http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microso...28606.html
Hope it's true, it would permit flexibility. And I bet you wish I was posting this on BTR, trollpoppin.

Quote:A source with knowledge of the matter gave us some early information about an "unspoken API," which we strongly infer is DirectX 12.
...
We were also told that DirectX 12 will support all of this across multiple GPU architectures, simultaneously. What this means is that Nvidia GeForce GPUs will be able to work in tandem with AMD Radeon GPUs to render the same game – the same frame, even.

This is especially interesting as it allows you to leverage the technology benefits of both of these hardware platforms if you wish to do so. If you like Nvidia's GeForce Experience software and 3D Vision, but you want to use AMD's TrueAudio and FreeSync, chances are you'll be able to do that when DirectX 12 comes around. What will likely happen is that one card will operate as the master card, while the other will be used for additional power.

What we're seeing here is that DirectX 12 is capable of aggregating graphics resources, be that compute or memory, in the most efficient way possible. Don't forget, however, that this isn't only beneficial for systems with multiple discrete desktop GPUs. Laptops with dual-graphics solutions, or systems running an APU and a GPU will be able to benefit too. DirectX 12's aggregation will allow GPUs to work together that today would be completely mismatched, possibly making technologies like SLI and CrossFire obsolete in the future.

There is a catch, however. Lots of the optimization work for the spreading of workloads is left to the developers – the game studios. The same went for older APIs, though, and DirectX 12 is intended to be much friendlier. For advanced uses it may be a bit tricky, but according to the source, implementing the SFR should be a relatively simple and painless process for most developers.

Queueing frames has been a difficult point for various studios, such that on some games SLI or CrossFire configurations don't even work. The aggregation together with SFR should solve that issue.

That's as far as we can reach into the cookie jar for now, but we expect to see and learn more at GDC.

http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/02/24/gtx-970/

Quote:Hey everyone,

Some of you are disappointed that we didn’t clearly describe the segmented memory of GeForce GTX 970 when we launched it. I can see why, so let me address it.

We invented a new memory architecture in Maxwell. This new capability was created so that reduced-configurations of Maxwell can have a larger framebuffer – i.e., so that GTX 970 is not limited to 3GB, and can have an additional 1GB.

GTX 970 is a 4GB card. However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth. This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512MB segment.

Unfortunately, we failed to communicate this internally to our marketing team, and externally to reviewers at launch.

Since then, Jonah Alben, our senior vice president of hardware engineering, provided a technical description of the design, which was captured well by several editors. Here’s one example from The Tech Report.

Instead of being excited that we invented a way to increase memory of the GTX 970 from 3GB to 4GB, some were disappointed that we didn’t better describe the segmented nature of the architecture for that last 1GB of memory.

This is understandable. But, let me be clear: Our only intention was to create the best GPU for you. We wanted GTX 970 to have 4GB of memory, as games are using more memory than ever.

The 4GB of memory on GTX 970 is used and useful to achieve the performance you are enjoying. And as ever, our engineers will continue to enhance game performance that you can regularly download using GeForce Experience.

This new feature of Maxwell should have been clearly detailed from the beginning.

We won’t let this happen again. We’ll do a better job next time.

Jen-Hsun

http://us.hardware.info/reviews/5937/gig...l-response
Fuck 'em.

Quote:People certainly weren't indifferent to our article, as websites from across the globe reported its findings. Furthermore, we received feedback from a number of Dutch webshops, who stated that they were not aware of this practice, and that they weren't exactly thrilled about them. Gigabyte did promise us an official statement, but despite the fact that two months have passed, we have yet to receive one. Gigabyte's Dutch office informed us that they're dependent on Gigabyte Taiwan for an official statement, and we have obviously yet to receive anything official from Gigabyte Taiwan.

What we did receive was a pair of emails from Gigabyte's global PR manager during Christmas. The main criticism that he provided was that the kind of throttling we observed when using revision 2.0 of the B85M-HD3 motherboard could also occur when using motherboards made by other manufacturers, and that we were thus providing a biased report because we failed to consider other manufacturers' products.

Based on this response, and on other statements that Gigabyte Taiwan sent to other websites, it appears our primary argument has not been understood. In our article, we do not fault Gigabyte for producing a motherboard that throttles due to overheating. However, we do fault them for the fact that they're selling significantly altered products that offer less functionality and reduced quality, while having the exact same product codes / bar codes. We merely included the "throttle test" to demonstrate that the GA-B85M-HD3 revision 2.0 indeed substantially differs from revision 1.0, seeing as how the two boards clearly exhibit different behaviour in our test.

We have however taken steps to verify Gigabyte's implicit accusation of other motherboard manufacturers also making budget boards that throttle when having to provide power to a heavily loaded Core i7 processor: we are currently in the process of completing a test in which we compare budget H81 motherboards made by the four big brands with regard to this phenomenon. That said, we would again like to stress that this was not the focus of the original article, and that this does not diminish the severity of substantially changing the attributes of a product during its lifespan.
...
Since Gigabyte remains unwilling to comment on the situation, even after many reminders from our side, it is difficult to consider this case as definitely closed. The fact that a number of significantly changed products have been given a new name and new codes is certainly a positive thing. At the same time, however, the act of producing new revisions continues, and it remains unclear whether Gigabyte will in future once again significantly change existing boards in a negative fashion without adjusting their product codes.

With Gigabyte being unable or unwilling to clarify the situation, there's only one piece of advice we can give to consumers. If you're looking to purchase a Gigabyte motherboard – because of a review on Hardware.Info or another site, for example – you should before ordering always visit Gigabyte's website and verify whether new revisions have been released in the meantime. If so, you should use the photos to try and determine whether any significant changes were made. If you find that components have been removed or adjusted, but are unclear on what these changes exactly entail, you should contact Gigabyte and ask them to explicitly state what has been changed. Moreover, if you're going to order a product, you should first contact the shop where you're planning on purchasing the product, and ask them to check what revision they have in their warehouse and are going to send to you. While this is a fair amount of work, it is also for the time being the only way to ensure that you'll receive a motherboard that is identical to the motherboard on which you've read a review.

We will of course keep an eye on things. Should you, or somebody you know, happen to encounter a new revision that has identical codes but features substantial alterations, be they positive or negative, we would love to hear about it. We secretly hope that Gigabyte has, despite the lack of a formal response, learned from the resulting commotion, and will henceforth only sell minor revision and improvements under the same product code.

http://www.timecube.com/
Paranoid schizophrenia at its finest.

http://store.steampowered.com/universe/
SteamVR, Steam Controller, but the last one's got my attention. "Living room devices"? Could these be the $99 Steam streaming boxes Valve was pondering a while ago? If so, the regular Steam Machine OEMs just got shafted, as the primary advantage of their boxes, game streaming, just got yanked out of their hands.

http://vr-zone.com/articles/amd-fx-8800p...87542.html
Well, that rumor was true after all.

Quote:The 3DMark benchmark doesn’t reveal all the details about the APU but does confirm that the AMD FX-8800P will have 12 Compute Cores. These could include 4 x86 cores based on the AMD Excavator architecture and 8GCN Compute units. We also notice that the stock core clock has been reported to be 1,700MHz while the maximum turbo clock speed is reported to be 2,100MHz. It also appears to be a dual-core part with four threads. The benchmark test was taken on the AMD Gardenia platform, an internal code for the Carrizo test board. The GPU has been listed as Radeon R7 graphics with 1GB of video memory.

2-22-2015

Should you turn your computer off at night?



The idea that you should avoid turning your computer off at night is pretty popular: After all, frequent shutdowns and start ups are going to have an impact on the components and wear them out faster. Aren’t they? On the other hand, you’d imagine having your computer running all the time is going to contribute to wear and tear as well, wouldn’t you?


So what’s the deal? Should you turn it off or leave it on?

“If you use your computer more than once a day, leave it on at least all day”

“If you use it in the morning and at night, you can leave it on overnight as well. If you use your computer for only a few hours once a day, or less often, turn it off when you are done.”

2-20-2015

NASCAR suspends Kurt Busch after domestic violence details

NASCAR suspended Kurt Busch indefinitely Friday after a judge said the former champion almost surely choked and beat a former girlfriend last fall and there was a ''substantial likelihood'' of more domestic violence from him in the future.

In a stunning move two days before the season-opening Daytona 500, NASCAR said Busch would not be allowed to participate in any series activities until further notice given the ''serious nature of the findings and conclusions'' made by a Delaware judge involving the driver known as ''The Outlaw.''

Busch attorney Rusty Hardin said the driver will appeal

''We assure everyone, including NASCAR, that this action against Mr. Busch will turn out to be a travesty of justice, apparent to all, as this story continues to unfold,'' Hardin said in a statement. ''It is important for everyone to remember that the Commissioner's report has to do with a civil, family law matter and no criminal charges have been filed against Mr. Busch.

''We ask everyone's patience as this case continues in the court of law and are confident that when the truth is known Mr. Busch will be fully vindicated and back in the driver's seat.''

Busch becomes the first driver suspended by NASCAR for domestic violence.

Travis Kvapil, who qualified second for Friday night's Truck Series race, was arrested and charged with assault of his wife in 2013. NASCAR took no action against Kvapil.

In a 25-page opinion explaining why he issued the no-contact order this week, Family Court Commissioner David Jones concluded that it was more likely than not that Busch abused Patricia Driscoll by ''manually strangling'' her and smashing her head into a wall inside his motorhome at Dover International Speedway last September.

The 36-year-old Busch has denied the alleged assault, which is the subject of a separate criminal investigation, but the judge said Driscoll's version of the incident was more credible than Busch's.

Driscoll did not file charges until November, and the Delaware attorney general has not decided if Busch will be charged.

But Driscoll sought a no-contact order, and the couple spent four days over December and January in a Delaware court presenting their sides. At one point, he accused of her of being a trained assassin.


Jones noted that Driscoll presented false testimony that conflicted with that of a chaplain who saw her immediately after the alleged assault and said he didn't see any marks or bruises on her. Jones nevertheless said he didn't believe Driscoll's false testimony amounted to perjury or intentional falsehood.

The judge concluded that Busch did not appear to be a prototypical batterer who uses violence to subjugate or control, but that the incident instead was most likely a ''situational'' event in which Busch was unable to cope and to control his tendency to act out violently in response to stress and frustration, causing him to ''snap.''

At the same time, however, Jones said he believes there's real possibility that Busch will lash out again. Jones added that because Busch has a propensity to lose control in response to disappointing or frustrating situations involving racing and that those who love him are likely to be around him at those times ''there is a substantial likelihood of acts of domestic violence by respondent against future intimate partners.''

Busch's attorneys filed a motion Thursday asking Jones to re-open the hearing so that they can present testimony from three acquaintances of Driscoll who they say were previously reluctant to get involved but have now come forward to contradict statements Driscoll has made about her relationship with Busch.

2-20-2015

Intel's Challenge to NVIDIA Is Coming This Year

Graphics chip specialist NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA  ) has essentially run away with the high-performance-computing accelerator market. The company says its Tesla GPUs accounted for 85% of the market as of the middle of 2013, with Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC  ) competing Xeon Phi product line barely registering.

Knights Landing will be different than its predecessor in three important ways.

First, it will be far more powerful. Knights Corner could do about one teraflop, or 1 trillion floating point operations per second, at double precision, while Knights Landing triples this performance to three teraflops. This puts Knights Landing in line with the performance of NVIDIA's most powerful Tesla GPU, the K80.

Second, Knights Landing will be available as both an add-on card and a stand-alone processor. The stand-alone version allows Knights Landing to act as the main processor, although since it will be composed of dozens of low-power Atom cores, single-thread performance will be poor. A likely configuration, then, will be a powerful Intel Xeon server CPU coupled with a Knights Landing processor.

This configuration comes with one important advantage compared to add-on boards. NVIDIA's GPUs need to communicate with the CPU, sending data back and forth between main memory and video memory, and it must do this over the PCI-E bus. This creates a potential bottleneck in the system, something the stand-alone Knights Landing avoids.


NVIDIA also has a solution to the issue of sending data back and forth between the CPU and the GPU. The company has developed a technology called NVLink, which allows the processors to exchange data five to 12 times faster than PCI-E, and it is already set to be used in two new supercomputers being built by the U.S. Department of Energy. This reduces the advantage the stand-alone Knights Landing has over NVIDIA's GPUs.

Third, Intel manufactures its own chips, and Knights Landing will be built on its 14-nanometer process. NVIDIA relies on third-party foundries, and currently all of its products are stuck at 28nm. Apple and other high-volume foundry customers took all the available 20nm capacity last year, and it's unclear exactly when NVIDIA will issue any products below 28nm.

This gives Intel an important advantage that NVIDIA can't match. Knights Hill, the successor to Knights Landing expected in 2017 at the earliest, will be built on Intel's upcoming 10nm process. What node NVIDIA will be on at that point is an open question.

Intel has far more resources than NVIDIA, and if it throws enough money into the effort it's hard to imagine the company not eventually winning a significant chunk of the market, especially considering its manufacturing advantage. The main question is whether the opportunity is large enough, relative to Intel's size, to warrant this effort.

In the end, the market might grow quickly enough to enable NVIDIA and Intel to both succeed. But if Intel's Knights Landing doesn't put up a much better showing than its previous efforts, the company may need to rethink its strategy.

2-20-2015



How to find out if Superfish infected your computer – and what to do about it


If you follow anything having to do with tech on the Internet, you have undoubtedly read something about Superfish in the past 24 hours. In a nutshell, Lenovo sold tons of computers with software called Superfish Visual Discovery pre-installed. Lenovo has been selling computers preloaded with Superfish for the past two years, and the software is supposed to help serve alternative, image-heavy ads in Google search results.

As it turns out, however, Superfish is a pretty frightening piece of adware

LastPass went beyond simply explaining what Superfish is, and the company created a tool that will instantly inform you if your computer is infected with Superfish.


It couldn’t be easier to use. Simply visit this page on the LastPass website and you’ll see a message at the top of the screen informing you of whether or not your computer is infected.

If you see this message, you’re good to go:



If you see a message saying Superfish is running on your computer, it’s relatively easy to remove.


Here are the removal instructions, also courtesy of LastPass:
If you’re affected by Superfish, you must first uninstall the program:

1. Click the Windows Start button
   
2. Search uninstall program
   
3. Launch uninstall program
   
4. Right-click on Superfish Inc VisualDiscovery and select Uninstall
   
5. If prompted for administrator password, enter or provide confirmation
   

1. Click the Windows Start button
   
2. Type certmgr.msc into the Search box
   
3. Click the certmgr.msc Program to launch it
   
4. If prompted for administrator password, enter the password or provide confirmation
   
5. Click on Trusted Root Certification Authorities
   
6. Open Certificates
   
7. Look for certificates mentioning Superfish Inc.
   
8. Right-click on any Superfish Inc certificates and delete
   
9. Restart your browser and return to this page to see you are safe