Far Cry 2 Gameplay Demo, Technical demo, Screenshots and Fact Sheet

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: May 28, 2008 - 3:53 PM PST Last week during nVidia Editor’s Day Spring 2008 Ubisoft made a gameplay presentation of Far Cry 2. I happened to be there and record the whole presentation, basically the folks from Ubisoft playing the game and showing what’s new – you can watch it below. Funny enough they said that this was the first public presentation of this game, but we could find a few other videos with gameplay presentations of Far Cry 2 on YouTube (but since these other videos were all shot in 2007 we believe our demo was performed with a more updated version of the game). They also provided to the folks present a fact sheet, two high-res screenshots and a technical video presentation, all of which I also included here. Enjoy! Obs: since YouTube has now a 10-minute limit per video I had to split the video into two parts. Far Cry 2 gameplay Demo, presented during nVidia Editor's Day Spring 2008 (May 22nd, 2008) Far Cry 2 technical Demo, showing the new technical features used in the game Screenshots click to enlarge click to enlarge Fact Sheet: click here to download Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

The Future – According to nVidia

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: May 25, 2008 - 12:05 PM PST Last week nVidia held their Spring 2008 Editor’s day, where they presented their forthcoming series of graphics processing units, which will be released next month. While we can’t talk about this new chip series yet due to the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), we can talk about some ideas that nVidia is seeing as “the future of computing” – basically more GPGPU usage (i.e. the use of the graphics chip to process regular programs) and the co-existence of “competing” technologies like ray tracing and rasterization. click to enlarge Figure 1: The future of computing, according to nVidia. During the whole Editor’s Day nVidia repeated ad nauseum how marvelous GPGPU is, showing several examples of applications where performance increased monstrously by the use of this technique. For those who don’t know the concept, the idea is to make the video card GPU to process regular programs instead of using the CPU. What is allowing this to be possible is nVidia’s CUDA compiler, which is capable of compiling any program written in C to be run on any nVidia GPU from series 8 on. We’ve already wrote an article explaining more about this technology. Is nVidia saying that in the future GPUs will replace CPUs? No exactly. The computer will still need a CPU, but the way nVidia is seeing it the role of the CPU will dramatically decrease in the future. In fact, this is already happening. Thru their “nTeresting” newsletters nVidia has been hammering Intel in the past month, claiming that contrary to what Intel wants you to believe CPU’s aren’t playing an important role on gaming performance anymore and the savvy user should buy a cheaper CPU and spend the saved money on a better video card for a better gaming performance. With GPU performance increasing and more and more tasks that were previously performed on the CPU being transferred to the GPU, this idea makes sense. With GPGPU this idea will also be valid for regular applications, as soon as mainstream products start to use the GPU for processing, boosting the application performance. During the event Adobe declared that they will start using GPGPU on their forthcoming products, in particular the next version of Photoshop to be released around September, and this could represent the first step towards that direction. Even though from the presentations it is clear that GPGPU can really boost performance on specific applications, the future is always unclear and the performance increase brought by GPGPU for the average user will only depend on software developers upgrading their programs to support it. It is always important to remind that programs compiled to use GPU’s from nVidia for processing won’t run on ATI’s. Of course final products can detect which video card you have installed on your system and load the CUDA-compiled code – which will provide the performance increase – if you have an nVidia video card. As for the rasterization vs. ray tracing battle, nVidia is seeing the co-existence of both technologies in the future, as ray tracing is in fact a better technology for some applications, but worse for others. They used as an example the film industry, which use both technologies on movies depending on what needs to be rendered. Nowadays ray tracing isn’t used by games. So by this talk we may expect future GPUs and games to support ray tracing? Maybe, but this probably won’t happen before 2010. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (2) top

Are Intel chipsets really capable of running DirectX 10 games?

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: May 1, 2008 - 9:52 AM PST That is the question nVidia is asking around. They just sent us some information about DirectX 10 support on Intel chipsets with integrated video. The conclusion is simple: DirectX 10 support isn't relevant as on-board video doesn't have enough performance to run today's games anyway! See below the full e-mail we've got from nVidia. If you are interested in learning more about integrated (a.k.a. on-board) video from Intel it is an interesting read. --- Received from nVidia May 1st, 2008 --- Intel integrated claims DirectX 10...try it out... Intel promised to have a DirectX 10 driver by yesterday, so keep your eyes peeled. Last week a new Intel motherboard came out and along with it Intel claimed that their GMA X3500 was DX10 capable. "The DG35EC Classic series board is built with integrated graphics based on GMA X3500 integrated graphics. It includes HD video playback for movie clips and media streams without the need for an add-in video card and is the first to have integrated Microsoft DirectX 10 capability with OpenGL 2.0 support." Even though you can see Intel claiming DirectX 10 support as far back as June 2006 for their 965 chipset (NOTE: wouldn't that make those motherboards the first ones to support DirectX 10?) they still have not released the long, long, long delayed driver, only offering a driver with no DirectX 10 support on their website. The good news for anyone who may have mistakenly believed they could actually use DirectX10 on all the Intel products they claim it for is that a driver leaked on the web. Since Intel states it is DirectX 10 capable, we decided to try it out on the available DirectX 10 titles that are shipping today, as a preview to the official release of their driver: Call of Juarez @ 1280 x 1024, no AA/AF -- 1.8 fps Crysis @ 1280 x 1024, no AA/AF -- 4.4 fps World in Conflict @ 1280 x 1024, no AA/AF -- 5 fps BioShock @ 1280 x 1024, no AA/AF -- 3.7 fps Company of Heroes @ 1280 x 1024, no AA/AF -- 3.6 fps 5 fps or less on the DirectX 10 titles available today at the meager setting of 1280 x 1024 with no AA/AF. Sounds fun. GMA X3500 does not seem very "capable" to me, in fact it seems downright incapable of being used with actual DirectX 10 applications. Now consider that DirectX 10 titles will only get more stressful on the graphic subsystem as the API matures and game developers continue to add more impressive visuals. Saying GMA 3500 is DirectX 10 capable is kind of like saying Styrofoam is "nutrition capable". I guess Intel's definition of capable is a lot different than our definition... a lot. Intel DirectX 10, FTL. System info: ASUS P5E-VM HDMI Intel G35 chipset 7.14.10.1451 video driver Intel Core2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2337.6 MHz (7.0 x 333.9 MHz) - Conroe 2x1024 MBytes (2048 MBytes) Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 32-bit Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

New Layout on Hardware Secrets

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: April 24, 2008 - 5:14 PM PST Hi folks! Today I changed Hardware Secrets layout a little bit, adding an icon to represent each article, on each section and on the main page. Since the number of articles grew a lot in the past months, I think this will facilitate finding articles on our website. Also, in order to the category pages not be very long, I also added a navigation system, i.e. if the category has too many articles, it will be broken down into several pages. Please let me know what you think about this modification. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (2) top

Huntkey Green Star 450 W Re-tested!

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: March 24, 2008 - 3:07 PM PST As I promised I bought another Huntkey Green Star 450 W power supply to redo the 450 W load test using another load pattern. The result? Absolutely the same. Huntkey Green Star 450 W is in fact a 360 W power supply that explodes if you try to pull 450 W from it. This time we taped the test in order to prove our claims. Click here to read the updated review, including the video. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

BFG 800 W Power Supply Review Updated

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: March 18, 2008 - 3:54 PM PST BFG has released a new "Limited Edition" version of their 800 W power supply correcting the video card power cables issues, which were too short, adding two longer video card power cables. So this new version has a total of four video power cables instead of "just" two. Because of the release of this new version, we updated the text from our review. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Gold-Plated DeLorean and Batmobile

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: February 10, 2008 - 6:15 PM PST K.I.T.T., DeLorean, Batmobile and Mach 5 (from Speed Racer cartoons) are emblematic cars for nerds  above 30 years old like me. And this weekend I was able to see in person a 24-karat gold-plated De Lorean and the original Batmobile from the Pow! Smack! Wham! 1960’s Batman TV series. These two classic cars are just two of the over 200 cars exposed in the National Automobile Museum in Reno, NV. The amount of interesting cars there is amazing, and you should visit this museum during your next skiing/snowboarding trip to Tahoe – it is within walking distance from the main street (Virginia Street), where the main casinos are located. The 1981 24-karat gold-plated De Loren was one of the two manufactured to promote American Express Gold card. click to enlarge click to enlarge click to enlarge click to enlarge click to enlarge The Batmobile is an all-time icon, making success even with kids from the Pokémon generation: buttons, buttons and more buttons! For me what is really worth dying for is the radar (a.k.a. “Detect-a-scope”) on the dash board on the passenger’s side. click to enlarge click to enlarge click to enlarge The museum is great, but it would be far better if they had K.I.T.T. on display (click here for my coverage on K.I.T.T.)! Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Load Tester in Action

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: February 7, 2008 - 6:11 PM PST I am very happy today. I finally put together our methodology for testing power supplies, using our new SunMoon SM-268 load tester, of course. By the way, it seems that only a half-dozen websites use a load tester to make their reviews, what makes our new reviews even more valuable (let me know if you know about a website that uses such equipment and that I haven't listed on the last page of our methodology). In the next few days I'll be "upgrading" as many "First Look" articles on power supplies as we can, adding our load tests to them. And I've just "upgraded" our first review, PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610 EPS12V, which, by the way, can really deliver its rated 610 W at 45º C. The next few days should be pretty busy around here... ;-) Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

CES 2008

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: January 7, 2008 - 5:23 PM PST I am right now attending CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, NV. Since Comdex no longer exists this is the big computing show in the USA right now but, as the name implies, it is not only about computers, but about all sorts of electronic devices. This is my first CES and everything people always told me about it is true: it is huge, there is a lot of interesting things to see and you have to walk a lot as things are very far away, transit around the conventions center gets chaotic (a 10-minute drive turns easily into a 45-minute stop-and-go) and by the end of the day you are really exhausted. Even with the massive 14-hour jet-leg I didn’t feel so tired during Computex in Taipei – even though Computex is huge you don’t need to walk too far for the off-site meetings and parties. In Vegas moving from the main convention center to any of the nearby hotels takes at least a good half an hour. Several websites are covering CES 2008 and to be honest it is hard to compete with websites that have three or more guys covering the show at the same time. I am all by myself here and it is simply humanly impossible to cover the entire show. So instead of posting a long “CES 2008 Coverage” article I will focus on posting separated “First Look” articles from relevant products that I really find worth talking about. Due to the massive amount of stuff going on here probably several articles will be posted after the show is over. So, stay tuned! click to enlarge Figure 1: CES 2008. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Shock-Proof LCD Monitor from ASUS

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: January 4, 2008 - 5:22 PM PST People say that an image is worth a thousand words. Specially when I don't understand a word of Russian. But the video is really cool, the guy hammers a monitor and much more and it doesn't even get scratched: http://www.abum.com/61948/New-flat-panel-monitor-can-take-a-crossbow-shot-and-survive.html Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top