• Carsten

    by Published on 07-08-15 00:35
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    Good evening ladies and gentlemen, I know it's been a while. But I will update the page more frequently in the coming weeks and months!

    Now back on topic: Windows 10 requires a WDDM-driver and a DX9-card, which from a hardware point of view includes basically every card made in the last 10 years. But not ...
    by Published on 28-01-13 21:22  Number of Views: 94101 
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    The rumor mill has been busy over the last few days. Not only speculating about the Xbox‘ and Playstation’s next installments (and sometimes simply reurgitating blatant fakes), but also about Nvidia’s monster GPU GK110 that’s supposedly being productized in february 2013 as some form of Geforce.

    The 7.1 billion transistor chip was introduced at last years‘ GPU Technology Conference on Nvidias home turf. It was being touted as the next best thing next to sliced bread and first productized as Tesla K20 and Tesla K20X accelerator cards at ISSC in November 2012. Conveniently, it was by then already being put to use in the world’s fastest supercomputer, ORNL’s Titan.

    Speaking of Titan, the rumor mill also has it, that the card that’s gonna be launched in the next few weeks (if correct) also carries this denominator: Geforce Titan – whether this goes with a number (I’d like „Titan 1“) or not or if it’s true at all, is still shrouded in the crystal balls of the fortune tellers. What is equally unknown outside Nvidia is the exact configuration which Titan 1 will be carrying and in this article I am going to explore a few variables and give reason as to why I think Geforce Titan will (or should) be configured this way or another.
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    by Published on 28-11-12 21:31  Number of Views: 56126 
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    ZiiLABS was formerly known as 3DLabs Ltd., a renowned provider of in-house designed graphics accelerators and software for the professional OpenGL CAD/CAM/CAE markets.

    As Creative Technology, Singapore-based parent company of ZiiLABS announced on November 19th, they expect to close a deal with chipdesigner and -maker Intel Corporation in the current quarter ending December 2012. The subject of the deal will be various technologies and patents from ZiiLABS as well as engineering ressources from their UK-based headquarter. Intel will pay 50 million US-Dollar altogether and acquire non-disclosed engineering ressources of the UK sudsidiary of Creative Technology.
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    by Published on 23-10-12 22:24     Number of Views: 174449 
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    Intel has a less than stellar record when it comes to driver support for anything that is not an inf-update for their mainboard chipsets. After being established by industry leaders like Apple, Nvidia and AMD, Intel could not longer ignore the industry standard OpenCL - the open compute language. More or less reluctantly, they put out driver support for their CPUs, mostly functional, but quite underwhelming when it came to performance.

    One popular example for how enthusiastic Intel was about performance optimized OpenCL drivers could readily be seen by running Luxmark for example. This raytracing benchmark utilizes OpenCL-enabled processors, no matter what kind of beast they are. When you're using a recent Radeon graphics card in your system, chances are that you already have an OpenCL-1.2-enabled driver for your central processor installed - the one that comes with AMDs Catalyst driver package.
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    by Published on 30-12-11 16:16     Number of Views: 62602 
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    AMD Radeon HD 7970 - not unleashing the full potential of Tahiti?

    AMD's recent launch of it's latest and greatest, the Radeon HD 7970, despite taking over the single-gpu performance crown, left quite a few people wondering. Wondering, if that was all; wondering, if there might be performance left on the table somewhere in the drivers; wondering, if the focus on compute did cost to much gaming performance. This was especially true when comparing the number of transistors to it's predecessor Cayman, which already boasted an impressive 2.64 billion little transistors. Tahiti's number was far more impressive though and with 4312 million transistors broke the 4 billion mark. Now, a possible explanation has surfaced in a photograph of what looks like a product catalogue from AMD partner Sapphire.
    Update Jan 3rd, 2012 21:45: According to a story over at Brightsidenofnews.com, Chris Hook, currently „Head of WW Social Media and Ecosystem Communications” at AMD flat out denied, saying
    There are no hidden cores…


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    by Published on 28-12-11 09:00     Number of Views: 74223 
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    AMD Radeon HD 7970 - Tahiti XT

    AMDs recently launched Radeon HD 7970 brought the first installment of „Graphics Core Next“ in the shape of a 4.312 billion transistor processor code named Tahiti. With Graphics Core Next (or GCN for short) AMD has taken a radically different approach to compute than with their former Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) based micro-architectures. The emphasize not only in the last sentence is on compute because that's the area were the new architecture is set to flex it's ALU muscles first and foremost - for graphics only, AMD remained adamant, VLIW was (and is) a very efficient way of cramping highly potent circuits on a small amount of die space.

    Gaming performance of the Radeon HD 7970 is somewhere between 25 tp 50 percent up from HD 6970 and somewhere from 10 to 30 percent above the former single GPU champ Geforce GTX 580 - no matter if 1,5 or 3 GiB. With that settled, let's take a look at Tahiti in it's XT version and dig a little deeper.
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    by Published on 12-12-11 21:44     Number of Views: 84377 
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    AMD APP SDK 2.6 component versioning

    Just a quickie this time. AMDs developer page has been updated as of now with the checksums of AMD APP SDK 2.6. The files linked there as of this writing are still 2.5, but if you alter the link to point to 2.6 instead of the linked SDK, you get the brand new APP SDK 2.6. But please try and visit their site first - they should have updated it any minute now. In a blog-entry from a couple of days ago, AMDs Mark Ireton apart from revealing today's launch date for the 2.6 SDK, already outlined some of the changes, AMD APP 2.6 will bring. Most notably, Open CL 1.2 will be on the support list for 2012 where AMD is commited to fully support the most important open GPU-Compute standard on both CPUs and GPUs. The APP SDK 2.6 is to include previews on some of OpenCL 1.2's core features according to AMD.
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    by Published on 15-11-11 17:33     Number of Views: 66914 
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    AMD Catalyst 11.11 WHQL Version Numbers

    After last month's very late release of Catalyst 11.10, the November issue of AMDs Radeon graphics drivers, Catalyst 11.11 WHQL is available for download already. AMD also issued the first Catalyst Application Profile, short CAP, for 11.11 release, which adds tweaks for the Battlefield 3 profile in Crossfire multi-GPU configurations, improves Crossfire performance for Global Ops: Commando Lybia and disables Crossfire - probably there have been issues - for Driver San Francisco.
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