Will Nvidia PhysX ever be worthwhile?

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Nvidia has talked up its PhysX system incessantly since it bought Ageia Technologies, creator of the engine, in February 2008, but it’s struggled to make a significant impact on the PC gaming landscape. So, despite the impressive tech demos and endless optimism, is PhysX looking more like a white elephant with every passing GPU and game release?

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First look: ATI Radeon HD 4830

Friday, October 24th, 2008

It seems that, at the moment, ATI is releasing fantastic graphics cards on a month-by-month basis. Now, it’s the turn of a part that’s been designed to sit between the Radeon HD 4670 and HD 4850 in ATI’s comprehensive line-up: the HD 4830.

The specifications reveal that, while the 4830 isn’t as powerful on paper as the 4850, it’s still a powerful GPU in its own right. A core clock speed of 575MHz is only 50MHz lower than the 4850, and 512MB of 900MHz GDDR3 memory certainly hints at the new card’s potential.

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Technological progress: lost on the masses

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

I loaded up Steam for the first time in a while last night and was promptly asked to participate in Valve’s ongoing hardware survey. I’ve done this before, and the results are always fascinating, so I jumped right in. A few clicks later, and a quick scan of my cobbled-together PC, and I got to see the breakdown of nearly 1.8million gamers’ systems – with some surprises.

Just 41% of polled users have made the much-needed step to a dual or quad-core processor – the norm in pretty much all new PC systems sold today – and 38% have shelled out on 2GB or more of RAM. Assuming a correllation between the two, that leaves a huge proportion of PC players who are still trundling along on 1GB of RAM or less and a single-core CPU.

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Strange things afoot in the world of graphics

Friday, May 30th, 2008

Today I’ve been reading about not one, but two rather retro developments in the wacky world of graphics cards, and both have left me scratching my head.

The first is the re-announcement by Asus of its XG Station, which brings external graphics to laptops. It was first “launched” early last year, as a way to get GeForce 7-series desktop gaming power via the ExpressCard slot on a laptop – but we didn’t recieve a review sample, and it soon became clear it would never see the light of day in the UK.

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Nvidia’s confused GPUs

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Nvidia aren’t known for their demure and shy antics, so I wasn’t surprised at a press briefing a few weeks ago when they launched an attack on what some quarters – namely Intel with their new Larrabee GPU – who have identified ray-tracing as the future of graphics.

They spent a great deal of time assuring the assembled members of the IT press that it was a waste of time – every game since before the turn of the Millennium (indeed, since the demise of voxels) because every game is made using polygons and that developers wouldn’t want to alter their techniques and systems around a new, somewhat experimental technology.

So, why have Nvidia gone and bought a ray-tracing company?

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Nvidia Squares Up to Intel

Monday, April 28th, 2008

So, after finding out that Intel were planning to release its own graphics card – the mysterious and, at the moment, practically mythical Larrabee – the Nvidia boardroom must have been a fun place to be. The GPU market is, after all, where the Californian company has ruled the roost for the past few years thanks to the strength of the 8000-series and, now, the emergence of some decent 9000 series cards like the 9600 GT and 9800 GTX.

Evidently, it’s decided to come out on the offensive: Nvidia boss Jen-Hsun Huang recently lambasted Intel’s integrated graphics, which have long been a staple of PCs that don’t need to play games and edit demanding videos, as ‘a joke’. He also boasted of his plans to ‘open a can of whoop-ass’ onto Intel, which must be quaking in its boots – after all, its CPUs haven’t done that well, and they certainly not market leaders with no real competitors. Ahem.

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