Windows 8 to be shown at CES?

Rumor mill in overdrive once again

 

Whispers started late last week that Microsoft might be planning a special sneak preview of Windows 8 during CES. At first, we didn’t think much of the rumor, but now multiple sources are saying that Microsoft could, in fact, be planning a first strike with a look at Windows 8 during CES

Sources tell us that if Microsoft does go ahead with this sneak preview of Windows 8 to the world, it would likely be a showing of the whizz bang features of the future OS and how they will apply to the new technology that they are talking about:  namely the tablet and software as a service in the cloud

While we have heard strange rumors of Microsoft talking about products that are far off in the future, we have to admit that we find it hard to believe that Microsoft would even want to start talking about Windows 8 yet, when it is still riding high on the sales of Windows 7. While we doubt there will be any real showing of Windows 8, it is possible that it will be mentioned

First glimpse of EVGA GTX 570 Superclocked

Preview: 65MHz factory overclock

 

Two days ago Nvidia launched the GTX 570, the second addition to the Geforce 500 series. Since Nvidia gave its partners a green light for overclocking, the day of the launch saw many factory overclocked cards. One of the fastest so far is the EVGA GTX 570 Superclocked, which boasts a 797MHz GPU. This means that EVGA pushed the GPU by 65MHz

EVGA GeForce GTX 570 Superclocked specification

Part Number               012-P3-1572.
Core Clock Speed        797MHz
Processing Cores         480.
Memory Clock Speed    3900MHz
Memory Bandwidth      156GB/sec
Shader Clock Speed    1594MHz
Bus                            PCI-E 2.0.
Interface                    DVI-I, DVI-I, Mini-HDMI
Product Warranty       10 years upon registration

 

As is usual for EVGA, Superclocked comes with reference Nvidia cooler. Thankfully, Nvidia did a great job this time around and managed to implement vapor chamber tech resulting in really good performance. Intensive operation won’t see EVGA GTX 570 SC‘s temperatures exceed 86°C, and while we didn’t consider the fan to bee too loud, it was clearly audible. Note however that we were pretty satisfied with noise levels, especially when compared to the GTX 480.

The GTX 570 Superclocked‘s performance is great. Thanks to the factory overclock, this card is faster than the GTX 480.

Although the GTX 570 Superclocked is overclocked already, there’s still room for further overclocking. Note however that this is only possible if you decide to increase the core voltage, as default 987mV wouldn’t allow the GPU to exceed 810MHz

Apart from the Superclocked version, EVGA launched the plain GTX 570 at reference clocks. Both cards will be bundled with EVGA's Precision OC software with GTX 570 skin, free limited edition EVGA gaming poster and 3DMark 11.The EVGA GTX 570 Superclocked card is curently listed with a lowest price set at €370,
Here are some preliminary results – stay tuned as the full review will follow soon

XFX Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 tested

 
Review: AMD strikes back with a vengeance

Today is Radeon HD 6900 day and AMD has a lot riding on the new Cayman series. As usual, the new series offers two cards dubbed Radeon HD 6970 and Radeon HD 6950. Both are based on the new Cayman core, AMD's second generation DirectX 11 core. Of course, unless you spent the past six months under a rock, you probably knew this, but now that the intro is out of the way, we can get on with stuff that actually matters

Radeon HD 6970 will succeed the HD 5870 on AMD's single-GPU throne and it will compete against Nvidia's Gefroce GTX 570. The fastest single-GPU card in this year will still be the GTX 580, but the fastest card around overall remains the one-year old AMD dual-GPU HD 5970.

Since both graphics heavyweights are well behind their deadlines, the fight for the fastest graphics card is expected to start in early 2011. This period will see AMD announce its dual-GPU HD 6990, whereas Nvidia will be ready with its own dual-GPU board

This year seems to have favored AMD when it comes to DirectX11 cards, as the company managed to fill out its DirectX11 lineup quite nicely and much sooner than Nvidia. AMD's execution was nothing short flawless, which can't be said of Nvidia. Furthermore, sales figures confirm that AMD won this round with about 25 million shipped DirectX11 cards under its belt

However, as much as AMD and Nvidia try to promote new DirectX 11 technologies, Steam statistics say that 85% of gamers still didn’t upgrade to DirectX 11. The reason is more or less the lack of DirectX 11 games. With its HD 6900 series, AMD aims at hardcore gamers looking for top performance and plan to upgrade to DirectX 11 graphics with a brand new graphics card

The Cayman Architecture

Radeon HD 6970

Radeon HD 6950



The recently released AMD Barts GPU used the “old“ VLIW5 design, although it had some neat features regarding the actual design of the chip (individual dispatch processors for each of the SIMD blocks). Cayman on the other hand feels like real evolution as it indeed features the new VLIW4 design. This means that it has four proper stream processing units, as opposed to VLIW5 with four simple and one complex SP unit

Cayman now uses what AMD calls a 4-way co-issue. This means that all stream processing units have equal capabilities, and there is no complex SP unit     also known as the T-unit

The new VLIW4 design should provide a ten percent improvement in performance per mm2, at least according to AMD. Although it looks like all four SM units are equal in size and use, it appears that two (third and fourth) are assigned with some special functions, also known as the transcendentals. Bear in mind that they have nothing to do with Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson

The talk of greater parallelization started with the Barts GPU which had individual dispatch processors for each SIMD Engine Block, something that certainly helped Barts with tessellation. Cayman on the other hand, has two graphics processing engines (GPEs), one for each SIMD engine, which means that it should raise the tessellation performance by a factor of three to four when compared to the HD 5870, at least on paper

Another novelty is the upgraded Render Back-End which in Cayman's case has 128 Z/Stencil ROPs, 32 color ROPs, 2x faster 16-bit integer ops and 2-4x faster 32-bit FP ops

XFX's HD 6970 is a reference design card measuring 27.4cm in length, just like the HD 6950 (the PCB measures 26.5cm). The cooling is also the reference solution and the cooler looks similar to the one employed on HD 6800 cards. However, unlike HD 6800 boards, the HD 6900 series features a backplate, much like HD 5800/5900 series cards

The I/O panel features two DisplayPort 1.2 connectors, HDMI 1.4a and two DVI connectors (one of them is single-link with a maximum resolution of 1920x1200). By using DisplayPort outputs it’s possible to chain up to six monitors to a single card. As far as sound goes, HDMI 1.4a provides Dolby True HD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192KHz/24bit output

Like its HD 6970 brother, the HD 6950 also sports a XFX-branded exhaust vent. XFX Radeon HD 6950 features two DVIs, one HDMI and one DisplayPort



Unlike the HD 6800, HD 6900 comes with two CrossFire connectors. This means that you can use four cards in a 4-way CrossFire


The card also features a dual-bios toggle switch that makes bios updates a breeze. Setting 1 is unprotected for user updates, while setting 2 is the protected factory default mode. Clever

The TDP, something that has been quite a debatable topic recently, is set at 200W for the HD 6950. AMD is currently using three different TDP values and calls them PowerTune Maximum Power, Typical Gaming Power and, of course, Typical Idle Power

Note that 200W is AMD's PowerTune maximum power whereas typical gaming power is set at 140W. Idle TDP is set at 20W, same as the HD 6970. The card needs two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors

The PowerTune feature looks similar to a gimmick used by Nvidia on its GTX 580 card and it looks like this one locks the HD 6970 maximum TDP at 250W. Typical Gaming Power is set at 190W while the idle stands at 20W

XFX used its standard box design for the new Caymans

Testbed

Motherboard: EVGA 4xSLI
CPU: Core i7 965 XE (Intel EIST and Vdrop enabled).
Memory: 6GB Corsair Dominator 12800 7-7-7-24.
Harddisk:   OCZ Vertex 2 100 GB
Power Supply: CoolerMaster Silent Pro Gold 800W
Case: CoolerMaster HAF X
Fan Controler: Kaze Master Pro 5.25".
Operating System: Win7 64-bit
263.09_desktop_win7_winvista_64bit
HD6900_8.79.6.2rc2_Win_Vista_7.

3Dmark 2011

In 3Dmark 2011 Radeon HD 6970 scores slightly lower than 8000 at entry settings while the GTX 580 scores 8700 in the same test. The runner up, Nvidia's GTX 570, scores slightly above 8000 while the GTX 480 is slightly below 8000.

At performance settings Radeon HD 6970 a.k.a. Cayman XT scores around 5300 while the GTX 580 scores are just tad below 6000 and the GTX 570 loses by an inch with 5251. GTX 480 scores are almost identical to the GTX 570, its 5244 points are again slightly lower than the HD 6970.

In more extreme conditions Radeon HD 6970 scores 1744 while the GTX 580 scores 1963. Radeon HD 6970 again wins against the GTX 570 and GTX 480, which scored around 1680.


3DMark Vantage

Games: Aliens vs Predator

AMD has improved Antialiasing performance on the HD 6900 series and this is clearly visible in AvP tests. The HD 6950 is faster than the Cypress-based HD HD 5870 with maxed out antialiasing






Tessellation: Unigine Heaven

In Unigine, AMD's efforts to boost tessellation performance bear fruit once again. Nvidia cards manage to outperform the new Radeons in Extreme tests, but this is hardly a real-world benchmark. Using more realistic Normal settings, AMD can easily stand up to Nvidia, which means it has managed to close the tessellation gap and meet Nvidia's tessellation performance. Although some might consider this fact to be somewhat trivial considering tessellation support in current titles, it's worth noting that superior tessellation performance was one of Nvidia's main selling points over the past few months

Tessellation: TessMark

TessMark tests resulted in rather horrid results for Cayman cards, but this is clearly a software issue related to older Catalyst releases and it should not be taken seriously. AMD claims TessMark performance will be vastly improved in new driver updates, scheduled for early 2011. Despite this, we chose to include the results in our review, just to annoy fanatic fanboys who have already issued several fatwas calling four our untimely deaths

Overclocking HD 6970

Overclocking HD 6950

Overclocking Score

AMD PowerTune

A simple explanation of AMD’s PowerTune technology is that the GPU runs at maximum clock until it detects potential problems with thermal dissipation; the latter scenario causes the card to downclock. The nominal GPU value is 880MHz, and the GPU should run within its TDP  budget

AMD implemented several low-frequency states so that PowerTune technology can dynamically alter clocks based on the internal calculations of the GPU’s power consumption. A similar technology is found in Nvidia's GTX 570 cards, where dynamic altering of clocks effectively manipulates TDP without affecting performance. GTX 580 is the first card to implement such hardware monitoring technology and AMD's new cards also rely on it. However, when compared to GTX 570 or HD 6900, the GTX 580’s engine seems simplified as it downclocks the GPU by 50% upon detecting FurMark and similar apps, and that’s that. Basically the GTX 580 proves that muscles don't usually mix with brains

This technology is a rather nice feature if you're dealing with a smooth running game, as it will allow you to conserve energy and lower noise by simply sliding the controls in PowerTune. It will also keep the temperatures lower by reducing the clocks and lower temps are always a good idea

Conclusion (of 2010).

The closing weeks of 2010 have proven to be quite an exciting time in the graphics business. After Nvidia successfully launched the GTX 580, surprising many observers who did not expect such a successful revision of the massive Fermi core, AMD took a somewhat defensive stance after more than a year in the lead

The HD 6900 series is AMD's response to the new threat and now we know what both teams have to offer on the pitch. AMD took an early lead thanks to its successful HD 5000 series and Nvidia's delays, but in the latter half of the year Nvidia managed to score back some ground with the affordable GF 104 core and the speedy GF 110. Despite this, AMD cashed in on its lead and outsold Nvidia in the DirectX 11 market by a comfortable margin. However, at the end there can be only one true winner and you will be happy to know that it's you, the consumer

AMD can claim a victory in total sales numbers and the fastest graphics card on the market, thanks to the HD 5970, Nvidia managed to retain the title of fastest GPU on the planet with the GF110. However, the end result of that the struggle is visible in any price search engine. Consumers can choose between several competitive graphics cards in all market segments at relatively modest prices

The XFX HD 6950 and XFX HD 6970 are excellent products and if you are in the market for a high-performance DirectX 11 card, they are more than a good choice. Compared to Nvidia's GF110 cards, the new Radeons manage to perform admirably. The HD 6970 easily matches the GTX 570 in terms of performance, yet it should cost a bit less, between five and ten percent less. However, the HD 6950 truly manages to hit the sweet spot. With VAT, it's projected to cost between €250 and €275 depending on the market and at the moment Nvidia simply doesn't have a product to take it on. In addition, it's somewhat quieter than the HD 6970. It's faster than the old HD 5870, especially in new games and it has a more advanced architecture with greatly improved tessellation performance

So there you have it. AMD did not unsettle the GTX 580, but it has done something even better. It has churned out two competitive and very well priced graphics cards that will surely end up on many Christmas shopping lists. Great work, especially in the tessellation department. That's it for 2010 folks, but as soon as we sober up after the holidays, both AMD and Nvidia will spice things up with new dual-GPU cards, just in time to save on heating bills in the northern hemisphere

Radeon HD 6970 to cost 275 euro

Excellent price, 6950 for €225.

 

We just got an update of Radeon HD 6900 series pricing. The Radeon HD 6970 will sell in Europe as of 5 AM Wednesday for €275+VAT, while Radeon HD 6950 will sell for just €225+VAT euro

The UK suggested retail price is £225 incl VAT for Radeon HD 6950 and £279 incl VAT for Radeon HD 6970. UK chaps will get the cards at 6.00 AM due the time zone differences. California and the rest of Pacific time zone will get the card on December 14th at 9.00 PM, while east coast New York gets it December 15th at 00.00 AM

This is a surprising move as the prices are much lower than anyone had expected. For comparison, the Geforce GTX 570 sells for at least 340 euro, while the cheapest Geforce GTX 580 on the EU market sells for 480 euro, and in most cases for well over €500.

We heard that €360 for 6970 and €320 for 6950 was the plan before, but obviously it got canned. One can only hope that AMD can make money with such low prices, but as end users we should simply be thrilled for getting great graphics cards at such low prices

The prices are excellent and even if the cards ends up somewhat slower than the GTX 580 and GTX 570, they will definitely be very attractive due to competitive pricing

Kudos to AMD for the price, the fight is on

AMD rolls out Catalyst 10.12 driver

Gets a new Catalyst Control Centre

AMD has released its newest version of the Catalyst driver, the Catalyst 10.12. The driver will be available as a preview for early testing and as a full version. The new version, at least the preview one, brings couple of major updates including the new Catalyst Control Centre, something that has been rumoured for quite some time

The new CCC is now resizable, has a built-in search and features a new design. AMD has also announced the Catalyst Application Profile, or simply CAP. The CAP are going to be weekly updates that should give additional performance improvements for applications and games. As far as the driver goes, the new Catalyst 10.12 includes support for DivX on AMD Radeon HD 6800 series CARDS, which means that with this driver and the DivX accelerated solutions, you can expect A lower CPU load, extended battery life etc

The new driver also brings support for OpenGL 4.1 including the new features introduced in OpenGL 4.1 and the new ARB extensions introduced with OpenGL 4.1, as well as the AMD Stream 2.3 SDK release

You can find it and download it here

Cayman goes full monty

Looks pretty clean

 

After a picture of the HD 6970 it has just been a matter of time before the Cayman based card goes full monty

The design of the PCB looks surprisingly clean and this time we are looking at a 6+2-phase digital PWM voltage regulation design that gets power from 8+6-pin PCI-Express connector, so in this case we are talking about Cayman XT, or simply, the HD 6970.

The card has 2GB of memory and all the chips are located on the front side. We aren't quite sure what is the purpose of the backplate, possibly to keep the VRM cooled. The GPU is angled positioned, something that we've seen before on AMD cards

Germans ask IBM to make them the world's fastest supercomputer

Must be very precise

 

Germany's Bavarian Academy of Science has contracted Biggish Blue to build a supercomputer that, when completed in 2012 will be the most powerful in the known world

Dubbed the SuperMUC, the computer will be run by the Academy's Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Germany. It will be available for European boffins who are probing the frontiers of medicine, astrophysics and anything else boffinish that needs a computer

The MUC suffix is borrowed from the Munich airport code and Martin Jetter, chairman of the board of IBM Germany said that the German and European research community will get a push to be on the forefront of international competition

The system will use 14,000 Intel Xeon processors which will be shoved into IBM System x iDataPlex servers and it should be able to reach speeds of 3 petaflops. We guess when the BBC reports it, it will say something like a second of a machine at this speed can process the same amount as would take someone with a pocket calculator a trillion years

SuperMUC will use a new form of cooling that IBM developed, called Aquasar. It uses hot water to cool the processors, a design that should cut cooling electricity usage by 40 percent, the company claims

Arndt Bode, chairman of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre board of directors said that SuperMUC will provide previously unattainable energy efficiency. This approach will allow the industry to develop ever more powerful supercomputers while keeping energy use in check," said, in a statement

Once built, the system should rank near the top of the twice-annually compiled Top500 list of world's most-powerful computers. The top of the list at the moment is the Chinese Tianhe-1A system benchmarked a performance of 2.67 petaflops

By the time it is built, SuperMUC will have some new competition for the top spot. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are each building a 20 petaflop computer. Both are expected to be operational in 2012.

LG Optimus 2X brushes competition aside

Speedy dual-core superphone with HDMI

A few videos featuring LG's upcoming Optimus 2X superphone have popped up on Youtube and we can safely say the performance is quite impressive

The Tegra 2 based Optimus 2X manages to easily outpace both the Samsung Galaxy S and iPhone 4, which is no small feat considering their spec. The Optimus 2X is surprisingly responsive and clearly outpaces the competition in some basic everyday tests

However, one of the most impressive features is not sheer graphics performance, but rather HDMI support. In a video featuring some nice Korean daytime TV, the Optimus 2X shows its prowess as a media player, capable of delivering 1080p

You can check out the clips here

Reference HD 6970 has dual-BIOS

Factory and user one

 

We managed to score a few more details regarding the mystery switch located next to the Crossfire connectors on the HD 6970 card

According to what we know so far, the HD 6970 will have a dual BIOS and the switch is used exactly for that. The switch has two settings and according to AMD's own slides, the setting 2 makes it "protected as factory default", while the setting 1 is unprotected for user updates

Either it means that AMD will release a BIOS that gives you more performance but also raises power consumption or something else, it is still not clear, but it sure does sounds pretty interesting

Of course, we will know for sure on 15th of December

April 2011 release for new MK

Three editions from which to choose

 

NetherRealm Studios and publisher Warner Bros Interactive have confirmed that the new Mortal Kombat is on track for an April 2011 release. The title will be offered in three editions for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

The three editions will be standard, Kollector’s, and Tournament. Both the Kollector’s and Tournament editions of the title will offer a number of perks over the standard edition of the game. The Kollector’s edition will come with figures of both Sub-Zero and Scorpion, an art book, and additional downloadable content that will add “Klassic” costume skins as well as avatar costumes and props

The Tournament edition will be limited to just 20,000 copies and when they are gone, they are gone. The big attraction is a custom designed portable fight stick, plus all of the content from the Kollector’s edition and a few more things that have yet to be announced

The PlayStation 3 version of the game will offer stereoscopic 3D support and Kratos from God of War that will be exclusive to the PS3 version. Currently, there is no word yet if any such exclusive will be offered for Xbox 360 owners, but it appears to be unlikely at this point. Sources do confirm that a number of retailers will be offering different pre-order exclusives

While all of the extras and offerings for the Kollector’s and Tournament editions have yet to be decided, it is a good bet that NetherRealm will throw a few more things in for good measure before it is all said and done. The early buzz on the title itself seems to be strong, as the game has gone back to its roots and focused on what made the franchise great. Warner has a lot riding on this release and is focused on getting it right, which it will hopefully do with this release and which they hope will re-energize the franchise with players

Gawker hacked

Commenters details leaked

 

Gawker's database of 1.5 million usernames, emails, and passwords has been hacked after it claimed that it was “not afraid” of the hackers at 4Chan

Gawker has admitted that its databases appear to have been compromised. Passwords stored on the site were encrypted but simple ones may be vulnerable to a brute-force attack. It is recommending that users change their passwords on the Gawker GED/commenting system and on any other sites on which you've used the same passwords. Readers should also change their company email password and any passwords that might have appeared in email messages

The site said that it was “deeply embarrassed by this breach". An unknown and unverified source said in a note to Mediaite that the hack was motivated by Gawker's haughty behaviour

"We went after Gawker because of their outright arrogance," the source said. "It took us a few hours to find a way to dump all their source code and a bit longer to find a way into their database." The source said that it had found a conversation in Gawker's Campfire logs in which Gawker staff said that they were not afraid of 4chan

Radeon HD 6970 slower than GTX 580 in 3Dmark 2011

Slower or similar to GTX 570, tests in

 

We got some numbers for Radeon HD 6970 in 3Dmark Vantage and the latest 2011 version. We know that this test is not real life based, but it still provides a nice reference

We have compared the 3Dmark data we acquired from a source with our own that we got on a similar configuration. In 3Dmark 2011 Radeon HD 6970 scores slightly lower than 8000 at entry settings while the GTX 580 scores 8700 in that same test. The runner up, GTX 570, scores slightly above 8000 while the GTX 480 is slightly below 8000.

At performance settings Radeon HD 6970 a.k.a. Cayman XT scores around 5300 while the GTX 580 scores are just tad below 6000 and the GTX 570 loses by an inch with 5250 score. GTX 480 scores almost identical to the GTX 570, its 5250 points are again slightly lower than HD 6970.

In more extreme conditions Radeon HD 6970 scores 1800 while the GTX 580 scores 1950. Radeon HD 6970 again wins against GTX 570 and GTX 480 who scored 1680.

The launch is on Wednesday December 15th 5AM Central European Time or 6PM GMT or Greenwich time.  Chaps in New York or across east coast will be able to see the card launching on November 15th at 00.00 AM while those from California get a slight advantage and can see the card selling already on December 14th 09.00 PM

Sources have also confirmed that the GTX 580 wins in most of the games. You’ll see some official scores in less than 48 hours from now

Tegra 2 available in 100,000 + orders

No small orders please

 

At least some good news for Nvidia. When it comes to Tegra 2 processor, a Developer Technology Engineer called David C. has said many times that the minimal order or Tegra 2 chips is 100,000 units

A batch of 100,000 sounds like pretty big number but Nvidia's sales machine doesn’t want to bother with smaller fish. We do know that LG and Motorola are at least two companies who got probably even more than 100,000 chips but we would doubt that Point of View got 100K of these chips for its Tegra 2 tablet

Tegra developers kept asking Nvidia for most of 2010 to buy smaller quantities but Nvidia didn't want to do it. Good thing is that Colibri Tegra T20 design kit was supposed to be available in Q4 2010, but we could not confirm whether this happened. The latest info said that this module was supposed to be available in December

The 100K orders per customer also means that Nvidia will sell at least a few 100,000 batches as it won't let you buy less. However, Nvidia needs to sells millions to make some decent profit out of this quite costly and daring project

Latest NFS DLC not for PC

Will get some DLC in the future

 

Despite the fact that we love our consoles, playing games on our PC is still of the things that we really like to do. It continues to be frustrating, however, when we see PC gamers once again getting shafted with less than their console friends; and it appears that such will be the case with the latest downloadable content for Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, which will be a console-only release

Yes, that’s right, if you elected to purchase Criterion’s new NFS title on the PC rather than your gaming console, then you will not be able to buy the PDLC pack on the PC. Apparently, it has nothing to do with PC owners’ money not being any good, it is just a question of resources, and they don’t have the resources to deliver all new content to all platforms

Our translation of this goes something like this: “We don’t sell enough copies of the PC version of the game to start with, and we sell even less of available downloadable content to PC users in general, so it isn’t really worth the effort to do PC DLC as we simply make no money on it.”  Of course, this isn’t a direct quote from EA or Criterion, but it does mirror the way many PC gamers feel these days when they buy a title that is available for both the console and PC platforms

If it is any consolation prize, Criterion has confirmed through forum replies that they do intend at least some updates and content for owners of the PC version of the game, but they didn’t have any timeline or additional details to announce at this time. Criterion has been a long-time supporter of the PC platform, so we do suspect that they will deliver something for PC owners of the game, it really is just more of a question of when

VGA Awards outs new info

Title and date confirmations

 

One thing you have to say for the Spike Video Game Awards (VGAs):  even if you don’t like the results, the awards have done a very good job at attracting top publisher and developers into announcing new titles that are in development, showing off titles that are further along since we last saw them, or finally confirming ship dates for titles that we are expecting. The VGAs on Saturday night gave us a little bit of all of this

Electronic Arts confirmed what we had previously already had been telling you, with the news that SSX would be making a return with the new SSX: Deadly Descents. Our initial impression from what we saw makes it hard to tell where this title is going; but already we are hearing a good amount of mumbling that from what we saw in the trailer, it didn’t look anything like a hybrid of SSX Tricky and SSX 3 (which is what many gamers seem to want). We will have to wait and see on this one, but it is slated for arrival during late 2011.

Microsoft confirmed the new Forza 4, which will be hitting the track for a fall 2011 release. Our sources tell us that this will be a hybrid title that will offer controller and steering wheel support, but will offer the Kinect interaction that we have already seen; but it is currently unknown if you will be able to use Kinect to actually drive all of the cars in all of the modes in the game. This does not end the speculation that an additional title might be coming from Turn 10, which is a Kinect-only Forza title, but right now our sources seem to think that the focus is clearly on Forza 4

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception received a release date, which is 11/1/2011 that was confirmed in the new trailer. THQ showed off a new title called inSane that is being designed in conjunction with Guillermo Del Toro and being developed by Volition. Look for inSane some time in 2013. Rumors of Prototype getting a sequel are now confirmed, with Prototype 2 arriving on dealer shelves in 2012. Resistance 3 is now confirmed for arrival on September 6, 2011, which will finally end a three-year wait. Thor: Gold of Thunder will be arriving on May 3rd, 2011.

Skyrim: Elder Scrolls 5 was finally officially confirmed and surprisingly got a release date of 11/11/11, which means that it has been in development for almost as long as we have wanted to see this title happen. Mass Effect 3, the final chapter in the trilogy was finally officially confirmed for a holiday release in 2011 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. Mortal Kombat fans that own a PlayStation 3 will be excited to learn that Kratos will be a playable character exclusive to the PlayStation 3 when the title arrives for both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. Batman: Arkham City is not confirmed for a holiday 2011 release

Overall, there was a lot to see from the trailers and release announcements within the trailers. Of course, many of the trailers didn’t feature a lot of in-game footage, but several of the announcements were big ones. The news does offer some clarity ahead of E3 as to what the release schedule for 2011 is going to look like, and it already seems that we are going to see a significant number of triple-A titles for 2011.

XFX rolls out a new HD 6850

Dual fans 

To make the wait for Cayman based cards a bit more bearable, XFX has prepared yet another card based on the now quite famous Barts GPU - the HD 6850 Dual Fan edition

Despite the fact that it has a non-reference dual fan cooler, the card is still working at reference clocks. So, you are looking at a standard Barts GPU with 960 Stream processors, clocked at 775MHz for the GPU and 4000MHz for 1GB of GDDR5 memory. Of course, the card comes with a 256-bit memory interface

The new card comes with the same backplate you might've seen on previous HD 6850 cards so you can expect two DVIs, HDMI and Displayport outputs as well as XFX's custom exhaust grill. The best part is that XFX is currently working on its HD 6850 Dual Fan Black Edition, so it shouldn't be long until this one hits retail as well

The plain HD 6850 Dual Fan is already listed all around Europe with a €192,90 price tag. Scan.co.uk also has the card listed for £157.07 inc. VAT

AMD HD 6950 works at 800MHz

1408 SPs, 200W TDP 

We managed to score more details regarding the upcoming AMD Cayman based cards. By the looks of it, some things have changed since the last slides, which we saw back in November. According to the latest specifications, the HD 6950 ended up clocked at 800MHz for the GPU and has 1408 Stream Processors, 22 SIMDs (two SIMDs less than the HD 6970) and 88 Texture Units

The info that we now have looks solid and it appears to be what AMD has been telling its partners and selected press about its upcoming Cayman based HD 6970 and the HD 6950 cards. The HD 6950 is capable of delivering 2.25 TFLOPs of compute power and uses the VLIW4 shader architecture, same as the HD 6970.

The GDDR5 memory on HD 6950 cards ended up clocked at 1250MHz (5.0Gbps) and paired up with a 256-bit memory interface, which is a bit lower than the 5.5Gbps on the HD 6970. The interesting thing is that both cards will be equipped with 2GB of GDDR5 memory

The TDP, something that has been quite a debatable topic recently, is set at 200W. Note that 200W is AMD's PowerTune Maximum Power whereas typical gaming power is set at 140W. Idle TDP is set at 20W, same as the HD 6970. The card needs two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors and has two DVI, two mini-DP and an HDMI output

The card has already found its way to some of the press guys, and should launch on 15th of December

Sony and Sharp come out swinging

eReader market hots up

 

Things are hotting up in the eReader market as both Sony and Sharp come out with handbags swinging

Sony, battling Amazon and Apple in the ebook and tablet race, o launched its Reader range in Japan along with a dedicated virtual library. It has already launched in 13 other countries including the US. The move is a return to Japan for the electronic giant's e-reader business since it left in 2007 after seeing low demand at the time

Sharp has launched its multifunctional Galapagos tablet computer in a bid to rival Apple's iPad. The device allows users to read e-books, as well as major newspapers and popular magazines, delivered at designated times

Japan used to be years ahead of other countries  in terms of offering Internet access, and provided cameras and mobile payment options before others as well as live television. However since Samsung's Galaxy S and Apple's iPhone have come along the technology crown has slipped a bit.  However it is still important for Sharp and Sony to get a toe hold in that market

Sharp's new brand represents a shift for the company from conventional one-off sales of stand-alone products to devices that will continue to "evolve" through software updates, it said in a press release

Sharp will offer about 24,000 e-book titles for the Galapagos, while Sony has around 20,000 titles for the Reader
Sharp is taking orders for the Galapagos only via mail or the Internet, but Sony is flogging its Reader in the High Street

HIS intros PCIe x1 HD 5450

Get them while they’re small

HIS has introduced a rather interested PCIe x1 card based on AMD’s Cedar PRO core

To the best of our knowledge, which really isn’t saying much, the H545H1GD1 is the first and only PCIe x1 board to feature DirectX 11 support. While some might rightfully argue that DX11 support isn’t crucial on a product aimed at the ITX market, it’s still a comforting fact



Aside from DX11 support, the new HD 5450 has a few other things going for it. It’s tiny and passively cooled, making it an excellent choice for HTPCs and other SFF rigs based on ITX motherboards. It also packs HDMI, VGA and DVI outputs. The board is reference clocked, 650MHz for the core and 1000MHz for the memory. It features 1GB of DDR3, which is plenty all things considered

We’re not sure about the price, but off the top of our heads, the H545H1GD1 should cost about €50.

Patriot announces its Supersonic USB 3.0 flash drive

Up to 100MB/s write 

Patriot has announced its latest addition to the flash drive lineup, the Supersonic USB 3.0 flash drive

Featuring native USB 3.0 controller and quad-channel design, this one will offer impressive write and read speeds of up to 100MB/s and 70MB/s, and mind you we are talking about sequential speeds. The Supersonic flash drive has metallic casing so it should be a tough little bugger as well

Unfortunately, we won't see this one before Q1 2011, when it will show up in retail/e-tail in 32 and 64GB capacities. Of course, we are sure that we'll see it up and running during CES 2011 in Las Vegas

Cayman 6970 has less than 300W TDP

AMD officially

 

AMD has clearly abandoned its performance per watt graphics dream. The company that used to make small and power efficient chips went for a different approach, a huge chip. As we reported earlier, Cayman in its Radeon HD 6970 variant has a total board power rating of under 300W

AMD has a history of avoiding some industry standards such as TDP as they already tried to skip this standard when Barcelona core went hot. AMD is currently using three different TDP values and calls them PowerTune Maximum Power, Typical Gaming Power and, of course, Typical Idle Power. The PowerTune feature looks a lot similar to the gimmick that Nvidia used on its GTX 580 and it looks like this one lock the HD 6970 maximum TDP at 250W. Typical Gaming Power is set at 190W while the idle stands at 20W

The card physically has one 6-pin and one 8-pin connector and it plans to introduce PowerTune technology where you will be able to add or substract 20W in order to save some power and the Amazon forests or add some maximal power for better overclocking

Overall the best case scenario looks to be quite hot and much more than people are expecting, us included. AMD will officially launch Radeon HD 6970 and 6950 on the December 15th 5AM European Time and December 14th 08.00 PM California Pacific Standard Time and you will get this one confirmed

Notion Ink's Adam tablet ready for pre-order

Prices start at US $375.

 

Notion Ink's Adam tablet has been filling the press lines for quite some time and it looks like that the wait is finally over as Slashgear is reporting that the device is finally ready for pre-order. The initial pre-order will be reserved for those that have been registered commenters on Notion Ink's blog and these will be the first ones to get the link, while others will have to wait a bit more

In case you somehow managed to miss Notion Ink's Adam we are talking about a 10.1-inch LCD or Pixel Qi (1024x600) multi-touch screen device that is powered by Nvidia's Tegra 2 processor based on dual-core Cortex-A9 and ULP GPU, has 1GB of memory, 1GB of SLC flash memory and 8+GB of storage space. The rest of the long feature list includes a microSD slot, 3.2 megapixel swivel camera, stereo speakers, two USB 2.0 ports, mini USB, HDMI output, 3-axis accelerometer, ambient light sensor, GPS, digital compass, 802.11bgn WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 and a 3-cell battery

The Adam will be available in four versions, two with LCD and two with Pixel Qi screen. The difference is similar to the iPad so you'll either choose the one with WiFi only or the one that has 3G as well. The price starts at US $375.33 for the LCD/WiFi version and the US $425.33 for the LCD/WiFi+3G version. The PixelQi versions are a bit more expensive so you'll have to cash out US $499.45 for the one with WiFi and US $549.99 for the one that has both the WiFi and 3G

Of course, Notion Ink didn't release an official ship-out date but Slashgear came forth and revealed that it should ship by January 6th next year, at least to those that pre-order it now. You can find it at Notion Ink's official web site, although it's a bit sluggish, probably as it is currently getting a lot of attention

Battlefield 1943 experiment was good

Has generated $16 million in sales

 

When DICE and Electronic Arts announced that they were going to release a download-only version of the new Battlefield 1943 many didn’t know how successful it would be. At the time it was considered an experiment to see what kind of revenue a download-only remake could actually generate

EA announced during the USB Media and Communications Conference that Battlefield 1943 has been able to generate over $16 million in sales after Microsoft and Sony got their cut. This is not too bad for a graphically enhanced and limited remake of the father of the Battlefield series

While Battlefield 1943 remake didn’t offer all of the bells and whistles of the original Battlefield 1942, what it did offer was the core feeling of the original game with the best maps from Battlefield 1942 with updated graphics; and that provided a combination that was quite the ticket for fans of the franchise. Perhaps most appealing to EA is that it didn’t really cost that much to make, and because of the scaled-down nature of the Battlefield 1943 release, it didn’t take that long to develop

Sources tell us that the success of Battlefield 1943 played very heavily into the decision to attempt to take the download offerings for Battlefield to the next level with the release of the upcoming Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam expansion add-on pack. The Vietnam add-on, while it does require a copy of BFBC2 to play, is a stand-alone gaming experience

It will be very interesting to see if DICE and EA are able to replicate the success that they had with Battlefield 1943 with the Vietnam add-on pack

German hacker says sorry to Lady Gaga

All got out of hand

 

A teen German hacker has said that he is sorry for nicking the music of popular beat combo arties like Lady Gaga and Kelly Clarkson and flogging them online

Deniz A. told Bild newspaper in an interview that he and a friend hadn't set out to do anything wrong and he never thought it would go so far. He said that the pair were only interested in the music and wanted to hear it

Coppers claim that the pair used a Trojan Horse malware to hack into the artists' computers for about 12 months before being discovered

They made more than €10,000 in illegal sales and forced the advanced release of several singles. So far the pair are yet to be charged

Gigabyte's Brazos motherboard pixellized

The mini-ITX AMD Fusion

 

X-Bit managed to score a picture of AMD's upcoming Fusion platform and this motherboard comes from Gigabyte. Featuring all the goodies and the recognizable blue PCB colour that Gigabyte lays on its all motherboards, the new GA-E350V-USB3 is based on Hudson-M1 chipset

The details of the motherboard include an E-350 APU featuring two Bobcat cores running at 1.6GHz, Radeon HD 6310 graphics with 80 Stream Processors at 500MHz and support for AMD's UVD 3.0, two DDR3-1800+ memory slots four SATA ports, a single PCI-Express x16 slot, USB 3.0 support, integrated audio, and D-Sub and DVI outputs

The motherboard looks quite sweet and the DirectX 11 support and 18W TDP from the APU certainly sound appealing, at least on paper

Antilles, Radeon HD 6990 is Q1 2011

Dual chip Radeon HD 6000

 

We got confirmation that Radeon HD6990, AMD's dual-chip board codenamed Antilles won't surface until Q1 2011, and we know that we've said before. This is an update. Despite original plans to launch the dual-GPU card based on Northern Islands in Q4 2010, it looks like AMD has decided to postpone this product till Q1 2011.

We don’t know if this is a business decision or that they have some issues but it doesn’t look like we will see Nvidia's dual chip card this year either

AMD's graphics partners are not happy as they will miss the Xmas shopping spree before these cards arrive, but traditionally this part of market will wait for its product as a single chip is simply not an option for them

You can only imagine how hot these card can end up as they will have two massive chips to power, but I guess this market will forgive the slight noise as long as the card perform as they are expected

Cayman-based Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 should be the last cards to launch in 2010 and everything else follows next year

Radeon HD 6970 is 10 - 20% faster than GTX 480

Update: Hold the presses, it's faster

 

AMD has talked to some of its favourite journalists and wants to prepare them for the European Cayman launch that should take place on December 15th, exactly seven days from now

Some of the lucky ones got the cards that they are testing them as we speak, while partners should have the cards ready to ship early next week. We got a hint about the performance, and we will settle for that

AMD's own benchmarketing data claims that Cayman XT is slightly below 20 percent faster than a GTX 480 in 3Dmark Vantage. When we compare our own GTX 480 results and add 20 percent on top of that it turns that Cayman XT loses to both GTX 570 and especially GTX 580.

It looks like AMD has big gains versus GTX 480 in all OpenGL games including ET Quake Wars, Wolfenstein MP and Chronicles of Riddick, quite old games if you ask us. It is around 20 percent faster than the GTX 480 in these games

In HAWX 2 Radeon HD 6970 is some 15 percent faster than the GTX 480, and in Dirt 2 it is over 15 percent faster. When we compare the scores we have with this game and GTX 480 and add additional 15 percent we don’t see it beating the GTX 580, but it gets close

The smallest gain is in Far Cry 2 with only a few percent faster than GTX 480, following with World in Conflict where ATI is below 10 percent faster and Metro 2033 where ATI wins by slightly over 10 percent, again vs GTX 480.

There might be some cases where Radeon HD 6970 will be able to beat the GTX 580, but the first impression is that Nvidia should end up slightly faster in most games

Update

It appears that our usually well informed source failed us, and forwarded a photoshopped roadmap. So, we plainly got served. We are in the process of gathering more reliable info on Cayman performance and we will write an update as soon as we get something worthwhile. It will clearly end up quite a bit faster and we apologize for the inconvenience

Point of View comes up with three GTX 570 cards

Ultra Charged at 810MHz

 

Point of View and its TGT team has decided to launch no less than three different GTX 570 cards, and will easily claim the highest factory overclock throne with its POV/TGT GTX 570 Ultra Charged that ended up clocked at 810MHz

The plain one works at reference 732MHz for the GPU, 1464MHz for those 480 CUDA Cores and 3800MHz for memory. The Charged version got overclocked to 772MHz for the GPU and 1544MHz for Shaders. The 1280MB of memory got a boost to 3888MHz and it's paired up with a 320-bit memory interface

The creme of the crop GTX 570 is the GTX 570 Ultra Charged clocked, or to be precise factory overclocked to 810MHz for the GPU, 1620MHz for Shaders and 3960MHz for memory. This makes the Ultra Charged the fastest, or the highest factory overclocked GTX 570 card on the market

Bear in mind that POV/TGT tends to surprise us with a Beast version as well and that this one might be coming soon, as according to our info the GTX 570 GPU can be overclocked higher

All the cards are already available in Europe. The plain one sells for around €360, Charged for €380 and Ultra Charged is available at around €410.

Nvidia rolls out its 263.09 WHQL driver

New one for GTX 570/58

 

Following the launch of its new Geforce GTX 570 card, Nvidia has also released a new 263.09 WHQL driver for GTX 570 and GTX 580 cards

The new driver package includes HD Audio driver version 1.1.9.0., PhysX driver version 9.10.0514, support for DirectCompute for Geforce 8-series and later GPUs, support for OpenCL 1.0 and OpenGL 4.1, and support for GPU overclocking and temperature monitoring via Nvidia System Tools software

The release notes file doesn't include any details regarding the performance improvements for the new driver so we'll guess that these are the same as with the previous 260-series releases

You can download the new driver directly from Nvidia website here

Zotac rolls out its GTX 580 AMP!

Overclocked to 815MHz

 

Just a day after Nvidia's announcement of the GTX 570, Zotac decided to roll out its AMP! version of the GTX 580, a card that was announced in its reference form almost a month ago

Although it still uses the same reference cooler, the AMP! Edition version of the GTX 580 ended up overclocked to 815MHz for the GPU, 1630MHz for those 512 CUDA Cores and 4100MHz for 1536MB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 384-bit memory interface

The card ships with Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands game bundle. The new GTX 580 AMP! is already listed in Europe and can bought for around €550.