General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

Amiga Returns (Kind Of) In A Little Box With A Big Price Tag

Posted: 22 Mar 2012 11:02 AM PDT

One of my earliest gaming memories involves trading illegal goods, hunting down pirates, mining asteroids and generally gallivanting around the galaxy as the intrepid Commander Jameson in the Amiga version of Elite. Unfortunately, the Amiga was killed off soon afterwards -- or so we thought. It turns out that the Amiga brand, kind of like Cthulu, was just biding its time. Commodore USA just announced it's releasing a new small form factor PC sporting the Amiga name, but packing a much, much bigger punch than its predecessor.

With the exception of a slot-loading Blu-ray drive and the Amiga name etched across the front of the case, the Amiga mini looks a lot like the Mac mini, right down to its aluminum case and the lowercase "m" in mini. Spec-wise, the Amiga mini should've been called the Amiga maxi; the mini-ITX-based rig includes a quad-core 3.5GHz Intel i7-2700k proc, a 1TB HDD (or optional 300GB/600GB SSD drives), built-in Wi-Fi and a whopping 16GB of 1333MHz DDR3 RAM.  It runs a custom Linux build called Commodore OS Vision.

There are a few major downsides to the Amiga mini, though. First of all, the system packs an aged GT 430 Nvidia GPU, a distinctly underwhelming choice, especially when paired with the overwhelming RAM and CPU. Why would you even pick up a PC with that much processing power if not to play video games or engage in some heavy duty video editing?

The price may be an even bigger hurdle, however. Commodore is selling the Amiga mini for a whopping $2,500, and you'll have to tack on another $500 or $1,000 if you want those 300GB or 600GB SSD drives, respectively. If that's a bit too rich for your blood, Commodore's also offering a bare-bones Amiga-branded box that contains nothing but the Blu-ray drive for "just" $350.

Also, old skoolers take note: Commodore USA isn't THE Commodore from back in the day, but another company that bought the rights to the Commodore and Amiga names.

Still interested? Then head on over to the Commodore USA website for more info. Be prepared to wait a while after forking over your cash, though -- the lead time on these bad boys is 4 to 6 weeks.

Thanks to TheVerge for pointing this out! Image credit: Commodore USA

Rogues Gallery: 15 Frustratingly Proprietary Storage Formats

Posted: 22 Mar 2012 10:36 AM PDT

Sharing: It's one of the first things we're taught as children. One of the most basic social graces, sharing allows us to create new friendships, divvy up precious resources and expand our horizons. Too bad the board of directors of so many high-tech companies never figured this out. Companies like Sony, Apple and Iomega have been saddling us with proprietary memory solutions for years now. Here's our pick of 15 of the worst examples.

Nvidia 600M GPUs, New Asetek Liquid Cooling Tech Look To Level Up Laptop Gaming

Posted: 22 Mar 2012 10:21 AM PDT

Gaming laptops have made big strides in recent years, but let's be honest: getting great frame rates on a mobile device is easier said than done. A pair of new products unveiled over the last couple of days hold the promise of powerful portable performance, however. First up is the GTX 680's little brother, the Kepler-based 600M class mobile GPUs, which are smaller, faster and less power-hungry than their predecessors. Meanwhile, the thermal gurus over at Asetek have introduced a new slim form factor liquid cooling technology designed just for notebooks and AIOs -- then overclocked a Alienware M18x to 4.4 GHz to show off its chops.

Nvidia says its 600M GPUs are small and energy efficient enough to fit into Ultrabooks, but adds enough oomph that the first Ultrabook running the 640M -- the Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3 -- is capable of playing Battlefield 3 at Ultra settings.  (Although, to be fair, the Timeline Ultra M3 stretches the definition of an Ultrabook at 5 lbs. on the nose.) In fact, Nvidia told PC World that the 640M can handle any game currently on the market. The GPU won't drag you down when you aren't gaming, either; the 600M series utilizes Nvidia's Optimus switching technology to disable the GPU when a notebook's integrated Intel graphics are up to handling less intensive tasks.

The Asetek mobile liquid cooling technology, on the other hand, combines liquid cooling with enhanced heat exchanging, but otherwise works basically as you'd expect it to. From the Asetek press release: Slim form factor liquid cooling technology takes full advantage of the fact that CPUs and GPUs are rarely fully stressed at the same time. The technology interconnects all of the thermal management devices enabling them to dynamically "borrow" idle cooling capacity from one another.  In addition, the liquid cooled coldplate has less thermal resistance than a heat pipe.

The video above is kind of bland, but it explains how the new liquid cooling system allowed Asetek to overclock an Alienware M18x to new heights (and new benchmark scores). The notebook's 3.5 GHz Core i7-2920XM was boosted to 4.4 GHz and the dual Radeon 6990M GPUs got bumped from 680MHz to 800MHz, all while putting out less noise than the standard air-cooled M18x. No word on pricing or availability, unfortunately -- but don't expect it to be cheap.

Kepler Unveiled: Nvidia's GTX 680 Benchmarked In-Depth!

Posted: 22 Mar 2012 06:00 AM PDT

Johannes Kepler once wrote, "Nature uses as little as possible of anything."

Nvidia's latest GPU, code-named Kepler after the German mathematician, looks to be inspired by that quote, as much as by the original Kepler's mathematical prowess. The new GPU—the GTX 680— offers superb graphics horsepower, but requires only two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors. It's a big departure from the last-generation GTX 580, which was fast, but power hungry.

We'll talk about performance shortly, but let's first look at Kepler's underlying architecture.

Smaller Equals Bigger

Kepler GPUs are built using a 28nm manufacturing process, allowing Nvidia to build in more circuits in less die area. 

Like Fermi, Kepler is a modular architecture, allowing Nvidia to scale the design up or down by adding or subtracting functional blocks. In Fermi, Streaming Multiprocessors, or SMs for short, are the basic building blocks from which the GTX 500 line of GPUs were built. The CUDA core counts inside the SMs could vary. For example, each SM block in the GTX 560 Ti contained 48 CUDA cores, while the GTX 580 SM was built with 32 cores. The GTX 580, on the other hand, had a total of 16 SMs of 32 cores each, for a total of 512 CUDA cores.

Kepler's functional block is the SMX. Kepler GPUs are built on 28nm, which allowed Nvidia's architects to scale things a bit differently. So Nvidia increased the number of cores inside a Kepler SMX to a stunning 192 CUDA cores each.

The GTX 680 GPU is built from eight SMX blocks, arranged in paired groups called GPCs (graphics performance clusters). This gives the GTX 680 a whopping 1,536 CUDA cores.

The SMX doesn't just house the CUDA cores, however. Built into each SMX is the new Polymorph engine, which contains the hardware-tessellation engine, setup, and related features. Also included are 16 texture units. This gives the GTX 680 a total of 128 texture units (compared with the 64 texture units built into the GTX 580). Interestingly, the cache has changed a bit—each SMX still has 64KB of L1 cache, part of which can be used as shared memory for GPU compute. However, that means the total L1 cache has shrunk a bit, since there are only eight SMX units in the GTX 680, not 16 as with GTX 580. The L2 cache is also smaller, at 512KB rather than the 768KB of Fermi.

Another interesting change is that pre-decoding and dependency checking has been offloaded to software, whereas Fermi handled it in hardware. What Nvidia got in return was better instruction efficiency and more die space. Interestingly, the transistor count of the GTX 680 GPU is 3.5 billion, up only a little from the 3 billion of the GTX 580. The die size has shrunk, however, to a much more manageable 294mm2—by contrast, Intel's Sandy Bridge 32nm quad-core CPU die is 216mm2.

Textures, Antialiasing, and More

One of the cooler new features from an actual application perspective is bindless textures. Prior to Kepler, Nvidia GPUs were limited to 128 simultaneous textures; Kepler boosts that by allowing textures to be allocated as needed within the shader program, with up to 1 million simultaneous textures available. It's doubtful whether games will use that many textures, but certain types of architectural rendering might benefit. 

Nvidia continues to incorporate its proprietary FXAA antialiasing mode, but has added a new mode that it's calling TXAA. The "T" stands for "temporal." TXAA in its standard mode is actually a variant of 2x multisampling AA, but varies the sampling pattern over time (i.e., over multiple frames.) The result is better edge quality than even 8x MSAA, but the performance hit is more like 2x multisampling. 

Another cool new feature that will also eventually be supported in older Nvidia GPUs is Adaptive Vsync. Currently, if you lock vertical sync to your monitor's refresh rate (typically 60Hz, but as high as 120Hz on some displays), you'll get smoother gameplay. However, you might see a stutter as the frame rate drops to 30fps or below, due to the output frames being locked to vsync. On the other hand, if you run with vsync off, you may see frame tearing, as new frames are sent to the display before the old one is complete.

Adaptive Vsync locks the frame rate to the vertical refresh rate, until the driver detects the frame rate dropping below the refresh rate. Vsync is then disabled temporarily, until the frame rate climbs above the monitor refresh rate. The overall result is much smoother performance from the user's point of view.

Finally, Nvidia has beefed up the video engine, building in a dedicated encode engine capable of encoding H.264 high-profile video at 4x – 8x real time. Power usage is low in this mode, consuming single-digit watts, rather than the shader-driven tens of watts of past GPUs.

The GTX 680 Graphics Card

Nvidia built an improved circuit board to host the GTX 680 GPU. The board will ship with 2GB of GDDR5, with the default memory clock running at 6008MHz—the first board to ship with 6GHz GDDR5. The GTX 680 also introduces GPU Boost, an idea borrowed from the world of x86 CPUs. GPU Boost increases the core clock speed if the internal thermal environment permits. This allows games that offer lighter overall load to get additional performance as needed. In another departure, the GTX 680 offers a single clock—the shader clocks are now the same as the core clock frequency. Product boxes will likely show both the base and boost clocks on the box. As with recently released AMD products, the GTX 680 is fully PCI 3.0 compliant.

A few notable things spring to mind when examining the specs. First, this is a 256-bit wide memory interface, as opposed to the 384-bit interface of AMD's Radeon HD 7970. Nvidia makes up for this with both improved memory-controller efficiency plus higher clocked GDDR5. The frame buffer is "only" 2GB, but that was enough to run our most demanding benchmarks at 2560x1600 with all detail levels maxed out and 4x MSAA enabled. 

Also worth calling out is Nvidia's new devotion to power efficiency. The GTX 680 is substantially more power efficient than its predecessor, with a maximum TDP of just 195W. Idle power is about 15W. We saw the power savings in our benchmarking.

The GTX 680 is also the first single-GPU card from Nvidia to support more than two displays. Users can add up to four displays using all four ports. Nvidia was strangely reticent about discussing its DisplayPort 1.2 implementation, which should allow for even more monitors once 1.2 capable monitors and hubs arrive on the scene later this year. 

The GTX 680 cooling system is a complete redesign, using a tapered fin stack, acoustic dampening, and a high-efficiency heat pipe. The card was very quiet under load, though perceptually about the same as the XFX Radeon HD 7970's twin-cooling-fan design. Of course, having a more power efficient GPU design is a big help. The GTX 680 is no DustBuster.

How Does It Perform?

We pitted the GTX 680 against two previous GTX 580 designs, the slightly overclocked EVGA GTX 580 SC and the more heavily overclocked EVGA GTX 580 Classified. The XFX Radeon HD 7970 Black Edition was also included. We ran our usual benchmark suite at 2560x1600 with 4x MSAA enabled, along with the FutureMark and Unigine synthetic tests.

The GTX 680 clearly takes most of the benchmarks, though the XFX HD 7970 eked out a couple of wins. Note that it's possible some of these benchmarks are actually becoming CPU limited, even with 4x MSAA, but it's hard to say for certain. That's very likely the case with HAWX 2, where the older GTX 580 Classified—albeit a heavily overclocked GTX 580—manages a 1fps advantage.

The GTX 680's idle power ratings are impressive, too. The total system power at idle was just 116W, 8W better than the XFX card. However, Nvidia doesn't incorporate anything like AMD's ZeroCore technology, which reduces power to a bare 3W when the display is turned off (as when Windows 7 blanks the screen.) Even better is the power under load—the GTX 680 is the only GPU to run at under 300W at full load.

The GTX 680 we tested is Nvidia's reference card, and it's likely that some manufacturers will ship retail cards at higher core clock speeds. Retail cards will be available upon launch (March 22). Nvidia is pricing the card at $500, but prices may vary a bit depending on manufacturer. That $500 price tag substantially undercuts AMD's Radeon HD 7970 pricing by as much as $100, which makes the GTX 680 look even better for high-end gamers.

The GTX 680 looks to regain Nvidia the performance crown briefly held by AMD, and is priced lower, to boot. What's most intriguing, however, is that Kepler likely has some headroom for even greater power consumption, which may allow Nvidia to ship an even higher-end GPU when needed. The performance horserace continues, and while the top spot now belongs to Nvidia, the company also needs to deliver midrange GPUs to compete with AMD's more recent product moves. In the long run, gamers will benefit from more choices and competition. It's a win all around.  

 

 

 

 

Boutique System Builders Join the Kepler Launch Party

Posted: 22 Mar 2012 05:59 AM PDT

Great news everyone, Kepler is here! Of course, you already knew that because you have MaximumPC.com bookmarked, right? And if you have MPC bookmarked, then you must have starting reading through our "Kepler Unveiled: Nvidia's GTX 680 Benchmarked In-Depth!" article (and if you haven't, be sure to check it out) the moment the NDA lifted this morning. But do you know which system builders are carrying them?

We know of several right off the bat, and as the day goes on, we're sure company press releases will keep rolling in. But for now, here are the boutique system builders who have reached out to let us know they're carrying the GeForce GTX 680 graphics card.

Going alphabetically, AVADirect is at the top of the list and has added the GTX 680 option to its 3D Vision II , Z68, X79, and E5 Xeon system configurations, along with its line of gaming and workstation setups.

Next on the list is CyberPower PC, which is offering the debut Kepler card in all of its desktop gaming PCs, including the Gamer Infinity, Gamer Ultra, Gamer Xtreme, Zeus, and Fang III series. Systems based on the new card start at $1,199. You can find those systems here.

Maingear is ready to roll with Kepler's launch and has added the graphics card to its SHIFT, F131, and X-Cube systems, and will offer it in its Vybe system later on the down the road.

Lastly, Origin PC has added the GTX 680 to its desktop (Big O, Chronos, Millennium, and Genesis) systems and the GTX 675M to its notebook (EON17-X) configurations.

EDIT: Digital Storm, Geekbox, iBuyPower, V3 Gaming, and Velocity Micro all have announced they're also carrying Nvidia's new graphics card.

Unfortunately, 'Human Bird Wings Video' is Probably a Hoax,

Posted: 22 Mar 2012 05:45 AM PDT

At some point or another, everyone fantasizes about being able to fly, soaring through the air like a bird high above the ground, over buildings and wherever your fancy takes you. A man named Jarno Smeets took that dream and seemingly made it a reality by concocting a sort of winged apparatus that allowed him to flap his arms and soar like an eagle. He uploaded a short YouTube video that quickly went viral, and just like that, over a million viewers were able to live out their fantasy of flight vicariously through some guy on the Internet. The only problem is Jarno Smeets doesn't appear to exist and it now appears that the video is a fake. Hello bug, meet windshield.

There's still a slim chance the video is legit, but if that's the case, why does nothing about Jarno Sheets check out? Wired.com put its detective cap on and tried to verify the bird-man's impressive resume, and at each step along the way, people he supposedly worked with or went to school with shrugged their shoulders and said, "Who?"

Smeets claims on his LinkedIn page that he used to work at Pailton Steering Systems from 2008 to 2010. John Nollett, the group managing director for Pailton Engineering Limited, told Wired he checked with each of his divisions and nobody has heard of Smeets.

"He's never worked for us in any of our locations," Nollet said.

There's no record of Smeets ever attending Coventry University in the U.K. where he supposedly went to school from 2001 to 2005, and not surprisingly, Smeets declined Wired's request for a phone interview, claiming he's "overwhelmed" at the moment.

But Wired did speak with a computer scientist at Stanford University who performed CGI effects for movies like Terminator 3 and Star Wars: Episode III, and in his opinion, there's plenty of reason to be suspicious, such as cutting the camera, which is an "obvious trick."

Do you think the video is a fake?

Acer's Iconia Tab A510 Touches Down in the U.S. with Tegra 3 in Tow

Posted: 22 Mar 2012 05:30 AM PDT

Acer today did something it's never done before. The company launched its first quad-core tablet in North America, the Acer Iconia Tab A510 with an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. It's also one of just a handful of Android devices running the latest build of Google's open source operating system, version 4.0, or more deliciously known as Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).

The Iconia Tab A510 is a 10.1-inch tablet with 32GB of built-in storage. It doesn't have a so-called Retina-class display like the new iPad, though it does wield a 1280x800 screen resolution (16:10) and 85-degree viewing angle. The A510 also boasts a built-in micro HDMI port, micro USB 2.0 port, 1GB of RAM, microSD card reader, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, 1MP front-facing camera, 5MP rear-facing camera with autofocus, and a 9800mAh battery good for up to 11 hours of video playback via Wi-Fi and up to 13 hours of video playback via local storage.

For those of you who plan to be productive in between sessions of Angry Birds and Facebooking, the A510 comes with the full suite of Polaris Office 3.5, which is compatible with Microsoft Office and allows reading and editing of various document formats. Acer's Air Print technology is also part of the deal and allows users to print wirelessly from their tablet.

You can preorder the Iconia Tab A510 now for $450, though Acer didn't say exactly when it will ship.

Image Credit: Acer

Lian Li Draws Inspiration from Auto Industry in Designing PC-Q15 Computer Case

Posted: 22 Mar 2012 05:10 AM PDT

We're not sure slapping on a pair of wheel-like stubs to a mini-ITX computer case qualifies as an accurate representation of a miniature SUV, but according to Lian Li, that's exactly the type of vehicle that inspired its new PC-Q15 chassis. Sporting an "automobile-esque design," the PC-Q15 is another brushed aluminum enclosure from Lian Li with a compact footprint and numerous features that bely its smallish stature.

The PC-Q15 measures 8.27 inches (W) x 8.5 inches (H) x 12.99 inches (D), or 210mm x 216mm x 330mm if you roll with the metric system, and supports mini-ITX motherboards. It can accommodate a front-facing optical drive, three 2.5-inch storage drives, and a single 3.5-inch drive. There's also room to fit a single videocard up to 9.84 inches (250mm) in length, and the case offers up to 3.54 inches (90mm) of clearance for your CPU cooler.

Other features include two USB 3.0 ports, a single 120mm fan, noise dampening rubber strips for your hard drive, pre-routed cables, and an included 300W power supply with 80 Plus efficiency.

The PC-Q15 is available in silver and black for $179 MSRP.

Image Credit: Lian Li
Posted by Shri Krishna

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