*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.

Game Optimizations: ATI Catalyst^TM9.9 Driver
With last month’s release of the ATI Catalyst^TM 9.8 driver, we saw huge game performance increases, given that, this month the driver team focused on other applications and optimizations.

ATI Catalyst^TM 9.9 Driver has no new features but does have the following resolved issues:

Anti-Aliasing support for Ghostbusters
ATI CrossFireX^TM support for Resident Evil 5
Graphics corruption fix for Sims 3
ATI Catalyst^TM 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 Catalyst^TM 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.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. 
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.

Game Optimizations: ATI Catalyst^TM 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 CrossFireX^TM 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 GL^TM 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 Catalyst^TM 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 Catalyst^TM 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.

“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

XP 32

Xp 64

Vista and Win7

Vista/Win7 32

Vista/Win7 64

[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.

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 Phenom^TM II TWKR Black Edition processors expressly for the purpose of commemorating the record performance feats with the AMD platform technology codenamed “Dragon” and AMD Phenom^TM 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 Phenom^TM 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 Radeon^TM 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.

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!

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 Phenom^TM II X2 550 Black Edition and the AMD Athlon^TM II X2 250 processors.

The press release reads as such:

“AMD Athlon^TM II processor delivers new native dual-core architecture, efficient 45nm technology and 3 GHz performance at an affordable price –
AMD Phenom^TM 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 Phenom^TM 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 Phenom^TM II quad-core processors.

The AMD Athlon^TM 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:

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.”

- Anand Shimpi, AnandTech

“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.”

- Paul Lilly, Maximum PC

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.”

- Alan Matson, Overclockers Club

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.

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 Radeon^TM HD 2000 series right up to the latest ATI Radeon^TM 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 Phenom^TM 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 Radeon^TM 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.

With 2 months of ATI Catalyst^TM 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 Catalyst^TM 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 Catalyst^TM 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 Radeon^TM 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 AVIVO^TM 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 Catalyst^TM Control Center Basic View) for a better experience when transcoding video files.

Game Optimizations: ATI Catalyst^TM 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 CrossFireX^TM configurations with anti-aliasing enabled. 
• Company of Heroes - enables performance gains for both single GPU and ATI CrossFireX^TM configurations. 
• BattleForge- enables performance gains for ATI CrossFireX^TM configurations. 

 And last but surely not least, my favorite community: Linux® ATI Catalyst^TM 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.

Recently I got my mitts on a DV2 and I thought I’d have some fun gaming with it.  Now you may not consider the HP Pavilion dv2 a “gaming” notebook, but hold that thought for a few moments…

My HP Pavilion dv2 config as given to me was:

AMD Athlon™ Neo Processor @ 1.6Ghz

ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 3410 Premium Graphics

DDR2 – 2G

12.1” Screen

3.8lbs

External BluRay

HDMI output

And a whole lotta coolness

As stated above and as clearly obvious from the specs, there is no dual or quad core cpu, no high-end GPU (let alone ATI CrossfireX™ technology), no 20” screen. So all in all, not a normal spec’d gaming notebook, BUT, that has never stopped me before and it won’t this time!  Let’s load this little badboy up with some tier1 PC games and see how it handles.

Let’s level set though, this notebook is beautiful, its sleek and stylish, has good mainstream battery life and (as of the writing of this blog) is the only comparable laptop in its class under $750 (after a limited time $50 Mail-in rebate), BUT, I believe some mainstream consumers might want to game on it from time to time so this blog is solely a service to them (and to us enthusiasts who love to see silicon sweat under load).

On tap today is Left4Dead, Tom Clancys H.A.W.X and CoD WaW! A tough bunch of games, no Pong or Tetris here folks!

Left4Dead was played @800x480 2x AA, 4X AF, Shader Detail – High, Effect Detail – Low, Texture Detail – High!

L4D

The gaming experience was fantastic; especially when I reminded myself that this was an inexpensive Ultrathin Notebook weighing under 4lbs and that I was playing on a super portable platform.  The game play dropped below 30FPS a couple times but if this actually reduced or impacted game play I could have simply reduced the quality settings to adjust, but even at lower FPS, it was a good experience.

Tom Clancys H.A.W.X is a newly released game from Ubisoft which is one of 2009’s best Flight Sims.  I loaded up the Demo and put the little HP Dv2 to the ultimate flying test!  Seeing as how Ubisoft “recommends” a dual core AMD processor, I was a little apprehensive, but in the end, the Dv2 shined again. The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3410 inside the Dv2 delivered a great gaming experience at native resolution and the other settings were: 1280x800 – Environment – Low, Texture – High – HDR – Off.

Here is a video capture of the gaming experience on the HP dv2:

A zombie shooter and a flight sim pwned, what was next? My failsafe, CoD WaW! I know, I know, you are now “wincing,” expecting the game to beat the PC; the verdict is in, the Dv2 “got GAME!” I was almost knocked off my feet at the ability to play CoD WaW. Seriously, this is one mean little piece of innovation all wrapped up in an ultra thin chassis.

Xavier over at Notebooks.com captured some sweet video of his experience playing CoD WaW that is worth checking out!

A little nugget of info to pass along, my version of the Dv2 came with 40 preinstalled games, titles like Agatha Christie – Death on the Nile all the way to and including ZUMA Deluze and Wheel of Fortune.  While not first intended to be a gaming notebook, the HP Dv2 does not disappoint!

Buy here.

Check out what others are saying:

Pat Moorhead here and here

Pat Moorhead on Batterylife

Nigel Dessau

Notebooks.com

TGDaily

SLASHGEAR

PCMAG.com

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.

The launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4770 card marks the first use of a 40nm processor on the desktop, and the fifth consecutive time that AMD has been first to launch graphics processors based on a new process node. Considering this track record, you would think getting to 40nm was a cakewalk, but that was not quite the case.  Being the first to 40nm was the result of some incredibly talented AMD people not settling for the status quo, but instead working tirelessly to deliver to you the best product they could. 

As a gamer, you may ask how this impacts you. The reality is that 40nm delivers a number of benefits, including:

More performance and better energy efficiency: AMD was able to improve performance-per-watt by more than 30% and lowered power consumption by 30 watts-a tremendous feat for our engineering team, thanks in large part to their tremendous experience in bringing high-performance graphics parts to market.¹

High performance gaming at incredibly affordable prices: Harnessing 40nm technology has helped AMD reduce prices and deliver advanced gaming and HD multimedia technologies at previously unheard of prices for the desktop market.  The ATI Radeon HD 4770 card launched this week with a suggested retail price of only $109 USD, with some add-in-board partners adding a limited-time $10 mail-in rebate -- resulting in launch prices as low as $99. As you can see, gamers are excited about the idea of ATI Radeon HD 4770 graphics.

Future products: Looking forward, 40nm processors are a big deal for both AMD and gamers.  We anticipate that the knowledge we’ve gained from our experience with the ATI Radeon HD 4770 product will enable AMD to generate even better yields and performance from our 2nd generation 40 nm parts.  For gamers, we expect this to result in widespread availability and good prices for these products.  When you combine that with the fact that the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series is the only top-to-bottom line of DirectX® 10.1 hardware available, and that all DirectX 10.1 features will be fully supported in Microsoft’s forthcoming DirectX® 11 API, it bodes well for AMD and our ability to continue to introduce leading technologies that help enable an excellent gaming experience.

Choosing to be first to deliver new technology before the competition has its challenges. In fact, the entire semiconductor industry has learned from experience that major architectural changes and process node transitions are best undertaken separately. There have been stories reporting 40nm manufacturing challenges and the reality is that 40nm was initially a difficult process technology, even more so because AMD was the first to try it. We mitigated our risks by strategically choosing the ATI Radeon HD 4770 as the first desktop product to make use of this new technology.  Not only is it a real product, with real-world dynamics, but it is based on the proven, stable and refined RV7xx graphics processor architecture. That fact helped us deliver an exceptional performer at an incredible price.

For AMD, working in the demanding and always changing semiconductor space, innovation is core to keeping our company and our industry moving forward to help us provide better products at greater value to businesses and consumers alike.  Between DirectX® 10.1 gaming support, high-performance GDDR5 memory and now 40 nm processors, I can’t remember another time in our industry where we could say we delivered so many industry firsts at such affordable prices.  As a gamer, that gets me excited.  Hopefully you are too, and like me, you’re excited to have reached 40.

¹ Comparing the ATI Radeon™ HD 4770 GPU to the ATI Radeon HD 4850 GPU

Simon Vivera is the product manager for the ATI Radeon™ HD 4770 GPU. 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.

Does your PC have overclock potential?  Our new AMD Phenom^TM II processors certainly do, and to showcase this I ventured over to our super secret lab buried deep inside the bowels of our Austin campus to prove the point!

Picture long hallways of unmarked doors, the hum of machinery, people milling about eyeing you up and down, wondering who you are and why you’re there.  Now imagine a dream job for an enthusiast, one where you have almost limitless access to silicon, hardware and time to hone your craft. This is the life of Pete Hardman, one of AMD’s in-house overclocking gurus!

Pete comes into work every day, passes through the “MI6″ type security barriers, enters his lab and proceeds to break records the world may never ever know about (at least that’s what he tells us)! All in a day’s work I say!

You may have seen some of the insane things we’ve done with Dragon platform technology and liquid helium, both at CES and with our friends in Finland. But for this blog we’re going to keep it simple and break down a ‘tried and true’ method for getting more performance out of your AMD Phenom II processor.

Check out his classy nameplate

Pete's work desk - a little unorthodox to say the least

Pete and I took the new AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition processor and walked it through a proper overclocking methodology using AMD OverDrive^TM software*.  Here are the steps we went through in detail:

Overclocking 101

Step 1 – Figure out your goals, small increase or one shot big gain? Power efficiency, is it important? Going for a full system max overclcok? Find the limits?

Step 2 – Procure the right hardware and software.

Our test system:

AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition quad-core processor

ASUS M4879T Deluxe DDR3 Motherboard 

4G Corsair DDR3 Memory

ATI Radeon^TM HD4870 X2 GPU

Thermalrite Ultra 120 Extreme “TRUE”

2 – 120mm high volume fans

Software add-ons:

AMD OverDrive software

Maxon Cinebench benchmark R10

3DMark® 05 benchmark

CPU-Z

Step 3 – Prep system – thermal paste the CPU, mount your air cooling solution as per guidelines.  Keep the thermal paste to a nice thin amount; this will be beneficial once the heatsink is applied and pressure is added.

Step 4 – Power on system and boot to the OS – Install AMD OverDrive software*

Step 5 – Change frequency; make small incremental changes to the systems multiplier.

Once you have made your frequency multiplier changes, run a benchmark like Cinebench or 3DMark® to check for stability.  Adjust frequency using stock voltage first before increasing voltage.

Step 6 – Increase multiplier and redo step 5 until the benchmark does not complete.

Step 7 – Once you have established the ‘ceiling’ in terms of frequency at stock voltage, do a cold reset/reboot.

Step 8 – Now increase voltage; this should also be done incrementally. You need to know how the voltage scales with frequency. As you increase voltage, frequency should increase, but there is a limit where too much voltage will start to reduce frequency; this is the “Sweet Spot” – find it!

Step 9 – Make a small 50mv increase, now retry the benchmark at the same frequency you previously failed at.

Step 10 – Continue to increase frequency at the new voltage until you find a fail case (meaning your computer hangs or blue screens).

Step 11 – Once you have a fail case at the new frequency, increase the voltage another 50mv and redo Step 10

Step 12 – Once you have established a threshold on voltage and frequency, we now move to the Northbridge and we make those changes via BIOS

Step 13 – Restart and enter BIOS

Step 14 – Click on CPU/NB Frequency and make an increase; we went from 2G to 2.4G which is a large jump and ended up at 2.8Ghz.

Step 15 – Continue to make incremental increases until you have a fail.

Step 16 – Take the results from steps 5, 8 and 12 and put them all together into a total system overclock. CPU cores, Voltage and North Bridge frequency all overclocked to establish a high performing PC experience

Overclocking can be a lot of fun; I personally like to do a moderate overclock and leave my system at that performance level.  Pete, on the other hand, is pushing the boundaries of silicon every day.  Chances are you are wondering what frequency we ended at, well, the results may vary, and what Pete and I achieved may not be representative of what everyone can do.  With that caveat clearly stated, our final frequency was 4.2G on air without overclocking the memory.  Not bad considering we did not spend a lot of time tweaking, we simply followed the steps above that delivered a good 1 Ghz OC.

*And remember kids, AMD’s product warranty does not cover damage caused by overclocking, even when enabled via AMD OverDrive^TM software.

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.

Twist my arm, unreleased GPU meets, unreleased CPU meets unreleased Microsoft OS! When I was asked to build out a totally “unreleased product” PC and experience/blog on the tremendous gaming capabilities of such a system, I was all over it!

First things first, collect all the necessary components; as you can imagine this is a very easy task at AMD.

Components – CHECK

Chassis – Antec Skeleton (as this is easy to do quick uninstalls and reinstalls)

Birthplace – yes, we are human, even though we work and live in grey cubes

Lifting the veil!

Motherboard – Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P (AM3)

Memory – 8G Corsair XMS3 DHX DDR3 1333

CPU – Unreleased AMD Phenom™ II Quad Core (3.2Ghz)

GPU – ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 OC (unreleased at the time, available today)

OS – A super secret version of Windows 7

CPU is an AMD Phenom II X4 quad core running at a stock frequency of 3.2Ghz, this CPU is scheduled to be available sometime in Q2.

The GPU is a third generation DirectX10.1 graphics card that is powered by the most powerful gaming GPU under $2601.. Availability of this GPU is April 2nd worldwide (today) and I was excited to test it early!

Some of the specs to the GPU are:

Compute Power – 1.36 TFLOPS

Core Clock Speed – 900 Mhz

Memory – GDDR5

Frame Buffer – 1G

Memory Bandwidth – 124.8 GB/s

Transistors – 959 million

Stream Processors – 800

On to the gaming experience.

Home office and test area – Yes, that is Tweetdeck open, yes that is an HP dv2 on the left and yes that is an Optimun Prime helmet beside my Master Chief helmet! Me=Geek

Just for clarity, I installed a really mature version of Windows 7 as the OS to go with the ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 software driver that we just released. This excluded me from using AMD Overdrive™ for overclocking2 or Fusion Gaming Utility3 as I did not have time to fully test these apps on Win7 (rest assured we’ll get to those in other blogs). Not to mention, I really wanted to give you a sense of the coolest gaming PC build possible!!!

If you have read any of my previous posts, you will quickly come to realize that I love Call of Duty 4: World at War, Left 4 Dead and F.E.A.R.2. These were my games of choice. As you can clearly see above, I hooked them up to one of my 30” DELL monitors and cranked all the game settings to the max. It was simply beautiful, truly cinematic HD gaming.

L4D, killing zombies on a 22” screen is boring, killing zombies while rendering with an HD4890 on a 30” screen was scary!! I have never been so stressed out while gaming (minus my first time playing DOOM).

Did I mention the system was almost silent, it was cool and quiet!

F.E.A.R. 2, can’t say I’m tired of playing the first few levels of this game, especially on such a massive screen with so much horsepower!Between the CPU and GPU, F.E.A.R 2 purred along at 2560×1600 without a hitch, flicker or anomaly! It was the way the game was meant to be played! (no pun intended here)

Did I mention the system was almost silent, it was cool and quiet!

The experience of CoD4 WaW was awe-inspiring! Nothing like running into a fox hole – gun a’blazin’ (or in this case, flame thrower a’flamin’) without the distraction of load times or annoying interruptions from hitches and flickers!

Did I mention the system was almost silent, it was cool and quiet!

If you are a hard core gamer looking for the best GPU value in the market – and when I say value I do not mean cheap or thrifty, I mean hardnosed best product for the money – the ATI Radeon HD 4890 needs to be a consideration! Market leading performance, exceptional price AND actual availability on launch day! No PR gimmicks here folks, no paper launches, no “ball and cup” games, just innovative product, with industry leading features built by gamers for gamers!

Don’t take my word for it; here are some very reputable 3rd party review sites to verify my experience!

“Editor’s choice Enthusiast Gold Award”

Mark Warner, Brent Justice, HardOCP

“Bon” Award (performance 4/5, features 4/5)

“It is hardly known if the GTX 275 will be available in volume or at the price promised”

Clubic.com (France)

“It is not a completely new design, but the Radeon HD 4890 is an exciting product nonetheless. To put it simply, the Radeon HD 4890 is the fastest, single-GPU powered graphics card AMD has ever produced. And its competitive pricing and overclocking headroom should further its appeal amongst enthusiasts.”

“HotHardware Recommended Award”

Marco Chiappetta, HotHardware.com

Now, I need to get back to gaming on this beautiful piece of engineering…until next blog!

(BTW: I respond to most all comments personally, catch me here or on Twitter)

Cheers!

Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton

1 Internal calculations show that the ATI Radeon HD 4890 delivers 1.36 TFLOPs of raw compute power. Third-party testing shows that the fastest competing GPU, the GeForce GTX 280 graphics processor, delivers 1.06 TFLOPs of raw compute power. http://www.gpureview.com/GeForce-GTX-285-card-605.html.

2 AMD product warranty does not cover damage caused by performance tuning, even when enabled using AMD software.

3 THIS UTILITY MAY DISABLE SECURITY / ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE, OR ADVERSELY AFFECT YOUR SYSTEM. REVIEW ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTATION CAREFULLY BEFORE INSTALLING

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.

March marks a bit of an inflection point in PC gaming.  This month sees three of world’s leading game publishers bringing DirectX 10.1 games to market – a sign that developers are increasingly recognizing the quality and performance benefits that can be gained through DirectX 10.1, something we’ve already seen with GSC Gameworld’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky.  Earlier this month, Ubisoft released Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. to strong reviews, and next week will see the release of EA’s BattleForge and SEGA’s Stormrise.  All three games make use of DirectX 10.1 and from our early looks, offer up either higher frames-per-second performance, better image quality or both compared to being played on DirectX 10 hardware.  Definitely check them out.

Apart from all of the new games coming out, this month also plays host to the annual Game Developer Conference, giving developers a chance to show off new previews of forthcoming games.  For AMD and a lot of other companies, Game Developer Conference, or GDC as it’s more commonly known, is a chance to tackle the pressing issues facing game makers today.  The conference takes place this week in San Francisco, and interestingly I think we’re about to see another industry inflection point, one that once-and-for-all looks to knock down proprietary hardware barriers, and focus on standards-based approaches to game development.  All game developers are looking for ways to make the most of their development resources – taking advantage of industry standards is a big part of that.  While I can’t giveaway all our news just yet, it’s safe to say that AMD will be a key contributor to that conversation this week.

As a bit of a preview, if you’ll be at GDC and you’re planning the sessions you’d like to attend, definitely make sure to get this one on your calendar for next Thursday, March 26.  Game physics once again returns to the spotlight at GDC as I’ll be joined on stage by OTOY’s Jules Urbach to explore standards-based game physics using OpenCL and ATI Stream technology, and the developer implications of server-side rendering using AMD Fusion Render Cloud.  As a bonus, AMD’s Ward Tisdale will talk about how AMD is working with developers to make games accessible and educational through our “Changing the Game” program.  Lastly, if you’re a Richard Huddy fan – and let’s face it, who isn’t? – join us at GamesBeat 2009 right around the corner on Tuesday to hear about the future of gaming hardware.  Info on the 4 p.m. session can be found here.

Between a glut of fantastic DirectX 10.1 games, and the renewed emphasis on standards-based approaches to game development, hopefully you’ll agree with me that there’s a lot more change in the air this March than just the weather.

Neal Robison is Director, ISV Relationship Management 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.

For anyone who hasn’t figured it out yet, I officially have the best job in the IT world. For those of you still unconvinced, just read this post.

Walked the floor with none other than Charlie from The Inq…

After I spent 4 solid days locked in a 10×10ft white room briefing journalists and analysts and after a grueling panel discussion @Digital Hollywood, I was finally freed to walk the show floor…

It just so happened that the infamous Charlie D notoriously known as the slayer of “Corporate Pirates”, the destroyer of “Marketing Fluff” and the wearer of “the coolest t-shirts” from The Inquirer was in the AMD press area and agreed to accompany me on my technology pilgrimage.

Set forth young men and wander…

First stop The Sands Convention Centre:

Charlie wearing a stylish pair of Vuzix 3D Glasses

We stopped by the Vuzix booth and took a look at their “3D glasses for gaming” to experience the difference between their glasses and the other 3D glasses at the show, I have to admit, playing CRYSIS with these glasses rocked…You feel like you are in the game, you are able to play games and watch movies at 16:9 widescreen aspect ratios. The model we tried was only 4ozs and had an amazing 11hr battery life. I think these products have a future with the gaming community.

Before we left The Sands, I ran into an old friend, I took a quick pic of him lazing away watching a movie in 3D.

Tarindar from Hexus.net chill’in @CES09

Next stop North Hall:

Had a quick stop @ Dolby and saw some really cool technology, they really know how to max out the audio experience, more on that in a separate blog.

Moving on we came across D-Box and saw some very cool racing simulators. I jumped in one of these and took it for a spin, wow what a heart pounding racing sim experience.

d-box D-Box and it’s "true to life" racecar cockpit

Side view of the Cockpit awesomeness

After our brush with greatness on the virtual track, we headed off to hunt down Thermaltake’s booth.

Thermaltake had an amazing amount of hardware and peripherals on display, I had to narrow down the really cool tech as they had so much, here are the two top products (IMO):

Dual slot external HDD

Thermaltake SpinQ – Mix between Art and Design

This SpinQ cooler is practically silent and it does have uniqueness about it in terms of design. Notice the shiny award behind it, the SpinQ won a covenanted innovations award for Design & Engineering, Congrats TT.

The next stop was iZ3D:

3D Monitors in all their glory

Now these guys are hardcore 3D gamers…I had no choice but to sit-down and experience MSFT FlightSim (RIP) in all its 3D glory.

Yes, your immediate assumptions is correct, I tried to crash the plane, but MSFT does not allow that anymore

Check out these guys, they have some interesting technology, both with glasses and in monitor. I had a blast playing FlightSim in 3D to be honest. No worries, these 3D monitors are regular monitors as well; just exit 3D mode and take off the cool shades and you are back in “normal” everyday business.

When we were @iZ3D there was a loud brouhaha happening right outside so Charlie and I had to check it out…to our amazement.

Welcome to Race Car Sim heaven - $40,000 of pure bliss

The guys next door were Simcraft they are the proud makers of REAL <not for us gamers> full-motion simulators. Three monitors, multiple hydraulics a lifelike roll cage and 100% adrenaline fed gaming bliss.

Neither Charlie nor I had the nerve to jump in this badboy (mostly because the line stretched on for 400ft) so we didn’t actually try it out, but based on the sheer massive amount of people in line to do a few laps I am convinced this is a winner.

Oh, did I mention they are priced around $40,000 USD and professional race car drivers practice in them?

Moving along:

Over @ the Creative booth, I ran into my old (me not him) pal Fata1ty showing off his new Creative usb headset for gaming, gotta get me one of those.

Also, I noticed a few outliers in their booth check these out:

"Wetter is Better" goes the tagline - The World's first desktop personal computer cooled by patented total liquid submersion - ReactorTM

“

This beast is a fully submerged PC, yes, fully submerged in LIQUID, patented LIQUID, but still liquid, imagine.

The TEAM ATI guys did this back in 2004 @ a LAN party in Dallas, but their chassis was a fishtank and the liquid was mineral oil, who knew it would be commercialized. Wow.

Also, in the creative booth, we saw this:

NEC CRVD-42WX Curved Display

As they say – A picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, 10,000 words

AMD Dragon Platform was everywhere

The show was a success for us @ AMD, here are some highlights in case you missed all the media during the show:

See you next year!

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.