General Gaming Article |
- AMD’s Radeon HD 7970: 4.3 Billion Transistors of Pure Performance
- Verizon Fixing Galaxy Nexus Signal Issue by Adding More Bars
- Windows Phone 7 App of the Week: Xbox Companion
- Put the Pitchfork Down, Verizon Confirms 4G Restored for All
- RIAA: Our Torrenting IP Addresses Were Used By a Third-Party
- Future Tense: Music Depreciation
- How to Create a Personalized QR Code
- Terrible Tech Advertising: The Most Shameless Tech Product Placement in TV and Movies
- Microsoft Pulling Out Of CES After 2012 Show
- GPU-Z Update Adds Support for Radeon HD 7970, 7350 Graphics Cards
| AMD’s Radeon HD 7970: 4.3 Billion Transistors of Pure Performance Posted: 21 Dec 2011 09:05 PM PST AMD moves its high-end GPU family to 28nm, delivering stunning performance and impressive efficiencyWe knew this was coming. We saw all the signs: The rumors. The price drops on existing videocards. The tweaked versions of old standbys masquerading as "new" GPUs. But more than anything, it's been too long since we've had something fresh to sink our teeth into. And as has been the case in each of the last several big product launches, AMD is serving the first course. Eric Demers, CTO of AMD's Graphics Division, began talking about the company's Graphics Core Next (GCN) earlier this summer. He described a new GPU architecture that would take graphics to the next level. He promised a GPU-compute monster that would remain highly scalable, so versions could be built into future generations of AMD APUs. The first iteration of Graphics Core Next comes in the form of the Radeon HD 7970, and it marks a substantial architectural shift for Radeon graphics. We'll examine the overall architecture first, and then we'll dive into the hardware specifics of the Radeon HD 7970.
Goodbye VLIWPrevious AMD GPU generations used very long instruction words (VLIW), a way of tightly packing multiple GPU instructions in order to move them around the GPU and memory efficiently. VLIW went through a couple of tweaks, including a change to a four-word VLIW scheme from a four-word scheme . VLIW was well tuned for the modern generation of programmable graphics, but it wasn't so hot for GPU compute. With AMD betting the farm on Fusion, which inherently takes advantage of a GPU's parallel-compute capability, the company needed a more flexible architecture. So AMD discarded VLIW in favor of something the company calls GCN Quad SIMD (single instruction, multiple data). Instead of a single VLIW instruction plus four math operations for the ALU (arithmetic logic unit), the GPU uses four SIMDs and a single ALU operation. The four SIMDs can do the same work as a single VLIW, but they can also act independently when needed.
GCN marks a major shift in how AMD GPUs operate, behaving more like a general-purpose vector processor than a pure graphics engine. What's more, each basic building block, called a GCN Compute Unit, includes a scalar coprocessor that can behave like a traditional—but non-pipelined—CPU. AMD has beefed up the caches that are distributed throughout the GPU. Each GCN core (yes, AMD is calling them cores) has its own dedicated L1 read/write cache. Each group of four cores shares a 16KB instruction cache and a 32KB scalar data cache. All the cores communicate over a shared bus to a partitioned L2 cache that can be sized differently depending on the graphics card and particular GPU die. AMD intends for GCN to serve as the basis for several product families. The first product, code-named Tahiti, is aimed at gaming enthusiasts who want maximum frame rates while enabling maximum eye candy. The next product, code-named Pitcairn, will supersede the Radeon HD 6800 series. Pitcairn will be followed by a series code-named Cape Verde, which AMD believes will redefine the segment now held by products such as the Radeon HD 6700 series. Code-name TahitiAMD took advantage of TSMC's new 28nm manufacturing process to build its new high-end GPU. The Radeon HD 7970 sports 4.3 billion transistors in a surprisingly small 365mm2 die. AMD product marketing manager Devon Nekechuk tells us AMD's 28nm yields have been both "good" and "predictable." Tahiti is assembled from 32 GCN compute units, which translates to 2,048 stream processors, each of which is based on AMD's new SIMD-plus-scalar architecture. The existing Radeon HD 6970, by contrast, is equipped with just 1,536 stream processors and doesn't benefit from the new architecture. The 7970 includes 768KB of L2 cache and eight render back-ends capable of pushing 32 color ROPs per clock and 128 Z/stencil ROPs per clock cycle. The existing 6970 provides the same quantity of render back-ends, but the newer card boasts higher throughput and much-improved efficiency; plus, the 7970 features a 384-bit interface to 3GB GDDR5 memory and a PCIe 3.0 interface. The GPU is capable of peak throughput of 264GB/s.
Tahiti also implements a feature known as partially resident textures. Local graphics memory is used as a kind of big cache for texture data, and very large textures can be streamed in on demand. This improves performance in game engines that use features such as virtual texturing or mega-textures: Texture sizes can be as large as 32TB (yes, terabytes). The Radeon HD 6970 is oft criticized for its weak tessellation performance, especially when compared to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 580 series. AMD has beefed up the GCN's tessellator by improving the reuse of vertices, improving its off-chip buffering performance, and providing larger parameter caches. AMD predicts overall tessellation performance will be as much as 4x better than the 6970, depending on the application. On the compute side, Tahiti uses dual asynchronous compute engines, which can independently schedule and dispatch work to improve multitasking. The compute engines can work in parallel with the graphics command processor, and AMD reports that context switching is "fast." The GPU also features dual built-in DMA engines, and AMD suggests the chip can saturate a PCIe 3.0 x16 bus when running compute chores. Floating-point performance is fully IEEE compliant, and the 7970 is capable of pumping out up to 947 double-precision gigaflops per second. It is the first GPU to support OpenCL 1.2, DirectCompute 1.1 and C++ AMP in hardware. Video processing has also been improved. Given the right application, Tahiti can evaluate 7.6 terapixels per second (peak), and it has the ability to transcode 1080p video in faster than real time.
The Radeon HD 7970Now that we've examined the GPU, let's take a look at a reference-design example of the first videocard that will use it. We'll start with power efficiency and noise, because AMD has made some notable advances on those fronts. The Radeon HD 6970 drew roughly 20 watts at idle, which was pretty good at the time. The Radeon HD 7970 card AMD provided for this evaluation, which is outfitted with one six-pin and one eight-pin PCIe power connector, idles at just 15 watts. AMD has also developed a new feature called ZeroPower that shuts puts the card into a deeper sleep state—including turning off its cooling fan—when Windows shuts off your display. In this state, the card draws just three watts. ZeroPower delivers benefits when you're running two or more cards in CrossFire X mode, too. When your computer is simply running normal Windows stuff, the secondary cards will turn their fans off and reduce their power consumption to three watts, since they're not driving displays. That means a multi-GPU system at idle will consume nearly the same amount of power as a single-GPU rig. In our tests, a machine equipped with a reference-design Radeon HD 7970 card, a six-core CPU, 16GB of RAM, and two hard drives consumed just 109 watts at idle. That power consumption is incredibly modest for a machine that powerful. The 7970 draws more power under load than one equipped with AMD's older high-end GPU, but it's still more conservative than Nvidia's maximum power consumption. AMD will continue to use PowerTune technology to manage power consumption at all performance levels. One microcontroller monitors the thermal and power states of different parts of the card, and a second adjusts voltage and frequencies in real time. This allows AMD to set higher peak clock rates while remaining within the card's 250-watt TDP rating. AMD has also reengineered their reference-designing cooling mechanism. The fan has larger blades, and all monitor connections are on one half of the mounting bracket, leaving the entire other side free for ventilation slits. Based on our subjective evaluation, the 7970 card was substantially quieter than the 6970 card we compared it to. Eyefinity 2.0AMD is improving its Eyefinity technology, and some of those changes will carry over to current-generation cards. One key feature that all Eyefinity capable cards will get is better bezel compensation and new configurations, including 5 x 1 support (in either landscape or portrait configurations), which should make driving and flying games incredibly immersive. Maximum supported resolution over multiple displays will be beefed up to 16K x 16K. That, my friend, is a lot of pixels.
AMD is also improving its stereoscopic 3D support, although it will continue to rely on third-party manufacturers to produce compatible glasses and displays. The Radeon HD 7970 will drive three displays in stereoscopic 3D mode using upcoming DisplayPort 3D monitors. Reference-design 7970 cards will be outfitted with one dual-link DVI, two mini DisplayPort, and one HDMI 1.4a. They'll support up to six displays simultaneously, although you'll need the right mix of adapters to do that. AMD's new Discrete Digital Multi-Point Audio (DDMA) is another interesting feature, which could be useful in online gaming, video-conferencing, and other situations. If you're engaged in a video conference with several other participants displayed on discrete monitors equipped with speakers, it will enable directional audio, so that when a participant on a monitor to your left speaks, you'll hear his or her voice on that left-hand monitor. AMD says DDMA will also be useful for multi-room audio setups, so you can play a game on the computer in one room, while music is piped into speakers in other rooms in the home. PerformanceWe tested a reference-design Radeon HD 7970 card using beta drivers, so bear in mind that our benchmarks are based on a work in progress. This card did not, however, come with the telltale EMI warning labels that typically mark early engineering samples. We did encounter one glitch, although it happened only once during testing, and we were unable to replicate it: When we cold-booted the system, the GPU's clock reset to 500MHz (instead of the usual 925MHz). We used AMD's OverDrive feature, part of the Catalyst control panel, to reset the clock to the factory default. We compared the 7970 to three other cards: an XFX Radeon HD 6970, running at 880MHz and paired with 2GB of GDDR5, an EVGA GTX 580 SC, which is slightly overclocked at the factory to 797MHz and is outfitted with 1.5GB of GDDR5 memory, and an aggressively overclocked (855MHz) EVGA GTX 580 Classified, which is equipped with 3GB of GDDR5. Unlike our standard tests, we brought the pain by benchmarking all four cards on a 30-inch display at 2560 x 1600 resolution, 4x AA, and all settings at their maximum values. When the smoke had cleared, the two GTX 580 cards won just a single benchmark, the HAWX2 test, which tessellates just about everything in sight. There were a few effective ties between the 7970 and the EVGA Classified, including Metro 2033 and Just Cause 2; but when the 7970 won, it generally won big. It opened a substantial lead on the Unigine Heaven synthetic test, for instance, even when we cranked tessellation to "extreme." AMD suggests that the Radeon HD 7970 has some clock-speed headroom, so we can expect to see factory-overclocked cards pushing the core clock rate up to 1GHz and possibly higher. That 3GB of frame buffer will come in handy for GPU-compute applications. AMD's expects retail cards based on the 7970 to sell for $549, which strikes us as a reasonable—but not exceptional—value. AMD will also ship a cost-reduced version of the 7970, in form of the Radeon HD 7950 in early 2012, but the company hasn't released specs or pricing on that SKU. Specifications - Radeon HD 7970 vs. Radeon HD 6970
Benchmarks
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| Verizon Fixing Galaxy Nexus Signal Issue by Adding More Bars Posted: 21 Dec 2011 03:07 PM PST
"A future software update will adjust the signal strength indicator to more closely match other Verizon Wireless devices," the Verizon statement read. Presumably, this will mean the Android 4.0.3 build expected in the coming weeks. The update is simply going to be interpreting the actual LTE signal differently when showing the user signal bars at the top of the screen. If this update fixes anything, it's merely the user's subconscious perception of network quality. It could be said that Verizon is running psy-ops on Galaxy Nexus users. The phone won't get better signal, but it's going to look a whole lot better. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Windows Phone 7 App of the Week: Xbox Companion Posted: 21 Dec 2011 03:03 PM PST When Microsoft announced the Windows Phone platform at Mobile World Congress, Xbox lovers had to be excited about the potential for integration between phone and console. Sadly, those aspirations for a unified gaming platform haven't reached the levels that many of us dream about, but Microsoft is making an effort to provide added value to customers who embrace the Microsoft ecosystem.
The Xbox Companion app for Windows Phone provides a way for Xbox 360 owners to control their console and more efficiently browse music and video using their Windows Phone. After a quick pairing process Windows Phone users can search or browse for videos on Netflix, the Zune Marketplace, or other sources using their phone. This video content can then be queued to play through the Xbox to a HDTV, or you can simply get more information on the movie such as cast details or movie reviews.
Obviously we're still a far cry from a unified gaming platform between the console, phone, and (most importantly) the PC. But if you think about it, even the basic functionality provided in this first version of the Xbox Companion app Microsoft has accomplished some things other platforms can't compete with. We can't wait to see where they take things from here. Xbox Companion is a free download from the Windows Phone Marketplace. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Put the Pitchfork Down, Verizon Confirms 4G Restored for All Posted: 21 Dec 2011 02:53 PM PST
The carrier disputed the earlier reports claiming that 3G data was down as well. Voice calls and SMS were never affected, either according to Verizon. Still, for all those customers paying up for tiered 4G data plans, it can be a little galling to be dropped back down to 3G for half the day. just poking one's head into the Verizon forums or checking Twitter made that much perfectly clear. 4G LTE is still a new technology, and Verizon has done the most to get it rolled out to the masses. Perhaps this is just part of the deal being on the cutting edge as the carrier dumps millions of 4G phones onto its new network. How's your 4G today? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| RIAA: Our Torrenting IP Addresses Were Used By a Third-Party Posted: 21 Dec 2011 02:41 PM PST
The RIAA is claiming that the IP addresses in question were run by a mysterious third-party which connected to one of the public torrent trackers. "Those partial IP addresses are similar to block addresses assigned to RIAA. However, those addresses are used by a third party vendor to serve up our public Web site," an RIAA spokesperson said. So it is the group's position that the IP addresses might belong to it in some tacit way, but someone else did the deed. If the situation were reversed, and it was the RIAA accusing someone else of file-sharing, we imagine they wouldn't much care who was actually using the IP address at the time. The RIAA was remarkably vague about just which associated third-party was using its IP address, but they're probably not going to sue. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Future Tense: Music Depreciation Posted: 21 Dec 2011 01:58 PM PST Recently, a correspondent with more attitude than common sense excoriated me for having no taste. He could be right, but I doubt it. I had mentioned in passing that I have thousands of CDs in my music collection, enough to fill a 3-terabyte hard drive. This particular adversary's argument was that because taste is the product of a thousand distastes, obviously I had none because I had failed to winnow my collection. It doesn't take a lot of smarts to realize that this is an inaccurate application of Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crud.") The inaccuracy arises from the assumption that little or no taste was applied in the original purchases. (The assumption that 5,000 CDs is too many, that there isn't enough quality music in the world to fill 5,000 CDs is even more horrifying.)
But in one sense, the adversary was right that I have thousands of songs that I haven't listened to in years. My Uncle Morrie was also right back in the 70s when he looked at my collection of vinyl disks and remarked that I had more music than I could listen to. Ironically, Uncle Morrie was his own kind of pack rat. Among other things, he collected jeans. After he died, we found more than 100 pairs in his closets, more jeans than any one person could wear. Right. I'd rather collect music. Let's assume I have at least 6,000 hours of music on the shelves. If I were to listen to ten hours of music a day, it would take 500 days to play every track. But nobody listens to their music collection that way. We pick and choose based on our changing moods. We have collections because we want to have choices. A completist has to have every item in the set, regardless of the quality (or lack of) in any individual item—but a collector gathers items of value that he selects for specific qualities. With music (as with books, comics, movies, and TV shows) the collector wants to have a purposely selected repertoire of entertainment choices. I should be grateful to the adversary because he reminded me I wanted to write about the history of music recording. Humanity's relationship with music has fundamentally changed over the last hundred years. Music has become a much greater part of our lives—but at the same time, that convenience has reduced much of its impact and importance. Before electricity, all music was live. We either created it ourselves or listened to someone else create it. The only distribution system was sheet music. Knowing how to play a piano, a guitar, a violin, was an important skill. A marching band was a delicious treat. A music hall was a cultural center. If you wanted to experience an epic performance of an opera, or hear a major symphony, you had to go to a concert hall. Music was an event. It was a performance. It was ephemeral, it existed only in the moment, and then it disappeared forever.
We have no recordings of any music prior to 1877, when Edison invented the phonograph. We have little idea what the music of ancient Greece or Rome actually sounded like. We have some hints of traditional Inca and African and Native American music. A great deal of the Chinese and Japanese musical traditions have survived over the centuries and we have European musical texts dating back almost a thousand years. But even the best recreations are still only recreations—filtered through contemporary experience and sensibilities. They are interpretations of what we think the original experiences might have been. Electricity made it possible to record, store, and distribute music accurately and widely. The early days of records made it possible for a performer or an orchestra to reach people all over the world, a larger audience than a lifetime of live performances could reach. Records created a whole new kind of fame for performers. When radio broadcasting began in the early '20s, it created a new kind of national identity. People everywhere could experience the same events in synchrony. The radio brought news and entertainment into homes everywhere, connecting even the most distant dwellers to their big-city neighbors. Music, both live and recorded, reached whole new audiences. People who might never have heard an opera or a symphony or even a simple song could now be a part of the developing urban culture. Prior to the invention of radio, mother might read aloud to the family, usually a chapter of a book. On special occasions, someone in the family would play an instrument or sing. After the radio arrived in the parlor, the personal creation of entertainment declined. After dinner, the family would gather in the living room to listen to the evening's news and entertainment, rescheduling itself to the various weekly programs. And as the radio became the focus of the family, the family identity gradually became homogenized to that role-models portrayed in the nightly dramas.
And radios were big in those days! They were cabinet-sized behemoths that filled a corner of the room, with huge tubes that doubled as space-heaters filling the top half, and a 12-inch speaker in a large enclosure on the bottom. The sound quality could be fairly impressive. On Sundays, the network radio stations would play serious music—symphonies or operas, noteworthy pieces of classical importance. Listeners who had never had the chance before, now became familiar with the works of Beethoven and Mozart, Tchaikovsky and others. Additionally, classical music pieces were often used as themes for movies and radio programs. Franz Lizst's Les Preludes was the theme for the Flash Gordon serials, Rossini's William Tell Overture is practically synonymous with The Lone Ranger, and who doesn't sing "kill the wabbit!" while listening to Wagner? In the '40s, table radios (eventually clock radios) became commonplace. They could never match the big speakers for volume or impact, but they took up less room and could fit in kitchens and bedrooms for personal listening. In the '50s, television stole radio's nighttime audiences, so radio had to reinvent itself. FM and FM stereo provided significantly better sound quality than AM—true high-fidelity—so it became the new home of classical music. Car radios became a standard feature on all new cars, no longer a pricey add-on, so drivers could listen to news and ball games on their AM stations. The invention of the transistor radio made AM an even more portable medium. The baby boomers took to it like puppies to kibble. By the end of the '50s and the beginning of the '60s, teenage boomers were listening to rock and roll everywhere. Every major city had at least one, sometimes several competing, rock and roll stations. The DJs were the helmsmen of the burgeoning rock culture—elevating Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, the Beach Boys, and eventually that band from Liverpool into icons. On weekends, teens went to a dance concert to hear a live band or to a teen club where a DJ spun records, but even on school days, teens gathered to listen to 45rpm singles in their bedrooms. The portability of music was first a delicious novelty, a luxury, and finally a convenience—but that convenience changed everyone's relationship with our music.
As the '60s turned into the '70s, car stereos and cassette players and boom boxes made music even more portable. The result was that as consumers became more and more accustomed to that convenience and portability, music stopped being an event. It became a kind of auditory wallpaper. Soon it was everywhere and often inescapable. Weird stuff dripped out of elevators and kitschy coffee shops, something called "easy listening." That meant you didn't have to pay attention to it. The unintended consequence of all this convenience was that music began to lose much of its emotional impact. Part of it was that recording technology couldn't handle the wide dynamic range of most music, so the music had to be compressed—the high peaks of drumbeats were audibly limited. The playback technology was even worse. Music played over most radios was small and tinny. Speaker systems were cheap, often dreadful, and almost always sonically mismatched for their environment. There were some exceptions. One was the movie theater, where images were wedded to sound. Magnetic sound tracks provided significantly better quality, and theater owners had to invest in decent loudspeakers and amplifiers anyway. Turning up the volume often hides the lack of dynamic range, but if you listen to any MGM soundtrack from that era (Dr. Zhivago, for example) you can hear how compressed the sound really was. Another exception was the enthusiasm of hi-fi hobbyists. In their near-fanatic pursuit of great sound they turned high end stereo gear into an industry. High-fidelity stereo freaks were dedicated to restoring both the physical and emotional impact to recorded music. The stereo magazines of that era often discussed how the home experience was different than the live experience and whether or not a recording should be judged by how well it recreated the live experience or whether the home experience should be weighed on its own merits. Sony's cassette-playing Walkman made music a personal experience. The sound quality of a properly calibrated set of earbuds or headphones could be remarkable and the sight of someone walking down a city street plugged into some unshared reverie became commonplace. In the glory days of cassettes, enthusiasts ripped their own music tapes from vinyl records. With a knapsack full of cassettes and extra batteries, you could be set for the day. But the Walkman was a mechanical device with a couple of miniature motors that had to withstand the rigors of portability. The lifespan of even the most rugged player was often less than a year. The emergence of the MP3 player—the iPod and all the wannabes—is the current evolutionary phase of portable music. The first ones had hard drives, but now the music player is solid-state, nearly unbreakable, and with enough capacity that you can carry a whole library of listening in your pocket. (Not quite an entire collection of 5,000 CDs, but certainly your favorites.) Add video and maybe a few games and you have a complete personal entertainment device.
We're already seeing smartphones and tablets doubling as music and video players, and Amazon now lets you stream selections from your library direct to almost any device you own. It may be that portable music will disappear as a product and become instead a fungible (look it up) service. What all of this history proves is that human beings have an enormous hunger for music. Recording and playback technology has evolved to meet that hunger. We seek out music everywhere, we bring it home, we take it with us, we tailor it, we use it and even abuse it. (Spike Jones, P.D.Q. Bach, Weird Al Yankovich.) But the continuing evolution of technology has also produced a profound shift in our personal relationship with music. For many (most?) consumers, music has now become a completely individual experience. You design your listening to suit your own moods and tastes, you create a unique soundtrack for your life. Your relationship with music no longer depends on availability of performers or broadcasts. You no longer have to share your music with others. Your music is a personal event that you summon at will. Depending on what you want it to be, music can be wallpaper, soundtrack, anthem, or epiphany. Depending on how you listen to it, music can be background or immersive. Our technology not only gives us a choice in what we listen to, but also how we listen to it. Music is now a mutable resource. On the one hand, it can be argued that having music be so casually available produces a context of disrespect for all music. Because it's so easily obtained, it's no longer a special event. We can regard it as disposable, replaceable, even irrelevant. But on the other hand, it is just as easy to argue that having access to so much music as a regular part of life makes it possible for all of us to enrich our lives with even more musical discoveries than ever before. It's an opportunity to widen our menu of choices and expand our personal repertoires. What do you think? What's your experience? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| How to Create a Personalized QR Code Posted: 21 Dec 2011 12:50 PM PST If you've been in a public space in the last year or two, you've probably seen a QR code—a small, square two-dimensional barcode that looks a bit like a miniature crossword puzzle. They've been around for more than 15 years, but they've recently exploded in popularity, thanks to smartphones, which are perfect QR-scanners. Unlike traditional supermarket-style barcodes—which codify an identification number—QR codes are binary representations of numbers or letters, and can be many different sizes. A tiny QR code can represent just 30 numbers, and a giant one can represent thousands of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. With that much flexibility, everyone can find a use for QR codes. In this article, we'll show you how to make a distinctive, personalized QR code to put on your business card, or anything else. Step 1: Get Your vCardWe're going to avoid the obvious joke here and let you know that vCard is a standard for digitally transmitting contact information. You might have encountered a vCard attached to an email message in the past, but they work great in QR codes, too—most QR reader apps are designed to detect vCards and automatically enter the data into the phone's contact list. There are plenty of sites that will create a vCard QR code for you automatically (just a Google search away), but we recommend the web app here.
There, you simply click the Select a Code Action drop-down box, and select Create a vCard. Then, enter your personal information into the boxes below (image above), and hit Generate Code. Note that QR code size is dependent on the number of characters encoded, so you might find yourself dealing with a giant, unwieldy code that will be hard to fit on a business card. To get it down to size, we recommend using only vital information, like your name, phone number, and email address. Another way to get around having a huge QR code is to have a personal website with your contact info (perhaps in a downloadable vCard) and to embed a link to that in a QR code. You can use a link shortener to make the URL and QR code as small as possible, which you will want for the next section. Step 2: Personalize Your CodeOne downside to QR codes is that by default they look a little impersonal. If you want to give your business card some visual appeal, there are a couple of simple things you can do. For one, you can give it a more interesting color scheme. The QR code generator we recommended defaults to black-on-white, but you can tell it to use any color for the foreground or the background. Make sure the background is lighter than the foreground, and that there's decent contrast between the two. Otherwise, reader apps may have a hard time with it.
An even neater-looking trick, and one that's still easy to pull off is to use a subtle color gradient. To do this, just open your image editor of choice (Photoshop and the free GIMP both work great), create a color gradient, and then use your QR code as a mask for that layer (image below).
If you want to go a step further by introducing a logo into your QR code, that's entirely possible, as well. Just make sure to use the highest error correction setting (this can be set in the web app we recommended earlier) when you generate your QR code. This will make the code larger, but will allow it to be read even if up to 30 percent of the code is erased and written over.
For best results, don't place your graphic or logo over the tracking boxes in the corners of the code. With some trial and error, you should be able to find out what scans and what doesn't (image above). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Terrible Tech Advertising: The Most Shameless Tech Product Placement in TV and Movies Posted: 21 Dec 2011 11:37 AM PST Unless you've been intentionally cutting yourself off from mainstream movies and TV (and we wouldn't blame you if you had), you've probably become aware of the practice known as product placement--when companies pay money to have their product or brand featured in a movie or TV show. Used judiciously, product placement can be a way for filmmakers to get a little extra cash and flesh out the realism of their world. It makes more sense to see characters at a bar drinking real brands of beer, after all. Unfortunately, Hollywood isn't known for its subtlety, and product placement can all too often be jarring and obvious. And, of course, tech brands are no stranger to this kind of advertising. We've put together a gallery of 15 of the most shameless, hamfisted instances of tech product placement in movies and TV shows. Check them out, then hit the comments and let us know what we missed.
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| Microsoft Pulling Out Of CES After 2012 Show Posted: 21 Dec 2011 11:07 AM PST
"We'll continue to participate in CES as a great place to connect with partners and customers across the PC, phone and entertainment industries, but we won't have a keynote or booth after this year because our product news milestones generally don't align with the show's January timing," Microsoft VP Frank Shaw wrote in a blog post today. Instead, the company will throw more of its marketing might at direct communications with consumers via social media and retail stores. The split isn't a complete surprise; for years, CES has been slowly drifting away from its computer-focused past and leaning more towards gadgets and home electronics. So we ask you, the Maximum PC readers: is CES becoming a thing of the past for computer lovers? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| GPU-Z Update Adds Support for Radeon HD 7970, 7350 Graphics Cards Posted: 21 Dec 2011 10:52 AM PST
GPU-Z v0.5.7 fleshes out support for a few other GPUs, including AMD's Radeon E6760, HD 3650, HD 5570, HD 6450A, HD 6470M, and FirePro V4800 and V3800. In addition to better support for the above GPUs, the update fixes half a dozen issues, including one where PCi-E 3.0 might show up as PCI-E 2.0. You can download the latest build here. |
Verizon might have been busy dealing with a couple of LTE outages as of late, but it has also had a chance to evaluate claims of poor 4G performance on the new Google flagship Galaxy Nexus Android phone. On that front; good news! An 
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Ever since the interesting, yet disturbing site YouHaveDownloaded went live, the Internet has reveled in hunting down the IP addresses of copyright cops who have been illegally downloading content via torrents. One group found to have some internal pirates is the RIAA, which 
Has CES seen its heyday? The gargantuan trade show seems to get bigger and more packed every year, but some top companies – Apple and Google among them – avoid the gathering like the plague, instead focusing their attention on other events and conferences. Now, a third 10,000 lb. gorilla is pulling out. Microsoft, a longtime CES mainstay and a massive presence at the show, announced today that the 2012 conference will be the last one for the company.
GPU-Z is one of our favorite tell-all utilities to carry around on a USB stick. It doesn't require any installation, it has a small footprint (around 900KB), and it reveals just about everything you could want to know about your videocard, from the BIOS version to the number of ROPs. TechPowerUp is pretty good about keeping GPU-Z updated, and the latest build adds support for AMD's Radeon HD 7970 and 7350 graphics, as well as a few other enhancements.| You are subscribed to email updates from Maximum PC - All Articles To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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