Blog - July, 2009 - Page 2

The death of Elpida Hypers

Posted on 13th Jul 2009 at 12:42 by Richard Swinburne with 3 comments

The buzz in extreme overclocking circles recently has been about DDR3 memory featuring Elipda Hyper ICs coming to an early death. In response to this, several companies have stopped selling very high frequency and/or very low latency DDR3 products built with these ICs.

Games I have made

Posted on 9th Jul 2009 at 11:31 by Joe Martin with 7 comments

I once heard that most music journalists are generally people who got into the business because they lacked the drive or ability to actually be a musician themselves. Likewise, I’ve heard it said that games journalists are probably people who lack the drive to actually make their own games.

For me, that’s pretty true and it’s bred within me a massive respect for game developers, because making computer games is damned difficult. Not only are there the technical issues of knowing how to code and how to actually make the game, there’s the management issues too. You have to know what makes a game good and, if you’re working as part of a team, you have to be able to keep a group of people focused on a single cohesive vision. You need a logical mind that knows how systems should function and what redundancies need to be built in for every eventuality.

Over the years I’ve tried my hand at making a number of different games, starting when I got a copy of AMOS for the Amiga 500+ we had at home and I started tweaking the example games that came with it. I didn’t get far, but I got a basic understanding.

I'm a GPGPU snob when it comes to video transcoding

Posted on 8th Jul 2009 at 10:08 by Richard Swinburne with 13 comments

If it ain't hundreds of frames per second, I don't want to know.

If I'm forced to use a CPU, it feeeeeeels painfully slow.

Everyday I get the train into London, and with the luxury of a 16GB iPod touch I usually watch an episode of something on the way in. The downside is that this usually requires transcoding video from a DVD or other source so that it works on the iPod.

Since my PC houses a still very capable GeForce 8800 Ultra, I decided it'd be worth having another look at Badaboom, the CUDA compatible GPGPU video transcoder.

It's come a long way since we first saw it and for the most part it works great - a 30 minute episode of animation or TV takes 3-5 minutes to do in the morning. By the time I'm out the shower it's ready to zip to the iPod and I'm out the door.

Tags badaboom, cuda, gpgpu, ipod, nvidia, opencl

When a patch broke my favourite game

Posted on 7th Jul 2009 at 11:31 by Harry Butler with 22 comments

Back in April I reviewed Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor and it pained me to give the game such a negative review. You see Company of Heroes is one of my all time favourite games, and up until the release of Tales of Valor I played it religiously, taking to the fields of Europe for 1 vs1 auto matches on a nightly basis, learning from my mistakes and watching Shoutcasts of better players to improve my skills. Make no mistake, I absolutely adore this game. And the the developers broke it.

iPhone 3GS – the Apple tastes sweet

Posted on 6th Jul 2009 at 10:26 by Antony Leather with 33 comments

I blogged recently about the fact that while I hate Apple, I was considering acquiring the new iPhone 3GS. The reasons for this was that I wanted something a bit lighter and easier to use than my HTC TyTN II which sported Windows Mobile 6.1. Well, I’ve now owned a 3GS for just over a week and in short, it’s everything I wanted and more.

Games I Own: Final Fantasy VII

Posted on 3rd Jul 2009 at 14:44 by Mark Mackay with 49 comments

Anyone who read the Tales of Vesperia review recently will know that I felt the game played a lot of like JRPG legend Final Fantasy VII. It would be true to say many of the Final Fantasy games since VII played a lot like it also, but I mentioned VII because it's the one most people have had a 99+ hour love affair with.

Lynnfield has arrived

Posted on 2nd Jul 2009 at 16:52 by James Gorbold with 16 comments

We just thought you’d like to know that a pair of Lynnfield CPUs arrived in the office today. Lynnfield is the codename for the second generation Nehalem-architecture CPUs that will replace the Core 2 later this year (for more on its actual retail branding, you can read our recent news story).

Lynnfield CPUs differ from current Core i7 CPUs such as the i7-975 in that they have four physical cores, but only the top two models will have logical Hyper-Threaded cores - lower spec Lynnfields will not support Hyper-Threading at all. In addition Lynnfield has a dual-channel DDR3 integrated memory controller instead of supporting triple-channel DDR3. As a result of these changes, Lynnfield CPUs will ship with LGA1156 packaging, so will not work in existing LGA1366 Core i7 or LGA775 Core 2 motherboards.

Bing will beat Google

Posted on 1st Jul 2009 at 11:47 by Clive Webster with 29 comments

Alex wrote an interesting blog post about Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, last week. The gist of it was that Google is so successful that competing against it with a similar product isn't going to work - and as a result, his idea was that searching social sites such as Facebook and Twitter is probably the biggest threat to Google.

I feel that’s slightly missing the point. Bing, after all, is the default search engine for Internet Explorer, which is the default browser of the interweb, therefore as long as Bing just works and is good enough (in the same way that Google is now) no-one will see a need to switch. Far from Microsoft needing to up its game to beat the services of Google, it’s Google that needs to provide a compelling reason to switch the search engine of IE’s search bar from Bing to Google.

bit-tech.net

The death of Elpida Hypers

Games I have made

I'm a GPGPU snob when it comes to video transcoding

When a patch broke my favourite game

iPhone 3GS – the Apple tastes sweet

Games I Own: Final Fantasy VII

Lynnfield has arrived

Bing will beat Google

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