Displaying items by tag: GPU

When I first started covering the computer world the most common resolution was 640x680 with the hard core gamers getting 800x600. The dream of the day, which some called the golden age of gaming, was 1600x1200 with around 30Fps. Now the dream is “photo realistic” resolutions without the need for heavy anti-aliasing and texture filtering. Even in the mobile world this is becoming a bigger issue with retina displays on the Apple side of the world and 3 and 4k screens on the PC side.

In any technology based company there is a need for strong leadership. The problem comes in finding the right person to take the role of leader. We have seen how much of an impact the right and wrong choices can make in companies like Apple and AMD. As current CEO Rory Read prepares to step down we are taking a look at AMD and their leadership over the years. With AMD they have fought the battle of leaders ever since the tenure of Hector Ruiz. Ruiz is possibly one of the most universally disliked CEOs that AMD has ever had. Most will put AMD’s current situation squarely in his lap.

It is the dream of many computer enthusiasts to have a mobile system that is at least as powerful (if not as flexible) as their desktops. I know that I personally have spent a small fortune on finding mobile devices that can run all of the rendering and editing software I have without tearing my shoulders off my body. For their part both Intel and AMD have cut the gap between desktop and mobile performance in the CPU world, but mobile GPUs have traditionally lagged way behind their desktop counterparts.

EVGA has been taking flak from consumers over an unusual design for the cooler on their GTX 970 ACZ graphics card. The problem arose when someone pointed out that the GPU does not make contact with all three heatpipes. According to EVGA this is the way the card was designed so everyone should calm down and get back to gaming.

Not all that long ago we reported that there was a chance that nVidia might skip over the 20nm half-node and move to the next full node in line due to issues that TSMC has been having with their 20nm process. 20nm has been the dream of GPU manufacturers for some time and despite the money that has been thrown at it, neither TSMC nor GlobalFoundries can seem to get it right. One reason for this could be due to leakage while another is just that as the process gets smaller building large and complex devices using a half-node just does not work.

The rumors are ramping up about the next generation of NVidia GPUs. Although we already know that the next GPUs (second-gen Maxwell) will not have the unified memory architecture or 20nm process size that NVidia (and everyone else hoped) that does not mean you will not be getting a good product. However, possible specs and performance are not what the latest rumor is all about. This time the rumblings are about possible launch times.

In the world of silicon size matters, but not in the traditional way. Manufacturers are always looking to make things smaller so they can stuff more into the same space. However there are two types of die shrinks. In the CPU world you see what it commonly referred to as full die shrinks while GPUs tend to do things in half-node steps.

In development it has always been a given that if you can code for a specific build of materials or specific hardware platform you can usually get more out of the application you are developing. Nowhere was this more evident than when RISC CPUS were on the market. At the time that DEC Alpha was king we saw a 667MHz CPU slamming 1GHz processors from both AMD and Intel. The reason for this was that the software was specifically coded to take advantage of that platform.

We have all heard rumors about how this or that game developer “intentionally” crippled a game on one platform or another, but in the end those usually are little more than manufacturer guerilla marketing efforts. Today though, we are hearing that a game company may have left out visual features from a new AAA title that seriously reduce the visual quality of the game played on the PC.

New Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Z graphics card with 12 GB of memory was supposed to arrive to stores on April 29th, in the meantime, rumurs have emerged and saying that will not happen after all.