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Posts Tagged ‘OpenCL’

AMD Hopes to Push "Open Physics"

September 30th, 2009 by Rafael Hernandez No comments

AMD_logo.jpgGaming has come a long way graphics-wise but there’s still quite a ways to go when it comes to the details that would make them truly immersive. One of those somewhat under-represented features is physics modeling which would improve realism but has so far been splintered into camps.

AMD has joined up with Pixelux Entertainment in order to develop an open source alternative physics engine that should be able to run on any OpenCL or DirectX 11 DirectCompute capable graphics card or hardware.

Interesting approach but, then again, there are only so many graphics chip makers and Intel, with Havok, and Nvidia, with PhysX, have already staked their claim.

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Categories: Graphics Cards, Software

Apple Snow Leopard Ships in September, Only a $29 Upgrade

June 8th, 2009 by Rafael Hernandez No comments

Apple Logo

It’s not that Apple doesn’t try, oh they put as much effort as humanly (and Steve Job..ily) possible but you can’t expect all of their OS X updates to be insanely feature packed and full of new programs.

Still their Snow Leopard update is on track to launch in September and should only cost OS X 10.5 users a rather reasonable $29 upgrade cost. For the money you get…well nothing of note really.

Ok they are implementing their Grand Central technology which makes all of OS X multi-core aware so that all of its processes aren’t trying to run on a single core improving overall system performance and responsiveness.

Another neat addition is OpenCL support which allows developers to create applications that can run on a computer’s graphics card (GPU) which is, in some cases, many times faster than the computer’s processor. I definite plus for graphics manipulation and video transcoding/editing.

It doesn’t have all of the feature points of previous Mac OS X updates but it sets them up for future technologies quite nicely.

Source: Apple

Categories: Apple, Software