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Nvidia's DirectX 10 Hack Suggests That Features Really do Exist in Ion LE Chip

Paul Lilly — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:10:32 -0500

It's pretty common for hardware vendors to artificially gimp their budget or lower cost parts. Take AMD's tri-core chip, for example, which comes with a core disabled that isn't necessarily bad. And who still remembers Nvidia's vanilla 6800 graphics card that came with 4 software-unlockable pipelines to transform it into a 6800GT? As it turns out, Nvidia may have taken the same software-based approach to its Ion LE platform.

Nvida's Ion LE sports the same 1080p HD playback capabilities as its pricier sibling, but in order to cut costs, LE kicks DirectX 10 support to the curb. But as MyHPMini forum member runawayprisoner discovered, his may be entirely software-based, and a quick driver hack is all it takes to get the regular Ion drivers to install.

All runawayprisoner did was is add Ion LE's device driver ID to the Ion drivers, and once he did that, they installed like a charm, DirectX 10 support and all.

Whether or not that means full DX10 support remains to be seen, but according to runawayprisoner, if nothing else DX9 gaming stands to receive a sizeable boost in performance up to 50 percent.

Image Credit: imageshack.us runawayprisoner

Total War Dev’s Stormrise to Require DirectX 10, Vista

Nathan Grayson — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:49:23 -0600

Developer Creative Assembly’s new-er RTS, Stormrise, isn’t a simple, no-strings-attached type of girl like its sister franchise-in-arms, Total War. No sir – while Total War only aims to please (and succeeds, by the look of things), Stormrise won’t relinquish the key to its post-apocalyptic chastity belt without a little wining and dining first. However, whereas Windows XP’s reliable charms might’ve brought the princess back to your castle back in middle school, Stormrise wants – nay, needs – more.

And that’s where Vista comes in.

"Stormrise has been designed for DirectX 10 and Vista only right from the start," said Stormrise lead designer Artem Kulakov."Vista only. DX10 only. No fallback option. We have never suggested this or hinted at it, so it shouldn't be a surprise."

But why bet the success of a new franchise on a pie-in-the-sky setup that only 25% of PC gamers can even access? Short answer: consoles.

"DX10 has offered a lot of advantages over DX9," Kulakov added. "First of all, DirectX 10 allowed us to simplify the rendering engine. It matches capabilities of next generation consoles better than DX9, which is important for us considering that Stormrise is a multi-platform title. We had fewer driver-specific compatibility issues with Stormrise compare to our previous games released with DX9."

Person-with-bad-idea-during-a-recession-says-what? Consoles and RTSes (especially those of the obscure, generically titled variety) are notorious for their inability to play nice together. Really, it's like putting all of your eggs in one basket with a gaping hole in the bottom; the expected outcome is as clear as day, so why even do it?

Matrox Soups Up TripleHead2Go Digital Edition: Up to 3x1680x1050!

Mark Edward Soper — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:35:02 -0500

Matrox's TripleHead2Go Digital Edition, which enables you to drive up to three digital monitors from a single DVI port, has just received a significant upgrade.

We last encountered TripleHead2Go Digital Edition in our January 2008 review of the Hypersonic Sonic Boom OCX flight simulator PC. Hypersonic used it to drive three 1280x1024 digital monitors for a 3840x1024 panoramic view of the wild blue virtual yonder.

So, what's new with TripleHead2Go Digital Edition? Now, you can run up to three widescreen displays at 1680x1050 or 1440x900 resolutions. 3x1680x150 gives you an eye-popping 5040x1050 desktop, while 3x1440x900 provides a slightly less stunning 4320x900 desktop (and, it also supports WXGA's 1366x768 resolution).

And, the best news is that you don't need to buy a new version of the external box: if your graphics card has an ATI or NVIDIA DirectX 10 GPU with the latest graphics driver and a dual-link DVI connector running on Windows XP or Vista, all you need to do is:

Upgrade your TripleHead2Go Digital Edition's firmware to version 6.52 or later
Install the GXM software suite 2.03.02 or later
Choose your monitors' resolution from the display.

If you're not sure you're ready for the upgrade, the upgrade page also offers a link to the GXM System Compatibility Tool.

Unlike Matrox's graphics cards, which aren't designed for gaming, TripleHead2Go works with your existing graphics card to provide a wider desktop for gaming or other tasks. If you're already using one, or think you'd like to give one a try, tell us what you think.

Update 8-08-08: A hat tip to reader spaced_out_monkey, a user of TripleHead2Go, for pointing us to the Matrox Surround Graphics website. It offers a list of over 250 games that work with TripleHead2Go, downloads, wallpapers, tech tips, and more.

Product image courtesy Matrox Graphics

EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT SSC Edition

Michael Brown — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:06:23 -0500

There’s never been a better time to be in the market for a new videocard. Nvidia’s GeForce 9600 GT, represented here by EVGA’s overclocked SSC Edition, is one reason this is true.

We awarded AMD’s Radeon 3870 a Kick Ass award in our January 2008 issue when it was selling for $260. When the 9600 GT hit the market, the average street price for cards based on the 3870 plunged to $206. EVGA’s implementation of the 9600 GT was selling for $215 when we benchmarked it, but the average price for cards based on that part was just $182.

The 9600 GT is based on Nvidia’s G94 GPU, a cut-down derivative of the G92 that forms the more powerful 8800 GT and the even faster 8800 GTS (the version with 512MB of memory, not the ones with 640MB and 320MB frame buffers). By “cut down,” we mean all three chips share the same basic architecture, but the 9600 GT has 64 stream processors compared to 112 procs in the 8800 GT and 128 in the 8800 GTS.

EVGA upped the core clock to 740MHz (from a stock 650MHz) and the 512MB of memory to 975MHz (from a stock 900MHz). Nvidia’s ace in the hole is its ability to run the stream processors at a higher clock rate than the core, which helps explain how the 64 processors in the 9600 GT can outrun the 320 stream processors in AMD’s Radeon HD 3870. EVGA bumped them from a stock 1.625GHz to 1.835GHz.

If your interests lie more in film than gaming, you’ll be pleased to know that the 9600 GT has the PureVideo HD circuitry that allows it to offload from the host CPU all the decoding work needed to play high-definition movies on Blu-ray and soon-to-be-obscure HD DVD discs.

MSI R3870 X2 T2DIG

Michael Brown — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:54:01 -0600

AMD’s Radeon HD 3870 is a fine GPU for the money. It doesn’t outperform Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTX, and it lags far behind the extravagant 8800 Ultra, but it does deliver a phenom— er, make that a tremendous price/performance ratio.

So what happens when you put two of these parts—each with its own 512MB frame buffer—on a single board? You get a Radeon R3870 X2. The result isn’t as spectacular as you’d expect, but MSI’s implementation delivers plenty of bang for the buck. This card isn’t an Ultra killer by any means, but with a price tag of just $450, it doesn’t need to be.

There’s nothing mysterious about the R3870 X2—the two GPUs are exactly the same as those on a single-GPU card. Each one has 320 stream processors, a 256-bit memory interface, support for AMD’s Unified Video Decoder (for offloading HD and Blu-ray video-decoding from the host CPU), and dual-link DVI with HDCP on both links (to support the native resolution of 30-inch LCD panels).

If you care as much about high-definition video decoding as you care about gaming, you probably know that neither Nvidia’s 8800 GTX nor its 8800 Ultra supports those last two features. And unlike Nvidia’s new GPUs that do fully offload HD video decoding, the R3870 X2 supports the incremental updates to DirectX: Direct3D 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 (although we believe this support to be unimportant right now).

MSI set the GPUs’ cores to run at 828MHz and the memory at 955MHz, a fraction faster than AMD’s reference-design specs of 825MHz and 900MHz, respectively. As with AMD’s 3870 X2 reference design, MSI’s board has two 512MB frame buffers, one for each GPU. AMD’s reference design and MSI’s implementation both use GDDR3 memory, compared to the GDDR4 memory found on single-GPU 3870 cards. AMD tells us there’s nothing about the design that would prevent its board partners from using GDDR4 memory or from increasing the size of the frame buffers (although we suspect there wouldn’t be a tremendous difference in performance from either design change).

A PCI Express 1.1 bridge chip sitting between the two processors effectively creates CrossFire on the card (with 16 bi-directional lanes for each GPU) without the need for a CrossFire chipset on the motherboard. There is, however, a single interconnect that will allow you to build a CrossFireX rig with four 3870 GPUs onboard, but that does require a CrossFire chipset. The board itself supports PCI Express 2.0, but AMD tells us that putting a PCI Express 2.0 bridge chip between the two GPUs would have delayed the product and wouldn’t have yielded much of a performance boost anyway.

Having all the components on a single board strikes us as a much more elegant solution than sandwiching boards together, which Nvidia did with its since-discontinued 7950 GX2. It also allows AMD to use a single cooler, which is located at the very end of the board and exhausts outside the case, for both GPUs and both frame buffers.

You’ll need both the six-pin and eight-pin power connectors if you intend to overclock a 3870 X2 board.

Having a single fan not only renders the card nearly as quiet as a single-GPU configuration but also avoids the need for twice the electrical power. The R3870 has two auxiliary power sockets onboard, one six-pin and one eight-pin, but only the six-pin socket is needed for normal operation. If you intend to overclock the board, you will need to send power to both of them. In our tests, our 3870 X2 test system consumed about 170 watts at idle and around 275 watts under load, compared to the 3870’s 117 watts at idle and 208 watts under load.

We periodically update the games we use for videocard benchmarking, but we’ve stuck with the Shader Model 3.0 tests in the artificial benchmark 3DMark06 as a means of providing continuity. The results we’ve seen with the 3870 X2, however, indicate that the benchmark has finally outlived its usefulness: The 2x performance boost it delivers there doesn’t jibe with the frame rates we saw in actual games. In fact, there was virtually no performance scaling in Crysis at all with the 3870 X2 when compared to a single Radeon 3870.

The 3870 X2 is a good solution, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem with dual-, tri-, and quad-GPU systems: Their performance doesn’t scale with every game—including high-profile titles like Crysis that you’d buy these cards for in the first place.

HIS Radeon HD 3870

Michael Brown — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:04:13 -0600

This is the second Radeon HD 3870 we’ve reviewed, and we like it just as much as the first. It doesn’t outrun Nvidia’s G92-based 8800 GTS 512 (reviewed above), but it’s a great value among midrange videocards.

This model is based strictly on AMD’s reference design, so it doesn’t feature HIS’s IceQ 3 cooling technology. But the fan on the double-slot cooler is plenty quiet for any application, save deployment in a home-theater environment. This is made possible by the die shrink and 55nm manufacturing process AMD uses to build the Radeon HD 3870, which consumes much less power and generates considerably less heat than its predecessors.

The Radeon HD 3870 supports PCI Express 2.0, but it also boasts several features that Nvidia can’t match at any of its price points. One of the most interesting of these is an HDMI adapter that plugs into the card’s DVI output. The GPU can send the 16-bit PCM stereo or 5.1-channel digital audio stream from a DVD, HD DVD, or Blu-ray disc right alongside the digital video from the same source.

If your display is equipped with good-quality speakers and HDMI inputs (or if you’re using an A/V receiver with HDMI inputs and outputs), this adapter can eliminate a few cables from your configuration. As innovative as this feature might be, we think few people will actually take advantage of it. Most of these cards will be used in gaming PCs—which generally include monitors with DVI inputs and speakers with analog-audio inputs. The 3870’s support for Direct3D 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 is equally esoteric in light of game developers’ widespread reluctance to embrace even DirectX 10.0.

The benchmark charts reveal that the Radeon HD 3870 can’t outrun Nvidia’s G92-based GeForce 8800 GTS, but since it’s $85 cheaper, it doesn’t need to.

Asus EN8800 GTS 512MB

Michael Brown — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:25:09 -0600

Nvidia’s introduction of the GeForce 8800 GT left us wondering what would happen to the slightly older 8800 GTS—the model coupled with a 320MB frame buffer more so than the one paired with 640MB of memory. Nvidia cleared it all up by introducing the GeForce 8800 GTS, which has a 512MB frame buffer. Confused? We can’t blame you.

Nvidia’s branding strategy is puzzling because this graphics processor is quite different from the other two 8800 GTS cards, which were based on Nvidia’s G80 architecture used in the higher-end 8800 GTX, and the even faster 8800 Ultra; this one is based on the G92 featured in the aforementioned 8800 GT.

As such, the 8800 GTS 512 includes three important features you won’t find in its older cousins: support for PCI Express 2.0, integrated PureVideo HD circuitry (for offloading all high-definition video decoding from the host CPU), and HDCP copy-protection support on both its DVI links (which enables large-screen monitors to display commercial HD video at their native resolution).

On the other hand, this GPU (like the 8800 GT) is outfitted with a narrower 256-bit memory interface, compared to the 320-bit interface in the original 8800 GTS. And like boards based on the 8800 GT, boards based on the 8800 GTS 512 are equipped with only one SLI connector—there won’t be any three- or four-way GPU action with this card.

The only other features that separate this from the cheaper 8800 GT are clock speeds (Asus’s EN8800 GTS runs its core and GDDR3 memory at a stock 650- and 970MHz, respectively), the number of stream processors (128 versus the GT’s 112), and the presence of a dual-slot cooler. This is a terrific card, but with street prices for the 8800 GT and AMD’s Radeon HD 3870 hovering at $285 and $250, respectively, we just can’t elevate it to Kick Ass territory.

World in Conflict

Norman Chan — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:10:27 -0600

Nothing flexes our imagination like alternate history scenarios, and World in Conflict delivers one that has us on the edge of our seat. It’s the late 1980s, and the Cold War is far from over. The commies have already made a push to invade Western Europe, and in a desperate move, have decided to mount a sneak attack on American shores. It’s your mission to contain the Soviet invasion and retake Seattle before the invaders paint the country red.

WiC isn’t just the prettiest strategy game we’ve ever played—the effects are stunning—it’s also one of the most tactical. In each mission, you’re charged with capturing a series of control points with a limited number of units. The game eschews base building and unit construction by giving you a set number of points to call in vehicle and infantry airdrops. Points are reclaimed after your troops perish, so the strategy becomes how you allocate the various types of tanks to capture and hold the front lines. This Battlefield-esque reinforcement scheme ensures there’s never a long break in the action, but also gave us enough time to plan our next assaults.

The suburbs of Washington state and the bleak wilderness of Eastern Europe are just a few of the amazingly detailed battlegrounds ready to be demolished in the game. In-game cut scenes help flesh out the narrative by giving glimpses into the lives of the soldiers fighting under your command. The war at home feels very real; its impact resonates even more when nukes are detonated on American soil.

Taking the fight online yields another fresh RTS experience. Players team up to take on armor, air, support, and infantry roles, each with special units that uniquely contribute to an overall match. We dug using helicopters to rain down guided missiles of justice, but found the support role not as useful as the other offensive classes. Online niggles aside, World in Conflict is one of the most accessible and action-packed strategy games we’ve ever played.