Future of Alan Wake's DX10 Support Is Still In Dark

FudZilla got some interesting infos about the most talked game title Alan Wake and its DirectX 10 version.Here's what they got from:

Besides the usual "We haven't announced anything on this yet" when asked about DirectX 10 support, they managed to find out that the upcoming game from Remedy Entertainment called Alan Wake will benefit from quad-core processors. According to the interview, "quad's" will be up to 30 percent faster than dual core processors. Besides the last years blow dealt by Microsoft concerning the fact that Alan Wake is not a 2007 title, another hard punch was aimed at XP users, when it was said that it is best to consider Alan Wake to be a Vista exclusive game.

According to the interview, the so called "The Alan Wake engine" will use the Havok physics engine. When asked about multi-GPU solutions, Markus Maki made an interesting statement that they will "much rather put [their] development efforts to make sure [that] the game runs great on most gamers' systems, those with single GPUs."

As for now, the game will be available for Xbox360 and PC. You can check out the full interview here.

Read the rest...

First Crysis Patch Released,Improves Performance

Crytek has released the first patch for its notoriously demanding first-person shooter Crysis. The 1.1 patch includes 31 fixes, updates, and tweaks, and Crytek says it mainly addresses performance issues. Indeed, the lengthy change log for the patch lists fixes for a couple of memory leaks related to antialiasing and DirectX 10 graphics, not to mention optimizations for antialiasing and motion blur.

Also listed in the change log are fixes for various bugs, crash-inducing hiccups, and several tweaks to multiplayer balance. MP tweaks include reduced rocket splash damage against infantry in the game's Power Struggle multiplayer mode, slower rockets, rocket hit detection tweaks, and a reduced radius for grenade explosions.

The Crysis 1.1 patch weighs in at a hefty 139.15MB and can be downloaded from a variety of locations including FileShack, EA.com, Crymod, and Clan00.de. Nvidia recommends that users of SLI multi-GPU setups install the 169.28 beta release of its ForceWare graphics drivers (available here) in order to obtain optimal performance.

Source

Read the rest...

CES 2008:DirectX 11 To Roll Out In Early 2009

Fudzilla found out that Microsoft plans to finish up DirectX 11 in late 2008 or early 2009. This means that it will move rather quickly from DirectX 10 and 10.1, but it might take some time for hardware to go the same way.

We still don’t know many things about the new API, but at least we have the rough plan that it is coming. It is clear that 2009 will be the year or DirectX 11, and the way the market works we should see some good DirectX 11 games by 2010.

Seems like an eternity now, but as you might know, tempus fugit.

Read the rest...

Intel's G35 Benchmark Results

OC Workbench published 3DMark06 and 3DMark05 benchmark results of a Intel G35 based motherboard.

We ran a simple test 3dmark05 and 3dmark06 on our Intel G35 mainboard with 2GB DDR2-800 on X6800. The results are much better than the previous G33 chipset. It was tested on VISTA Ultimate.

Here are the screen shots. 3Dmark05 scored 1196 and 3Dmark06 scored 651.

On ECS G33 mainboard, 3Dmark05 scored 839 while 3Dmark06 scored 326.

If you were to compare with the ATi RS600 chipset, the G35 is still far off. On a similarly configured system (XP), 3Dmark05 scored 1170 and 3Dmark06 scored 538. At least, we see that G35 is able to do better in 3Dmark06 with a score of 651 against 538 on the ATi RS600.

Read the rest...

Radeon HD3850/3870 To be Launched Tomorrow

Radeon 3870, or RV670XT, and Radeon 3850 aka RV670PRO, will be launched tomorrow. We can tell you that Revival and Gladiator cards will be out and that you will see the cards with two DVI's, DVI and native HDMI, and later on you will see these cards with DVI + DisplayPort. It's all possible.

The Radeon HD3850 512MB card will score some 20 – 30 percent lower than a Geforce 8800GT 512MB and as we said before it will end up slower.

These two cards are two first DirectX 10.1 cards with support for Shader 4.1 and PCIe 2.0. It is a transistor optimized version of the R600 chip with UVD video processor included and it's manufactured at 55 nanometre.

The odd number of the beast, 666 million transistors, is something that you won’t forget that easily and the board has 320 stream processors, just as much as the original R600. Just as we reported months ago RV670XT aka Radeon 3870 math processing rate ends up at 497+ Gigaflops while 3850 card process 428 Gigaflops.

Tomorrow you will see a lot of reviews on the net and we will have a few, we're working on them as we speak.

Source

Read the rest...

Expect Intel G35 In December 2007

Intel has pushed its G35 integrated chipset core all the way to December if not even later. Intel originally wanted to release this new integrated DirectX10 chipset in early Q4 2007 but obviously, it skipped its original schedule.

We suspect that G45 gets more attention as G35 is just slightly faster than G33 and many vendors think that it come a little bit too late. Obviously, G45 graphics got more engineering priority, as this is Intel’s bit IGP thing for middle 2008.

Asus is working of their board and it is already listed at few places but we heard that no one should have any G35 based integrated boards until late 2007. Late December or early 2008 is the new launch date now.

AMD and Nvidia still don't have a DirectX 10 integrated graphics core, this is scheduled for 2008 so Intel is not that much late.

Source

Read the rest...

NVIDIA MCP7A Chipset Coming In Q1 2008

In the first quarter of 2008 we can expect an improved version of NVIDIA's MCP73 chipset, OCW reports.

NVIDIA probably knows that MCP73 lacks PureVideo and it's support of Single channel DDR2 is not competitive enough for Intel users to switch to NVIDIA based chipset. Thus, they intend to release an upgraded version of MCP73, which will be known as MCP 7A.

MCP7A has 3 editions MCP7A-U. MCP7A-S and MCP7A-H. MCP7A-H is a discrete without video and it supports FSB1333 dual channel DDR2-800. It will also support PCIe 2.0 and comes with PCIe x16 slot.

MCP7A-U and -S comes with integrated video GF8X00. It is unsure what class of GeForce 8 it will be using. It could be in the range of 8400 performance.

It supports DX10, Purevideo HD, HDMI, Displayport, DVI and VGA out. It supports FSB 1333, Dual channel DDR2, PCie 2.0. Other features include SATA2, GbE, 12 USB ports.

Read the rest...

AMD DX10 IGP chipset ships in January 2008

The first integrated graphics chipset from AMD with DirectX 10 support - the 780G - will be available in January 2008.

As reported earlier this year, the new family of chipset solutions for cost-effective computers from AMD will feature two product families: AMD 740G and AMD 780G. The launch of both new integrated core-logic offerings will be aligned and is currently scheduled for January, ahead of Chinese New Year on February 7, 2008, though, the exact launch schedule for AMD 740G may be altered.

AMD 780G-series core-logic will feature HyperTransport 3.0 bus for CPUs, PCI Express 2.0 x16 and x1 for add-on cards and DirectX 10-compliant graphics core with universal video decoder (UVD) engine as well as D-Sub, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs. Additionally, AMD 780G chipsets will support Hybrid CrossFire technology, which is designed to reduce power consumption of systems equipped with high-performance graphics cards. AMD 740G core-logic is projected to feature a new DirectX 9.0-compliant graphics core with Avivo engine as well as PCI Express x16 and PCI Express x4 interfaces in the north bridge.

The 790G chipset, along with new quad-, triple- and dual-core AMD Phenom, Athlon or Sempron processors, will be the base for the company’s code-named Cartwheel mainstream platform, which sports a broad set of multimedia, performance and security features to attract attention of different customers.

Source

Read the rest...

Intel P45 and G45 Chipsets Expected In Q2 2008

Intel is working on two new chipsets - the P45 and G45.

These chipsets will replace the current P35 and G35 chipsets in the second quarter of 2008.

As it is a new chipset, it will support the PCIe 2.0, south bridge will also be using a newer ICH10 or ICH10R. The chipset will maintain the suppot of DDR2 and DDR3 memory type.

Eaglelake chipset will be known as P45 (discrete) and G45 (for integrated video with GMA x4500 with DX10 support).

The chipset supports new standards like display port in additional to the DVI, HDMI. It will also have hardware acceleration for HDDVD/BluRay. The chipset is said to officially support FSB1600 processors.

Read the rest...