Hasta La Gadget!

Take the 1GHz Scorpion core residing in Qualcomm’s current flagship Snapdragon, the MSM8x55, duplicate it, overclock the resulting pair by 50 percent, and give them improved graphics in the form of Adreno 220. What do you get? A barnburner by the unsexy name of MSM8x60. Yes, the 1.5GHz Mobile Development Platform Qualcomm loosed on the world at CES earlier this year has found itself prostrate on a test bench, where it has produced some of the finest graphical performance scores yet seen on a mobile device. The taxing OpenGL ES 2.0 test you see above shows the new Snapdragon doubling the frame rates churned out by Motorola’s mighty Atrix 4G (which admittedly has to work harder thanks to its higher-res display) and completely embarrassing older generation hardware like the EVO 4G. That’s a theme carried on throughout AnandTech‘s benchmarking, which you may explore in full at the source link. If you’re wondering when this world-beating dual-core chip will be coming to market, the answer is that it’s already inside HTC’s imminently upcoming EVO 3D and Pyramid devices, albeit running at a tamer 1.2GHz. Exciting, eh?

P.S. – Do take note that the Qualcomm dev platform was plugged into the wall during these tests and was not subject to any power management software that may have otherwise restrained its performance as on the retail chips under test. Moreover, the Egypt benchmark can only run at native resolution, which is what’s causing some seemingly aberrant results such as the iPhone 4 (960 x 640) ranking below the iPhone 3GS (480 x 320).

Continue reading Qualcomm’s 1.5GHz dual-core MSM8660 destroys the competition in majestic benchmark run

Qualcomm’s 1.5GHz dual-core MSM8660 destroys the competition in majestic benchmark run originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 02 Apr 2011 06:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In NVIDIA’s own words, this Thursday will bring us the company’s “next generation, highest performance graphics card.” If that has you thinking GeForce GTX 590, you’re not alone. The dual-GPU solution was expected to arrive at the PAX East get-together this month but seemed to shyly dodge the limelight, though now there’s no escaping its date with destiny. Just make sure to be up nice and early tomorrow, say around 9AM US Eastern Time, for the inevitable barrage of reviews. An unsatisfyingly brief teaser video, featuring Crysis 2 slyly running in the background, can be found after the break.

Update: Whoa, Nelly! Looks like it may end up being the GeForce GTX 590, as evidenced by these leaked images here.

[Thanks, Abdulmalik]

Continue reading NVIDIA’s next flagship graphics card to be unveiled at 9AM on Thursday, bring your own popcorn

NVIDIA’s next flagship graphics card to be unveiled at 9AM on Thursday, bring your own popcorn originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Mar 2011 04:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Like a pesky video game villain that just won’t go away, Microsoft’s DirectX has been a mainstay of mainstream PC gaming pretty much since the inception. Its existence hasn’t been without its tensions, however, with notable graphics guru John Carmack of id Software ignoring it in favor of OpenGL — until last week when he finally acknowledged that Direct3D had outgrown its cross-platform alternative and was now the preferable API for PC game development. That’s all well and good, but plenty of game devs, says Richard Huddy, head of AMD’s developer relations team, don’t want any API at all. Huddy points out the sadly obvious fact that modern graphics cards can pretty much stomp any console hardware into the dirt in a straight fight and yet fail to show the full extent of their superiority in actual game visuals. He’d prefer to see developers given direct low-level access to the hardware, so they can maximize their own talents and really push things forward. Of course, the beauty of DirectX is that it’s a standard that every Windows game designer can code to, leading to predictable and more widely compatible (if not necessarily spectacular) results. For more on how the future’s shaping up, hit the links below.

Game developers want DirectX to ‘go away,’ says AMD man originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Mar 2011 04:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In a world of sophisticated electronics these days, there are always risks to being an early adopter. Alas, it appears that our latest victims are owners of Apple’s Thunderbolt-laden MacBook Pros. Since launch, a number of frustrated customers have been reporting that their new unibody laptops — of all three sizes — are causing random flicker on both 24-inch and 27-inch Cinema Displays when connected via their Mini DisplayPort / Thunderbolt combo port, and now we have video proof to share the pain. Some also confirmed that even replacement machines from Apple are exhibiting the same behavior, though a source of ours says this doesn’t seem to be a widespread issue, and that the company’s hardware engineers are already looking into this. Either way, we’re likely to see a firmware fix for this bug soon — it’s no good having a large monitor constantly blinking at you.

[Thanks, Armando]

Update: sja3274, the creator of the original video above, informed us that his Cinema Display actually had a faulty connection anyway, but he still saw flicker on a new display — much like the behavior shown in the second video. As such, we’ve replaced our first video embed with our second one. Additionally, sja3274 was originally told to expect a software update last Tuesday or Wednesday, but obviously that didn’t happen, so perhaps this is a trickier fix than Apple expected.

Some Thunderbolt MacBook Pros causing flicker on Cinema Displays, Apple investigates (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 Mar 2011 14:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Place your bets, folks, because this one’s gonna get ugly. On your left: a thunderous triad of AMD Radeon HD 6950 cards running in CrossFire. On your right: the terrorizing threat of triple NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 in SLI. In the middle: a Tom’s Hardware tester just trying to stay alive. The winner? Well, as usual in these benchmark articles that sort of depends on what you’re doing, but in general it’s the AMD solution and its CrossFire barrage that comes out on top in terms of performance, cost, and even efficiency. But, that’s certainly far from the whole story. You’ll want to click on through to read about every agonizing blow.

NVIDIA SLI faces AMD CrossFire in a triple-GPU shootout originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Mar 2011 08:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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