Posted 05/20/09 at 10:45:00 AM by Norman Chan

We love the excitement of being on the cutting edge, but have to also acknowledge the risks of being early adopters of hardware. In fact, there have been numerous occasions where tech enthusiasts have put their faith into the seemingly fastest or the more innovative pieces of technology, only to be burned months or years later when that tech is revealed to have to a serious design flaw or falls victim to sudden obsolescence. In this roundup, we spotlight some of the most memorable PC parts and computing gadgets that showed huge promise but just didn’t deliver in the end. Whether it was high defect rates, underperformance, or bad launch timing, these products were poised to be market leaders if not for their spectacular failure.

How could the world's fastest optical drive be a failure? Read on!

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Posted 05/19/09 at 10:30:00 AM by Paul Lilly

Try to imagine where 3D gaming would be today if not for the graphics processing unit, or GPU. Without it, you wouldn't be tredging through the jungles of Crysis in all its visual splendor, nor would you be fending off endless hordes of fast-moving zombies at high resolutions. For that to happen, it takes a highly specialized chip designed for parallel processing to pull off the kinds of games you see today, the same ones that wouldn't be possible on a CPU alone. Going forward, GPU makers will try to extend the reliance on videocards to also include physics processing, video encoding/decoding, and other tasks that where once handled by the CPU.

It's pretty amazing when you think about how far graphics technology has come. To help you do that, we're going to take a look back at every major GPU release since the infancy of 3D graphics. Join us as we travel back in time and relive releases like 3dfx's Voodoo3 and S3's ViRGE lineup. This is one nostalgiac ride you don't want to miss!

It all starts after the jump!

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Posted 01/12/09 at 02:22:02 PM by Will Smith

Nvidia stands at a crossroads, with two closed, proprietary APIs that have mainstream potential: the general-purpose computing CUDA API, and the PhysX physics-acceleration API, which sits on top of CUDA. These are both promising technologies, but only owners of Nvidia hardware can harness their power. Meanwhile, there are two emerging open standards that mirror what Nvidia is doing with its proprietary development. One is OpenCL 1.0, and the other is a general-purpose GPU computing API, which Microsoft will include in DirectX 11. There are a relatively small number of consumer applications that use CUDA, PhysX, or OpenCL right now, but the possible applications for the tech are endless—grossly simplified, these APIs let graphics chips perform CPU-like functions.

The question Nvidia needs to be asking is simple: Will developers write their general-purpose GPU computing apps using a proprietary API that works on only a subset of PCs—those stuffed with Nvidia hardware—or will they use an open API that will work on every PC on the market?

More after the break. 

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Posted 12/01/08 at 06:37:22 AM by Paul Lilly

So you thought 3DFX was dead and gone? Well, you're right. The graphics company largely responsible for ushering in 3D gaming bit the dust nearly a decade ago when Nvidia devoured the company and announced it would not support 3DFX products. But that hasn't stopped others from stepping in to fill the void left by 3DFX's demise and its once mighty Voodoo videocard lineup.

For those of you still getting your old school game on, 3dfxzone.it has released new drivers covering a variety of vintage GPUs. Models supported by the SFFT 1.5 driver release include:

• Voodoo3 2000
• Voodoo3 3000
• Voodoo3 3500
• Voodoo4 4500
• Voodoo5 5500
• Voodoo6 6000 

We don't imagine too many Voodoo owners are concerned with running Vista, but for the sake of full disclosure, the new drivers support Windows 2000/XP 32-bit and XP 64-bit.

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Posted 12/13/07 at 10:17:56 PM by Paul Lilly

AMD announces two-core GPU, see what movie's being released online, an $85K internet phone bill, and more!

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