Graphics

On Friday, Intel engineers are detailing the inner workings of the company's first graphics chip in over a decade at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco--sending a signal to the game industry that the world's largest chipmaker intends to be a player.

During a conference call that served as a preview to the GDC sessions, Tom Forsyth, a software and hardware architect at Intel working on the Larrabee graphics chip project, discussed the design of Larrabee, a chip aimed squarely at Nvidia and at Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit.

And Nvidia and AMD will no doubt be … Read more

Nvidia was hit by a Standard & Poor's ratings downgrade Wednesday, according to a Dow Jones report, adding to the graphics chipmaker's woes.

Standard & Poor's ratings services ratcheted down its outlook on Nvidia from positive to stable, according to Dow Jones. S&P cited concerns about the graphics chipmaker's sinking revenue and profitability.

The ratings agency maintains a junk-level BB- grade on the company, and S&P noted that revenues from Nvidia's recent efforts to expand into cell phones, handheld devices, and supercomputer applications is small, according to Dow Jones. Nvidia also … Read more

Behind the release this week of Intel graphics software looms Larrabee, Intel's future graphics chip.

First, the news. Intel announced the release of Intel Graphics Performance Analyzers (GPA), a suite of software tools that enables PC game developers to analyze and optimize game performance on Intel Integrated Graphics. This is part of the Visual Adrenaline program, launched at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco in August, which provides tools, resources and information for game developers, artists, and animators, according to Intel.

But let's be clear about one thing: not a lot of people in gaming circles are … Read more

I got an e-mail from the folks over at O'Reilly Media mentioning that keynotes and other presentations from the company's ETech 2009 conference, held earlier this month, were now online at the ETech 2009 site. I missed that show, but I was interested in one of the keynotes, so I surfed on over to take a look.

The keynote I was looking for was indeed online: Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO of Pixel Qi and formerly CTO of the One Laptop Per Child organization, talking about "Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing." You can watch a video of the presentation … Read more

Nvidia announced that its PhysX technology is now available to Wii developers. This follows a similar announcement Wednesday, when Nvidia said it has become a PhysX tools and middleware provider for Sony's PlayStation 3.

In Thursday's Nintendo-related announcement, Nvidia said it has been approved as a third-party tools solution provider for the Wii console. As a result, Nvidia's PhysX technology software development kit (SDK) is now available to registered Wii developers, the graphics chip supplier said.

Nvidia's PhysX technology, based on the laws of physics, enables game objects to respond dynamically to physical events in a … Read more

ATI graphics drivers will now be delivered in one tidy package for both Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Advanced Micro Devices said Wednesday that it has released Catalyst 9.3, a set of new graphics drivers that constitute a "unified" driver installation package, with support for both Windows Vista and Windows 7.

One of the biggest changes for Windows 7 is support for the Windows Display Driver Model 1.1, an update from WDDM 1.0 used in Vista, according to Andrew Dodd, a software product manager at ATI. "(Catalyst 9.3) is one single binary and … Read more

Updated on March 18 at 8:00 p.m. PST with additional information throughout.

Nvidia on Tuesday said it has signed a license agreement with Sony to provide PhysX technology for the PlayStation 3, whereby Nvidia becomes the official tools and middleware provider for Sony PS3.

Nvidia's PhysX technology--based on the laws of physics--enables game objects to respond in a realistic way to physical events. More conventional technology uses a canned response, in which the same response is repeated over and over.

For example, a window breaks, or a person falls the same way every time. In a … Read more

Updated at 1:20 p.m. PDT with correction about the extent to which the Nvision conference is being scaled back.

Nvidia paid out $43.6 million to cover costs associated with graphics chip defects in its 2009 fiscal year, and in a separate development, a spokesman said Monday the company has no plans this year to hold the large-scale Nvision conference that it hosted last year.

In a Form 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Nvidia said it paid $43.6 million in fiscal year 2009 "in deductions towards warranty accrual associated with incremental repair and … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices worries that lingering issues--both real and speculative--with Apple MacBooks are giving laptop graphics a black eye.

In a phone interview Tuesday, Stan Ossias, director of marketing, mobile graphics, at AMD, began by asserting that my March 11 post "overstated" the case about heat and the instability of graphics processors in laptops and that some readers may interpret heat issues too broadly.

"In the case of Apple's product, I don't know what happened with Nvidia's GPU but we'd like to avoid having the negative aspects taint the entire industry," he … Read more