DirectX August 2009 End-User-Runtimes released

Written by Jon Worrel

Thursday, 10 September 2009 10:11

Contains Direct3D 11 and DirectCompute libraries The Microsoft DirectX team recently released its DirectX End-User-Runtimes for August 2009. This multilingual update contains the first official release of the DirectX developer resources for Direct3D 11, DXGI 1.1, Direct2D, and DirectWrite. Developers can now publish and distribute Direct3D 11 applications and games that leverage all of the software and hardware features of DirectX 11 in Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Additionally, the new Effects runtime for Direct3D 11 is now available as well as the D3DCSX library, which includes new technologies for utilizing DirectCompute for advanced processing on the GPU. This first version includes implementations of scan and Fast-Fourier transform that utilize Direct3D 11 capable GPUs. For software developers, the August 2009 DirectX SDK can be found here. This DirectX end-user-runtime package includes security and performance updates for the core API interface between multimedia and gaming, along with many new features across all technologies, which can be accessed by applications using the DirectX APIs. For gamers and enthusiasts, the August 2009 DirectX End-User-Runtimes can be downloaded here. source: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15442/1/

Nvidia’s Geforce 186.91 WHQL driver is out

Written by Slobodan Simic

Monday, 07 September 2009 16:26

Via Microsoft Update Nvidia has apparently released a new WHQL-certified Geforce driver, version 186.91. The driver is available for Windows Vista and Windows 7 and dates to September 1st. The new driver provides support for all the Geforce cards since Geforce 6 series as well as Nvidia’s Quadro, ION and bunch of other Nvidia based IGPs. As this one comes via Windows Update, it doesn’t include PhysX and 3D Vision with it, but if you want it you can find it over at Guru3D.com. source: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15387/1/

Nvidia’s new driver with Geforce 300

Written by Slobodan Simic

Monday, 07 September 2009 16:49

New driver, new GPUs The new driver that popped up on Microsoft Update brings some new strings as well and as far as we know, this is the first time that Nvidia’s Geforce 300 series is mentioned in drivers. The new strings contain eight new strings with, what appears to be, one desktop and seven different mobile GPUs. The desktop part is listed in NV_WHQL.inf as Geforce 310. The mobile parts start with Geforce 305M and Geforce 310M, two different Geforce GT 330M, Geforce GT 335M while the top offer should be Geforce GTS 350M and 360M. Whether these new strings will just be rebrands or new GPUs is left to be seen but at least some new names have popped up. Here is the full list of strings from the .inf file. - NVIDIA_DEV.0A66.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce 310″ - NVIDIA_DEV.0A6E.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce 305M” - NVIDIA_DEV.0A75.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce 310M” - NVIDIA_DEV.0A29.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M” - NVIDIA_DEV.0A2B.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M” - NVIDIA_DEV.0CAF.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M” - NVIDIA_DEV.0CB0.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GTS 350M” - NVIDIA_DEV.0CB1.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GTS 360M” source: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15388/1/

Gaming Performance Compared: Windows 7 vs Vista vs Windows XP (firingsquad.com)

by Brandon Sandman Bell
August 18, 2009

For some of you, Windows 7 is here. For others, it’s coming soon. The question we as gamers all want to know is will Windows 7 finally deliver on all the hype that began during the run up to Vista’s launch. Will it finally “unite the clans”: gamers who love Windows XP’s performance and scalability, versus the Vista gamers who have been enjoying DirectX 10 visuals and performance enhancements found in games like Far Cry 2.

I’m not going to spoil the answer on the first page of this article – that’s what the benchmarks are for – but I will say that as much as I rightly criticized Vista’s gaming performance back in January 2007, it ultimately did get a bit of a bad rep.

Sure, eye candy features like Aero Glass performed terribly with some hardware, USB transfers were slower, and user account control was so annoying most people just turned it off, but just as Microsoft was to blame for some of Vista’s problems, equally culpable were the hardware manufacturers. Intel had no business lobbying Microsoft to lower requirements in order to get their 915 chipset certified as “Vista Capable”, and nearly all the manufacturers were too slow in optimizing their Vista drivers for performance, if they had a Vista driver at all. Despite the fact that Microsoft had issued numerous public betas and release candidates for Vista, graphics drivers for instance were missing features and suffered from poor performance in some games on launch day.

All this bad news weighed heavily on the Vista launch. As the saying goes “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”. Well, Microsoft learned this lesson the hard way with Vista. Even though many of these issues were resolved within 8 months of Vista’s launch, public perception had already dragged Vista down….Read more

AMD officially launches Catalyst 9.8

Written by Slobodan Simic

Tuesday, 18 August 2009 10:03

CrossfireX performance and OpenGL 3.1 After releasing it few days early at Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton’s AMD blog, AMD has now officially released its new Catalyst 9.8 version. The new driver brings some CrossfireX performance gains in various games, as well as OpenGL 3.1 support. The games that will see a performance boost in CrossfireX modes include Battleforge, Company of Heroes, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Farcry, World in Conflict and Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X., all in DirectX 10 mode and with gains from 5 to 77 percent depending on the game. The new Catalyst 8.9 also brings support for OpenGL 3.1 which includes OpenGL Shading Language 1.30 and 1.40, instanced rendering with a per-instance counter accessible to vertex shaders (GL ARB draw instanced), data copying between buffer objects (GL EXT copy buffer), texture buffer objects (GL ARB texture buffer object), rectangular textures (GL ARB texture rectangle), uniform buffer objects (GL ARB uniform buffer object), and some other various OpenGL 3.1 related topics. You can find the new driver and full release notes here. source: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15091/1/

Windows 7 RTM final build gets leaked

Windows 7 RTM final build gets leaked

Written by Jon Worrel

Monday, 13 July 2009 07:24

Earlier than expected Very recent word on the internets tell us that the Windows 7 final RTM build has been leaked by China and is now making its way into the nooks and crannies of file uploading sites across the continents. The engineers in the Windows 7 department under the leadership of Mr. Steven Sinofsky have signed off and compiled the final RTM builds of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 on Friday, July 10, 2009 at 7:45pm. Highly accurate Russian website Wzor is reporting that Windows 7 RTM will possibly receive an official announcement at the upcoming World Partner Conference (WPC09) in New Orleans, Louisiana from from July 13th to July 16th. The first keynote is to begin at 8:30am CDT. For TechNet and MSDN subscribers, Windows 7 RTM is expected to be available for free via Connect beginning on Friday, July 24, 2009. Keep in mind that any beta or Release Candidate keys will not work with the final version, although that shouldn’t need a reminder as common sense tells us that Microsoft wants you to pay for the hard work it put into developing its new OS. However, we see nothing wrong with TechNet and MSDN subscribers obtaining a copy “elsewhere” and then activating it with a genuine key on the 24th. More here. http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/14620/1/

Silverlight 3.0 features GPU acceleration, multi-touch

Silverlight 3.0 features GPU acceleration, multi-touch

Written by Jon Worrel

Friday, 10 July 2009 07:55

Available today Today, Microsoft released the third installment of Silverlight, its competitor to Adobe Flash a day earlier than anticipated. The official introduction of the updated framework is scheduled to take place later today at an event in San Francisco. According to Microsoft, Silverlight 3.0 features hundreds of new improvements and can be found running on thousands of new APIs. Most notably, it features hardware GPU acceleration and hardware compositing, perspective 3D, bitmap and pixel API, pixel shader effects, and Deep Zoom improvements. As an addition, it features new codec support for H.264, AAC, MPEG-4, raw bitstream Audio/Video API, and improved logging for media analytics. In other words, the time has finally come to put your idle GPU configuration to use in rich media interactive web pages running on Silverlight. One of the other notable features of the new framework is that it includes multi-touch support . This is a really sexy way of Microsoft promoting its upcoming Windows 7 operating system (the first to natively support multi-touch) in that it will enable users to interact with web-based content in ways that have only been seen on the movie screen. Similarly to the psychological phenomenon known as an out-of-body experience, Silverlight 3.0 supports out-of-browser experiences.  Silverlight applications can be installed locally on a machine for offline access where they run outside the browser. They can be launched using the Start Menu or desktop shortcuts, and can run without any open browser windows. Additionally, applications can check whether they are running inside a browser or not. There are plenty of new highlights to the third installment of Microsoft’s cross-platform web app framework, but we encourage those who want to learn more to check out the Wikipedia page here. Microsoft Silverlight 3.0 can be downloaded here.

Chrome OS shots leaked

Chrome OS shots leaked

Written by Nedim Hadzic

Thursday, 09 July 2009 12:37

The real thing or just a mock-up? Gizmodo has gotten its hands on what seem to be the first shots of Google’s upcoming OS, Chrome, but don’t count your chickens just yet as they might not be the real thing. However, we’re not saying they’re not either as there are apparently many reasons why they might be. The person who leaked them allegedly works for a Acer’s part supplier, and since Acer is one of Google’s partners for Chrome OS, he was treated to a demonstration of Private Developer Beta. He says the full installation took 10 minutes and rebooting afterwards took 25 seconds, all done on Acer Extensa 4620Z laptop. Unfortunately, it might be too early for shots as the announcement was only made recently, and the guys from the site made an interesting remark about the location as the person who leaked the photos claims it was taken in Acer’s conference room whereas the photos show floral table tiles. Not much of an argument, but we have to commend their observation skills. The strongest point arguing that this is nothing but a mock-up is that the colors in Google’s logo are ordered incorrectly. Either way – it’s only a photo and there’s not much word about actual functionality so we’ll just have to wait and see. You can check out the photos and find out more here. http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/14592/1/

Firefox 3.5 debuts at last

by Cyril Kowaliski

Just over a year after the arrival of Firefox 3, Mozilla has finally unleashed the next major release of its popular web browser: Firefox 3.5. The final version has become available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in “over 65 languages.”

In case you didn’t pay attention during the protracted development cycle, here’s what Firefox 3.5 brings to the table, in the words of the official release notes:

• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio.
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing.
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

TraceMonkey and the updated Gecko engine are probably the most noticeable changes for day-to-day browsing, since they bring about serious speedups compared to Firefox 3. The Mozilla folks are definitely catching up to their rivals at Google and Apple in the performance department.

Otherwise, HTML 5 support lets you play some embedded videos without using the Adobe Flash plug-in or clumsy Java-based players. DailyMotion already has a pre-beta site up with nothing but HTML 5 videos. (Thanks for TR reader SH SOTN for the links.)

Source:
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/17148

Nvidia to launch DirectX 11 in 2009

Written by Fuad Abazovic

Yes we can Our sources have confirmed that Nvidia is working hard to launch its first DirectX 11 in this year. Well informed sources are telling us that the plan is to launch in late Q4 2009, but they can still make it before the end of the year. Many people were reporting that Nvidia’s high end GPU, something that we all call GT300, might be delayed for early 2010. Well we can tell you that this won’t happen, but we strongly believe that Nvidia cannot make it in time for the Windows 7 launch. ATI has every chance to launch its DirectX 11 before Nvidia. Nvidia will come just a month or two later, but still in 2009.

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/14350/1/

Nvidia’s releases Geforce 186.18 WHQL driver

Written by Slobodan Simic

All about Windows 7 Nvidia has released a new WHQL certified Geforce driver, version 186.18. It comes with v9.09.0428 PhysX, something that was already seen in 186.08 beta and features support for Geforce 6-series and up, as well as its ION platform, aka Geforce 9400. The new driver is basically the same as the previous one except for the fact that it fixes some bugs under Windows 7 OS. It comes with all the features that were launched with 185 version of drives so you can expect support for Ambient Occlusion, CUDA 2.2, and expanded GPU hardware acceleration for Nvidia’s Video Encoding library to GPUs with less than 32 cores. It also brings certain performance boosts for Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena by 25 percent, 22 percent in Crysis, 11 percent in Fallout 3 with antialiasing, 14 and 30 percent in Half-Life 2 engine games with 3-way and 4-way SLI, and up to 45 percent in Mirror’s Edge when antialiasing is enabled. Nothing really new here unless you are running Windows 7 and want some bugs squished. You can download the new driver here. http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/14295/1/

Microsoft to release beta security program

Written by Nick Farrell

Free program to be out in Autumn Software giant Microsoft said it will release a beta test of its free computer security program next week and is on track to launch a finished product in autumn. Microsoft Security Essentials is a bog standard AV product that claims to find and kill malicious software that can steal passwords and other personal information or turn PCs into spam distribution hubs. Redmond has promised to upload updated lists of identified malware daily, but will keep a low profile unless it detects dangerous software. Theresa Burch, a director on the security software team, said the program tries to spot malicious software even if it’s not on the list of known corrupters. When it encounters something suspicious, it phones home to Microsoft server for updated intelligence before allowing the program to run, a process Burch said is almost instantaneous. Microsoft will also have a list of trusted software sources, so the tool won’t accidentally block items like Google Web browser toolbar, she said. Security Essentials could put the fear of God into McAfee and Symantec and several other free packages. Burch said Microsoft was not interested in knocking such people out of business but instead wanted to improve security overall by people who don’t have current antivirus software to protect their PCs. The security software will come as a free download, but it won’t be part of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system, which goes on sale in October. Bundling the two could be fodder for antitrust complaints. http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/14301/1/

Catalyst 9.6 is out

Written by Fudzilla staff

More performance, more Linux support AMD has released the latest Catalyst incarnation, and 9.6 brings us several performance tweaks as well as improved Linux support. Here’s what AMD is promising in terms of improved performance: Company of Heroes – performance gains of up to 25% for the ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series, and performance gains of up to 10% for the ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series Crysis Warhead – performance gains of up to 11% for dual CrossFire Crysis – performance gains of up to 13% for ATI CrossFireX technology in dual configuration World in Conflict – performance gains of up to 30% for high settings that were previously CPU limited with the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series. Of course, your performance may vary, depending on your particular system configuration. Our favorite Scotsman, AMD’s Ian McNaughton says his favorite community is the Linux community, and it also got a treat, in the guise of SLED and SLED 11 production support and RHEL 4.8 early look support. You can find the full release notes here, and you can download the new drivers here. http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/14238/1/

Firefox 3.5 previews

Written by Nick Farrell

Better and faster The Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox 3.5 preview version is now available for download and we have had a few hours playing with it. Firstly it is a bit faster than earlier versions, although all the browsers on the market these days, such as Opera, Chrome and Safari are faster than the earlier generation. But the new browser has a few things which are more interesting including the use of open-source video standards, geo-location capabilities, and a few nice graphics tricks. With 3.5 it is possible to run a video player based on the open-source video formats Ogg Vorbis and Theora. What is cool is that by using HTML5 links and other interactive elements can easily be placed inside videos. What is interesting is that it can do things that Flash can’t, and if it is supported by websites it could send Adobe packing. Ogg Theora is supported by Daily Motion so it is not too far from being a possibility. Have a look at the demo video here http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/14147/1/

Windows 7 officially releases October 22nd, 2009

Written by Jon Worrel

An early Q4 release in time for the holidays In light of addressing a very confused press and establishing a concrete release date for a very significant milestone in its corporate history, Microsoft has finally announced the official day that the Windows 7 operating system will be generally available to the world at large. Without further hesitation, (What hesitation, you already have it in the header.sub.ed.) the official release date for Windows 7 is going to be Thursday, October 22nd, 2009. One detail we should note however is the fact that Microsoft has complete control over this launch and may decide to change the date at any time. To reach the milestone, Microsoft plans to wrap up development of the operating system by the middle or end of next month, Senior Vice President Bill Veghte said in an interview. “We’re locked and loaded for the launch,” said Phil McKinney, Chief Technology Officer of HP’s computer unit. “The quality of code is just absolutely stellar.” Microsoft has also stated that it will offer a “technology guarantee” program to those people who buy machines installed with Windows Vista within the few weeks prior to the launch of Windows 7. The few people in this situation will either receive a free or discounted copy of the new operating system. On another note, there have been hints suggesting that Microsoft might offer some sort of lower-cost upgrade to those who are already using Windows Vista. Even though we now have a sound release date available, the Redmond-based software maker has yet to announce an official pricing strategy for its new crown jewel operating system. Hopefully there will be an update on this soon.