Feb 06
Jan 24
This week the teams behind the NVIDIA GeForce Experience have unleashed the Open Beta version of the software, available for download by not just the select few (40,000 users, to be fair), but the greater public – you can grab it now! This Open Beta allows you access to the one and only GeForce Experience, a system where the teams of professionals and undeniably powerfully-minded graphics know-it-alls of NVIDIA’s GeForce ranks have for you sets of optimizations for the games you play all the time. In short: your PC games are about to get a whole lot more awesome.
This release has a limited number of games for which you’ll be able to get next-level optimization on your own GeForce-toting gaming PC. This release pumps up the availability of optimization beyond what the closed beta offered, with both Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad CPU support now ready for action. NVIDIA also added 2560 x 1440 display resolution support this time around – that having not been part of the closed beta release either.
With the GeForce Experience Open Beta you’ll see improved game detection logic as well as a collection of 41 games ready to look and work as magnificent as they’ve ever been on your machine. Having added FarCry 3, Mechwarrior Online, and the battle action heavy Hawken for this release, GeForce Experience is now able to work with 41 total titles. The rest are as follows:
Assassin’s Creed 3, Batman: Arkham City, Battlefield 3, Borderlands 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Counter-Strike:GO, CrossFire: Rival Factions, Crysis 2, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Diablo III, Dirt 3, DOTA 2, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, F1 2012, Fable III, Fallout New Vegas, Far Cry 3, FIFA 12, FIFA 13, Football Manager 2013, Hitman Absolution, League of Legends, Left 4 Dead 2, Mass Effect 3, Max Payne 3, Mechwarrior Online, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Planetside 2, Portal 2, Shogun 2: Total War, Star Wars The Old Republic, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, Team Fortress 2, The Secret World, The Sims 3, The Sims Medieval, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, World Of Tanks, and World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria.
The actual app and usage therein is beyond simple. Once you’ve got it downloaded and open, you hit the scan button to see if there are any games on your machine that are part of the current list the GeForce Experience works with. The machine we’ve used here is an Alienware M17x R4 (see our full review here), and on it we’ve got none other than Batman: Arkham City (see our full review here) which the GeForce Experience software recognizes easily.
From there it’s just a button click or two more before we’ve got full NVIDIA-approved optimization of our settings, based entirely on the hardware/software combination we’ve got and ready for the best-case-scenario outcome when we kick out the gaming jams.
And that’s it! The simplicity of this app is part of the experience, the GeForce Experience being one that’s meant to be beyond simple. This environment makes certain everyone takes the time to optimize their machines with as easy a process as possible so that NVIDIA’s GeForce graphics can do their work as well as possible – and everything looks and handles hot!
This release includes upgrades in performance for client startup, game scan, billboard display, and nothing less than straight up communication with NVIDIA as well. If you’re all about getting some fantastic support for your games straight from NIVIDA, it’s time you headed over to the GeForce Experience Beta download page and had at it. This release works with Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista, and is just 9.16 MB in file size – make it yours!
Bonus! Have a peek at the two videos below direct from NVIDIA – the first was filmed at the CES 2013 event we attended (see the timeline below for more info) with the bossman talking about the release iteration of GeForce Experience. The other video shows the app again in simple terms with fancy graphics flying everywhere – hot stuff!
GeForce Experience Open Beta hands-on: optimization for all! is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Jan 18
AVADirect, a company that specializes in custom-built computers, laptops, and server systems, has announced a world’s first. Their new 2U four-way server system is the first of its kind to house four NVIDIA Tesla graphics cards. The company says that “never has the industry seen or utilized such a solution,” until now.
AVADirect also partnered up with ASUS and used the company’s ESC4000 G2 Black 2U server platform to bring some respectable hardware to these new server units. On the inside, you can store up to 512GB of DDR3 RAM, with room for eight PCI-E 3.0 16x expansion cards (including those four Tesla units).
You’ll also find eight SATA ports with multiple RAID configurations, eight hot-swappable hard drive bays, and a 1+1 Redundant 1,620W 80PLUS Platinum power supply. That’s certainly a lot of firepower that must be treated carefully. AVADirect says that these new units are meant for render farms, imagine generators, rack-mounted graphics workstations, and multi-display workstations.
Of course, AVADirect will let you customize the new server system to fit your needs, and their website offers a ton of different configurations. However, the company’s recommended build costs just shy of $5,250, so if you’re serious about getting some major computing power in your hands, you better be saving up right this instant.
AVADirect announces world’s first quad NVIDIA Tesla server system is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Jan 10
Ready to talk mobile and desktop graphics? Us too, that’s why we’ve asked AMD’s director of global business units marketing, John Taylor to join us on the stage this morning. Follow all of the interviewing action just after the break.
January 10, 2013 12:30 PM EST
Check out our full CES 2013 stage schedule here!
Continue reading Live from the Engadget CES Stage: an interview with AMD’s John Taylor
Filed under: Cellphones, AMD
Jan 08
Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR Series 6 mobile GPU debuts at CES, we go eyes-on
Posted in: Today's Chili 
Last week, Imagination Technologies gave us a glimpse of its next-gen PowerVR Series 6 mobile GPU and its prowess with OpenGL ES 3.0. That demo didn’t showcase Series 6’s full potential, as the company could only let us see a test chip on an FPGA board that could deliver only 1 GB/s of bandwidth — one tenth of the GPUs performance capability. Now that Imagination Technologies’ first Series 6 partner, LG, has given the go ahead, the time has come to see what Series 6 can really do on an optimized board destined for an HDTV.
In addition to the Series 6, the company also demoed an older Series 5XT GPU that’s been upgraded with some recently released API extensions. Those APIs are meant to breathe new life into Imagination Technologies’ older GPUs and give them some of the rendering features found in the Series 6. Interest piqued? You can see the GPUs do their thing in our demo video after the break.
Continue reading Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR Series 6 mobile GPU debuts at CES, we go eyes-on
Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment
Jan 06
NVIDIA officially unveils Tegra 4: offers quad-core Cortex A15, 72 GPU cores, LTE support
Posted in: Today's Chili 
One new SoC per year? That’s what NVIDIA pledged back in the fall of 2010 and today at its CES 2013 presser, it delivered with the Tegra 4’s official unveiling. The chip, which retains the same 4-plus-1 arrangement of its predecessor, arrives with a whopping 72 GeForce GPU cores — effectively offering six times the Tegra 3’s visual output and is based on the 28nm process. It also is the first quad-core processor with Cortex A15 cores on-board, and offers compatibility with LTE networks through an optional chip. NVIDIA claims this piece of silicon is the world’s fastest mobile processor, and showed a demonstration in which a Tegra 4 went head-to-head against a Nexus 10 in loading websites (you can guess which one won).
The Tegra 4 also introduces new computational photography architecture, which adds a new engine to drive the image processing and significantly improve the amount of time it takes to calculate the necessary mathematics 10 times faster than current platforms. To show off its power, NVIDIA demonstrated HDR rendering on live video. The chip is also capable of implementing HDR in burst shots and with LED flash. The idea, NVIDIA says, is to eventually make our mobile cameras more powerful than DSLRs, and this is certainly a step in the right direction.
Gallery: NVIDIA CES 2013 press event
Joseph Volpe contributed to this report.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Wireless, Mobile, NVIDIA
Jan 04
OpenCL mod for the Kindle Fire HD reveals untapped graphics potential (hands-on video)
Posted in: Today's Chili 
As neat as the Kindle Fire HD already is, just a few dinky tweaks could turn it into so much more — a platform for true physics-based gaming, for example, or even for surprisingly fast photo manipulation. How come? Because both the 8.9-inch and 7-inch versions of the Android-based slate come with a graphics engine that can handle OpenCL acceleration. It certainly won’t work out of the box, but Amazon has been working quietly with Imagination Technologies — the folks behind the tablet’s PowerVR GPU — to try it out. The demo after the break is subtle, perhaps, but it’s fluid, detailed and goes far beyond anything that a stock device can achieve. It also proves that, in certain circumstances, OpenCL has the power to boost frame rates by 50 percent while simultaneously lowering power consumption by the same proportion. Read on for more.
Jan 03
PowerVR Series6 mobile GPUs are almost here, we go eyes-on with a test chip (video)
Posted in: Today's Chili 
Imagination Technologies is on a high right now. Throughout 2012, the company’s PowerVR graphics processors continued to monopolize the iPhone and iPad as well as appearing in (late 2011) Android flagships, the PlayStation Vita and even the first Clover Trail-powered Windows 8 tablets. But you know what? That’s old news, because all those devices run current-gen PowerVR Series5 silicon. Most new top-end devices in 2013 and 2014 will either contain the latest Mali GPUs from rival ARM, or they’ll pack PowerVR Series6, aka Rogue. This latter chip is currently being developed by at least eight different smartphone and tablet manufacturers and is expected to make a good bit of noise at CES next week.
But who’s going to wait that long if they don’t absolutely have to? To get a fuller understanding of what awaits us in the coming weeks and months, we scoped out a Rogue test chip at Imagination’s sparkly new HQ just outside of London, UK. The test silicon doesn’t represent the true power of Series6 because it’s running on an FPGA board that severely limits its bandwidth, but it’s still able to show off one crucial advantage: namely the ability to run OpenGL ES 3.0 games and apps. This API is all about improving mobile graphics through making smarter use of GPU compute, without annoying the battery, and the three demos after the break show just how it pulls that off.
Gallery: OpenGL ES 3.0 screenshots
Continue reading PowerVR Series6 mobile GPUs are almost here, we go eyes-on with a test chip (video)
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile
Dec 10
Custom PC-building company AVADirect has been in the business for awhile, and we’ve checked out some of their solutions in the past, but today they have announced what they call a “one-of-a-kind Supermicro rack-mountable system” that allows a quad-SLI NVIDIA graphics setup alongside additional expansion cards for the first time ever.
The company says that this solution allows users to have best of both worlds when it comes to graphics and expansion cards, since the tower can fit up to four graphics cards while still making room for additional cards for other purposes. AVADirect says that most other similar solutions don’t offer the same flexibility.
The motherboard featured in the default configuration (Super X9DRG-QF) offers four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, two PCI-Express 3.0 x8 slots, and one PCI-Express 2.0 x4 slots. So essentially, you could pop in four graphics cards and still have three slots left over for expansion cards like a RAID controller or a network card.
AVADirect says that this kind of flexibility “truly shines and stands out from other configurations” that are offered by competitors. The system also supports Intel Xeon E5 processors and up to 512GB of ECC-registered memory or 192GB of ECC un-buffered memory. On top of all this, there’s eight 3.5-inch hot-swap bays, and a massive 1620-watt redundant power supply to run the show. Of course, it won’t be cheap. AVADirect’s recommended build costs over $2,600.
AVADirect releases “one-of-a-kind” quad-SLI rack tower system is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Dec 06
NVIDIA launches GeForce Experience to automatically optimize graphics settings
Posted in: Today's ChiliNVIDIA has unveiled a new service called GeForce Experience that is essentially a cloud-based service that aims to analyze your hardware and automatically adjust in-game settings and display resolution for a better and optimized experience when playing games. NVIDIA has always been about making you gaming experience as great as possible, but this takes it to the next level.
It may seem like a complicated service, but NVIDIA promises that the user won’t be required to do much of anything. The tool is made to make the user experience as simple as possible. It definitely seems like a perfect solution if you’re not into guess-and-check graphics settings, which can forever for gamers to dial in.
The service can even automatically adjust more advanced settings like anti-aliasing levels and shadow options. There are obviously tons of different configurations that gamers could theoretically apply, but GeForce Experience can fetch optimal settings from the cloud and apply them for you, and it makes changes directly to your game’s config file.
The service is currently in beta, but it’s not public, so get in line if you think you might want to give it a try. If you enjoy tuning your own settings, then GeForce Experience probably won’t change your life, but the service also comes with automatic driver updates, and that’s one thing that every gamer can benefit from.
[via Maximum PC]
NVIDIA launches GeForce Experience to automatically optimize graphics settings is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
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