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Analysts reckon that Larrabee will not be the graphics hit Intel claim. Intel have claimed that Larrabee will be more powerful than Nvidia who have developed their products for a 10 year span. It takes years of practise to achieve good drivers, inter connects and memory bandwidth.

Intel have made great success in other processor markets, take the x86, server processors, mobile processors such as the Atom and mobile graphics processing. Even though a graphics device is very complicate consisting of billions of transistors and stream processors can they take on the likes of ATI and Nvidia?

Larry Seiler the senior principal engineer says Larrabee the Pentium derived design has five times as many cores, each core has a vector processor and is four times as wide. making the graphics processor 20x as fast as Nvidia’s existing offerings.

I guess its all talk at the moment, are ATI and Nvidia worried about the outcome? I assume so!

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ATi have launched their 4600 series graphics cards. These cards are on the market for the low to mid range budget enthusiasts, not every one can fork out £400 for a HD 4870 X2 or a Nvidia 280.

The series is basically a watered down version of the 4800 series cards. The cards are set to compete against Nvidia’s 9500 card.  The models of the 4600 series cards include the 4670 and the 4650. Both cards are a 55nm build with 320 stream processing cores. They also support directx 10.1 which Nvidia cards do not.

The cards are easy on the wallet and with 50w of power used under full load you wont need to invest in another PSU. What is off putting is when Graphics vendors support the latest direct x version but they can barely render the graphics at that level. This usually miss informs the consumer but I’d see the card as a good directx 9 card than a 10.1.

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Here we have a video of computer rendered graphics, i was quite intrigued by the short clip. The reflections on the real life objects were impressive! I wouldn’t say ray tracing but it was a good start The polygon structured shapes must of had 8 sides? compare than now to the polycount of a direct 9/10 model which has thousands! You can easily see the first signs of modeling and how it has progressed over the years.

Take a look at the video bellow! Enjoy!

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Now that I have shown you the basic graphics demonstration from the 80’s its now time to see what graphics are really like. Ok the shapes which were rendered had 10 sides not 8! 10 polygons w00 h00. Now consider this demonstration which actually renders the whole face model.

The previous video showed nice reflections on a egg shell, I doubt this was actually rendered but the reflection/ shine effect was obviously added to the demo. What I’m basically getting at is the graphics today, models of all shapes and sizes, building landscapes and models all of which are rendered with computer hardware.

I may investigate what the average polycount for a model was back in the 80’s compared to the present date what would you expect the result to be? tens against millions is my guess! For the demo check out the video below.

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Driver heaven has release some useful tool for the majority of Nvidia driven laptop owners. The software produced by driver heaven allows nvidia notebooks graphics processor owners to mod and utilise the up-to-date desktop drivers released bu Nvidia to run on their machines.
Drivers for their laptops can take time to filter from similar and other supported hardware parts used in desktop graphics cards.

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AMD have reportedly joining with developers to create a new generation of DirectX 10.1 game titles for the ATI Radeon 3000 and 4000 series. Partners involved include Electronic Arts, Sega and NHN Games, not small players by any means.

Sega have said, by creating the directX 10.1 platform the return would be a new stanards for gaming development.  They also  stated that the move will create faster games and prove the looks and eye candy.

EA on the other hand are pushing boundaries of the real time strategy genre including social and community technologies. It will be good to see the outcome of ATI’s development within the directX community.

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The S3 Chrome, S3 are claiming their Chrome 430 GT will out perform the current Nvidia and ATi counter parts. The board is priced at around $59 which seems to me as a bargin if current Nvidia and ATi cards are priced around $350. The card is directx 10.1 supported and includes third party features such as ChromotionHD which is S3’s video architecture for HD.

Ok with this said I have no updates for the vendor! I was hoping to hear something positive but with the months flying by Nvidia and ATi still lead the market. So as a update I dont see S3 as a threat to the main competition and I cant really see their products denting the market in any way. Lets keep an eye out on the ATI 4870 X2 and what benchmarks are out there!

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After the awards ceremony at Nvision 2008 after a number of medals and cheques were handed out the two guys from Myth Busters came to the stage. The Myth Busters gave a demonstration to illustrate a CPU and GPU with a Myth Buster twist.

First up was a small robot called Leonardo which was the “CPU” shot single paintballs out onto a canvas to create a simple smily face! :). The Big leo which was the GPU was in a different league all together. The CPU robot created an impressive BANG which shot numerous paintballs to make a pixelated version of the Mona Lisa, how artistic!

You can see the irony behind the hope show but you cant knock Nvidia for trying. The you tube video is bellow.

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x5 Now nvidias move to the Intel chipset has allowed the multi GPU support.

AMD can already run their version of SLI called Crossfire on competitors boards. Now Nvidia have joint suite Intel mainboards offer the best of both worlds. In my opinion allowing this multi GPU support by the two top graphics company’s is a brilliant move for compatability, futurproofing and allowing the end user to use Intel Chipsets but still have access to Nvidia, AMD based GPU.

Remember the x58 isn’t just another 755 socket its actually the Nehalem based Motherboard so it would be interesting to see some benchmarks on both sli, crossfire systems in the last quarter of 2008.

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As we all know Crysis is the second version of the Crytek engine. The game was originally called Far Cry if I remember correctly which was back then a brilliant graphics engine for out door environments. I know Crysis (Crytek Engine 2) has been out a couple of months now but I think this game is a perfect way of benchmarking your system in terms of gaming performance.

Over these last few months I have read all about Crysis and how its engine needs a large amount of computation i.e an expensive computer. For example a crossfire/ SLI system running either of the latest graphics offerings with an Intel core extreme processor could run Crysis in full detail around 40 FPS. Ok that sounds good but is it really worth it? For the highest settings!?

Dont be fooled, I then had the impression that the game is basically unplayable on dual core processors and systems with 8800 series Nvidia graphics but I found this was not the case. If your a mainstream gamer then high settings or the word Ultra High dont exists.  But! whats up with medium detail? If you enjoy games as much as me then  you will like the game play, graphics and physics but remember, treat the game as a benchmark! Think of it as an investment for your gaming future!

Benchmarking. Ok so We have a system running a AMD dual core processor 2g of ddr2 and a 8800GS Graphics Card, what will this system produce in terms of performance? Well Medium detail would suffice. The only issue is under intense game play or open areas of the island which usually mean struggling hardware. So we can easily  pin-point the issue and diagnose the P.C with a low clock speed processor please upgrade! Eventually this should evolve into a fast gaming p.c. able to run the likes of crysis in FULL/ MEGA HIGH detail not to mention future games which will probebly use the crytek 2 engine.

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