With the launch of the next blockbuster gaming title Batman: Arkham Origins, NVIDIA has decided to team up with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment to package the game with their newest series of Graphics Processing Units. This is the sort of bump that NVIDIA has been known to give to only the highest-quality and graphics-intensive games […]
Remember the 2011 iMac’s HDD replacement program? It seems like the machine thought it was time for an encore. Apple recently announced that 27-inch iMacs sold between May 2011 and October 2012 may be eligible for a free repair, citing faulty AMD Radeon HD 6970M GPUs (you can find the official statement after the break). The issue specifically affects machines with 3.1GHz Core-i5 and 3.4GHz Core-i7 processors, and can cause visual distortions, white or blue vertical lines or a solid black display. According to 9to5Mac, Apple is also issuing refunds to customers who paid to have the GPU fixed before the program was announced. Fair enough if you’re on a budget, but we won’t blame you if you use the issue as an excuse to upgrade.
Source: 9to5Mac
The Xbox One has already seen a lot of changes since its initial unveiling back in May. Most of the changes were simple reversals on earlier features that got gamers pretty upset with Microsoft. However, this newest update will put a smile on gamers’ faces. Microsoft bumped up the performance of the Xbox One’s GPU […]
The MacBook Air’s graphics capabilities make it too wimpy to play any proper games on out of the box—but there is a way to beef things up.
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The MacBook Air’s integrated graphics all but rule it out as a serious gaming machine. However, Larry Gadea at the Tech Inferno forums has found a way to make the Air a powerhouse through an ad hoc external GPU. His design mates a PCI Express video card to the Mac’s Thunderbolt port through a combination of two adapters, a Boot Camp installation of Windows 7 and third-party software. The performance improvement is appropriately dramatic, leading to frame rates up to seven times faster than what Intel’s HD 5000 can manage. Just don’t expect to buy a pre-assembled version anytime soon — the peripheral needs a desktop-class power supply just to run, and Intel won’t issue the licenses needed to commercialize Thunderbolt GPUs. If you’re absolutely determined to get a Crysis-worthy ultraportable, though, you’ll find Gadea’s instructions at the source link.
Filed under: Gaming, Laptops, Peripherals, Apple, NVIDIA
Via: MacRumors
Source: Tech Inferno
It’s a frankenstein monster of efforts, this computing rig appearing this afternoon, one that connects a MacBook Air to graphics it has no business running on its own – but certainly has the ability to roll with, it would seem. This amalgamation of bits and pieces starts with a Thunderbolt to Express Card adapter, moving on then to an ExpressCard to PCI-Express adapter, then connecting in the end to an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 graphics card. This beast then – after all that – brings what very much appears to be a high-end gaming experience to the Apple notebook.
The only caveat – other than an exposed set of fans, if you don’t wrap it all up – is the fact that you’ve got to use Apple’s Boot Camp to run Windows to make this all happen. Inside Boot Camp, Windows can bring the driver requirements needed to work with this high-powered graphics card, and the adapters seem to do the rest!
This setup is able to be plugged and unplugged with ease, making the MacBook Air an at-home beast of graphics delivery when you’re sitting down, a mobile computer as it’s marketed as when you’re not in the mood for gaming.
“You’ll get faster performance with an external monitor, but you’ll lose the convenience of not needing a giant monitor. This becomes relevant as people make better eGPU cases where your eGPU will be portable. Why bring a monitor to your friend’s place when your laptop already has one?” – Larry Gadea
Larry Gadea is the creator of this rig, and his original post to the Tech Inferno forums has more details on benchmarks and build options than you’ll ever care to sift through. Instead you’ll probably just want to kick this rig out yourself.
Meanwhile we’re reveling in the fact that someone saw things similar to Chris Davie’s column from earlier this year: Dear Apple, here’s what I want from the new Thunderbolt Display, complete with display-based GPU. Keep it powerful, and Apple – keep considering it!
VIA: MacRumors
MacBook Air rigged with NVIDIA GeForce GPU for Thunderbolt super-build is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.
NVIDIA has just announced an insane new GPU. Designed for (wealthy) graphic professionals, the Kepler-based Quadro K6000 is, apparently, "the fastest and most capable GPU ever built".
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NVIDIA’s just launched its latest flagship Quadro GPU for well-heeled graphics professionals, the Kepler-based Quadro K6000. The company claims it’s “the fastest and most capable GPU ever built” with double the graphics capability of its Quadro 6000 predecessor. It also has 12GB of the “world’s largest and fastest” DDR5 graphics memory, enabling companies like Nissan to load nearly complete vehicle models, for instance. Other niceties include 2,880 streaming multiprocessor cores, four simultaneous displays at up to 4K resolution, ultra-low latency video I/O and large scale visualization support. It’ll hit the market this fall from workstation vendors like HP, Dell and Lenovo, along with system integrators and distribution partners like PNY. There’s no pricing yet, but the current K5000 runs about $2,250 — so, prime your budget expectations accordingly.
Filed under: Peripherals, NVIDIA
Via: Slashgear
Source: NVIDIA
The Apple Thunderbolt Display is long overdue a makeover. Revealed in July 2011, the 27-inch monitor has watched generations of MacBook come and go – and, until this year at least, the Mac Pro stagnate with no compatibility whatsoever – and, despite the iMac aesthetic it originally echoed being significantly upgraded last October, still languishes with its original design. Sometimes, with Apple, you have to be patient. The company has, for the most part, a yearly refresh cycle, but the Thunderbolt Display is (in tech terms) old. Still, that arguably just gives Apple the chance to do something particularly special with the new Thunderbolt Display – so here’s my wish list.
The current Thunderbolt Display makes most sense when paired with either a MacBook Air or Pro, or the Mac Mini. Its 27-inch, 2560 x 1440 resolution LED-backlit IPS panel still looks great, even several years after its original debut, though it’s undeniably lacking in pixels compared to the Retina technology Apple is rolling out on its MacBook Pro notebooks.
What it hasn’t played nicely with is the existing Mac Pro, which until the upcoming 2013 iteration has lacked Thunderbolt support. Instead, Apple has kept the older, 27-inch LED Cinema Display around, effectively identical bar the use of a Mini DisplayPort connection.
The new Mac Pro, the stubby cylinder announced to great fanfare at WWDC 2013 last month, in fact introduces Thunderbolt 2 to Apple’s range (and the tech world at large). Delivering twice the bandwidth of Thunderbolt, by combining the two 10 Gbit/s channels into one, 20 Gbit/s pipe, it’s capable of full 4K UltraHD resolution and, in fact, of simultaneously displaying it on an external screen while also transferring it.
So, Thunderbolt 2 would be the first thing on my shopping list for the new Thunderbolt Display, not least because that extra bandwidth would be useful for turning the monitor into a hub. Since Thunderbolt (1 and 2) supports daisy-chaining up to six devices from a single host port, the use of the newer connection type means even more potential for high-bandwidth applications routed through the display.
The current Thunderbolt Display offers a gigabit ethernet port, FireWire 800, a second Thunderbolt connection for daisy-chaining, and three USB 2.0 ports. A humble upgrade would see that USB switched for the faster USB 3.0 standard.
“A wish list needn’t be humble: I want an external GPU”
Still, a wish list needn’t be humble, and so what I’d really like to see is the Thunderbolt Display gain its own external GPU. We’ve already seen some attempts at Thunderbolt-connected external graphics – Lucid showed off one, based on AMD’s Radon 6700, back in September 2012; it was capable of boosting a standard ultrabook from native 28fps to 89fps – but the argument for including it in the new monitor makes even more sense when you look at how the rest of Apple’s range is developing.
On the one hand, you have the MacBook Air, most recently upgraded with Intel’s fourth-gen “Haswell” Core processors. Now, Haswell is great for battery life – we comfortably exceeded Apple’s own 12hr runtime predictions, and that’s likely to get even longer when OS X Mavericks arrives later this year – but it doesn’t do much for graphical crunching. How much better to be able to plug in a new Thunderbolt Display and instantly get the benefit of extra GPU power when you most likely need it, right on the desktop.
The MacBook Pro is more GPU-potent from the start, thanks to its discrete chipset, but it too could still benefit from the addition of standalone graphics support where no compromise for power consumption would be required. The GPU in a new Thunderbolt Display could count on a mains power source, and as such not have to sacrifice any potency in the name of prolonging runtimes.
It’s with the new Mac Pro 2013 that such a display enhancement makes most sense, though. The compact diminutive workstation comes with dual-GPUs out of the box, but from the moment Apple first previewed it there were questions as to how upgrade-friendly the double Radeons would be. In fact, the whole Mac Pro redesign shifts from internal improvements to the benefits plugging in external components can bring, whether that be more storage, optical drives, or something else.
So, rather than swap out the onboard graphics, plugging in a new Thunderbolt Display could simply add to them. Mac developer Guy English wrote at length last month about the potential for parallel GPU processing (something AMD itself has been talking about consistently for its last few product cycles too, as part of its Heterogeneous Computing drive) and how the new Mac Pro will open up a fresh age of enormous compute power, along with Apple’s apparent shift away from pure benchmark boasts and toward the sort of real-world applications of today.
Even with the slimmed-down design of the current iMac, there’s certainly room in the 27-inch model for an extra GPU or two. In fact, since it’s my wish list and I can add what I like, I’d probably take up a little more of it with some onboard flash storage, adding to the internal capacity of whatever Mac is plugged in. We’ve already seen that Thunderbolt (1) external drives with solid-state memory can be as fast as internal drives; certainly enough to manipulate high-resolution video from, without any performance hit compared to when dealing with locally-stored files.
The biggest question is resolution. Right now, the 27-inch iMac runs at 2,560 x 1,440; Apple changed the panel sandwich itself in late-2012, optically-laminating the various layers together so as to improve visual quality, but the sheer number of pixels hasn’t been changed for some time. Despite ongoing rumors of a Retina iMac, for one reason or another – likely price and component availability – we’re yet to see it happen.
In an ideal world, Apple could step up to Ultra HD resolution (3,840 x 2,160) and blow our eyes away. Thunderbolt 2 certainly supports it. However, there’s a dearth of 27-inch Ultra HD panels out there right now; the closest you get, really, is Sharp’s 31.5-inch IGZO Ultra HD screen, which we’ve seen begin to show up in commercial monitors.
Apple is already believed to have an “in” with Sharp, which could certainly give it some leverage for snapping up the coveted panels. That would make for a big Thunderbolt Display 2nd-gen, however, both in terms of price and desk size. One possibility, then, could be a return to the days of multiple Apple display size options: perhaps a 27-inch version, running at the existing resolution, and then a larger model delivering Ultra HD for those that have the depth of wallet for it.
Whether Apple opts to cater to the cash-strapped, Ultra HD seems a case of “when” not “if”; after all, Phil Schiller already billed Final Cut Pro X with 4K support as being one of the key developments for the 2013 Mac Pro, even illustrating it during the WWDC keynote with a shot of a triple display setup powered by the workstation. If Apple doesn’t give its highly-paid top tier developers (and traditional Mac Pro audience) the monitors to match, someone else will, and I can’t see the canny Cupertino firm allowing itself to miss the opportunity.
The new Mac Pro tells, among many things, the story of Apple’s fresh attitude to modularity. Fitting everything bar the kitchen sink into a single box – and leaving room for twice as much again – is the old way; better, Apple seems to be saying, to take advantage of high-speed interconnects like Thunderbolt 2 to grow more organically, adding external components piecemeal as needed.
Apple could simply refresh the Thunderbolt Display with a new casing and the second-gen connection. It’d probably sell plenty, too. Still, I can’t help but wish that some of the company’s ambition filters down from the team responsible for the new Mac Pro, and the new Thunderbolt Display 2 becomes more than just a screen.
Dear Apple, here’s what I want from the new Thunderbolt Display is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.
NVIDIA has officially kicked off its GeForce GTX 760 GPU, which is being offered at the budget-friendly price of $249 and harboring Kepler architecture. In gaming benchmarks, the GTX 760 beats out the previous GTX 660 across the board, in some cases quite substantially. NVIDIA hails it as offering power “dramatically” beyond the gaming consoles
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