Posted 12/20/2008 at 07:43:28pm

You obviously haven't read up on the Hydra. The fact that its a "non-proprietary" solution is least notable feature of the technology, and to answer your question, no, ATI and Nvidia apparently don't know what they're doing with their crossfire and SLI solutions because they couldn't come close to 100% scaling of multiple GPUs to save their stock value.

Posted 12/19/2008 at 07:53:56pm

If LucidLogix's HYDRA Engine starts to appear in the coming year, and delivers on it promise of nearly 100% scaling of multi-GPU, then the current problems with using multi GPUs shouldn't be a problem for much longer, and it would make sense to plunk down $1000 for two of these cards.

Check out "http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/multigpu_startup_lands_18_million_funding" if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Posted 12/12/2008 at 04:25:10pm

RapidMind stood out for me in the listing of partners. I was recently trying to find out if there was a way to get the "Electric Sheep" screensaver to utilize a GPU. It would be a perfect match. All I found was a demonstration by RapidMind on how its GPGPU solution can be greatly beneficial to software like "Electric Sheep" ("60x performance increase").

Frankly, I find CPUs to be boring, for a lack of a better word. So many of the the mainstream uses of PCs seem to be better suited for GPUs anyway.

Posted 12/12/2008 at 03:52:50pm

Who cares if Physx dies? I've been rooting for Physx from the start, but what I've really been hoping for is for the industry to accept the idea of "hardware accelerated" physics, whatever that solution may be. It could be that a GPGPU solution like OpenCL, DX11, or CUDA that might finally fulfill all the promises that PhysX has been making all along. It could also benefit any gaming application that would find significantly more performance or headroom running on the GPU than CPU, such as artificial intelligence or procedural animation.

Posted 11/22/2008 at 01:11:27am

edit the shit outa it

Posted 11/21/2008 at 04:22:17pm

"Admittedly reasonable 10 large" is an understatement. How the hell is that possible. That's cheaper than this year's Dream Machine. Slap in LucidLogix's Hydra technology and we could have framerates in the thousands at unbelievable resolutions, or ray traced rendered games and believable, rich physics. You could finally make Crysis cry and beg for mercy.

Posted 11/21/2008 at 04:02:28pm

Hard drives are going to remain king in storage capacity for quite a while it seems, but SSD are ruling in speed, and have alot of room for improvement. At at "220MB/s read and 200MB/s write" it would take just three of these new Samsung drives in a RAID setup to completely saturate the new "SATA 6Gb/s" 600MB/s throughput specs. It would definetly be worth shelling out a few thousands for such a hardcore setup. I would be more than happy with a 64GB drive if it could completely saturate the SATA bus and was reasonably priced. That would be enough room for your OS, page file, and all your programs and games.

Posted 11/20/2008 at 09:00:45pm

oh come on! Its obvious whats really going on: The results of the data from the collider eventually leads to technological innovations the cause the end of the world, and people from the future have come back in time to sabotage the collider in an annoying attempt to save us all. Yeah, how about it, lets start that conversation.

Posted 11/20/2008 at 02:08:00am

Physx's strength is simulating cloth, but particle physics simulation of fog and smoke are still a sorry sight, as they have always. "Interaction" with smoke and fog still looks like your just kicking around translucent balls of cotton, its such shame, and that won't change until hardware acceleration of physics progresses further.

Posted 11/11/2008 at 06:07:20pm

This is a feature that should've been built into every hard drive ever created. Its a no brainer. Its better than using a software solution like Drivecrypt Plus Pack, where there is a noticeable difference in performance, it only works with certain OS, RAID implimentation is not supported, and in full drive encryption mode you lose the convenience of being able to use partitioning and drive imaging software.

My questions are - What's the encryption method used? Why is it only being offered in lower capacity drives? Does it work in RAID? Is badly is this going to hurt my wallet?