Making Love to Webkit

I just viewed Steven Wittens Acko.net and it is just awesome. You have to click here, to see the amazing stuff done with CSS 3D on the website. Don’t forget to click on the Load Scene, a little down in the post and then using the mouse to drag the scene. Classic Stuff!!

The site has used mrdoob’s JavaScript 3D library that also has some amazing examples to look at. It is very interesting to see how 3D in JavaScript is coming along in Webkit. People have been making Love to Webkit and it all looks so aesthetically pleasing and romantic…

WebGL & Hardware Acceleration in Different Browsers

There is a new race these days in the world of web browsers and it is how fast they can render graphics. As more and more people are trying to make web browsers as the rich media client, we see that hardware acceleration in browsers is getting the next point of race among the web browsers. If JavaScript benchmarking wasn’t enough, most new benchmarks these days are looking towards at WebGL (The JavaScript for 3D) and hardware acceleration in browsers.

There aren’t too many games out there yet, that use the WebGL extensions and so I believe this is another race from the browsers that isn’t about better user experience but more to win points in the benchmarks. Nevertheless, since the worst fairing browser IE9 has improved on the performance of WebGL and uses your computer’s graphics card to accelerate graphics in browsers, it is the every alternate browser’s moral responsibility of sorts to give you enhanced performance. This means that every other browser vendor will now tell you to update your graphics drivers, to prevent crashing of your browser and improve performance. While updating graphics drivers is not what the average computer user would do, the browser manufacturers will blame that crash on the graphics driver.

Here are some numbers comparing browsers in simple WebGL benchmark on a Windows 7 with Intel 2.5Ghz i5 and 4GB of RAM:

Browser (version/platform)	Frames per second (higher is better)
Firefox 3.6.15	6 FPS
Opera 11.01	14 FPS
Chrome 10.0.648.127	12 FPS
Firefox 4 Beta 12	60+ FPS

All browsers in the list are released stable versions, other than Firefox 4 which enables hardware acceleration only version 4 of their browser, but is still unreleased. Clearly, Firefox is very fast and possibly the ones who are running ahead in optimizations of WebGL. Nonetheless, other browsers (Opera 11.50, Chrome 11 and IE9) are also competitively close. I wanted to highlight really how fast things can get with some hardware acceleration.

Intel Larrabee to Support Both DirectX and OpenGL

Intel has been showing presentations on Larrabee for sometime now, but hasn’t openly talked about what instructions it will understand, clock speeds or even a hard launch date. For people who do not know, Larrabee is Intel’s attempt to integrate GPU with CPU and create GPGPU (General Purpose GPU) or computing through the use of graphics processing units. Intel today made it clear at Siggraph 2008 that Larrabee will support both DirectX and OpenGL for graphics processing.

Intel already has the highest market share in the GPU world, thanks to integrated graphics processors (IGP) in its chipset's sold with motherboards. But due to the dismal performance over the years of these IGP chipsets, no one ever considers these capable enough for mainstream gaming. Benchmarks have shown time and again that even the most basic discrete graphic cards can perform better than IGPs. With Larrabee, Intel has intentions to bring more computing/graphics power with lesser power requirements.

Larry Seiler, senior engineer in Intel's Visual Computing Group said that, Larrabee's consists of cores derived from Pentium processors and have added multithreading and 64-bit instructions. Each core consists of 256kb L2 cache and the first release of Larrabee will have 8 to 48 cores depending on the market segment. Larrabee also has advanced multi-core capabilities and uses a 1024 bits-wide, bi-directional ring network for fast, low latency communication between the cores.

The programming paradigm doesn’t change with Larrabee because it uses the same x86 instructions used by Intel’s current generation microprocessors. Also with DirectX and OpenGL support inside Larrabee it confirms that current generation games will also work fine. But without any mention of the performance improvement in graphics capabilities over current generation IGPs, I still have doubts whether Intel is actually competing with its own processors or with the GPU vendors like ATI (now AMD) and  NVidia. Larrabee does look solid on paper, but as we know papers do create a lot more hype than they can perform and Intel marketing does know how to play that game.

AMD also has been working on Fusion processor which will integrate AMD CPUs and ATI GPUs into one chip. NVidia on the other hand has create a new programming paradigm with CuDA, which tries to enable normal computer processing to NVidia’s GPU. Whichever company wins this GPGPU battle, we would like to see all of them fight on the same grounds and support existing standards. Today’s Larrabee announcement confirms that both the DirectX and OpenGL standards are followed and will allow current breed of games to run on the Larrabee.

DirectX 11 Coming This Month

Whatever ATI thought as an advantage, when shipping DirectX 10.1 in 48xx generation of graphic cards will be short-lived. Microsoft will be announcing DirectX 11 in about 2 weeks at Gamefest 2008. The Gamefest conference will be held on 22nd-23rd of July, 2008 in Seattle where Microsoft plans to officially launch DirectX 11.

DirectX 11 has lots of new features and is a much more important update to DirectX than 10.1. NVidia has announced that it will skip DirectX 10.1 and will directly ship its next generation with DirectX 11 support. DirectX 11 brings Shader Model 5.0 (SM5), which has been closely developed with GPU manufacturers. NVidia has been having the SM5 profile in the Nvidia SDK for sometime now, but didn’t have any new functionality. Probably the Microsoft announcement is what Nvidia has been waiting for. Also another eagerly awaited feature in DirectX 11 is Tessellation/Displacement, which means that converting displacement map to object mesh is lot more faster and less intensive. There are also hopes that something for general purpose GPU computing (GPGPU) may be added in the DirectX11 API, but nothing is yet known. Multithreading Rendering and Compute Shaders are definitely there in the DirectX 11 API.

DirectX11 should also be a major programming step for game developers because DirectX 11 will be the base for the next-generation XBox console that Microsoft promised to release sometime next year. A lot research has been put into DirectX 11 and next-gen XBox already, and we can expect some release date for Microsoft’s next-gen console during Gamefest 2008.

AMD Brings Back All-In-Wonder

AMD has released a press announcement that it Expands The Ultimate Visual Experience™ combining exceptional HD Graphics, HDTV, and HD Video for PCs. This   actually means that AMD is going to bring back the good ‘ol TV Tuner + graphics card that ATI used to sell under the All-In-Wonder line of products. The new ATI All-In-Wonder card is a PCI-Express 2.0, has the HD3650 GPU and Theater 650 Pro TV Tuner.

After AMD had stopped selling these products, with the last launch in Jan 2006, it does come as a surprise to a lot of people. The big advertisement with this launch is that AMD is making here is that it is full HD and can record in full HD. It can playback BlueRay and HD content at 1080p.

From the press release:

ATI All-in-Wonder HD prepares you for brilliant TV, sharp images and smooth playback on a wide variety of HDTVs and displays. With support for Microsoft DirectX® 10.1, gamers can play the top HD games with life-like 3D graphics, stunning realism, and great shading effects. Full support for PCI Express 2.0 technology allows for twice the throughput of current PCI Express 1.0 cards, which means gamers will be ready for demanding graphic applications.

The price of the product is going to be around $199 and sounds like a really good deal and value-for-money. The full spec-sheet can be found here. The plans are to hit the streets by July end.

AMD Working on Intel’s Physics Havok

AMD and Intel are rarely to be found in friendly talk. But this time, AMD is in talks with Intel to integrate “Havok FX” physics in its ATI graphics chips which is meant to improve realism in games and physics calculations in scientific applications. Intel last year acquired physics technology company Havok, and AMD plans to use its API inside GPUs.

AMD, like Intel has plans to have integrated CPU+GPU processors, but plans to use Havok physics in discrete graphics. The main competitor in the physics processing technology is Ageia, which was acquired by Nvidia. With two different technologies for physics, AMD decision to use Havok has important implications for game developers as well as scientific application developers. Nvidia has been pushing Ageia’s Physx technology to game developers and AMD was starting to feel lost. Today’s discussion about AMD using Havok gives AMD an advantage and its called Intel marketing. Intel will be using Havok inside its CPU+GPU Larabee and developers will be magically tilted towards using Havok because of Intel’s large market share.

The official announcement about how much AMD has to give Intel for the technology is still not out, but surely good money will change hand. Physics will definitely play an important role in the future of GPUs, either in games or general purpose computing. Along with ray-tracing, Intel is betting a lot on physics for the future of advanced computing and HPC. AMD has lots of room to maneuver, since it can switch between GPUs and CPUs with good ease. Lets wait and see how everything falls into place!!

Control Your Computer From the Brain at $159

OCZ had recently shown the NIA (Neural Impulse Actuator) and had told that they have started mass production for the device. The NIA is a special device which EEG (electroencephalograph) signals into keystrokes and simulates the functioning of a mouse. Upon proper configuration, the NIA will allow users to control PC games without the use of a keyboard and minimal use of a mouse.

The TGDaily reports that the NIA may be available in the US for $159 and it seems a very good price to pay for a niche and futuristic device like this. The NIA isn't the first device to use brain sensing. Another device known as the Emotiv's EPOC also has similar functionality, but uses a different technology. The EPOC can understand facial expressions and detect congnitive actions like pushing, pulling etc.

The NIA is definitely going to change the experience of playing games just like the Wii did with its motion controller. But the motion controller is not even half as futuristic as the NIA. Producing enough of these devices will be challenge for OCZ in the coming months, just like Nintendo has with producing Wii. Although the NIA is a little expensive for an input device, its lot more than an input device...

Download drivers to make Asus EEE PC on 1024x768

Anyone who has used the Asus EEE PC will know that the 7" screen does get small at times. During those times, you wish you had a larger screen or sometimes you want to increase the screen resolution. The default resolution on the EEE is very small and would be great to have it increased to 1024x768. I had seen videos on youtube showing off the higher resolution, but couldn't find how to do it.

Today I found a driver which is able to increase the resolution to 1024x768. Its a Win XP driver and will scale 800×600 and 1024×768 down to the EEE PC’s native resolution. The site also specifies for the newbie how to install the driver and get the higher resolution running.

You can download the drivers here.

*Disclaimer* If your Eee breaks for some reason its not my fault TRY AND YOUR OWN RISK

Yahoo Messenger For Vista: Download Preview

When Yahoo Messenger 9 was released last month, I was a little disappointed. I had seen the previous videos about the special yahoo messenger for vista. Since another "normal" version of Yahoo Messenger was released before the Vista one, I thought Yahoo has forgotten about the Vista-special version of its messenger. But Yahoo today released a preview version of its Yahoo Messenger for Vista.

The Yahoo Messenger for Vista does not have all the features that are part of the normal yahoo messenger since its only a preview. The highly anticipated voice chat, video sharing and file sharing (using Microsoft's Silverlight) seems to be missing from this version, which was demo'd at the CES. Also, its taken Yahoo way too long to release even this half-baked version.

The Yahoo Messenger for Vista is actually meant to showcase the bling-bling using the Vista specific graphic capabilities as well as other Vista components like Sidebar. A lot of people have been complaining about the slow performance of his version. Long Zheng says that Vista SP1 might improve the performance of the WPF that this version uses.

You can read more about it at the Yahoo Messenger Blog.

Want To Know What Celeb You Look Like??

Found this really interesting website, thanks to the complimentary LINQ from the Inq. You can go the MyHeritage Face Recognition website and upload a closeup photo of yours. It'll run some complex face recognition program and match your face to the faces of celebrities that are present in their database. After the search is complete, it creates a collage of celebrity faces that are your look-alikes!!

Its a flash based interface that they have built and it looks pretty slick. But you can't say the same about the accuracy of the face recognition. We all know that face recognition is a complex thing to do, but how about me looking like Winona Ryder or Halle Berry for accuracy!! :)) Even the 66% match with Jesse Bradford was flattering that anything else!

 

 

To test the accuracy I tried an image of I also tried an image of Salma Hayek and Elisha Cuthbert. The Salma Hayek face detection said, that Salma Hayek looks like Amisha Patel, the Indian actress - a fact I've been saying for sometime now!! And the Elisha Cuthbert detection is an awesome one... The picture I upload didn't quite look like Elish Cuthbert to me (but actually the photo is of hers) and the app found her!!

Other than the celeb face recognition there is also a genealogy on their website which is also pretty interesting.

Tell me who you look like and how accurately it seems to find you?? and which celeb do you look like??

Crysis Leaked!! Tread With Caution

The word has spread like wild fire on the internet that the highly anticipated game, Crysis has been leaked on to the torrent sites. Crysis is probably "the game" to be played this year and everyone have been sitting waiting for the game. And finally when there was only a week left, some notorious guys have leaked it off to the internet. This is really bad news for EA, since people who even had intentions to buy the original, won't be able to hold their patience anymore and download the game.

But I would suggest some caution to all the super-excited gamers, not to download any torrent with the alphabets C, R, Y, S, I, S. They should probably look at comments and also think if its the final version or some lame beta/alpha testers had received. And if EA has the final version, they should package it quickly, work night-out and send it to the shops by tomorrow. That would mean, the people who don't want to download 6GB, would go to the shops and get it first!!

Also, with the cracks not out yet, you never know who bundles the Trojan or Virus with the crack. Why do you as gamers expect the malicious crackers to crack his head without cracking your computer first!!?? So, don't rush mate.. Take your time and get the real package on the shelves... I mean who wouldn't want the manual for this all-time collectible ;-)

Update (18:00hrs GMT): Since, I talked about Dx10, the screenshots here are some food for thought comparing Dx10 Vs Dx9... I'm wondering if I like the Dx9 output??

Supercomputer On A Graphics Card (1 TFlops)

Not so long ago, who would have thought that a desktop computer would be able to process "trillion floating point operations per second (TeraFlops or TFlops). Most people not up-to-date with technology would say its impossible for a normal desktop computer to do it, but it isn't anymore!! Really..and I'm not marketing for any company...

Today AMD announced the FireStream 9170, a General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) running at 775Mhz and performs 497 GFlops. That's about 0.5 TFlops!! The FireStream is based on the RV670 chip and has 320 double-precision floating-point (FP) units. The RV670 will also be available in desktop variants for gamers and will be known as the HD 3850 and 3870 as mentioned by me here.

But it is still just 0.5TFlops... right?? Yes, but in about a few months time, AMD (actually ATI) will be releasing R680 which will have 2 of these chips working together. Add a few more clocks to the chip and we'll have a chip that can perform 1TFlops!! Aint that great??

Consider this: The world's fastest supercomputer i.e. IBM's BluGene/L scores 280.6 TFlops and costs a few billion dollars to build whereas one GPGPU will cost some thousand dollars. Do the math and you'll know its some million times cheaper with the GPGPU!! But the entire comparison I did is comparing apple to oranges. And the reason is because BlueGene/L uses general purpose CPUs which are easily programmed, whereas GPUs require special programming. I don't say that programming GPU is tough, it's just that we are habituated to program CPUs and hence we currently don't have the same type of tools that are used to program CPUs. But as the tools come up and mature GPGPUs are going to be the next milestone in supercomputing.

Intel also about a year back showed a 80 core processor do some networking to process as much as 1.81TFlops at 5.7Ghz... But its still got a lot more tweaking to do and the yield I think won't be very good at the moment!!

All of this means that in the very near future, by the use of GPGPUs, each one of us may be having a supercomputer built into our computers. But where is the work that these fast mean machines would be doing??

Gamers should be less selfish: Buy the 3xxx series

DirectX 10 Cards That Will Be Cooler

Finally I think we will have DirectX 10 cards worth your money... DirectX 10 is widely publicized to be the best thing that happened to gaming since "PacMan". I really don't see many games on the shelf that use only Dx10. Nor did we want the cards!! Yet it's been months that ATI & Nvidia have been selling Dx10 cards with the 2xxx series and 8xxx series respectively.

Coming on 14th Nov (Apparently Children's Day in India), we have the next-gen Dx10 cards launched by ATI also known as the 3xxx series (RV670). The first cards will be called the 3850 & 3870. These cards aren't apparently any faster compared to previous Dx10 cards. But what's special about these cards is that it'll be cooler and taking less power compared to both the 8800 and the 2900.

When the 8800 and the 2900 were released, I didn't buy them because of the high power required by these cards. Even when not under heavy usage these cards easily suck in close to 200W power and close to 300W on load. That much power requirement is just plain insane and should have been banned by government agencies considering the Global Warming Issue..

The 3xxx series doesn't make the power requirement lower by much, but it still promises atleast 50W lower than the current cards. I hope gamers realize they are being overly selfish by buying these power sucking monsters and buy something less power hungry. We are going less power hungry in processors, but when do we expect such a trend with graphic cards?? [Fusion?? Larabee??]

Unreal Tournament III Demo Leaked & Benchmarked

The much anticipated and highly delayed game Unreal Tournament 2007, now called Unreal Tournament III had a demo which was finally leaked and people got to play it... Not just play it, but the guys from PCPerspective benchmarked it as well!!

Just for history sakes, the game was showed at E3 2004 by the publisher's Epic Games. Later it was again demo'd at E3 2005. Most people expected that the game would be released sometime before the end of 2006, but it's still not out. part of the delay can be attributed to the new Unreal III Engine, which is used by the game. The Unreal III Engine is said to have the best pixel rendering and it seems there will be many more hit games using this engine.

The leaked downloads seem to be extremely slow.. Good luck to all you eager fellas!!