W~200W and then the residuals like chipset and devices really can accumulate to significant numbers. But hey, this is the extreme high-end arena, it never has been any different. It’s just that over the past years we as consumers and press have become much more critical about this topic.

In addition, if you want to go triple-screen stereo then you’ll need the two cards in SLI configuration.  But if you’ve got the cash and the power, it’s phenomenal performance.

GeForce GTX 580 SLI review.

Hardware gtx580, nvidia, sli

Dreamworks Animation joins the ranks of Walt Disney Animation, Framestore, ILM, and Sony Imageworks by choosing The Foundry’s Nuke as their standard compositing tool, to be first used in their upcoming feature film “The Croods”.

“Nuke is an incredibly powerful tool that will enable our artists to more readily embrace compositing as part of our creative process,” added Darin Grant, Head of Production Technology at DreamWorks Animation, “The Foundry has impressed us with their commitment to advancing the product and we look forward to an ongoing relationship with their team.”

via Dreamworks Animation Selects Nuke As Compositor Of Choice To Be Implemented Into In-House Pipeline Beginning 2012 – SHOOTonline.

Graphics dreamworks, nuke, thefoundry

Photoshop Actions are an incredibly powerful but frequently underutilized aspect of everyone’s favorite photo editing tool.  In a new tutorial on TutsPlus, marvel at the massive action they create to take a single flattened image and turn it into a beautiful 3D box, properly lit and shadowed.

Actions can be used to quickly automate repetitive tasks. In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to create an action that will automatically create a 3D software box from a flat template.

It’s a big tutorial (72 steps), and the resulting action can take minutes on a slower computer, but it’s a great example of the sheer power of Photoshop Actions.

via Create a 3D Software Box in Photoshop Using Actions | Psdtuts+.

Graphics photoshop, tutorial

Yesterday at the annual analyst’s meeting with AMD, they really talked up the upcoming Fusion parts that will combine AMD’s CPU and GPU into a single silicon, offering the “Best of Both Worlds” on a single chip.  What did analysts think?

Fusion is designed to save AMD’s bacon,” said analyst Roger Kay with Endpoint Technologies Associates. “AMD has just marched across the desert of 2009 and 2010 to arrive at the moment when they have a product that might put them ahead. Fusion is a pretty good deal. They have bet, if not the farm, much of the livestock and the barn on its success.”

Bold words for sure, but they’re about right.  Intel’s current GPU offerings, to put it bluntly, suck, and NVidia doesn’t have a suitable desktop GPU (Tegra is another story).  Putting both on one silicon is a risky, but powerful move that could really put AMD in the forefront.  That is, if it actually works.

The first prototypes came back to Austin from the Taiwan factory in April. They worked so well that AMD decided to move up the production schedule by a few months. Once the early prototypes had been thoroughly tested last spring, the Bobcat design team took part of the day off to celebrate their achievement at Buffalo Billiards on East Sixth Street downtown.

Now to see if they can just meet demand.

via AMD bets the farm on new Fusion chip system.

Hardware amd, fusion

A new article from AMD published in the “Embedded Control Europe” magazine called “Combining Hardware and Software for Advanced Embedded Graphics” seems to lobby a round soundly in the direction of Nvidia’s Tegra with statements like this:

Developers no longer need to spend so much time optimizing code to fit into small solid-state storage devices.  Even handheld-sized embedded devices with low-power processors can operate a fully-fledged Windows 7 operating system.  Thus, fully featured x86 computers can more easily adapt to fit the shape and size requirements of the embedded applications, lending themselves to becoming truly embedded and ubiquitous devices.

It may not be immediately obvious to read it, but there’s a strong underlying subtext here: Use AMD technology and you can run your existing Windows applications on mobile devices, instead of rewriting/recompiling them for Apple’s IOS or a Tegra-based device (Based on ARM).  This is a big win for developers who can recycle their existing code and development strategies, but one has to wonder: Will anyone really want to run Windows7 on a mobile device?  Apple kinda reinvented the mobile-device market by abandoning most of the desktop paradigms for a completely new experience.  Games like ‘Trism’ and Apps like ‘Google Goggles’ aren’t really suited well for desktop environments, how would they work in a Desktop Environment shrunken down to Mobile size?

Get the paper here (3 page PDF), or read it online.

Update: And if you really are serious about embedded development, you can try out AMD’s High Performance Embedded Graphics Reference Design Kit: An AMD A3 Processor combined with a Radeon E4960, 1GB Ethernet, and 2 HDMI, 2USB, and 2 SATA ports.

Hardware amd, whitepaper

News of NVidia’ GTX580 is all over the internet today, but one of the better reviews comes from the Jon Peddie Report who takes it through a series of popular benchmarks.  So what makes the card so great? Well, compared to the 480:

Now all 512 cores and all 16 polymorph engines are running, and at a higher clock with the same or less wattage than the crippled 480. Super good tessellation, great ROPS, and 192 GBytes/sec high-speed memory transfers.

They took the card and pitted it against the GTX480, along with the AMD Radeon HD5870 and 6870 in a collection of games, and ranked them (You should like this Jeff) by Framerate.

But that’s not the full story.  The GTX480 easily beats all four cards in raw framerate, but only barely squeaks past the 6870 in Power Per Watt, and loses in Performance Per Dollar.  In the end, the card winds up being the flat-out-winner in raw horsepower, but possibly not the best use of limited funds.  Of course, all of these tests were performed on games, and not engineering applications.  I’ld personally like to see some SpecViewPerf results, and I’m very curious to see how some CUDA codes would run with the additional cores enabled.  In our Quadro5000 review we showed that Raw Core-count is not a good indicator of performance, as the Quadro’s could easily beat the GeForces, even though had a lower CUDA-core count.

Definitely read the review for all the gory details and graphs.

via Nvidia GTX580 Review – Mount Tiburon Testing Labs Reviews.

Hardware benchmark, gtx580, nvidia

The rumors are now facts. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 is on sale at NewEgg for $559.99 with $7.87 shipping and handling. NewEgg has several models in stock, including graphics cards from Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA, and PNY.

Just to recap the specifications, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 will have all 512 streaming processors enabled, have a 128 texture mapping units (TMUs), have 1.536 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 384-bit bus, is using the GF110 chip, and will have a thermal design power (TDP) of 244 Watts. The GPU clock is running at 772 MHz, the shader clock is running at 1544 MHz, while the memory is running at an effective 4008 MHz. The EVGA card has the core overclocked to 797 MHz, so there is a little headroom left, though I doubt much.

via : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 for $559.99 @ NewEgg

Hardware gtx 580, nvidia

Today we begin with a look at the subjective life of a computer user, by Flowtown, and the mobile developer journey, from Vision Mobile. We move on with The Blog Herald‘s History of YouTube, and, while we’re at it, from Audio Affair comes the amazing Audio History. Our last pick comes from Voltier, telling us the Linkbait life cycle.

Read more…

Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

Over at TechEye they take AMD’s latest Eyefinity-6 for a test drive with some popular CAD packages, and contrary to what I originally expected, find it to be surprisingly scalable across 6 screens.

Starting out using Solidworks and using one monitor with the ATI FirePro V9800 brought in a graphical score of 3.81. The next sequence was four monitors running the application and two showing just the windows desktop. To our surprise the actual graphical score of 3.67 had dropped only by 0.14. Finally we pushed the whole six displays into one 5760 x 2400 unit and the final run took us by surprise again, showing a fine drop of only 0.13 with a graphical result of 3.54. The overall monitor increase only saw a very minor decrease in the final graphical output, an exceptionally good result.

I really suspected some pretty heavy impacts on framerates due to the extreme number of pixels you have to push. That resolution is full HD (1080p) across all six displays, great for most people, and to see it only drop by .27 when scaling from 2 to 6 is simply amazing.  It seems to indicate they aren’t fill-rate limited, but I’ld like to see some tests with varying geometric complexity to see how it scales out.  If extremely large models perform as well as simple ones, then.. Just wow.

via Review: AMD-ATI technology will make your eyes boggle – Wanna see six or more of the same or more? This will do it | TechEye.

Hardware amd, eyefinity

Next week I’ll be out in New Orleans at SC10, and every year at SuperComputing they have a high-speed network available for all attendees, and along with it a huge display of all the passwords they’ve managed to sniff out of unencrypted connections (ftp, telnet, unsecure HTTP).  This year, they’ll have some new competition thanks to the popular ‘FireSheep’ extension making the rounds.  If you want to make sure you don’t fall for a FireSheep install (and I almost guarantee there will be someone there using it), then check out the new BlackSheep extension.

BlackSheep does this by dropping ‘fake’ session ID information on the wire and then monitors traffic to see if it has been hijacked. While Firesheep is largely passive, once it identifies session information for a targeted domain, it then makes a subsequent request to that same domain, using the hijacked session information in order to obtain the name of the hijacked user along with an image of the person, if available. It is this request that BlackSheep identifies in order to detect the presence of Firesheep on the network.

Of course, BlackSheep won’t actually protect you, just warn you (at which point, it’s probably too late).  The only real solutions?

• Don’t use WiFi, Use a Cellular Modem instead
• Use all encrypted services (SSH & HTTPS)
• My Personal Favorite, Use a VPN

And know you know.. And Knowing is half the battle!

via Zscaler Cloud Security : SaaS Web Security, Web Security, URL Filtering, Internet Security.

Graphics, Hardware, Science psa