expreview has the specs on the new Radeon HD 4770, based on the RV740 chip. Of interesting note: They ship it with high-speed GDDR5 memory, but they’ve cut the memory interface in half (from 256bit to 128bit).
Slated to lauch May4th, price tag is at $99.
BOXX is breaking ground again with their new 3DBOXX8500, a new workstation based on the ‘Nehalem’ Xeon processor from Intel.
Capable of reaching 3.46 GHz using Intel Turbo Boost Technology, the 3DBOXX 8500 provides digital artists with 16 virtual cores of high-powered, multitasking performance for 3D design, animation, rendering, and visualization applications, as well as VFX compositing, video editing and digital intermediate workflows. Designed to accommodate multi-threading, multiple applications, and complex production pipelines, the 8500 features six Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series options, up to 192GB advanced DDR3 ECC memory, 12 terabytes of storage, and up to six hard drives.
Time to upgrade?
expreview.com has news that NVidia, presumably in response to AMD’s latest move to reschedule the Radeon HD4890 release to April 2nd, has done the same with the GTX275.
Unfortunately, NVidia has a reputation for “paper launches” (eg, Issuing press releases saying that it’s released, but without any inventory to actually sell). So even with the card “released” on Thursday, it’ll probably be a few months before anyone is actually selling them. That should give AMD a good lead in the short-term.
Specs on the GTX275 can be found on Hardware.Info
Update: Tom’s Hardware has more on this story.
According to Expreview, Nvidia will release the GeForce GTX 275 on April 2nd. Naturally, without some kind of source, such a date would be chalked up as simply rumor. However, that may not be the case, as DollarShops actually had the card listed for around $327 USD (€249) and promised to have the card in stock by April 4. Manufactured by Sparkle, the GeForce GTX 275 offers the 55nm GT200 GPU clocking in at 633 MHz and a 1164 MHz memory clock, 896 MB of DDR3 (448-bit), 240 stream processors, 2 DVI outputs and HDCP. However, now the card is gone, ripped from the online retail shop altogether.
Will it be released this week or not? That’s the big question right now.. Oh the Drama..
NVIDIA Brings GeForce GTX 275 Launch Forward to April 2nd – Expreview.com.
Update: Read our follow-up article, “What is NVidia Really Releasing?“.
NVidia has issued a press release announcing a new line of QuadroFX cards.
Another interesting piece of this is their new “SLI Multi-OS” system.
Built into the new Quadro FX 3800, Quadro FX 4800, and Quadro FX 5800, SLI Multi-OS allows users to tap into the advanced visualization and compute capabilities of the Quadro GPUs to experience full graphics performance within a virtualized system. SLI Multi-OS works in association with Parallels Workstation Extreme virtualization software and Intel’s VT-d technology, assigning both the host and guest virtual machine its own dedicated GPU. Available in the new HP Z800 workstation, the combination of these innovative technologies delivers application performance nearly identical to systems configured with a dedicated operating system and GPU.
This means you can now run OpenGL applications with full hardware acceleration inside a Virtualized environment. With virtualization becoming more and more attractive to larger organizations, and virtualization being used more on cluster-configurations to simulate one single large machine across a cluster of smaller machines, a good working virtualized OpenGL accelerator will be a huge win for NVidia in the upcoming thin-client space created by companies like OnLive & Gaikai
via NVidia Press Releases: SLI Multi OS and new QuadroFX’s.
Ford Motor Company has recently upgraded the Powerwall in their Electronic Design Presentation Room (EDPR) and Advanced Visualization Center (AVC) with Sony 4K Projectors, thanks to help from IGI.
The Powerwall at Ford’s EDPR is 60-feet wide. It is equipped with three projectors, model number SRX-S110, which produce 10,000 ANSI lumens each, and produce 8.8 million pixels per unit. The company also uses two additional SRX-S110 projectors for two separate screens in its AVC, which are used for full-scale viewing of vehicle designs.
They say it give stheir engineers better visualizations of their designs, but I think the real purpose is merely to make a great demo to guests.
via Sony’s SXRD 4k Projectors Help Keep Ford Motor Company In The Passing Lane.
MSI has just announced their new N285GTX card with SuperPipe technology. What is SuperPipe you might ask?
Heatpipe is an important component on a graphics card, which is responsible for transferring heat away from the GPU to the cooling find for dissipation. MSI N285GTX SuperPipe features two 8mm thick heatpipes which are 60% thicker than the traditional pipes, and show about a 90% improvement in thermal efficiency. It’s also equipped with a Twin Frozr dual-fan thermal design.
Aside from that, it comes with 1GB GDDR3 memory, and operates at 648/1476Mhz with a special OverClocked edition running at 680/2500Mhz. Currently available for EUR340 (~$450) in Europe.
via MSI Announces N285GTX SuperPipe Graphics Card – Expreview.com.
FiringSquad takes advantage of the recent price drops on the GeForce GTX260 cards to benchmark and compare three different types of cards: an original GTX260 engineering reference sample, some 65nm cards, and some 55nm cards. So what’s the main differences between a 65nm and 55nm card?
Thanks to its smaller manufacturing process, NVIDIA’s latest 55-nm GeForce GTX 260 GPU delivers improved power consumption, but the results were mixed when it came to temps. Since NVIDIA’s reference design removes the aluminum backplate on 55-nm GPUs to cut costs (including the GTX 285), we actually found that our 55-nm BFG and EVGA GeForce GTX 260 cards ran slightly warmer at load than 65-nm GeForce GTX 260-216 cards we had on hand, although they did run a few degrees cooler at idle.
CNet News attended Intel’s talk at GDC this week, where they unveiled a few more details about their upcoming Larrabee CPU/GPU chipset.
Larrabee is “Intel’s first many-core architecture,” Forsyth said. “The first product will be very much like a GPU. It will look like a GPU. You will plug it into a machine and it will display graphics,” he said. (GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)
“But at its heart are processor cores, not GPU cores. So it’s bringing that x86 programmable goodness to developers,” Forsyth said. Larrabee will carry the DNA of Intel’s x86 architecture, the most widely used PC chip design in the world.
Given Intel’s currently legal entanglements with NVidia over licensing issues, it’s uncertain what will ever happen with Larrabee, but it’s an interesting architecture. Intel’s a bit late to the game of massively parallel SIMD chips like NVidia & AMD/ATI use, but they’ve got the engineering knowledge and fabrication potential to put a huge dent in their competitor’s market shares.
via Intel details future graphics chip at GDC | Nanotech – The Circuits Blog – CNET News.
AMD/ATI’s announced their latest card, the FirePro V7750. With 1GB of GDDR3 memory, a 30-bit display pipeline, dual Displayport and a Dual-link DVI port, HDR rendering with 8,10, and 16-bit color component support, and more. It’s a true horse of a card, and available for $899.
It’s designed primarily for CAD users, like Solidworks. The full press release is inside.
Jon Stokes has a piece on Ars Technica about the “3d gaming revolution”, and how it’s not taking place on the classic fronts of consoles & PC’s, but rather on handhelds, driven largely by the iPhone.
I’ve covered at some length the ARM offerings in this space, and why Intel won’t have a shot at a real mobile phone form factor until sometime after transitioning to 32nm, but I’ve paid less attention to the software side of this equation. At a GDC session yesterday by the Khronos Group, a broad industry consortium working on the OpenGL, OpenCL, and other GPU-related APIs, I was surprised at just how little sway Microsoft has in the mobile 3D arena.
While OpenGL ES will run on Windows Mobiles devices (and probably the Palm Pre), those devices have been marketed and targeted mainly toward businesses. They will in time catch-up to the iPhone’s lead in gaming, but the damage has been done: Mobile Embedded Gaming is here to stay.
via Mobile 3D gaming revolution leaving Wintel behind – Ars Technica.
VizWorld.com Got an idea for a story? Drop us a line at [email protected] or other means.
Comments