Posts tagged with AMD
ATI Catalyst™ 9.11 Driver – What’s New?
Posted by Jay Marsden in 1:45 PM
(18 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)
Loading ...It’s that time again for the ATI Catalyst™ driver update! We have been getting great comments and feedback from the community because of this blog site. Please continue to send us your feedback as we do review them all*.
*IF you are having technical issues with the ATI Catalyst™ driver, or your graphics card please report your issues here.
Here is what is new in ATI Catalyst™ 9.11:
New Features
GPU Acceleration of H.264 video content using Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta
- This release of ATI Catalyst™ supports the new Hardware Acceleration features of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta for video encoded in the H.264 format.
- Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta introduces hardware-based H.264 video decoding to deliver smooth video playback, reduced system resource utilization, and to help preserve battery life.
- Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta is expected to be available for download from Adobe Labs (labs.adobe.com) before the end of the year. This feature is supported on the ATI Radeon™ HD 5800, ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 and ATI Radeon HD™ 4000 Series of products.
High Quality downscaling for Video Transcoding MSE
- This release of ATI Catalyst™ includes an enhancement for the ATI Video converter for users Transcoding high quality interlaced content (1920×1080i @60i videos) down to small resolution progressive content (320×240 @30p – iPod videos as an example), by maintaining high visual quality when down-scaling by a significant amount and converting interlaced video content to progressive.
Highlights of the Linux ATI Catalyst™ 9.11 release include:
New Features
Support for new Linux operating systems
- This release of ATI Catalyst™ Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:
- RHEL 5.4 support
- openSUSE 11.2 early look support
To download the driver, click here.
Till Next Month,
Jay Marsden
Jay Marsden is a Public Relations Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
ATI Catalyst 9.9 Driver – Everything you want to know and why you should care
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 1:34 PM
Loading ...Game Optimizations: ATI CatalystTM9.9 Driver
With last month’s release of the ATI CatalystTM 9.8 driver, we saw huge game performance increases, given that, this month the driver team focused on other applications and optimizations.
ATI CatalystTM 9.9 Driver has no new features but does have the following resolved issues:
Anti-Aliasing support for Ghostbusters
ATI CrossFireXTM support for Resident Evil 5
Graphics corruption fix for Sims 3
ATI CatalystTM Control Center – Basic mode now responds appropriately after exiting Quick Adjust Video Settings
Edge enhancement and de-noise sliders in ATI Catalyst Control Center no longer lags or appears out of sync with mouse movement
Launching Hotkeys Manager in ATI Catalyst Control Center no longer causes an unhandled exception error
The “Desktop Rotation” page in ATI Catalyst Control Center no longer shows additional information for the second display when the secondary adapter is connected
HDMI is now detected properly as DTV (HDMI) instead of DTV (DVI) when the HDMI display is hotplugged for the first time
ATI Catalyst Control Center no longer displays error message when specific HDMI displays are hot unplugged and hotplugged back
Intermittent failures no longer occur with Cyberlink MediaShow Espresso once a transcoding process has been completed
And last but surely not least, my favorite community: ATI CatalystTM 9.9 driver for Linux!
Support for new Linux operating systems
This release of ATI Catalyst driver for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:
• openSUSE 11.1 production support
• SLED and SLES 10 SP3 early look support
To download the full release notes, click here.
See you next month!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
DirectX 11 – What to expect!
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 5:01 PM
Realism like never before
Loading ...
Have you wondered what all the hype around Microsoft Windows 7 and DirectX 11 is all about? We will shed some light and answer some of those questions in this blog.
Let’s start with Windows7, everyone, including my own mother, is talking about this amazing operating system. Microsoft is rumoured to be launching the successor to Windows Vista in late October. What does it mean to you the PC user?
I cover my experience with Windows 7 in this blog; in a nutshell, the experience has been fantastic. It seems that Microsoft has worked out all the kinks and quirkiness of Windows Vista and are about to launch an incredible OS for the PC. Windows 7 (when compared to Windows Vista) is designed to offer the user a much more refined experience, smaller footprint, faster response times, long battery life and a much more visually intense and enjoyable PC experience.
Wrapped up in all the new Windows 7 OS splendour is a new API (Application programming Interface) called DirectX 11. Basically, the API allows developers to program software that uses a standard set of terms to communicate with the libraries and the OS. Think of it as game developers have some new toys to play with inside Windows to allow them to deliver better software.
DirectX has been around since 1995 with the launch of Windows95, a full history can be found here.
Let me break down the features and benefits of DirectX 11 -- the main features being:
-Tessellation -- Multithreaded Rendering - DirectCompute
Tessellation is a technology that has been around for a few GPU (graphics processing unit) generations. AMD has had Tessellation support since 2001, which was then called Truform; we also implemented Tessellation in the XBOX 360 GPU, then codenamed “Xenos”. Tessellation is a feature which increases the number of polygons in an image. Basically, Tessellation enables a more lifelike image, both of objects and landscape. Back in the day characters who were CG (computer generated) looked very blocky, almost cartoon like; with the use of Tessellation, developers are now able to significantly increase the number of triangles to draw an image, thus creating a more lifelike quality in games.
Multithreaded Rendering is a feature which allows DirectX to be processed via multiple CPU threads. This means that a dual-, triple- or quad-core CPU can have a higher utilization across all cores than DirectX APIs in the past. Historically the OS would load up a single core for commands to the GPU, in essence creating an overload on the first core and under utilizing the additional cores. With only one core issuing commands to a GPU, we have seen CPUs hold back the potential performance of the GPU. With Multithreaded Rendering, DirectX will take better advantage of all the available cores. This should result in a better experience for the multi-core user because of a faster processing pipeline and increased scaling.
DirectCompute is a feature which allows access to the shader cores/pipeline for Stream Computing (graphics acceleration) type applications and physics acceleration. One of the biggest technology breakthroughs of the past 5 years has been the notion that processing can be moved from the traditional CPU to the much more parallel GPU. Simply put, the CPU manages tasks sequentially; it accomplishes a task then moves on to the next task in a very orderly fashion and with tremendous speed. Today’s CPUs can work at speeds of up to 108.8 GigaFLOPS (Floatingpoint Operations Per Second).
A GPU is designed to work with many slower cores in parallel, giving a much wider vector -meaning a wider road for more cars to travel on -- than a CPU. This allows tasks to be completed faster if the program or software is developed to take advantage of many-many cores, albeit slower ones. Today’s GPUs can work at speeds up to 1.36 TeraFLOPS, giving the GPU a significant (almost 11 times faster) advantage when the proper software is run. This advantage truly delivers on the processing capabilities of Stream Computing. DirectCompute allows easier access to the GPU’s many cores for parallel processing; if the user is running applications that take advantage of Stream Computing then the performance experience increases considerably. We are seeing transcoding as the first type of task that is seeing tremendous benefit using Stream Computing. This means if you are an avid HD video or music user you will benefit when converting files to play on your laptop or iPod type devise; Stream Computing can significantly cut down the wait-time for enjoying your converted media.
Now, if you are a gamer you undoubtedly will be asking me “What games are going to support DirectX 11″? This is always a tightrope to walk for us as we are unable to pre-announce our technology partners titles and the specs around those titles; still, we want to give the consumer confidence that we’ve been assured there will be substantial titles in the market that take full advantage of your ATI Radeon DirectX 11-compliant graphics card. So, as this blog is published, here are the future DirectX 11 games we can talk about:
Dirt2 by Codemasters
BattleForge by EA
S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat by GSC Game World
- Check out this early spoiler for Dirt 2 -
Some industry folks have stated that we will see more titles that support DirectX 11 then we did for DirectX 10. Some even say that DirectX 11 is the full implementation of what DX10 should and could have been, but that is subjective opinion and conjecture.
Game developers discuss the benefits of DirectX11
Windows7 and DirectX11 are right around the corner, as is the newest ATI Radeon family of graphics cards. As always, it’s our goal to blur the lines between reality and what is rendered. I believe we have made a major leap towards crossing that chasm with our ATI RadeonTM HD 5000 series products and their support for DirectX 11.
Tessellation - Minimized
With Tessellation - Maximized!
Between now and the launch of Windows 7 and DirectX 11, we will continue to uncover the technical details, as well as the visual implications, for the user experience.
At the time of this blog, AMD will be the first GPU vendor to market with a fully compliant and enabled DirectX 11 graphics product. So don’t be fooled by claims in the market about DX10 GPU’s supporting DirectX 11….
My good friend Tim Smalley from bit-tech.net has a great in-depth article on DirectX 11: A look at what’s coming – Check it out.
Cheers!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
ATI Catalyst™ 9.8 Driver – Everything you want to know and why you should care
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 1:24 PM
Loading ...Game Optimizations: ATI CatalystTM 9.8 Driver
Our test system configuration is:
| AMD Phenom II 940 (3.0GHz) processor |
| Asus M3A79-T(790) motherboard |
| 4GB DDR2-800 5-5-5-18 memory |
| Windows VISTA Ultimate SP1 64bit |
This month we are seeing a massive performance increase with a whole host of games as compared to the ATI Catalyst 9.7 driver. Detailed release notes are available for most of the game optimizations; here are the highlights:
- Battleforge DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance improves of up to 50% with the largest gains in configurations using ATI CrossFireXTM technology.
- Company of Heroes DirectX 10 performance improves of up to 77%.
- Crysis DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 10% and quad mode performance improves of up to 34%.
- Crysis Warhead DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 7% and quad mode performance improves of up to 69%.
- Far Cry 2 DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 50% and quad mode performance improves of up to 88%.
- Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 40% and with quad mode performance improving of up to 60%.
- UnigineTropics OpenGL performance improvements of up to 20%.
- UnigineTropics DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in quad mode improvements of up to 20%.
- World in Conflict DirectX 10 performance improvements of up to by 10%.
Marketing sound bite: ATI Catalyst 9.8 – Open GLTM 3.1 Support
It’s fitting that last weekend AMD was in attendance at Quakecon 2009 in Dallas,Texas where the world’s most prolific OpenGLsupporters gathered for 4 days of ‘peace, love and rockets,’ that we are announcing support for OpenGL 3.1 and the following details:
This release of the ATI Catalyst driver provides OpenGL 3.1 extension support. The following is a list of OpenGL 3.1 features and extensions added in ATI Catalyst 9.8:
- Support for 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).
- Primitive restart (NV primitive restart). Because client enable/disable no longer exists in OpenGL 3.1, the PRIMITIVE RESTART state has become server state, unlike the Nvidia extension where it is client state. As a result, the numeric values assigned to PRIMITIVE RESTART and PRIMITIVE RESTART INDEX differ from the NV versions of those tokens.
- At least 16 texture image units must be accessible to vertex shaders, in addition to the 16 already guaranteed to be accessible to fragment shaders.
- Texture buffer objects (GL ARB texture buffer object).
- Rectangular textures (GL ARB texture rectangle).
- Uniform buffer objects (GL ARB uniform buffer object).
- SNORM texture component formats.
And last but surely not least, my favorite community: ATI CatalystTM 9.8 driver for Linux!
Support for new Linux operating systems
This release of ATI Catalyst driver for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:
- RHEL 4.8 production support
- Ubuntu 9.04 production support
ATI CatalystTM Control Center – Linux Edition support for RandR 1.2
This release of the ATI Catalyst driver for Linux introduces ATI Catalyst Control Center – Linux Edition support for the RandR 1.2 extension API. The following new features are now available in the ATI Catalyst Control Center – Linux Edition Display Manager:
- Display rotation
- Multiple display arrangement and desktop sizing
To download the full release notes here.
Please report all technical support issues here.
See you next month!
Cheers!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
What’s a good title for a Quakecon blog?
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 1:39 PM
It has to be about the “Future”…
“Last night, Darth Vader came down from planet Vulcan and told me that if I didn’t take Lorraine out that he’d melt my brain”. – George McFly
PMS Clan and a future gaming superstar on our Quakecon booth
Well, its day 2 at Quakecon 2009 and my brain hasn’t melted, but I have seen a Darth Vader or two… In thinking about the ‘right’ title for my blog, “The Future” was an obvious choice seeing as how we have packed up #Area64 and transported it all the way to Dallas.
What is #Area64 you ask, well, it’s the secret place in Austin where AMD has all of its unreleased products, engineering secrets and where we keep the flux capacitor. As one can imagine, we need to keep such a place heavily guarded and hard to find, so, what do a bunch of AMD gamers do, we packed it up and rebuilt it in the Gaylord Hotel for Quakecon. I am currently writing this blog from the heart of our mobile #area64, the sounds of next generation technology humming away behind me!
Pete and Chris from AMD showcasing our Quakecon shirts...
Wait a minute, Doc. Ah… Are you telling me that you built a time machine… out of a DeLorean? – Marty McFly
No, we didn’t bring our time machine but I am not going to comment on if AMD has built a time machine, that’s a completely different blog. But, we did bring what we expect will revolutionize the way you play games on PC’s in the future.
How does one gain access into #area64 and who gets access, great questions, here is what you have to do:
AMD will be limiting access to #Area64 to 100 almost random gamers, meaning anyone and everyone has a fair shot at “Seeing the Future”, just follow these AMD’ers on Twitter;
@IanMcNaughton – @Tweetoe – @Catalystmaker - @AMD_Unprocessed & @Caseygotcher
We will be tweeting hints and actions during Quakecon, it could be as simple as “The first 5 gamers who meet us at XX, gain access” or “Make a short video about Why you need or should have access to #Area64 and post to Youtube, gain access”.
Or, you could simply track us down and ask for an “on the spot action for access”.
Here are the shirts we are giving away, they are unique and numbered from 1-100, if you see anyone wearing them in the halls or BYOC, you know they have “SEEN THE FUTURE”!
The Future is Awesome!
As a special treat to all the readers of my blog, via this blog, you will be the first to download the latest ATI Catalyst 9.8 driver here:
XP
Vista and Win7
[Update: Official ATI Catalyst 9.8 Drivers are available here]
Enjoy!
Cheers!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
AREA 64 Presents: The TWKR…
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 11:29 AM
When fast just isn’t fast enough!
What do you get when you cross extreme engineering with extreme overclockability?
You get an AMD TWKR CPU.
**WARNING: Extreme overclocking is an activity that should be carried out only by experts, using expert tools in a safe and secure environment. Use of extreme cooling methods and materials, including but not limited to liquid nitrogen, can be extremely hazardous. Extreme overclocking is not for everyone – AMD urges caution and disclaims all liability for any damages, of any type or character (including without limitation, system damage, loss of data or personal injury) caused as a result of or while engaged in engaging in extreme overclocking activities.
AMD’s product warranty does not cover damages caused by overclocking, even when enabled via AMD software.
As they say, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!
Matt Davis aka @dattymavis
@dattymavis and I ventured over to AMD’s “AREA 64″ with a newly minted AMD TWKR CPU to give it a testdrive under some extreme Ln2, and what ensued was pure overclocking awesomeness!
First, let me introduce to you the AMD TWKR:
AMD created a small number of limited edition AMD PhenomTM II TWKR Black Edition processors expressly for the purpose of commemorating the record performance feats with the AMD platform technology codenamed “Dragon” and AMD PhenomTM II processors. These processors are designed to reach the utmost performance barriers of the AMD Phenom II processor and operate beyond the specifications of typical production level processors.
Called the AMD PhenomTM II X4 42 Black Edition TWKR processor, it is not currently for sale, and not covered by AMD’s product warranty. This processor is provided “as is” and AMD disclaims any and all liable for any damages, of any type or character (including without limitation, system damage, loss of data or personal injury), caused as a result of or in connection with the use of this processor.
These processors demonstrate the sound engineering and superior process technology that is in each AMD Phenom II processor.
With our TWKR in hand and a solid warning from our buildings management staff, we headed across Austin to AMD’s Secret Lab – AREA 64.
The lab is fully stocked with all the hardware an overclocker could ever imagine or dream of, shopping made easy! Did I mention the 9,000 gallon Liquid Nitrogen tank outside with direct piping into the AREA 64 lab, yup, doesn’t get much better than that!
The motherboard of choice was a Gigabyte 790X.
4G of Corsair memory,
An ATI RadeonTM HD 4870 X2 GPU.
And a TWKR CPU.
Hmmm, why is it not posting???
After 20 minutes of no posting at all, we finally realized that the DIMMS had been previously whacked and were no good… Step 1: Always make sure you have working hardware!
Once we had working hardware, we fired it up and started the “slow pour” of Ln2.
The steps we followed are detailed in this blog.
Ln2 engaged! First thermos of Ln2 got us to -120C, time for thermos #2. The second pour brought us down to -139C! Time for more!
The third thermos of Ln2 brought our TWKR part down to -186.6C – Ah, overclocking bliss!
At this point in time, I let @dattymavis take over as he is the obvious safer one between the two of us…
@dattymavis jokingly dons full protective gear and looks like something out of an alien movie…
Now time to see what this badboy can do! We pushed the proc to a single core overclock of 6.42Ghz at a voltage of 1.725volts. This was accomplished just having Windows at idle. We will leave it up to the professional overclockers to push the proc’s with a heavy workload.
As for a 4-core OC, we achieved 6.2Ghz at 1.8 volts. Again, this was at a temp of -182F with a light workload.
All in all, we achieved significant frequency for a couple of hacks with unlimited Ln2.
The TWKR is not currently for sale, but is designed to make a statement to the OC community: Thank you to each and every enthusiast who continues to support AMD and fights the good fight!
Ah, the sweat smell of Ln2...
If I’m lucky, I may be able to give away some of the TWKR processors via Twitter in the coming weeks. I’m not making any promises, but follow me if you are on Twitter and you just might be lucky enough to become a proud owner of a TWKR yourself someday.
Also follow @AMDDesktop…they have some goodies for the community too!
Cheers!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Real-time Gaming from the Cloud
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 5:33 PM
Will we soon game from the Cloud?
While social media has been the “new shiny toy” for some time, attracting the headlines and the VC dollars as companies and individuals try to monetize this phenomenon, another, related subject may be about to thunder and lightning. Yes, I’m talking about the “Cloud”.
For this hardcore audience, my question is: “Can you game in real-time from the cloud?”
I spent some quality time this week with Charlie Boswell, the guru behind so many cool programs at AMD. Think OTOY, LucasFilm, the digital music recording Industry, and you quickly understand that Charlie has one of the best jobs at AMD in working with these customers and technology partners. Here’s our conversation:
Ian: Charlie, thanks for taking the time today, can you give us the background on our efforts at CES around demo’ing “gaming in the cloud”?
Charlie:
Hello Ian…I’m really pumped about this so I appreciate the chance to discuss. …..here’s the deal.
At this year’s CES AMD rolled out a demo that shows how our platform technology (CPU, GPU, combined with Direct Connect Architecture) is enabling fully interactive cloud gaming. Sounds cool but what exactly is that?
Cloud computing on AMD Fusion technology allows fully interactive game play from virtually any type of client over the Internet because the heavy lifting is being done “server side” in the cloud. The user logs on, clicks open a browser and then starts blasting away. No hours of game installation, no exotic authorization dances, just instant gratification and that’s why I’m excited. My team’s role at AMD is to ensure our technology removes barriers so the user can be about his/her task rather than the technology. That is the main story of cloud computing. Enough preaching but I had to let that fly because it’s a powerful look at a better future for gaming.
The CES demo consisted of an AMD Fusion Render Node (based on AMD “Dragon” platform technology PC platforms) that hosted an off-the-shelf version of EA’s amazing “Mercenaries II” served up via the Internet. The laptop powered by AMD technology was given a URL to click and Mercenararies-II fired up. Playback was full screen at 60 frames/sec (see the video on YouTube for yourself <link>).
How is this accomplished? Is it a parlour trick? Well, this is not easy to pull-off. Jules Urbach, the CEO of OTOY, is the wizard of GPGPU. The software that made this work is from his company. He is to the GPU what Robert Rodriguez (another artist who employs AMD technology) is to digital moviemaking.
Jules is a true innovator and someone who chose AMD because we have all the pieces to make this work. We are the only one-stop-shopping platform solution for cloud computing hardware. The OTOY software harnesses the full power of the AMD platform including CPU, GPU and our Direct Connect high bandwidth interconnect.
In short, the game source code unaltered is hosted on the AMD Fusion Render Cloud hardware and served up on the web via breathtaking OTOY compression technology made possible by the AMD combined platform power. The OTOY software allows multiple instances of a game to be hosted on the AMD Fusion Render node so the solution scales for all the right economic reasons such as energy efficiency, space, quiet operation, etc.
Ian: That technology seems very cool, how is it similar or different to OnLive?
Charlie:
Yes, after the CES announcement of the AMD Fusion Render Cloud with OTOY, OnLive announced their solution at GDC in March. I was thrilled to see their announcement because it was further validation of the space. Both OTOY and OnLive have their unique business models and architectures, but they are similar in that they both require a truly scalable enterprise class backend solution. Implementing a technique I call “Invasion of the Client Snatchers” where you simply connect up a single client machine in the cloud to a user won’t work. It’s not practical or adaptable. You’re just snatching the client from the user and housing it. The Cloud server must behave like a compute cluster and scale organically with the statistical behaviour of the Internet user traffic. It must adapt to available power and bandwidth. It must scale for energy efficiency. It must allow for extensibility. This is where the AMD Fusion Render Node comes into play. You can host multiple simultaneous users on these devices and cluster them in true enterprise class style. Anyway, it’s great to see more teams jumping in. We celebrate the free market because it’s good for the user. Cloud computing is happening and OnLive is another fantastic example.
Ian: TechCrunch had an article a week ago, where they highlighted a game character jumping from a monitor to a notebook while the game was being served from 400 miles away, can you explain the technology behind that?
Charlie:
This is OTOY’s server side rendering in action. The heavy computing, drawing, and encoding are happening server-side in the cloud through the magic of the OTOY architecture host on an AMD Fusion render node. The client is entirely browser based. The bandwidth and latency required for full on interactive game play is made possible by/through the OTOY codec architecture. The performance of this codec meets the “real-time” requirements for first person shooters. Enough said. The AMD Fusion Render Architecture is the scalable foundation that could make this practical, scalable, and deployable across the global Internet.
Ian: To take it a step further, TechCrunch was given an exclusive this week that showed off the AMD/OTOY technology at work on a cell phone! Is this the future of mainstream gaming?
Charlie:
As I said a few moments ago, the uniqueness of the OTOY approach is their ability to serve to a variety of client types: smart phones, PDA, thin client, etc., etc. This is a great proofpoint that the heavy lifting is all done server side on OTOY-AMD Fusion Render Cloud. This is one future for Cloud Computing…turn it on and play. You never get exposed to the seedy side of technology (drivers, installation, updates). All that stuff is under the street just like in Disneyland. This is the future I want….Walt Disney had this figured out a long time ago.
Ian: So, gaming in the cloud is real, when might we see availability?
Charlie:
Ian, you’re seeing some of the promise now. We expect that you’ll see implementations later this year and full-on deployments in 2010.
Ian: Thanks Charlie, one last question, What’s next?
Charlie:
Let me answer that loaded question first by stating the cloud offers the planet at least the hope of a better user experience. My cause celeb on the past 10 years has been to help lobby for a better user experience by shielding the artist from both the tech and its culture. Technology can be unbelievably needy. Example, “hey man, you forgot to load the latest driver or OS update.” I don’t want that ever even said in my presence. I reject that. That is an example of technology sitting on top of humanity. The cloud is going to help eliminate the entire culture that perpetuates useless complexity. The revolution is next because the users demand it. The revolution is next because the economics demand it. If you only market to the geeks, the numbers don’t work do they…..
Simply put and a great way to close out this blog. Feel free to comment, both Charlie and I will be actively monitoring the comments and replying.
Cheers!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Cheers!
Finding the processor that fits you – maybe dual core is jusssttt riiight
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 2:38 PM
Look carefully at these 2 processors before buying anything else!
The mainstream CPU market is awfully crowded these days, a full line-up of model numbers from AMD and a further full line-up of confusing model numbers from Intel. Is the C2D E8600 better than a C2Q 8200, what about an i7920, is a 920 better or worse than a X4955? Is it about frequency, cores, memory channels or controllers, DDR2 or DDR3??? #$%^&*()_#$%^&* WHICH CPU SHOULD I BUY?
This blog hopes to help answer that question.
At AMD we have tried to make things very simple – we started with graphics and moved that model numbering system into CPUs. The bigger the number, the more performance you will get! Simple. Clean. Easy.
On June 2, 2009 we launched the newest addition to our mainstream CPU line-up, the AMD PhenomTM II X2 550 Black Edition and the AMD AthlonTM II X2 250 processors.
The press release reads as such:
“AMD AthlonTM II processor delivers new native dual-core architecture, efficient 45nm technology and 3 GHz performance at an affordable price –
AMD PhenomTM II X2 Black Edition processor combines value and unlocked potential for gamers and tuners on a budget”
Very well stated I must say! This sums up the benefit of each processor and now I will endeavor to take it one step further.
When a shiny new toy, like a quad core CPU, enters the market people tend to mentally move on and forget about past products, like the once dominant dual core. Historically, enthusiasts are the first to clamor for the latest and greatest, often regardless of cost. But let’s keep this ‘bleeding edge’ in perspective, currently only a small proportion of shipping CPU’s are quad core, the rest are made up of triple-, dual- and single-core processors. Usage and computing continue to evolve to take advantage of multicore processors but dual core processors still have a big piece of the pie.
Let’s bring this all back to the two little gems we launched on June 2. The AMD PhenomTM II X2 550 Black Edition is the single fastest dual-core client CPU we have ever engineered and brought to market. Incredibly, you can buy it at Newegg today for only $102.00 with free shipping.
That is just short of astounding! And this processor is built off the same die as the acclaimed AMD PhenomTM II quad-core processors.
The AMD AthlonTM II X2 250 is another product we launched on June 2, 2009 in Taipei; it’s simply an incredible little performance monster. Currently priced at $87.00 on Newegg with free shipping, this processor is born from its own die, meaning its half the size of its sibling mentioned above and does not share the same wafer.
How does that impact you, the consumer? Lower cost, lower power consumption.
This processor has a maximum design spec of 65W; average daily use can often fall well below even that..
Both processors feature the AM3 socket, which means they’re compatible with AM3 motherboards using DDR3 memory, OR they can be dropped into an AM2+ motherboard with DDR2 memory (which can further help reduce your overall system price).
Which one should you buy?
Well, here is my quick swag at generalizing which processor I think you should buy:
| Gaming | Gaming+Video | Video + TV | Photo+Music | Heavy Video Editing | Overclocking | ||
| Dual Core | Quad Core | Triple Core | Dual Core | Quad Core | Quad Core |
Like with any recommendation, take it with a grain of salt, it all comes down to your budget and expected longevity of your system.
It’s always tough for a corporate spinner like me to write about our own products. I try not to prop AMD products unless I have used them or I am extremely passionate and knowledgeable about them, in this case, I am all three: A user of an AMD Phenom II X4 550 processor in my system at home, absolutely passionate about the tremendous value these parts offer a consumer and a bit of an expert as I was part of the product management team who helped birth these products to see the light of day on our roadmaps.
It’s confusing to know what to purchase, I can honestly say, I don’t think you can go wrong with choosing either of these processors. But as always in my blogs, please, don’t take my word for it, check out what the reviewers have been saying:
“With the Athlon II X2 250 and the Phenom II X2 550 AMD has released two very competitive dual-core parts. They both perform and overclock well and are easily competitive with Intel’s Pentium E6300…I’ve really got no complaints here. AMD has done very well in both the pricing and execution of its first 45nm dual-core products.”
“Zipping along at 3.0GHz, the Athlon II X2 250 will take its place as the fastest Athlon processor in AMD’s lineup. Other vitals include a 45nm manufacturing processor, 65W TDP, and an AM3 package allowing it to support both DDR2 and DDR3 memory. Perhaps best of all, the new chip is being priced at a budget-friendly $87.”
Lost Circuit’s Michael Schuette on the AMD Athlon II X2 250, “Overall, well done, AMD, this little gem might be poised to capture even more market share.”
“If you are looking for great performing processors at an even greater price, you would be a fool not to consider the Phenom II X2 550 BE or the Athlon II X2 250. Their price to performance ratio is unmatched, and will not leave you hanging.”
Cheers!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Why we should get excited about DirectX 11
Posted by Richard Huddy in 7:33 PM
As an admitted gaming technology geek, it’s hard not to get excited about the advancements in game technology. As many of you know, DirectX 11 is just around the corner, offering a dazzling array of new toys for game developers and people like me to play with. But as excited as the developer in me is about DirectX 11, I’m even more excited as a gamer, and you should be too. That’s because DirectX 11, in combination with new graphics hardware, and in some cases Windows 7, brings significant changes to the computing experience, changes that mean upcoming games and other applications are about to get a lot better. Let me explain how.
Microsoft, and those of us in the graphics business, have been openly talking about DirectX 11 for around a year now – in fact, to be honest we’ve been talking about it since even before Windows Vista shipped at the very end of 2006! It takes a long time to put together a new version of DirectX and there are often tough decisions about what to leave out while finalizing any one version. So we often agree that the parts which are being left out in the ‘current’ version will find their way into the next version.
So let’s take a good look at what’s in DirectX 11. I’m not going to go into painful technical detail; instead, I will try to look at the consequences of those technical details. One important note, unlike DirectX 10, DirectX 11 isn’t tied to Windows 7, so those of you sporting a Windows Vista system will get to reap the rewards as well.
There are three main areas of impact in DirectX 11:
1. A beast called the tessellator has been added which enables games developers to create smoother, less blocky and more organic looking objects in games. This is the change you’ll probably be most aware of. And it’ll show up when you look at the silhouettes of hills and mountains or the profiles of characters in games. Where artists previously had to trade off quality for performance, now artists will have the freedom to create naturalistic scenery. We’ve gotten used to seeing strangely blocky ears and noses on our opponents. But the new generation of games should allow those opponents to scare the heck out of us instead. The tessellator represents a natural next step in gaming hardware (in fact the Xbox 360 graphics chip that AMD designed already has a tessellator, and AMD graphics hardware has featured tessellator technology starting with the ATI RadeonTM HD 2000 series right up to the latest ATI RadeonTM HD 4000 series cards today).
[An example of tessellation giving characters more definition.]
2. Games programmers will also be given a radically new way to program for AMD graphics chips. The second new beast in the menagerie is the excitingly named “Compute Shader”. It allows games programmers to treat the GPU in a much less graphics-oriented way; indeed, they can almost treat it like a highly parallel CPU. [The buzzword for this is "GPGPU" , see http://blogs.amd.com/play/2008/11/05/the-gpgpu-chronicles/ for details.]
Up until DirectX 10.1 a graphics programmer always had to think in terms of triangles – but the compute shader changes that and allows the programmer a much freer expression of their thoughts. If you try to solve a problem of artificial intelligence or physics, you probably don’t think the problem through in terms of triangles. So the compute shader is a more natural way for the programmer to approach his or her task. On top of that it allows access to some of the features that would otherwise have been hidden away inside our present and future chips and for that reason it will often allow significantly more efficient implementations than heretofore (that means “higher frame rates” to you and me 
).
3. DirectX has been sliced and diced and the internals redesigned to ensure that it is much more efficient at using the horsepower present in multiple CPU cores. This will be a huge win on chips like our AMD PhenomTM II quad and triple core processors [http://www.amd.com/gb-uk/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_15331_15332,00.html] and it will provide the opportunity for both higher frame rates and games which are more realistic, because they contain dramatically more detail.
There are numerous other, less important changes aimed to make the games programmer’s tasks easier. Some so small that you’d have to be a games programmer to care, some (like improved texture compression) are big enough to help out significantly with performance in corner cases.
Quite often you get to hear rather bland but optimistic statements about the future versions of DirectX. “It’ll be faster and better” – but you don’t get to hear much in the way of substantial justification.
This time around I hope it’s abundantly clear – I predict that:
- We’ll see higher frame rates because the way DirectX 11 uses CPUs will be more efficient.
- We’ll see higher frame rates because games developers will be able to use our GPUs more like CPUs.
- We’ll see smoother, more realistic characters and more realistic terrain as we move away from blocky polygonal representations to the kind that are used in movies.
- And a side-benefit, that will help PC gaming generally, is that the new version is easier to use, so it will help to keep game development costs down.
On top of that there’s something worth mentioning here about the evolution of computer graphics. Every generation of DirectX has been designed to be an improvement upon the previous generation. We always make a point of including all the old functionality (so that you can run any of your existing games). This time is no exception; the nearest thing to DirectX11 is DirectX10.1. And it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that I can’t resist mentioning that this means that owners of ATI RadeonTM HD 4000 series graphics have a distinct advantage, since AMD is the only major supplier of graphics chips that supports DirectX 10.1 http://ati.amd.com/products/Radeonhd4800/index.html . DirectX 10.1 is the closest you can get to DirectX 11 until Windows 7 ships.
When it does ship though, get ready for a significantly improved gaming experience thanks to the combination of DirectX 11 features enabled by phenomenal new DirectX 11 hardware from AMD.
Richard Huddy is Sr. Manager Developer Relations at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
ATI Catalyst 9.5 Driver – Everything you want to know
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 1:49 PM
Do you regularly update your graphics drivers?
With 2 months of ATI CatalystTM driver blogs under our belt, we are seeing a steady engagement from you guys in the community via this blog site. Please keep up the comments and suggestions and we will endeavor to answer as many as we can. So, without further ado – let me introduce ATI Catalyst 9.5!
Please report all driver related issues here.
*If you are having technical issues with your graphics card or are in need of driver support, please use the proper channels to submit those issues here.*
Marketing sound bite: ATI CatalystTM 9.5 – Unified Microsoft WHQL certified graphics driver for Windows® 7 and Windows Vista®
WHQL is the word of the month for this blog; AMD was the first to introduce a fully certified single unified WHQL approved graphics driver for Windows® 7 and Windows Vista®. By meeting Microsoft’s WHQL certification requirements in ATI CatalystTM 9.5 driver for both Windows 7 and Windows Vista, we clearly showcase our continued focus on delivering an extremely stable and robust Win 7 experience. First to market is important, but best to market first is how we roll at AMD in terms of graphics driver support for new operating systems. AMD led the market with early support for Vista and now continues that graphics driver leadership with the launch of Catalyst 9.5.
All ATI RadeonTM GPU users with an ATI Radeon HD 4000, 3000 and 2000 series product will enjoy WHQL certified support under Win 7 with ATI Catalyst 9.5.
Marketing sound bite: ATI Stream update:
<Insert Drum roll here please>
The comments section of my blog has been filled for 2 months with questions on when we were going to deliver 64-bit support for ATI AVIVOTM technology under Windows Vista, today is the day!
With today’s release of ATI Catalyst 9.5 a number of issues that you may have previously experienced using the ATI Video Converter have been resolved! Also, ATI AVIVO technology is now supported under Windows Vista 32-bit and Windows Vista 64-bit.
Using ATI Stream technology, users of ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series and ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series of graphics cards can take advantage of new optimizations in this video conversion tool (found in ATI CatalystTM Control Center Basic View) for a better experience when transcoding video files.
Game Optimizations: ATI CatalystTM 9.5
One of the items I want to cover each month is optimizations in games and highlighting those for you in this blog; now, I want to be honest and upfront, I intend to highlight the top games and/or optimizations but not all of them! All of the details and minutia are listed in the release notes of each ATI Catalyst Driver and that can be viewed here.
For this month the highlights are:
- Unigine Tropics DirectX® 9 – enables performance gains for single GPU and ATI CrossFireXTM configurations with anti-aliasing enabled.
- Company of Heroes - enables performance gains for both single GPU and ATI CrossFireXTM configurations.
- BattleForge- enables performance gains for ATI CrossFireXTM configurations.
And last but surely not least, my favorite community: Linux® ATI CatalystTM 9.5
No new features this month but a host of fixes included in this month’s release.
See you next month!
Cheers!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.