Apple Reaches New Milestone: 500,000 iOS Apps (Infographic)
12:28 pm
What is AMD GeometryBoost?
11:35 am
AMD has announced a new hardware-level feature in their new FirePro V5900 and V7900 cards called “GeometryBoost”. What is this you ask?
GeometryBoost in the new FirePro V5900 and FirePro V7900 is a unique hardware capability that processes two primitives per clock cycle. Each graphics engine is assigned to its own shader engine, consisting of up to 10 SIMDs. The results is a doubling in the rate of primitive & vertex processing, as well as back/front culling rates and scan conversion setup. It also doubles early reject rates.
The new 8th generation tessellation engine improves performance up to 3X in both OpenGL 4.1 and DirectX 11.
Sounds like another feature designed to compete with Quadro and targeted at the high-end CAD space. The last comment mentions using their new tessellation ending with OpenGL4.1 and DX11, but hopefully the “GeometryBoost” features will also offer a nice performance boost to earlier versions.
Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 24/05/2011
7:00 am
Our first pick in today’s selection it’s an interesting look at some of America’s overlooked amusement parks, provided by Intuit. After that, a trip into the history of the San Diego Zoo, by Goin 2 Travel, and then, San Francisco Hotel Guides and City Pass bring some facts and curiosities about San Francisco, and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Infographics Summary for 2011-05-23
10:30 pm
Martina Johansson’s Fairy Girl
4:17 pm
CGSociety has a nice writeup on Martina Johansson’s “Fairy Girl” model and rendering, showing her prowess with a whole collection of tools ranging from modeling to painting.
I tried a lot of different styles for the wings. For example I tried give her big butterfly wings but quickly realized that I wanted the wings to be much smaller and with less details to put more focus on the girl. This is in fact something I think we 3D artists can learn from painters. Not everything needs to be given details just because it’s hard or impressive. Give parts of less importance fewer details and vice versa. At least for still images. I made the basemesh in Modo. I then transferred that into ZBrush where I started the actual sculpting. I used Photoshop for the textures and Modo for lighting and render.
U.S. Army Offers MOSES 3D Web System for Non-Army Researchers
2:19 pm
The U.S. Military was one of the big consumers of the Second Life Enterprise Beta project, the “Virtual World On A Blade” project from Linden Labs that allowed people to run their own Virtual Worlds within their own networks. It was particularly attractive to the Military because they could then lock it down to their own DoD security restrictions, unlike other “public” virtual worlds. With it existing no more, the U.S. Army has released a parallel project named ‘MOSES’ (Military Open Simulator Enterprise Strategy) for all the orphaned developers.
Priority will be given to technology and / or military testing. “It doesn’t have to be a military project,” explains Maxwell. “If you’re developing or evolving some cool new kind of technology, like bots, for example, that would be clearly relevant to the MOSES mission.”
So far, Maxwell has assigned 18 sims for Air Force use and 4 sims for Navy use. Another 4 sims have gone to private research firms and several to individual qualified researchers. “I will keep assigning MOSES resources until they run out,” says Maxwell.
via U.S. Army Offers MOSES 3D Web System for Non-Army Researchers « Sitearm.
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