VizWorld.com

GreyScaleGorilla has a great short-post on “The Myth of Faster Computers”, specifically regarding their use in Motion Graphics work. Here’s his comment:

A faster machine isn’t just about speeding up your renders. It also allows you to make more beautiful work. How? Well, it’s not what you think. Being able to turn on more effects or turn up your anti aliasing isn’t what matters. Instead, it’s all about iteration. A faster render time allows you to see your changes in closer to real time. This allows for more experimentation and leads to more creative and beautiful solutions to problems.

That’s a great response, and applies to much more than just Motion Graphics.  This is impacting computer simulation and visualization as well, with scientists able to get results back faster.  When you operate on a deadline, the ability to do more ‘test runs’ is crucial and that’s primarily what faster computers offer.  Being able to render in 5 minutes instead of 10 minutes is nice, but being able to run 12 jobs in an hour instead of 6 is the more important issue.

via The Myth Of Faster Computers | greyscalegorilla/blog.

Hardware computer

Digital Storm has just announced a new desktop gaming system called ‘Black|OPS’ that aims to combine 1080P HD Visuals with NVidia’s GTX400 GPU’s to provide 3-screen 3D Vision surround gaming goodness.

Those who have never played on a 3D gaming system across three 1080p displays should be prepared to have their breath taken away. NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 400 GPUs generate the graphics horsepower to drive 750M pixels/second for 3 screens in full HD 1080p 3D Vision gaming for an incredible 5760×1080 experience. In terms of compatibility, NVIDIA’s intelligent software automatically converts over 425 games to stereoscopic 3D without the need for special patches.

They’re not bad on prices either.  $2800 gets you the GTS250 version, but upgrade to only $3000 for GTX460 Fermi-driven goodness.  Full Press Release after the break.

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Hardware 3d, computer, nvidia

Video cameras have become integrated into many devices. Intel is looking to take advantage of these video cameras for gesture based interaction. Intel’s Tony Chun describes mobile augmented reality for develping accelerators to be used in smart phones for image recognition and speech recognition. You can hit the link below for a two minute video describing the technology. From Intel’s website:

As video cameras are integrated into more devices from laptops to phones, computer vision capabilities have become increasingly attractive to enable applications such as gesture-based user interfaces and augmented reality. Intel has demonstrated a functional, reconfigurable hardware accelerator to enable advanced vision capabilities on mobile devices. This research from Intel Labs, St. Petersburg explores the automated design of reconfigurable accelerators based on tools-aided application analysis targeting computationally-intensive media workloads such as the SURF object recognition algorithm.

via Intel : Computer Vision Accelerator

Science computer, intel, vision

Cobra

CyberPower, makers of high-end gaming PC’s, has announced a new line of systems named “Fang” which sports a special Intel BIOS to facilitate overclocking.

The Fang series was co-developed with Intel and other leading manufacturers to offer one of the most unique and advanced gaming platforms in the world. The Fang series with Venom incorporates a special BIOS designed to allow for higher overclocking. The BIOS supports real time readings of CPU speed and additional options for QPI signal and CPU Clock Skew features, all of which improve overclocking capability.

The systems aren’t cheap, priced at $2400-$4000, but they do have some killer specs.  Full press release after the break
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Hardware computer, cyberpower, intel, nvidia