Good news, mobile gamers — NVIDIA‘s looking out for you and yours, and if you’re tired of lobbying to Congress about the inequities between driver releases for desktop GPUs and driver releases for mobile GPUs, you can finally move on to some other just cause. NVIDIA’s Verde driver program has been a relative success over the years, but it’s about to become a lot more gnarly when the company outs its 256 Series drivers in a few months. At that time, NVIDIA plans to “completely unify its GPU drivers, so mobile and desktop users will be able to get the latest releases simultaneously.” Users won’t find the desktop and laptop drivers in the same package, but we’re sure each one will be clearly marked on the download page. It’s worth noting, however, that these unified releases will only work with laptops featuring discrete GPUs, hybrid solutions utilizing NVIDIA-branded IGPs and Optimus-enabled machines; rigs with multi-vendor solutions (like the Alienware M11x, which uses an integrated set from Intel) won’t be allowed to join the party.
In related news, the upcoming release of the 197.16 driver for laptops will bring along support for external displays with 3D Vision, enabling 3D Vision-ready laptops to pipe 3D content to 3D Vision-ready LCDs with ease. Good news all around, but you’ll have to give those links below a visit if you’re hungry for more.
Well, this is sad. While we told you earlier this week that the Ion 2-powered ASUS Eee PC 1201PN wouldn’t be arriving until late May, a number of European sites have gotten early review samples of the 12-inch “netbook” — if you choose to call it that — and have discovered that it doesn’t use NVIDIA’s Optimus automatic graphics switching technology. That’s right, instead we’re told by NVIDIA that the discrete GeForce 201M GPU runs continuously and Intel’s integrated chip is never used — a configuration which sounds like it’ll absolutely kill the battery life on this machine. According to Hardware Zone, ASUS made this choice aiming to be the first to market with the next generation of Ion, but an Optimus version of the ASUS Eee PC 1201PN will be ready later this quarter. It also appears that an Eee PC 1215N with both Ion 2 and Optimus is floating around, but we haven’t confirmed what’s going on with that. We’re sorry if we confused you even more, but we’ll be keeping our eyes out for the early reviews of the 1201PN to see if our predicted two hours of battery life is on the mark.
Update: The 1201PN cannot be updated with firmware to enable Optimus — the hardware isn’t there for the automatic switching.
Chipmakers have spent billions of dollars over the decades to create specialized processors that can help make computer graphics ever more realistic and detailed.
Now an Australian hobbyist says he has created a technology that can churn out high-quality, computer-generated graphics for video games and other applications without the need for graphics chips or processor-hungry machines.
“Major companies have got to a point where they improve the polygon-count in graphics-rendering by 22 percent a year,” says Bruce Dell, 32, the creator of the new technology, which he calls Unlimited Detail. “We have made it unlimited. It’s all software that requires no special hardware, so you get truly unlimited detail in your scenes.”
Dell is an unusual candidate for a computer-graphics revolutionary. He’s an autodidact who’s never been to a university and who ran a supermarket chain for about eight years.
But he claims to have found a way to search through trillions of voxels, the 3-D counterparts to pixels, to render a scene quickly. Voxels have so far been used largely in medical- and mining-graphics applications, not video games.
Bringing voxel-based rendering to the world of video games is an interesting idea, says Jon Peddie, founder of Jon Peddie Research. That’s because voxels could take a middle ground between two current rendering techniques: the fast but not graphically realistic world of polygon rendering (used by most video games today) and computationally resource-hungry and comparatively slow ray-tracing technology.
“With voxels, you create a volume of points and look at those points to see what the picture is all about,” says Peddie. “That gives a very accurate representations of the world you are trying to render, without taking up too much computational resources.”
Creating lifelike images through graphics-rendering usually requires major computing power. To recreate three-dimensional objects on a computer screen, programmers define a structure in terms of its geometry, texture, lighting and shading.
The resultant digital image is an approximation of a real-life object, but has a computer-generated–graphics feel to it. It also requires intensive computing power, which means graphics programmers must have state-of-the art machines with special chips from companies such as Nvidia and AMD.
In most 3-D graphics-modeling programs, the virtual depiction of almost every real-life object, such as a trees or a stone, starts as a little flat polygon. More-powerful processors can help the software have more of these polygons, which means increased roundness to the objects on screen. With enough computing power, billions of little polygons can be generated, and each made so small that it’s almost a dot.
Another alternative is to use ray tracing, a method in which the computer traces the path of light through space, simulating the effect on the light as it encounters different objects. That approach creates much more visually attractive scenes, but it is extremely intensive in its need for computational resources.
Dell says Unlimited Detail has an alternative to these systems. It uses billions of “point cloud” dots, or voxels, to accurately represent a world. To render an image, Unlimited Detail then acts as a search engine.
Dell says his algorithm can quickly figure out the dots needed to render a scene, search the data to find only those points, and pull them up quickly enough for smooth animation. He calls it “mass connected processing.”
“Instead of putting a trillion dots on screen and covering the ones you don’t use, we show only what needs to be done and how you can manipulate those dots,” says Dell.
It’s all so new that Dell, who claims to have single-handedly written the software, is still in the process of forming a company.
So how legitimate are his claims? It’s hard to evaluate. Few graphics programmers or industry analysts have actually seen his software at work. Dell says those who have are bound by tight nondisclosure agreements limiting their ability to talk about it.
And graphics chip makers such as Nvidia are not impressed.
“Voxel graphics have been around for quite some time, but they are not considered to be as precise as polygon-based graphics,” says Ken Brown, a spokesperson for Nvidia.
Graphics rendered using voxels can run on less-resource-hungry machines, but they can’t offer the same level of quality as ray tracing or rasterization, he says.
“With voxels, there are issues that come up with shading and coloring the images properly,” says Brown. “If you look at the screenshots that Unlimited Detail has posted, the images don’t look all that realistic.”
Some of those problems can be ameliorated by using better tools, but it can’t be done by a one-man band, say Brown and Peddie.
“There needs to be an infrastructure around every new rendering technique,” says Brown. “There have to be SDKs, tools and drivers, and these are things that teams of people from many different companies come together to create.”
As for claims that Unlimited Detail can do real-time graphics rendering on a machine with a single-core processor and no graphics card, Nvidia people say they’re skeptical. Searching through trillions of points of data would require large amounts of RAM (random access memory), and Dell isn’t sharing any details on how his algorithm deals with that problem.
Even if Dell can validate his claims, it could be years before graphics programmers start using the voxel-based technique that Dell is advocating, says Peddie.
“It will be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, because there are too many entrenched systems and legacy files to be managed,” he says. “Anybody who is making graphics-creation software like Adobe, Autodesk and Maya will have to change their way of doing things. That’s a pretty big thing to change.”
Major companies such as Microsoft and HP also have patents around voxels, and if Dell wants to go professional, he’ll have to make sure he’s not infringing on the work of other researchers.
“The jury is still out on this idea,” says Peddie. “But Bruce Dell seems real, very sincere, and the idea looks solid.”
To preview Dell’s technology check out his own video:
“With every choice you make, ask yourself: is this a good choice, or is this a bad choice?” That’s the sage advice we were constantly given as tykes — and it’s advice that replays in our feeble brains every day as we write news. Turns out it’s also a piece of wisdom Apple’s latest round of MacBook Pros would be wise to heed, because currently, they’re making some awful decisions about when to turn on that power-sapping NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M discrete chipset. Read on to see what we mean.
Not many mortals will ever have to worry about choosing between a three-way GeForce GTX 480 SLI setup, an equally numerous Radeon HD 5870 array, or a dual-card HD 5970 monstrosity, but we know plenty of people would care about who the winner might be. Preliminary notes here include the fun facts that a 1 Kilowatt PSU provided insufficient power for NVIDIA’s hardware, while the mighty Core i7-965 test bench CPU proved to be a bottleneck in some situations. Appropriately upgraded to a six-core Core i7-980X and a 1,200W power supply, the testers proceeded to carry out the sacred act of benchmarking the snot out of these superpowered rigs. We won’t spoil the final results of the bar chart warfare here, but rest assured both camps score clear wins in particular games and circumstances. The source link shall reveal all.
News continues to trickle out about Toshiba’s upcoming tablets, which we learned just last week would come in both Windows and Android flavors and would be shipping before the year is through. Now it seems that both versions, despite offering different designs, will offer NVIDIA Tegra 2 internals. That both tablets will be manufactured by Compal makes us wonder if we weren’t given a preview of the future Tosh model when playing with a 7-inch Android prototype at CES in January, pictured above. There’s a video of that after the break to refresh your memory, a relic dating from the pre-G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra era. Simpler times, those.
While the MacBook Pro is just another Intel-based computer with standard internals, slightly inflated price tags, and a familiar (if legendary) design sense, Apple having the absolute corner on the market for building machines that legitimately run OS X can be a little rough on the upgrade obsessed. Waiting 10 months for a new computer, without an industry full of hungry competitors with wild alternatives to quench your thirst, can be difficult, and the January launch of Intel’s new Core i5 and Core i7 chips for laptops further fueled the saliva. Still, Apple would like you to believe these new MacBook Pros with their 2010-ready internals and same-as-last-year good looks have been worth the wait. Find out for yourself in our full review after the break.
Core i3 laptops with no more than 2.5 hours of battery life… seen ’em. Intel ULV laptops that last for more than 5.5 hours… seen ’em. A Core i3 laptop with NVIDIA’s Optimus discrete graphics that boasts 9.5 hours of battery life? Well, now that sounds new, and that’s exactly what the 13.3-inch ASUS’s U30Jc promises to be – that perfect chocolate vanilla swirl of portability and performance. But like us, you’ve got to be thinking there’s got to be sacrifices here, right? We thought so too, but surprisingly enough they’re extremely minimal considering the $900 pricetag. You aren’t going to find out what they are up here — hit that read more link for our full review.
In a discussion with Kin product manager Derek Snyder this afternoon, we’ve confirmed that both the Kin One and Kin Two are built on the same foundation as the Zune HD — in other words, they’re running NVIDIA Tegra silicon, and there’s no reason that anything you see on a Zune HD couldn’t run just as well on a Kin. Of course, that’s a purely theoretical statement at this point since Zune apps don’t work on Kin as it stands — the platform’s completely closed, though Microsoft has been insistent that we should keep a close eye on its over-the-air updates after launch as features evolve. Either way, that’s a marked (and curious) departure from Windows Phone 7, where Microsoft’s been taking an all-Qualcomm, all-the-time approach.
Realistically, we’ve gotten the impression today that Kin doesn’t come close to tapping out a Tegra’s horsepower, but that might be by design: Snyder also mentioned that a key goal of the development phase was to make sure that the phones could go a whole weekend without a charge. Running a Tegra at full bore 24 / 7 doesn’t lend itself to miserly power consumption, so the overall simplicity of the UI — and the lack of 3D gaming — might play a role there.
Either someone at Alienware is reading our reviews or the engineers over there happen to be as smart as us. What was our top complaint about the M11x? The lack of NVIDIA Optimus to automatically switch between the IGP and the GT335M GPU to help save battery life, of course. Well, if Notebook Review forum commenter Darkhan, who apparently has some affiliation with Alienware, is to be believed the company is working on adding just that to an updated M11x. Said to be released in the June / July time frame, the refreshed 11.6-inch laptop will apparently also be getting some new Intel Core 2010 CPUs. It does seems a bit early to update a product that started shipping just a month ago, but we wouldn’t put it past those crazy gamers. Dell wouldn’t comment on the rumor, so the only thing we can promise at this time is that we’ll be keeping an ear to the ground on this one. Updated: Darkhan has updated the Notebook Review forum page saying that he isn’t an employee of Dell or Alienware and that he just hears rumors like everyone else. We still have a hunch that some sort of update is headed to the M11x, but to reemphasize it is all just wishful thinking at this point.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
