Jon Peddie Reviews

Adobe apps — works in progress

2011-12-11T20:09:06Z

Adobe has come to the market with a raft of new apps for the tablet. They are useful to varying degrees but they all cost $9.99. Now, $9.99 is not a lot of money but it is a little high for an app and Adobe’s new apps vary quite a bit when it comes to usefulness and features. The app list looks like this:

Photoshop Touch—a scaled down version of Photoshop optimized for touch and designed primarily for content creation.
Collage—a brainstorming tool that lets people gather visual elements together on a work board to try out concepts.
Kuler—a color picking tool that lets you combine colors whether they’re complementary, adjacent, etc. into a swatch that can be used when designing or brain storming ideas.
Ideas—an illustration tool first introduced for the iPad and designed to work with Illustrator. It’s a vector-based drawing tool.
Proto—a design tool for web design. People can rough out a web design and bring it into a web design tool and add CSS.
Debut—a presentation tool for artists allowing them to present their art on a tablet.

You’re probably tired of looking at the list since we’ve written about the apps a bit but I’ve been playing with the apps quite a bit on an Android tablet Adobe (a Samsung Galaxy) gave us that was preloaded with apps and since I did all the work you’re going to have to read about them, at least a little bit.

This first slate of Touch apps are a real mixed bag and the usefulness of these apps will probably vary with the ways in which people work. That was exactly Adobe’s motivation in putting these things out there as quickly as they could. They’re probably not sure how people are going to work with these things either.

Not surprisingly, the two most useful apps are those that are closest to strong Adobe applications in the contrent creation world: Photoshop Touch and Ideas.

With Photoshop Touch, it’s clear that people went to work developing this product from a deep well and probably with a desire to try out some things that would make its way into Photoshop.

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Photoshop Touch has limited support for layers; it has more advanced editing than is available in competitive products; and it has one of the best new tools we’ve seen in a photo editing photo, the scribble tool. Scribble lets you roughly scribble in the areas you want to keep and in the areas you want to delete. Photoshop Touch will create a mask and it does a good job with fuzzy, outlines. Creating masks is a huge pain (for me, anyway). Using Photoshop Touch, you could cut out figures and send them to Photoshop or Illustrator via the cloud for more work. However, your work will be in the lower res of the tablet. You can’t scale up.

Similarly Ideas is a vector drawing tool. It too has some layer support but I found it most valuable as a line drawing tool. You can trace photos or do free hand drawings. Files imported to Illustrator come in with paths and strokes intact and ready for editing and work can be output as .eps, .pdf, or exported to .jpg, .png., whatever format is suitable for the work you’re doing.

With Ideas Adobe has created a valuable work tool for artists who can now work wherever they please.

We weren’t so thrilled with Collage and part of the problem is due to some problems the way the Touch apps let you get to your data. By far the best way to access data is via the Cloud. The Touch apps also support Facebook and Google. I could get to my photos on Facebook, but weirdly I could not get to my images in Google. Instead I could go to everyone’s images in Google and there are nice search tools to help me rummage through the available stuff. Okay, Collage is for brain stroming and so maybe it makes sense that I want access to a whole wealth of (more or less) open source images, but you’d think it’d be easy to get to my own images. Also, I couldn’t choose Gallery on the Android as a source for images.

I also found it a lot easier to grab a Kuler color swatch from the Creative Cloud than to copy it from the Kuler app.

This is in fact a problem throughout the Touch apps and a lot of it probably due to the architecture of tablets for iOS and Android. Apps aren’t really designed to interoperate all that much. Some apps interact better with others. I can use Gallery images for layers but I couldn’t get to them for Collage. There is a frustrating lack of consistency.

Debut, is a tool I just don’t get. It’s designed to enable artists to show their work using a tablet but hey, I can show my work easily enough by using Gallery or some other photo tool. I’m not sure why I want to spend $9.99.

Kuler is nice, but it’s kind of a one trick pony. As such it seems over priced compared to all the other $.99 show ponys out there. On the other hand, I’m not giving it up. One of its best features is that it can create a swatch of colors from a photograph. So, if you see something you like: a great room in a hotel, fabulous shades in a wall paper, you can grab it.

Proto also shows promise of being a very useful tool and not surprisingly, it is closely aligned with Adobe’s web development tools including DreamWeaver. Ideas for web designs can be sketched out and then sent to DreamWeaver for realization. It looks good, but I need to work with it a lot more to give it a fair shake. Truthfully, unless you’re a web master, once you’ve designed your web design, you don’t tend to go messing with it.

The Creative Cloud

Adobe’s Creative Cloud is at the center of the company’s strategy for its tablet apps. It is exchange central allowing files to be fomatted correctly for the tablet and to be managed in the cloud for other applications. The Touch apps are only a tiny piece of Adobe’s huge and ambitious strategy for the Cloud. In fact, Adobe hasn’t revealed how it’s going to extend Cloud support to Touch app users over the long haul. The Creative Cloud is in beta now and it’s free. When it’s officially rolled out, subscribers will pay $50 a month for services that include the ability to see and share files created in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign complete with layers, artboards and pages all intact as they are in the app.

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In addition, the Creative Cloud will support the Cloud access to the Adobe desktop apps including Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, After Effects, and so on.

It will also support Adobe’s growing publishing services products including Business Catalyst, online fonts via Typekit and more.

It’s not at all a bad deal for those using the Creative Suites in their jobs and large companies are going to love this, but some customers are having conniptions. They don’t like the idea of paying a monthly subscription fee. It’s a great deal for Adobe, which can count on an regular annuity (as we’ve heard Autoesk’s Carl Bass talk about subscription revenues). Adobe has pledged to allow customers to remain on the current licensing model and to keep using the their products as they have been if they prefer (I know, nice of them, isn’it?)

What do we think?

Have I said Inflection Point? No doubt the most overused phrase in this issue. But, let’s face it, the way we use and buy our tools is changing.

In this first round of products for tablets and the Creative Cloud Adobe has done more than introduce a few interesting programs. It has introduced its new pricing and packaging models. We think that in the long run, Adobe will offer different packages for different types of users. The companies offering Cloud subscriptions don’t seem to know that they’re not operating in a vaccum and that customers are being asked to sign up for a lot with each Cloud product they try or buy. – K.M.

Egnyte makes cloud storage a business

2011-12-11T19:58:14Z

Dropbox, Sugar Sync, OpenDrive, Mozy, Egnyte ... there are quite a few options for cloud storage services, but Egnyte hopes to stand out with security and management as well as competitive pricing. The company is a startup founded in 2008. They’ve made a big introduction at CloudBeat 2011 where they showed off their latest product, which adds integration with Salesforce.com. Egnyte has a hybrid cloud product that offers flexibility over how customers want to store and share their data. There is a local storage option to allow constant access to important files even when not online—data syncs automatically. In the Online Cloud, users can share files with a generous number of people depending on the type of account they have. The plans support NAS drives if customers want to add their own storage to the system but it also adds another $40. per month to the price tag. It’s a bargain for larger workplaces, but with the NAS option, the price is creeping up for smaller offices.

The system offers several options for accessing posting files including a Java applet for uploading multiple files and support for FTP.

Notifications are the software’s strong point and weak point. Adminstrators and power users can share files and set permissions for files and they can tell when users access files and access can expire. Egnyte can get pretty talky. When files sync it lets you know with a dialog box that appears on your screen and it sends email notifications. You can be sure people have access to the right version by sending a link to the most recent version. All that’s great, but the Egnyte notification box is a little bit big, and ugly and orange. You won’t miss it. And emails? I’m not sure I want to know that much. You can turn notifications off, but it would be nice to have more granular controls of notification.

Egnyte has a nice professional look and feel to it and customers can customize their storage site with their own logo. Files can be previewed but the interface also allows thumbnails, which may be all you need to see photos and tell the difference between documents and Power Points, etc.

In our experiments with the technology, we found some rough edges. The local cloud storage didn’t sync as I’d expect. You have to tell Egnyte that files are to be synced and shared. That’s not unreasonable, but it’s been difficult for me to remember how to find my way to the Local Cloud control panel. By the way, if you’re in a similar situation, you can get there via the little control on the task bar—at the top of a Mac screen at the bottom of a Windows screen.

We found that the Mac version seems to be a little slicker and a little easier to understand than the PC version. We asked Egnyte about this, and they said other customers have said the same thing. They credit the Mac’s ability to move files faster and its more streamlined architecture.

The good news

Egnyte solves a key problem for for us and It’s the reason I thought I’d write a review of a storage product which admittedly, falls out of the realm of our focus and probably our expertise. Like a lot of small companies we’ve been sharing files via email, Dropbox and Google documents. Hardly ideal. In fact, we’ve created astounding nightmares of versionitis. We never know who has the correct document. Egnyte enables us to share resources via links to content centrally stored and to specify that only the most recent version be accessed. It’s not perfect—more could be done to take Egnyte to a more robust collaborative tool. Better notification and logs would be a start. Possibly file check in and file check out—but that might be beyond the charter Egnyte has set for itself. At the moment the company is concentrating on getting the basics right and offering their product at a competitive price. It works out to about $5 per person per month.

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What do we think

The fact of the matter is, we’re all being dragged into into this cloud way of life. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s a bit of the wild west at the moment. The data management systems used by content creation professionals or designers and architects are coming to individuals and small business. Not a moment too soon, but instead of the very expensive and complete systems that are sold in the professional world, the mainstream is faced with putting systems together out of separate products for mail, contact management, document management. The little guy or guyette is the IT department and they’re the ones struggling to make it all work together. Egnyte is working with Google, it’s working with the Quick Office tool for phones and tablets on Android. It’s working with Sales Force to enabled sync’d collaboration. And of course there is an Outlook plug-in to bring those users into the fold. We also noticed that AutoCAD WS is supporting other cloud options Egnyte via the WebDav standard.

We’re talking overhead. We really are at an inflection point with all this cloud business. There will be better ways for this stuff to work together, and Egnyte looks like it’s trying to do just that and it’s offering its tools at an attractive price. We’re willing to give it a try simply because we’re getting to the point where our problems are screaming for solutions and solutions that are good enough for now, are a whole lot better than what we had before. – K.M.

Reviewing the HP Z210 Small Form Factor (SFF) workstation

2011-12-11T19:41:28Z

HP’s first foray into integrated-graphics for workstations was over a year ago, when the company launched the Z200 workstation with Intel’s 32 nm Westmere parts. That archicture coupled the GPU and CPU with two die in a package. Now, we think HP offered integrated graphics on the Z200 not because it expected many workstation buyers to be clamoring for it, but because it allowed HP to push down that always very marketable “starting at” price. Without the cost of an incremental discrete GPU, the build cost for the Z200 was (on the order of) $100 less than it otherwise would have been.

Pitching a workstation in the hundreds of dollars (initially $769) makes a lot of sense when trying to attract the very price-sensitive AutoCAD-using segment of the market. But in actuality, integrated graphics workstations, including the Z200, lived more on paper than on desks, as HP reported very few machines actually shipped without a professional-branded, discrete GPU attached.

Intel made it very clear that dialing graphics up big — more than any typical inter-generational transition And in terms of FLOPS, transistors and silicon real estate, on paper it looked like it would indeed deliver a big punch.

The rationale behind HP’s Z210, along with comparable models from rivals like Dell’s Precision T1600, wasn’t just plucked out of thin air. While the Z210 will appeal those with smaller budgets, HP clearly is going after the millions of SOHO and SMB users, those without a lot of IT support who tend to simply opt for a PC.

Configuration specifications for our HP Z210 review machine (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
CPU	Intel Xeon E3-1245 @ 3.30GHz
Memory	8 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3 (2 GB per DIMM)
Disk	500 GB SATA
Graphics	Intel P3000 (integrated) and Nvidia Quadro 600 (discrete)
OS	Windows 7, 64-bit
MSRP	~$2,000

The AutoCAD community represents the largest under-tapped group of users, and Autodesk’s recent shift to nudge users over to professional-brand graphics boards—by limiting its list of certified hardware to (essentially) Quadro FX and FirePro—gives OEMs another lever to help penetrate this huge pool of potential buyers.

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A key to getting the price down near its advertised starting price means relying on the performance of integrated graphics to avoid the add-on graphics board. Of course, that’s only going to be feasible if integrated graphics can perform well enough to provide a quality workstation experience.

The specs on our review model

HP loaned us a Z210 SFF system with the Intel P3000 as base graphics, along with an Nvidia Quadro 600 board.

The MSRP for our system without the Quadro 600 would be right around $2,000, a price that would put the machine right around the average selling price for a desk-side workstation. So while the model starts at a price at the very bottom of the workstation price bands, it’s worth keeping in mind that the configuration we tested is much more mainstream.

Plentiful I/O, including USB 3.0

As a perceived step up from a consumer or corporate class PC, a workstation vendor has got to match, if not exceed, the former on I/O. In most cases, they do, with the one notable exception we constantly see: no native HDMI, a common feature in consumer-class notebooks.

Four USB 2.0 ports fill out the front, along with mini-jack mic in and audio out. We were happy to see the multi-card reader on the front panel as well. Yes, with most companion electronic devices presenting themselves as Windows drives when plugged in via USB, the card reader is a nice fail-safe when it comes to transferring pictures, music or video.

Take one more look at the Z210’s backside. In addition to the motherboard, chassis-fitted USB ports, you’ll notice two more on an add-in card (left hand side of image). With so many standard USB ports, why would HP add two more in an add-in slot? To offer USB 3.0, a feature a mainstream PC can’t typically justify, but a workstation can.

Clever tool-less design so valuable in tight quarters

{image_3}One area where the HP machines made a mark with the Z series in general is in serviceability. Its top-end Z800 not only went tool-less, but made strides toward a near cable-less design.

But given that we’re looking at the small form factor (SFF) version of the Z210, we were intrigued to check out how well HP could engineer in ergonomic serviceability in this package, at this price. In such cramped quarters, a workstation designer needs to innovate in order to allow a user to install boards or swap drives. And while the Z210 doesn’t quite mimic the Z800, we were pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to service such a compact design.

Take swapping out a hard drive. Upon opening the cabinet (with the handle, no screws), we quickly learned the drive was hidden beneath the power supply. HP designed both the optical drive and power supply to rotate up and out of the way. Presto, the drive and connectors were now easily accessible. Rather than any snap-in type tray, the drive slips into its enclosure with four screw-in guides, easily swapped from the old drive to the new. Slick.

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We also needed to get in and add an Nvidia Quadro 600 board to upgrade the graphics over the motherboard Intel P3000. That didn’t go quite as smoothly, but still proved to be straight-forward, no screwdriver necessary.

Benchmarking the Z210, Intel P3000 and Nvidia Quadro 600

To assess the Z200’s performance we employed many of the same basic tools we have in the past, along with a few new ones. Isolating the graphics, we were anxious to see how Intel’s P3000 might fare, particularly in comparison to a low-cost professional add-in board, the Quadro 600.

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To address system-level performance, we again tapped a subset of the SPECapc test suite, namely for Lightwave and 3ds Max 2011.

We added Cinebench, for a bit more DCC exposure, and Cadalyst’s AutoCAD benchmark to get an idea of the machine’s capability running the target audience’s most popular app.

Benchmarking the Quadro 600 with Viewperf 11

First up was graphics. We ran Viewperf 11 for three iterations on each of the two graphics configuration, first with Intel’s P3000 integrated graphics and second with the Quadro 600 add-in board. We also included recent numbers we measured on AMD’s FirePro V5900. The comparison is not intended to directly compare the two boards, as their respective price points don’t make them apples-apples competition.

The first glance of the Viewperf 11 charts might make one wonder is where the results for the P3000 are. Well, we ended up without any, because the P3000 failed mid-test (or more accurately, the P3000’s OpenGL driver failed, choking on a vertex buffer call). The second thing is that the FirePro V5900 handily out-performed the Quadro 600.

Weighing these two disparately priced boards in the context of price/performance presents a more interesting, and far more equitable, comparison. Where the FirePro V5900 takes the crown in raw performance, the Quadro 600 nearly sweeps the Viewperf scores / $ race. Both results were in line with expectations. A $430 board should be substantially faster than a $170 board, but we also would anticipate seeing diminishing returns as we run up the price curve.

SPECapc Lightwave has been a mainstay of our benchmarking suite, and we have a substantial database of historical results to compare against. And the results that are most interesting in this context came from the review we’d done 18 months prior on the Z210’s predecessor, the Z200.

For the Multi-task and Render sub-scores, highly dependent on CPU performance, the Z210 achieves slightly better than 2X performance over the previous model. For the Interactive sub-score, which depends on both CPU and GPU components, the delta is not as great, though the Z210 still comes out substantially ahead. The smaller margin can be explained by the fact that the 18-months-ago system had a mid-range Quadro board, and the current one sports an entry board.

SPECapc for 3ds Max 2011. 3ds Max is a particularly interesting application to benchmark on this system, since it crosses over from the DCC to CAD spaces.

With the benchmark fairly new, and submissions to SPEC.org very few, it’s not easy to judge how well the HP Z210 with the Quadro 600 matches up. The only other results we’ve seen to date (either ours or submitted to SPEC.org) were generated on high-end graphics boards. They substantially exceed the Quadro 600 in performance, but then so do the prices.

Fortunately, the P3000 didn’t get in the way of completing another CAD-relevant system-level benchmark, Cadalyst 2011 from Cadalyst Labs. The Z210 SFF with P3000 roughly matched the same system with the Quadro 600 on 2D graphics performance, sensible given that 2D operations aren’t likely to tax any modern GPU, discrete or integrated. But on 3D, the Quadro 600 shined, outpacing the P3000 by 36%. The 600’s total index exceeded the P3000’s by about half the margin it did on 3D, coming in 17% higher.

By contrast, the Cinebench test didn’t quite follow the script. While there was a noticeable delta on the graphics-focused subtest (OpenGL), the leader and laggard weren’t the ones we figured. The P3000 surprisingly turned the tables on the Quadro 600, as the former nudged the latter by 6%.

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What do we think?

This review of the Z210 SFF gave us our first chance to check out the new breed of small form factor workstations. It also gave us our first opportunity to review a desktop workstation based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge.

HP’s work on the design and chassis was typical HP. It was easy to see not only quality engineering, but the attention to the details of the chassis and enclosure. Sometimes we in the IT world get too focused on speeds and feeds and forget about things like ergonomics and aesthetics. Apple doesn’t, one of the reason it’s where it is today, and neither does HP.

With this machine, HP couldn’t integrate expensive features, as build costs for this market segment are critical. But also critical in marketing a small form factor machine is to make it serviceable. The ease in which we swapped out a hard drive was a perfect example of how seemingly simple devices or tools can make all the difference.

The small form factor also had us harkening back to the old days when a “desktop” computer actually lived on the desktop. Ours was laid out horizontally, under the monitor. And while minimizing desktop real estate isn’t as big a deal to us, as say crowded financial trading floors or high-priced office space in Tokyo, we still appreciated the ease of access having the machine at desk level and arm’s length.

When it came to CPU and system-level performance, the Z210 SFF delivers a solid punch in a small package, thanks to Sandy Bridge and the Nvidia Quadro 600. In fact, we found our results running SPECapc for Lightwave on the Z210 to be a perfect example of Moore’s Law, or at least how Moore’s Law is often construed. One interpretation of the law holds that silicon-based performance will double every 18 months, and the Z210 certainly adheres. Well, when we compared the Z210 SFF with its predecessor—delivered a quarter shy of 18 months—we saw better than 2X the results. Impressive.

Now our first experience with integrated graphics running workstation applications wasn’t as positive. Where applications and benchmarks ran, performance generally paled in comparison to the Quadro 600. And since that board is so inexpensive, it doesn’t make sense for most professionals to rely on Intel’s P3000 integrated solution alone. But that doesn’t mean our experience with the P3000 changed our outlook on the prospects for CPU-integrated graphics in workstations; rather, it validated our position. We have never believed that integrated graphics—be it today’s CPU-integrated version or yesterday’s incarnation embedded in the chipset—is yet up to professional-caliber snuff for the bulk of workstation users.

Sure, it could suffice for a small subset of the professional user community, those that look to workstations more for their reliability or CPU performance than for visual performance. Think software developers. But integrated solutions have never served more than a small fraction, and while Sandy Bridge’s improvements will increase that fraction, its share will remain a small minority.

But just because Intel’s P3000 isn’t quite ready for prime time, it doesn’t mean we’re going to be Intel bashing either. Because while we don’t expect integrated graphics to support many workstation applications today, it doesn’t change our outlook that its role will only continue to grow as the industry moves forward. – A.H.

Benchmarking the FirePro V7900, V5900 and V4900 / The V4900 shined on SPECapc Lightwave

2011-12-11T18:16:05Z

The FirePro V7900 and V5900 boards, based on AMD’s Caymen GPUs, now occupy the mid-range and high-end positions in AMD’s workstation graphics portfolio. The V4900 workstation AIB is the latest addition to the line. It’s built with the Turks Northern Island’s GPU, and targeted at the entry level. AMD provided us with all three new models to assess their competitive positioning.

To get a sense of the performance the new trio can deliver, we employed some of the same basic tools we have in the past, including one relatively new (and very welcome) addition. We benchmarked the three boards shortly after they were released, but not simultaneously. We tested the V5900 and V7900 in August 2011 and the V4900 in November 2011.

We tapped SPEC’s Viewperf to isolate the stress on the graphics boards, and we use SPECapc, Cadalyst and Cinebench tests to get a handle on how well the boards support whole-system performance. Choosing among the SPECapc suite of benchmarks, we chose Lightwave and 3ds Max, representing two popular applications used primarily in digital content creation (DCC).

The latter was especially useful, as the latest version, SPECapc for 3ds Max 2011 has been updated. Improvements include new models and test cases, a cleaner and enhanced user interface, and most important, compatibility with more recent versions of both 3ds Max (2011) and Windows (both 32 and 64-bit Windows 7).

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Configuration specifications for our HP Z200 review machine(Source: Jon Peddie Research)
CPU	Intel Xeon X5670, 6-core @ 2.93 GHz
Memory	12 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3
Disk	2 x 500 GB (7200 rpm SATA)
OS	Windows 7, 64-bit

Our Z800 test bench

Thanks to HP, we’ve got an impressive test bench for professional graphics boards. The company was kind enough to equip us with their top-end Z800, capable of driving up to four PCI Express boards at once. With a 6-core Intel Xeon X5670 CPU (Westmere generation) running at 2.93 GHz, paired with 12 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3 memory, our Z800 provides a powerful and consistent foundation upon which to assess the performance of these and other workstation-caliber boards.

Viewperf 11

The first test was with Viewperf 11, the most recent revision of the long-time graphics benchmark. A nice step up from Viewperf 10, this version thankfully eliminated the multitude of confusing options on running the benchmark and in their place is a simple dialog box that allows you to select resolution and number of iterations. Simple. Thank you, SPEC.

Where 1280 x 1024 used to be a reasonable common denominator for setting resolution, we’re now pushing to 1920 x 1080, as the resolution is now generally pervasive and supported by most moderately priced monitors.

Not surprisingly, the three boards delivered results commensurate with their GPU specifications and price tags: the V7900 bested the V5900 by a significant margin, and ditto for the latter over the V4900. The V7900 managed a 31% margin over the V5900 on one viewset (ensight-04) but performed not materially better on two other viewsets (lightwave-01 and proe-05). On average, the V7900 was just around 10% faster than its sister mid-range board. Likewise, V5900 outperformed the entry V4900 in similar fashion, with a big gap on ensight-04 (64.6%) and more modest deltas elsewhere.

Similarly, the results for the V5900 and V7900 compared to other similarly priced boards with results submitted to SPEC (e.g. Nvidia’s Quadro 2000 and Quadro 4000, respectively) also varied widely. With some viewsets (e.g. lightwave), the boards all performed similarly. However, in some viewsets (e.g. esight, tvcis) the AMD boards bested their rivals substantially, while in others (e.g. catia, proe), they lagged far behind. While difficult to compare overall, it appears the AMD boards are on relatively equal footing with their rival’s price-comparable SKUs.

On Viewperf 11, the V7900 runs on average about 10% faster than the V5900, which is about 15% faster than the V4900 (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
3 iterations	V7900 perf. edge over V5900	V5900 perf. edge over V4900
catia-03	9.2%	13.6%
ensight-04	31.0%	64.6%
lightwave-01	-0.2%	6.6%
maya-03	13.6%	9.2%
proe-05	0.2%	2.2%
sw-02	3.4%	4.8%
tcvis-02	15.1%	1.0%
snx-01	7.1%	28.6%

SPECapc: Lightwave and 3ds Max 2011

To evaluate overall system performance, we employed two SPECapc tests, for 3ds Max and Lightwave, along with Cadalyst 2011 and Cinebench. While 3ds Max is increasingly used as a visualization tool in CAD spaces like architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), both Lightwave and 3ds Max are used in digital content creation.

However, with SPECapc, neither the graphics nor the rest of the system are solely responsible for scores. Rather, it’s the sum of the parts that are being tested, to try to give the user an idea of how the system might perform in a real-world environment. Where GPU-accelerated rendering is the bottleneck, throughput will vary by graphics AIB. But where it’s not (CPU, memory or I/O limitations), the test won’t show a difference. Average it all out, and the differences in results for whole-system type tests like these come in lower than for Viewperf.

The V4900 shined on SPECapc Lightwave, as it performed on par with its higher-priced siblings and actually nudged out the V5900 on all three sub-tests. That parity needs to be taken in context. First off, SPECapc Lightwave is notoriously CPU-bound, especially for the Render and Multi-task sub-tests of Lightwave (ironic for something named “Render”, but in this case rendering is performed in software on the CPU, not via hardware-accelerated APIs like OpenGL or DirectX) … so no big surprise that the results for all three boards were nearly identical.

SPECapc Lightwave’s Interactive does more GPU-based rendering and the V7900 did show an edge over the V5900 (4.1% faster).

We like the way SPEC organized the sub-test composite scores for 3ds Max 2011, separating out GPU and CPU.

The overall Large Model Composite is a weighted blend of test results for two sequences: the CPU creating a large scene, and the GPU viewing the scene (with varying viewpoints/ports).

As we’d expect, with SPECapc 3ds Max’s GPU Composite (+10.4%) and Large Model Composite (+13.3%), the V7900 has the clear edge, not as dramatic an edge as it has in some Viewperf tests, but an edge nonetheless.

On the other hand, the V4900’s Large Model Composite score was a head-scratcher. Since the V4900 is a lower-end board with fewer resources than either of its two bigger siblings, we would expect to see the Large Model Composite score somewhat reduced, but not to the degree we observed. Looking at the individual scores that comprise the composite, we noticed that it wasn’t just the GPU portion that was dramatically reduced, but the CPU component as well. The latter result made no sense, as all three boards were running on the same test-bench.

Cadalyst

The CAD space represents the largest chunk of workstation and professional graphics users. But while 3ds Max gets a share of work in CAD as well as DCC, there’s one application that dominates the former space: AutoCAD. And when it comes to getting a feel on how well a board or system can handle AutoCAD, we fortunately still have the mainstay Cadalyst benchmark, now updated to 2011.

Results from the Cadalyst 2011 tests are in perfect agreement with the boards’ pricing and positioning. The more the test relies on the GPU, the bigger the performance delta (+6.5% for 3D Graphics and +2.4% for Total) as we step up from new Northern Islands’ FirePro SKUs. And the less the test or sequence relies on GPU horsepower — that is, execution ends up being CPU or memory bound — the less of a difference measured (+0.4% for 2D).

Cinebench

Last but not least, we have Cinebench. Cinebench renders a 3D sequence (currently, a car chase through town) utilizing both CPU and GPU resources. It reports a composite performance number for both CPU (CPU) and graphics (OpenGL). Since we’re benchmarking graphics boards, and comparing two boards on the same Z800 test bench, we focus on the OpenGL component.

Once again, we see that the inexpensive V4900 shines. Running the V5900 on the new driver would have been very interesting, and it’s something we’ll probably get a chance to do in the context of AMD’s next board release.

Of interest to both a graphics board supplier and its customers is how products in the vendor’s portfolio are positioned with respect to one another.

Commensurate with its higher price, the V7900 shows consistent performance superiority over the V5900 on SPEC tests, but less so on Cadalyst (a fact AMD’s likely fine with, considering that market segment is not the target for the V7900). Viewing these system-level results in combination with Viewperf 11, we could justifiably (albeit roughly) peg the V7900 as a 10% better overall performer, with the potential to deliver perhaps 20-30% better performance in localized instances.

By contrast, the V5900 had a tougher time separating itself from its lesser sibling, the V4900, which given its price and lesser GPU, was a pleasant surprise. But given that different drivers were involved, we need to take that observation with a large grain of salt.

Performance gains stepping up the new Northern Islands based FirePro SKUs (for more GPU-relevant test components) * The V4900 had the benefit of a more recent driver ** A spurious result, we believe( Source: Jon Peddie Research)
Benchmark	Test / Metric	V7900 perf. edge over V5900	V5900 perf. edge over V4900*
SPECapc for 3ds Max 2011	Large Model	13.3%	282.5%**
SPECapc for 3ds Max 2011	GPU	10.4%	0.2%
SPECapc for Lightwave 9.6	Interactive	4.1%	-0.7%
	3D Graphics Index	6.5%	4.7%
	Total index	2.4%	3.5%
Cinebench	OpenGL	12.7%	-4.8%

What do we think?

The graphics arm of AMD, what we once called ATI, is clearly on the rebound. Looking back, we see the timely release of the company’s Evergreen GPU generation back in September of 2009 as the watershed moment marking AMD’s resurgence. Evergreen drew a very competitive line in the sand, perhaps not delivering the all-out max performance that Nvidia’s subsequent Fermi generation did, but establishing some compelling price/performance.

The company followed up on its hallmark performance-per-dollar with Northern Islands, a generation that made sensible and relatively low-risk improvements over Evergreen. And the Northern Islands GPU most capable and appropriate for workstation use is Cayman. In the FirePro V7900 and V5900 boards, we see the first workstation-caliber usage for Cayman, and the results are what we expected. Both offer compelling price/performance, and the V7900 manages a reasonable-but-not-overwhelming advantage over the V5900.

While Cayman is the premiere Northern Islands’ GPU, don’t count out other members of the family. As the first and only FirePro board to tap the Turks GPU, the V4900 demonstrated some very compelling price performance. The exact extent of the V4900’s prowess relative to the V5900 is not completely known, as we had that third variable of a newer driver to consider when weighing the results. But regardless, the V4900’s numbers still say an awful lot about the price/performance of the Turks GPU. Its impressive performance particularly on Cadalyst dovetails perfectly with its market positioning. Both AMD and Nvidia tend to push the lower half of their product lines more toward that AutoCAD user base.

After several years in which Nvidia executed almost flawlessly—while ATI had the stumbling block of its acquisition by AMD to deal with—AMD’s share had fallen dramatically in the professional graphics market, down to a low of only 8.6% unit share by mid 2008. Riding on the back of Evergreen, the company’s managed to boost that share to 17.1% in the first quarter of 2011, and move it a nudge higher in Q2 to 18.5%, its highest level since the close of 2006.

Doubling share is of course a commendable feat, but it would have put a far bigger dent in rival Nvidia’s share had it been doubling from its former levels (e.g. 27.7% in Q1’05), not its all-time low. Now Northern Islands is here bearing the FirePro brand, and based on the price/performance merits of the initial trio of boards, we don’t imagine AMD will be conceding any significant unit share in the near term. And given the company has already signed on workstation leaders Dell, HP and Fujitsu to drive OEM sales for the V4900, we expect market leader Nvidia will be feeling noticeably more pressure than it’s been accustomed to. – A.H.

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Review of ASUS MARS II 3GB: the fastest AIB in the history of the world

2011-10-27T17:58:55Z

Visually striking, the Mars II 3GB dual GTX 580 is an impressive piece of technology in both performance and size. The Mars II checks in at 13”x 6”x 2.5” and at a stunning 5.2 lbs. Consider: two EVGA GTX 590s together weigh in at a mere 5lbs.

Aside from its staggering size the first thing one notices are the dual 12 cm fans capable of 220CFM which Asus says gives the Mars II a 600% greater air flow than a standard AIB. The fans come with a Turbo fan button that when enabled keeps the 12cms fans buzzing at top speed regardless of the software settings, and goes over 50 dB on the sound meter.

Along with the 12 cm fans the Mars is outfitted with extensive heat sinks measuring an inch in height and running along 9 inches of the 13” board. In addition to the sinks, the board is equipped with copper piping. Asus is not going overboard with these precautions. The Mars II is not a souped-up GTX 590 but rather it is a fully clocked GF110 running at 782 MHz, the standard GTX 590 runs the GF110 GPU at 630 MHz. And with the Asus over-clocking utility you can ramp it up even further.

Asus has also come up with a an exclusive SAP alloy (Super Alloy Power) that they say ensures stable wattage and keeps the AIB 35 degrees cooler than a standard card. The alloy also provides a much needed rigidness to the card. The alloy combined with specially designed PCIe anti-shock sustainer helps keeps the card locked in the slot when the tower is upright.

The Mars II is priced at $1,500. With that price tag in mind, it did not seem fair to test it against a $700 GTX 590. Instead we configured a GTX 590 SLi system to challenge the Mars II. We built the test bed based on an Intel DX58SO2 motherboard, with a 3.20 Ghz Intel core i7 970, an Intel solid state drive, and an EVGA (Antec) 1200W Classified SR-2 power supply. The case is a Corsair CC600TWM-WHT Special Edition Graphite Series 600 T Mid Tower Gaming case.

Now we never thought we could ever stress the spaciousness of our beautiful white Corsair 6O0T case but then again the Mars II is one big board, but with a little fidgeting, the Mars II snapped in and there was actually plenty of room to spare.

We put up the MARS II against the best boards we have, and we can confirm that it is the faster card in the world.

Now the P-Mark and common sense will tell you that could get better performance for the same price if you went ahead and set-up your system in a GTX 590SLi configuration. But then you wouldn’t have the cachet of owning the fastest AIB is the history of the world. Asus expects the Mars II to appeal to a very specific type of customer. It is more like a collector’s item if you will, which is why they are only making 1,000 and offering a Limited Edition laser engraved plate with each card, ours happens to be lucky no. 015.

Maybe it's just because it is such an impressive looking board and such a substantial piece of hardwae but gameplay did seem a little more special using this board. It was snappy and the screen images were vivid.

The Mars II is an impressive piece of technology and we are very glad to have been able to play and test the world’s fastest AIB.

Construction of Asus dual GPU AIB and heatsinks (Source Asus)
	ASUS Mars II	GTX 590 SLi
GPU	GF100 2x	GF110 2x(downclocked)
Graphics Clock	782 MHz	630
Memory Clock	4008 MHz	4008 MHz
Driver	280.62	280.62
Watts Idol (system)	143W	140W
Watts Load (system)	500W	515W
Price	$1500	$1400 - $1500
DCI Ports	2	6
HDMI	1	0
Display Link	1	2 (mini)
Memory Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Memory	3GB	6GB
Power Connectors	3 – 6pin connectors	4 – 6pin connectors

Testing Vellamo

2011-09-24T13:17:21Z

Vellamo is a mobile Web benchmark that evaluates browser performance on Android devices and provides a holistic view into browser performance. It also evaluates networking, JavaScript, rendering, and user experience incorporating industry standard and custom tests. The test was developed by Qualcomm.

We ran Vellamo on a couple of Android tablets and a few android phones to see how they compared.

There was a mixture of operating systems and service providers as shown in the table.

The tablets, with larger more powerful SoCs clearly got the best scores, while most of the phones were in the same range.

Brand	Model	Specifications	NW	Androd OS
Motorola	Atrix	Dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 proccessor, ULP GeForce GPU, Tegra 2 chipset	ATT	2.2
LG	G2x	NVIDIA Tegra 2 AP20H dual-core processor (2X 1 GHz)	T-Mobile	2.2
Sony-Ericsson	Xperia Play	1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with Adreno 205 GPU	Orange	2.3
HTC	EVO 4G	1 GHz Qualcomm QSD8650	Sprint	2.3
Motorola	Droid X2	NVIDIA Tegra 2 AP20H dual-core processor (2X 1 GHz)	Verizon	2.2
Samsung	Galaxy Tab 10.1	1 GHz dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2	WiFi	3.0
Motorola	Droid	OMAP3430 chip downclocked to 550MHz	Verizon	2.0
Acer	Icona Tab	Tegra 2 with 1GB of DDR3 RAM	Wi-Fi	3.0

Building a hot rod

2011-09-24T13:07:01Z

There are three (probably more) approaches to building a gaming PC:

Build the lowest cost unit you can that will run FPS Dx11 games at >30 fps.
Build a machine that is pretty good and less than $5,000.
Build the biggest baddest money is no object machine.

We chose to go for the middle and built the following system.

JPR’s Corsair hot rod of the month

This can be considered a state of the art machine with a dual GPU AIB that runs S3D and a nice size 23.6-inch monitor. A fast SSD drive and 8 GB of DDR3 give it plenty of data delivery and the AIB gets the pixels to the screen ASAP. This is a machine you can be comfortable in front of for extended periods of time, won’t be obsoleted soon, and one you’ll never have to apologize for.

Component	Price
Case - Corsair CC600TWM	$170
Power Supply - EVGA 1200W	$335
DVD & 160 GB Intel SDD drive	$350
Mainboard - Intel DX58s02	$250
CPU - Intel i7 970 3.2 GHz	$550
RAM 8GB - Corsair	$40
Keyboard - Logitec G110	$60
Mouse -Razer	$50
Display- Acer GD235HZ	$320
AIB - Nvidia GF590	$480
3D - Nvidia 3D vision	$70
Total	$2,675

AnTuTu mobile device benchmark

2011-07-28T16:28:16Z

Nice evaluation tool for Android devices

The AnTuTu System Benchmark is an Android benchmarking tool that can run a full test of a mobile devices’ processor through a series of test for easy comparison. It can test for

Memory Performance
CPU Integer Performance
CPU Floating point Performance
2D and 3D Graphics Performance
SD card reading/writing speed
Database I/O performance.

And when completed presents the results in a numeric list on the mobile device’s screen.

We ran the benchmark on some of the mobile devices we had and got the following results (we didn’t test for SD car or Database I/O performance.

Based in China AnTuTu was developed by Beijing Zhirui Technology Limited, the company trademarked the name in March 2011.

Quadrant.

Quadrant is another mobile device CPU, I/O and 3D graphics benchmark. The Standard Edition requires an Internet connection to compute benchmark results and is supported by ads. The application does not work on devices with no GPU. And the new Nexus S, Google phone is not yet supported. We are investigating this test and will report on it in the next issue of MTTL.

Over clocking

A vibrant over clocking community is emerging within the mobile device industry. We think Nvidia can take credit for attracting this clan of users to the arena. Before Tegra and Android no one thought about the possibility. We can see it now—helium cooled Smartphone runs at 3 GHz and scores 5,000 in Rightware tests.

Benchmarking Mobile devices

2011-07-28T16:17:13Z

New Web Browser test shows value of GPU clock

How do you benchmark a mobile device? You download an app and run it. Qualcomm has a nice one, more on that later.

But how do you benchmark a mobile device with a benchmark that isn’t in a sanctioned app store. If you had a little more control over the device you could email to your mobile device, but getting it to install from the email would be tricky. Maybe we need an app for getting apps.

So if you want to test a lot of mobile devices there are some obstacles in your way. But you can use WIFI to get to the web even if you don’t have an account for a device you’re testing.

In mid-June this year Qualcomm released Vellamo, a Web browser benchmark. You do know that Qualcomm acquired AMD’s ATI group that made mobile phone graphics, right? And you probably remember that just before they got acquired, ATI acquired Bitboys in Finland. And there are a couple of other Finns in the graphics group at Qualcomm. Therefore it should not come as surprise that in Finnish mythology Vellamo is the goddess of the sea. She’s sometimes described as “cold hearted” but often pictured as a mermaid.

Vellamo is a benchmark that evaluates mobile Web browser performance on Android devices. It provides a holistic view into browser performance and stability, including networking, JavaScript, rendering, and user experience. Qualcomm says it incorporates industry standards and custom tests, and suggests we can use it to learn about the mobile device we’re carrying and/or would like to carry.

We have a few mobile phones here and an Android tablet and decided we’d give the mermaid a twirl. Luckily, the Vellamo app is available in the Android Market so it’s easy to install.

As the data suggests, GPU clock speed seems to count the most in Web browser performance. However, there are other uncontrollable variable such as the network.The test results presentation is quite good, and very straight forward. In fact it’s one of the better data-graphics we’ve seen in terms of all it says in such limited space and limited colors.

The top score is for the LG Galaxy Tab tablet and is the big winner in this batch of tests.

What do we think?

It’s important to keep in mind this is just a test of Web browser performance and not overall processor or phone performance. We are going to run similar tests on these (and other) mobile devices using Rightware’s benchmark as well.

Vellamo web browser benchmark scores (Source: MTTL)
Brand	Model	Processor	Network	OS	Vellamo Score
Samsung	Galaxy Tab	Dual-core 1GHz Cortex-A9 Nvidia Tegra 250 T20, 333MHz GPU	WiFi	Android 3.0	943
Motorola	Atrix	Dual-core 1GHz Cortex-A9 Nvidia Tegra 250 AP20H, 300MHz GPU	ATT	Android 2.2	635
Motorola	Droid X2	Dual-core 1GHz Cortex-A9 Nvidia Tegra 250 AP20H, 300MHz GPU	Verizon	Android 2.2	633
LG	G2x	Dual-core 1GHz Cortex-A9 Nvidia Tegra 250 AP20H, 300MHz GPU	T-Mobile	Android 2.2	620
Sony-Ericsson	Xperia Play	1 GHz Qualcomm Scorpion MSM8255 Adreno 205 GPU	Orange	Android 2.3	613
HTC	EVO 4G	1 GHz Qualcomm Scorpion QSD8650 Adreno 200 GPU	Sprint	Android 2.3	521 he next issue of MTTL.

Review: HP Envy 17 redux

2011-07-28T15:52:04Z

Second time’s a charm – but the first time wasn’t bad either

This is a lot of computer for $1,600. It comes with a 120 Hz (S3D) 17-inch display, a Blu-ray player, 750 GB HDD (7200 RPM), 6 GB DDR3 (1333 MHz) system RAM, AMD HD6850M discrete GPU with 1 GB GDDR5, HDMI and an Intel i7-263QM (2.) GHz—2.9 GHz). It’s got a SATA I/O, DS memory slot, VGA and four USB 2.0 sockets. A whole lot of computer for not too much money.

It’s a complete media center that can be used for watching HD Blu ray movies, listening to music, editing videos and pictures, and playing games—serious FPS games. And the games and movies can be in 3D.

The updates to this new Envy 17 include:

Switchable graphics (controlled by user or automatically when going on battery)
Discrete graphics updated to Radeon 6850M;
Added CoolSense hardware and software. The computer detects where you’re working and adjusts the cooling;
Added Intel Wireless Display;
Updated to HDMI 1.4;
Added RAID 0 for dual HDD configs;

Changed Media software solution from HP MediaSmart to Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 for both 2D and 3D. (will up-convert DVD video and photos)

Added DDD’s TriDef Ignition S3D Game player as preinstalled software.

See more

The Envy comes with three video outputs: VGA, HDMI, and DisplayPort; in fact, it’s the first notebook to offer a DisplayPort interface. The displays are driven by an AMD HD 6850M GPU with:

Engine clock speed: 575-675 MHz
Processing power (single precision): 920-1080 GFLOPS
Memory clock speed: 900-1000 MHz
Memory data rate: 3.6-4.0 Gbps
Memory bandwidth: 57.6-64 GB/sec

Eyefinity is enabled. You can use up to 3 external monitors—one on HDMI, one on DisplayPort, one on VGA. It will only support 3 monitors so if you’re using 3 external you have to turn off the notebook display or use the notebook display and 2 external monitors

Equipped with a GB of DDR5 memory, HP says the machine will get up to one TFLOP of processing capability.

The system has switchable graphics. With power supply plugged into the wall the default is the discrete GPU, and when on battery it’s the integrated graphics. You can override it by right click on desktop and choose, “Configure Switchable Graphics”

Movies

To play a Blu-ray disc CyberLink requires you to down load the CyberLink BD & 3D Advisor. This is setup, and the country code protection for the HDCP copy protection.

An internet connection is required obviously (to down load the Advisor) and also to allow you to rate and post your impressions of the movie via SocialBlu, Sony’s social network gateway. You can link into your Twitter account from it. You can also skip it, which we did. The internet connection is also used by Sony to download previews of other movies, which can become pretty annoying. You can skip past most of them but you have to be careful, if you get too aggressive or impatient CyberLink PowerDVD 10 hangs and it takes the Task Manger to kill it.

You also have setup the software to allow a mouse to work with it. When you do that you get an iconic display that gives you the normal remote control functions, and you can then activate those functions by clicking on them with the now activated mouse.

When you start up CyberLink PowerDVD 10, which is a free version and comes installed on the HP Envy 17, you are invited to upgrade to PowerDVD 11 ($59.99)

Sounds good

The movies look great and sound terrific using the Beats Audio with HP Triple Bass Reflex Subwoofer. HP of course recommends Beats headphones, but since we don’t have any we used a ear-cup set of noise canceling headphones and it sounded great—unbelievably good for a PC and headphones.

HP engineering collaborated with Interscope Records to develop the headphone/line-out audio solution which consists of an audio controller with great noise performance, really good Total Harmonic Distortion + Noise (THD+N), and a wide range DAC. The notebook’s internal audio signal routing uses HP’s signal integrity techniques to eliminate low level noise typically experienced with PC audio, the listening experience is nothing short of amazing.

Click on the arrow in the notification area (lower right portion of screen) you should see a red circle with the b (Beats logo) as one of the icons. Double click on it to open the equalizer.

Games

To start we loaded a game, “Far Cry 2.” We set its options up for the wide screen and 120 Hz refresh. Then we launched the TriDef Ignition application and pressed the scan button, in seconds it found “Far Cry 2” and we launched it from the TriDef list. Naturally it didn’t work, TriDef doesn’t support DirectX 10 on “Fry Cry.” So we loaded “Crysis” which TriDef does support on DX 10—a better choice. It played S3D OK (with settings on medium, but at full res) but it’s an older game and so the characters didn’t look great, like cardboard cut outs. However, there was no ghosting or flicker. So then we down loaded from Steam “Battlefield Bad Company 2” which TriDef supports in DX 11. The game ran. Then we tried to get it registered in TriDef’s Ignition game launcher app—that was tricky, and had to browse through the system to give TriDef the path. Then we launched from the TriDef app and were told the game doesn’t use Dx 9, 10, or 11. But of course it does. We then found out from DDD they are still working on their Steam client. DDD is a most responsive group and within two days we had a patch for BBC2 and it worked like a charm, and looked great—it does stress the system through..

We ran Unigine on it. Even with reduced resolution to 1680 x 1050, AA off AF 4X and shaders low, it only got 10 fps, not good enough for heavy duty FPS game play. We ran “Crysis” DX 10 and got 12 fps with AA off at 1920 x 1080. Dropping the resolution to 1680 x 1050 it got to 19 fps. And with “Far Cry” we got 19 fps.

Can’t get lost

The machine comes with a huge TB HDD in a RAID 0 configuration. RAID 0 benefits users who work with large files and want improved storage performance. As a result power users often enable RAID 0 through a lengthy & complex process to achieve the best performance; the ENVY17 enables RAID 0 right out of the box.

When a system is configured with RAID 0, the user sees a single large storage drive rather than two smaller drives. Even though the user sees only one drive, RAID 0 data is distributed across both drives. This allows data, especially large files, to be read faster, because data is read simultaneously from both drives.

What do we think?

You could make this machine your entire entertainment center. With its Blu-ray player, large 17.3-inch, 1920 x 1080 120 Hz screen, Beats sound system; it’s got everything one would need. It’s not a great game machine but it’s got lots of compute power for productivity applications and web surfing, and a comfortable keypad and wrist rest.

HP ran their own tests on the HP Envy to evaluate the effectiveness of the RAID 0 configuration. (Source: HP)
Score	Non-RAID	RAID 0	Percent Performance Improvement
Overall PC Mark Vantage:	9415	9948	6%
Memories Suite (measures performance when handling photos and video)	5842	6614	13%
TV and Movies	5644	6092	8%
Gaming	6546	7364	12%
Music	8153	7829	-4%
Communications	12461	11613	-7%
Productivity	7110	7485	5%
HDD Test Suite:	3609	4295	19%
Windows Defender	14.78	16.12	9%
Gaming	9.91	9.95	0%
Importing Pictures	32.92	36.51	11%
Windows Startup	15.16	16.57	9%
Video Editing	34.16	44.52	30%
Media Center	88.41	177.63	101%
Importing Music	7.71	6.69	-13%
Application Loading	3.75	5.01	34%

Review Amimon WHDI: Remote HDTV from your PC

2011-07-28T15:22:00Z

Israeli based Amimon developed WHDI (Wireless High-definition Interface) chipsets. A fabless semiconductor company, Amimom established the WHDI concept for uncompressed wireless HD video for CE video devices. WHDI allows flat-panel televisions and multimedia projectors to wirelessly connect to HDTV video sources and obtain a quality equivalent to that achieved with wired interfaces such as component video, DVI and HDMI, or so says the company.

The company’s modules and reference designs are for the 5GHz unlicensed band of uncompressed HD video streams, and offer equivalent video data rates of up to 3 Gbps (including 1080p) using 40 MHz of bandwidth in compliance with FCC regulations. Video data rates of up to 1.5 Gbps (including 1080i and 720p) can be delivered using 20 MHz of bandwidth, conforming to worldwide 5GHz spectrum regulations. The range is beyond 100 feet, through walls, and latency is less than one millisecond.

Future technologies
Technology	Data Transfer Rate /sec	Maximum Range	Frequency	For use in
WiGig	7GB	not given	60 GHz	portable computers desktop computers
WiVu	not given	not given	not given	portable electronics portable computers home audio/video components

Some of the technical statements made by the WHDI group have raised questions about the claim of 3Git/s data rates. Sceptics say such claims violate basic laws of physics. Claims of 3Gbit/s data rates over a 40MHz channel equates to 75 bits per Hz. (3Gbit/s divided by 40MHz). For those not schooled in communications theory this is a number almost ten times what physics dictates is possible (802.11n by example only goes to 8 bits using QAM-256 best case). We asked Amimon about this and they told us

WHDI is a video modem not a data modem, so the comparisons to data modems can be confusing—when comparing wireless video links one should compare the relevant metrics of video: what video rate (1080p, 720p etc.) can be delivered at what quality (robustness, PSNR) and at what latency.

WHDI delivers 1080p 60Hz (which is 3GBps of Raw Video). WHDI can also deliver deep color (which actually brings it up to 4.5GBps). WHDI delivers the video with no loss of quality (it’s equivalent to HDMI) and with practically no latency (less than one millisec). Unlike data modems that treat every bit the same way, WHDI prioritizes the transmitted information based on visual significance: more significant information gets more protection; less visually significant information gets less protection over the channel—the result is a highly robust link that results in very high quality. (WHDI technology is used in medical applications and in professional applications because it is the highest quality wireless video solution).

Currently available technologies
Technology	Data Transfer Rate /sec	Maximum Range	Frequency	For use in
Wi-Fi	450MB (0.450GB)	230 feet	2.4 & 5 GHz	mobile phones portable electronics portable computers home audio/video components
WirelessHD	5GB	not given (line-of-sight)	60 GHz	home audio/video components
Wireless USB	480MB (0.480GB)	30 feet	3.1-10.6 GHz	mobile phones portable electronics portable computers
WHDI	3GB (of raw video)	100 feet	5 GHz	home audio/video components

Given that WHDI is based on prioritizing based on visual significance, it cannot be used for delivery of random data—so this may be the part that can be confusing (delivery of 75 bit per Hz of random data is of course impossible, but delivery of raw video with that rate is made possible with the WHDI video modem techniques).

There are a couple of other wireless techniques for sending HDTV via HDMI through the ether in your home. For example there’s Intel’s WiDi also known as WirelessHD which is based on 802.11n. The first generation only supports a 720p, Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig), and the IEEE 802.11ac effort to name a few.

The tests

We got a kit from Amimon and tried out the WHDI. We’ve already experimented with the WirelessHD stuff using an HP Wireless TV Connect and were pretty pleased in an earlier review, although we felt the range could be better.

With the Amimon unit we again used an HP Envy 17 3D as the source (love that machine). Unfortunately we don’t have 120 Hz HDMI monitor so we couldn’t test remote S3D. The current transmitter dongle is delivering 1080p/60 over the HDMI cable. The TV uses a Frame Rate Converter (FRC) to convert to 120Hz, 240Hz or even higher. Amimon says their next generation chip will support resolutions of up to 4Kx2K.

The installation couldn’t have been easier. Plug the transmitter dongle into the HDMI socket on the source (the HP Envy), connect the dongle to a USB port on the PC side for power (if your PC’s USB doesn’t offer enough power you can always use a USB power plug like the type used with mobile phones. Then on the monitor side, plug in an HDMI cable between the monitor and the receiver, plug in the receiver’s power supply and bam—you’re done. No drivers to load, no setup menus, just plug and play.

We used Despicable Me as the first test, and then Kung Fu Panda. CyberLink Power DVD 10 was used for the Blu-ray player (Microsoft’s Media Player in Win 7 doesn’t support Blu-ray yet).

We used an HP Dreamcolor LP2480Zx as the HDMI display. It is a 24-inch 1900 x 1200 resolution display with 10-bit primary color—the widest gamut you can get. The screen of the HP Envy 17 3D is a 17-inch 1920 x 1080 120 Hz display and it looks fantastic, and also would show up any flaws in the original content. We paused the movies at various places and closely examined the images on the Envy 17 and the HP 24-inch monitor and could detect no difference.

When we ran the movies we looked at the HP 24-inch monitor for any stutters, frame drops, tears, or distortions and saw none—nada, nix. The data flow was perfect, and looking at them side by side we could detect no latency.

We also ran a game (“Far Cry 2”) on the HP Envy 17 and used a wireless mouse and keyboard in front of the HP 24-inch monitor. Game play was excellent.

The specifications say you can be up to 30 meters away, and although we didn’t qet quite that distance, mostly due to the limitations of the mouse and keyboard, we did get 10 meters away and everything still played fine. We declare WHDI a winner.

The tablet is a blank slate - Review ArtRage for Apple iPad

2011-07-01T12:33:40Z

Steve Jobs is not always right and in fact, he was totally wrong when he dismissed the idea of a stylus for his devices because among all the other things the iPad does well — remote control, movie player, presentation platform, and best friend on a lonely Saturday night — the iPad is turning out to be a really great piece of paper. We have downloaded several drawing program for the iPad and every single one of them is good. Just the current list of drawing tools on my computer includes Brushes, by Steve Sprang: $7.99; Autodesk SketchBook Pro: $4.99; Adobe Ideas: free.

There’s plenty more available out there and I’ll probably wind up getting many of them, such as the new Adobe Layers which accompanies Adobe Ideas. Each one of thsese programs has their attractions. For instance, Adobe Ideas is a vector program enabling users to bring their work from the iPad into Illustrator.

ArtRage, the latest product I’ve been working worth is, is much more of a paint program. It has become a favorite program among people who use Wacom tablets and it’s likely to become a favorite among artists using the iPad. It’s available for $6.99 and is loaded with options for different brushes, paints, inks, and papers. It allows you to save combinations for brush styles and papers.

ArtRage has a clean, simple interface. The bottom two corners of the page are used for options pickers: brushes on the left, colors on the right. You can just stab your stylus, or finger, down to pick up the tool you want and you can easily revert back to a previous choice. When not in use the options panels disappear, leaving a complete page for your work. The interface in no way slows you down rather, it really feels like painting. Well, if in painting it were easy to go from water color to oil to airbrush and mix them up.

Like most art programs on the iPad, ArtRage has support for layers and you can use a photograph for tracing. It alos lets you “pin” a photo to the workspace if you’d rather use it as a reference. An especially nice feature, is the use of an eye dropper so you can grab colors from the original picture to use in your masterpiece. Unlike many of the competitors, ArtRage stands out for its support for unlimited layers and unlimited undos.

ArtRage is also painterly in that it can be hard to precisely control the way the paint behaves if you’re using some brushes like watercolors. This can be fun or frustrating, but the beauty of digital is that you can just undo when things get out of control.

Early reviews of the product point out that ArtRage can get overloaded as you build up your work with layers, paints, custom brushes etc. The response of paints can sometimes slowdown. Also ArtRage may warn you that it’s running out of memory and advise you to quit and restart. While, this is not a lot of fun when you’re in the zone and painting away, it’s preferable to losing work. In my personal experience, I did not find the problem to be any more pronounced than on some other programs, and I’m using the original iPad. The workflow should be smoother using an iPad 2.

One of the reasons I wanted to write about ArtRage is to talk about the revolutionary potential tablets are bringing to computing. Wacom started brought the idea to life with its Cintiq LCD drawing pads and the evolution of touch technology has brought the idea into the mainstream. Now, there are tablets. The tablet format does a good job of replacing the sketch book and with the ability of some programs to export your work to the computer for further refinement and to exchange formats for professional use, well, clearly the tablets have the potential to become professional graphics arts tools.

And this is where there is room for improvement. ArtRage enables users to transfer files to the ArtRage program on the computer for further work and it, in turn, allows work to be exported in the PSD format for Photoshop. It’s far from elegant. In comparison SketchBook Pro, which does not have the same breadth of tools, does save to PSD for more flexible transfer. And, of course, Adobe’s own tools are designed to enable interchange with Photoshop and Illustrator on the PC.

All these programs that are evolving for the iPad are evolving with different strengths. SketchBook Pro is a great drawing tool and it gives the user a feeling of percision. ArtRage is a nice complement with its great paint tools and options. It would be nice some day to have the ability to work on the same drawing in different tools and take advantage of the best in each. So far it looks like Adobe’s PSD format with its support for layers might emerge as a common platform, but for now, the paths to file exchange are tortured. Given the unwillingness of software companies to share access to their customers, and the iPad’s relative inflexibility when it comes to exchanging files, that situation will probably remain for a while. Here, I hasten to add that there are proably good reasons for Apple’s jealous maintenance of file access and that workarounds such as iDisk and Dropbox are evolving, but there is a ways to go. We wonder whether the eventual arrival of tablets from a variety of vendors and supporting Android and Windows platforms as well as Apple will help move progress along a little faster.

ArtRage, Ambient Design Ltd., Aukland, New Zealand.

Field Monitor Pro makes taking a display on the road a dream

2011-06-15T22:24:30Z

Big, bright and lightweight. Now there is a display that can tempt you to bring it along as a laptop companion on a trip.

Mobile Monitor introduced their Field Monitor Pro display at the Connected Traveler Showcase in San Francisco. It’s an ultra-bright 15.4-inch backlit LED screen delivering 1280x800 resolution in a clamshell 4-pound ABS-polycarbonate case.

“It is a no compromise second monitor that adapts beautifully to every situation on the road, said Larry Pensack, president of MMT. “It’s easy to carry, highly resistant to damage, and makes getting things done plain easier.”

The Field Monitor Pro connects up to Intel based Apple MacBooks or Windows based PC laptops over their USB ports using DisplayLink USB connectivity.

No special video output cable adapters are required. It has a built in stand, or can be hung on a wall and used in either portrait or landscape modes. And because it incorporates DisplayLink, it can used with up to six of these displays.

This display can be used in an extended display mode giving you lots more elbow room on your computer desktop. It also works in a mirrored mode.

Priced at $289. USD, it includes a built in numeric keypad, which extends the keyboard capability of the laptop. The display is available without the keypad for $10 less. Working accountants and auditors will love this feature as well as folks dialing numbers with Skype and Google Voice accounts.

What do we think?

I carry a 13” laptop everywhere I go, and the display is simply not big enough for working with Adobe Lightroom or anything that really requires a larger screen area, so I hook into a desktop display almost anytime I can find one. This display is thin and light enough to fit in a laptop bag and take along without adding bulk, too much cost, or even adapters for whatever you encounter. I think this will be a very nice accessory you can take on your trips without much concern for the excess baggage.

Android vs. Android vs. Android

2011-05-18T21:05:15Z

A look at the Motorola Droid 2, LG G2X, Sony Ericsson Experia Play

We’re swimming in Android phones right now. We have a (slightly) older Droid 2 that’s actually in use as my working phone, a brand new Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, and an LG G2X. The Droid 2 is a Verizon phone and the G2X and Xperia Play are from T-Mobile. The three phones are very different and they’re aimed at very different users, but there are some basic similarities too. The Droid 2 and the G2X are both based on the Android 2.2 operating system. The Xperia Play is 2.3 Gingerbread. The Droid 2 and the Xperia Play both have 1 GHz processors though the Xperia Play has the newer Snapdragon Scorpion processor. The Droid 2 has a 3.7-inch display, while the G2X and Xperia Play have 4-inch screens. That was probably too many words to say that a comparison of the three seems valid.

The differences are pretty obvious as well. The G2X is based on Nvidia’s Tegra. It’s targeted clearly at gamers and enthusiasts. The Droid 2 has a slide out keyboard and it’s a business like phone. The Experia Play has a slide out PS game pad and has obvious gamer appeal.

For those who haven’t played with an Android phone, the essentials are basically the same, and don’t vary that much from the grid of apps. In theory if you’ve even seen an iPhone you have a pretty good idea of how an Android phone is supposed to work.

The Android operating system is not as easy to get up and running as an iPhone, but it’s not bad. I’m sure it’s not at all cool to admit this but it’s kind of great the way Google has taken over our lives with cloud apps. If you do have all your contacts and mail in Google’s system, it’s a snap to transfer everything to the phone. What’s hard to understand at first about Android is that there are a couple of steps to getting to your apps. There’s turning on the screen, unlocking the screen, and moving beyond the home screen—not a big deal, but an adjustment all the same. Another unobvious feature is that Android keeps track of notifications and background tasks in a pull down bar at the top. It took me a pretty long time to discover this. It’s a useful thing to check every now and then because you might find that you’ve got a bunch of stuff running in the background—the darkside of multi-tasking.

Droid 2

The Droid 2 has become the working telephone. It’s solid, the 5 MP camera is superior to the lousy first-gen iPhone camera and comparable to the newer iPhone 4, but it’s not desperately better. There is a noticeable speed difference between the Droid 2 and the newer phones. We’re using it as a baseline.

One thing I really like on the Droid 2 and miss on the other two phones is the Swype app. It enables you to input type by sliding between letters. It’s very fast once you learn it. Swype is coming out for more Android phones, but I couldn’t find it for the other two phones. I did find SlideIt by Dasur Pattern Recognition Ltd. and it works the same way. It’s worth trying out this type of input for the small digital keyboards that are becoming standard on smart phones. Ironically, the Droid 2 also has a slide out keyboard. For me, Swype is so fast, that I tend to use it instead of the keyboard. However, I don’t want anyone taking away the keyboard either. It’s very convenient for long emails or spontaneous email ruminations in which you don’t want to sound like a foul mouthed 3-year old who can’t spell.

The 5 MP camera is very good with the expected controls including zoom and some nice extras like scenes: landscape, portrait, macro steady, sport, and night shot. Set at standard settings, it’s not great in dark situations, but the camera does a good job under decent circumstances.

Game play? It never really occurred to me to play a game on this phone. It has “Angry Birds,” what more do you need? Actually I also tried out the “Glow Hockey” game the shipped with it, and I had a reasonably good time. It comes with a “Need for Speed Demo.” If you are in a locked room and desperate, you can play games on this phone.

LG G2X

The G2X is a big win for Nvidia’s Tegra 2 and it shows off the chip to good advantage. It’s fast. Browsing is responsive. The camera has 8 MP—more than most mobile phones of this generation—and it looks very good. The G2X screen is bright and tuned to be highly saturated. It might not be right, but its beautiful, and all your pictures look amazing on the phone. They hold up reasonably well when transferred to the computer where they’re displayed in a more normal color gamut.

The G2X is designed for gaming and it has absolutely no problem handling games. All those saturated colors add to the fun. “Need for Speed” is just great on this phone. (It’s good on most smart phones because it’s engineered to take advantage of accelerometers. Have a look at Natural Motion’s “Backbreaker” as well.) In general, I’m terrible at “Need for Speed,” but I’m better on a phone than PC so it’s more fun. The phone ships with TegraZone, an app that conveniently takes you right to a store for more games. In addition to “Need for Speed,” the G2X comes with “Nova.”

The phone is just down right snappy. In fact, I’ll say I was perfectly happy with my little Droid 2 until the G2X put things in perspective. The dual-processor enables better multi-tasking performance when playing games and listening to music, or, for students, reading a book and watching a movie. It puts up with a lot of piled up applications before you start thinking, uh oh, better check to see what all I’ve got running in the background.

A side note: some of the phones have had a glitch. They crash. The forums have quite a few tales of anguish. The first version of the phone we got had the glitch and after a terrible weekend of taking the battery in and out, rebooting, and finally restoring—all to no avail, my very firm advice is to march that baby right back to the store. It’s not your fault, and it’s not your job to fix it. The phone is a true joy, there’s no reason to suffer. (We asked about the number of phones that might have had the problem. We didn’t get an answer, and at this point maybe it’s not known, but there are enough people complaining about the problem on the web, that I thought it worth mentioning. Again, life is short, take it back, get a new one.)

The Sony Ericsson Experia Play

The Experia Play is one of the most anticipated new phones out there. I know I anticipated it quite a bit. Unfortunately, anticipation is not working in the favor of this phone. Poor Sony, they’re having one of those Sony seasons that happens to them every so often in which nothing ever seems to go right. As this is being written, we’re waiting for Sony’s game network to come back up after a hacker revenge attack. It’s bad, it’s been real bad for Sony. It would have been great for this phone to be a huge, monster hit. It’s not.

First, the basics. The phone has a slide out Playstation controller and it includes the left, right buttons on the back of the device. For reasons known only to Sony, the buttons don’t seem to control much on the phone except games. It seems like there was probably a pretty big disconnect between the phone design and the game development side of Sony—which makes sense, Sony Ericsson and Sony Entertainment are different companies, really. It’s almost as if the controller was just attached to the phone. So, unless you’re really dying to play PSP type games, there’s not much added value to the controller. It would have seemed a great opportunity for additional navigation and selection controls in the OS or in apps, zooming, something. The thing adds quite a bit of expense, it should add more value.

Phone	Processor	RAM	Android Version	Display	Camera	Battery Life	Price (unlocked)
Droid 2	TI OMAP 3630 1 GHz	512 MB	Android 2.2 Froyo	3.7 inch, FWVGA, 854 x 480	5 MP	9.58 talk; 315 standby	$600 (on intro)
G2X	Tegra 2, AP20H Dual Core, 1 GHz ea.	512 MB	Android 2.2 Froyo	4-inch WVGA 400x800	8 MP back; 1.3 MP front	5 hours talk; 280 hours standby	$499
Xperia Play	1 GHz Qualcomm MSM8255	400 MB	Android 2.3 Gingerbread	4-inch Bravia FWVGA (480x854)	5.2 MP back; VGA front	8.25 talk: 425 standby	$650

Sony has made some bone-headed moves. To my mind, the camera is the best of the bunch. Although it’s not Sony’s top of the line Exmor 8 MP sensor, this 5 MP sensor works the best in low light. The Exmor R is a back-illuminated CMOS image sensor that provides much better performance in dark environments. The camera on the Play handles great but there’s no zoom. Really, no zoom. I looked all over the web thinking I was missing something. I can’t get over trying to push all those wonderful buttons on the device just in case they wake up and decide to become useful. No luck so far.

The device has hardware buttons for the bottom controls where most Android phones settle for soft – the search, return, home, and menu keys. They’re nice.

The phone feels great in the hand. It’s responsive and the screen looks good. Just as you’d expect: Sony can make good cameras and screens and blessedly they do for this phone. Also, Sony needs to be commended for including a decent pair of headphones with the Xperia Play. Thank you Sony, you put the competition to shame.

Weirdly, the phone doesn’t test well and if gamers are anything they are testers. They’re going to notice that the Experia Play doesn’t do well in the benchmarks. It seems just like that kid in the third grade who did lousy on tests and grew up to the be a physicist; the phone may not test well but just walking around, it performs much better than the tests would have you believe. It’s much snappier than the Droid 2. The Play wakes up and gets to work much faster than the G2X.

This is where it paid off to use the Droid 2 as a base, because in preliminary tests the Droid 2 did better than the Play. What? That can't be. I turned off all the background stuff on the Play, I turned the phone on and off and ... ah ha, the nifty Timescape theme added by Sony Ericsson keeps running. It’s a handy instant notifier of all your Facebook, Twitter, Google feeds. Turn it off before testing. That helped, quite a bit but I still think the benchmarks don’t do the phone justice.

I lost quite a bit of quality time playing “Bruce Lee” and “Crash Bandicoot” (really). There is something comforting and friendly about playing games with the controller, and I think it feels more immersive in many cases.

Prices for the unlocked phones are all over the place, but they seem to have settled into the range of $199 for a phone with a contract. Heck, they might as well give the things away for the amount of money that will be extracted from you during the life of the contract.

Benchmarks

Speed, so what am I basing my comments about speed on. Well first of all perception. The length of time it took to turn each on and get to the home screen from the lock screen; getting to the app screen from home; the perceived responsiveness of browsing on the screen; and performance in apps—all very subjective. Once they are up and running all three devices are fine.

For back up, we also ran the Standard Benchmark from Aurora and the AnTuTu System Benchmark.

	Droid 2	LG G2X	Xperia Play
Overall Score	1740	3415	2004
Memory	353	619	334
CPU Interger	617	912	648
CPU Float	146	985	283
2D Graphics	163	347	147
3D Graphics	260	332	221
Database IO	85	25	220
SD Card Write	(3.6 MB/s) 36	(8.2 MB/s) 82	(4.6 MB/s) 46
SD Card Read	8.0 MB/s 80	(113 MB/s) 113	(10.5 MB/s) 105
Android Version	2.2	2.2.2	2.3.2

What do we think?

Overall, the favorite in this bunch is the LG G2X. It’s pretty. It’s fast. The camera tells the rest of my cameras to go ahead and stay home, it’s got this one covered. One tiny complaint that’s driving me crazy? I can not figure out how to turn off the camera shutter sound —a passport to dork-land every time one uses the camera in a press conference or presentation. I’ll have to try and download another camera app, I reckon.

I wanted to like the Xperia Play. The camera is better. It’s really really fun. It’s responsive but there’s just some annoying features like the lack of a camera zoom. This phone could get a lot better with a firmware upgrade or maybe a rev. 2.

The Droid 2? What d’ya want? It’s my phone.

The future is now: PC on your TV

2011-05-18T20:54:47Z

Imagine being able to launch an Internet browser (any browser) on your television screen from the comfort of your couch. Imagine being able to visit social and business networking sites, write a paper or letter in a word processor, create, review, and edit spreadsheets, view and edit family photos and video, watch stored and streaming hi-def video, and perhaps most important (personal bias injected), imagine being able to play PC games from your couch. Well you can right now, and it is amazing. And it does not require one of these new “internet enabled” televisions. In fact these new iTVs look pretty toothless compared to the capabilities of the system we tested below, with users being restricted to “apps.”

There are a few things you will need to accomplish what we describe. The first is an HDMI equipped HD television. The second is a PC with an HDMI output. If you have that then you need to get a wireless HDMI video kit, and lastly a wireless game controller and/or keyboard. At JPR’s Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs we ran this kit through its paces and we were impressed. Here’s the bad news. There is no way to be sure how this setup will perform in your home if you want to go through walls or upstairs/downstairs. Different homes have different materials in the walls, objects in between your television and your PC, and radio interference that can mess up the signal. At longer ranges even a person standing in the way can cause interference.

Now back to the good news. The results are worth the effort. If you live in an apartment or condo your chances are pretty good that you will have very good performance. If you live in a home with simple walls and a clean environment around the receiver and transmitter your chances are pretty good. We tested our system in a bit of a nightmare environment, so I think most people could expect even better performance than we achieved. Our receiver was stationed in a media cabinet that was filled with other electronic devices.

With a cleaner environment we can expect better performance, and/or longer range. Also, one could use a longer HDMI cable and extend the receiver as far toward your transmitter location as the cords would allow.

We used an HP 17-inch Envy 3D laptop as the source device and put it on a roll around seat to test the distances and various locations. You can see the HDMI transmitter on the seat. In the photos is an HP wireless HDMI transmitter. The installation was dead simple easy. Out of the box, plug it in, use it. The companion unit, the receiver, plugs into the HDMI socket of the TV. It needs a power outlet too, the transmitter is powered via USB from the PC.

We tested three different kits (The HP Wireless TV Connect, and Brite View models BV-1222 and BV-2322) at five different locations using a number of different applications. The HP receiver is the same size as the transmitter and has a vertical configuration and the Brite Vew receivers for both units are about the size of the BV-2322 transmitter.

One thing that is important to note is that although all these systems can transmit 1080 video easily, if you want to read and type text, you must have the right resolution for your screen size and viewing distance. In our case the television was a 40-inch and the couch was 10 or 11 feet from the TV. At 1080 text was too small even with the Windows enlarged text mode. (This system will work with Apple or any other OS as long as the wireless controller is supported.) If you are sitting closer or have a larger display, then 1080 may be just fine. I would wager that 7 feet would be sufficient for 1080 on a 40 inch TV. So we ran the PC at 720 line resolution when using the TV and it was perfect. Text was easily readable and video quality was plenty good for sources like YouTube.

We rolled the HP Envy around to several locations trying to get the system to break.

The distance from the receiver in the cabinet (sitting on top of the PS3) was about 30 ft away from point 5 in the map.

We should also note that we did not adjust the location of the receiver or the placement/direction of the receiver, which can affect results at various distances. However we believe our results can indicate the general performance characteristic of each unit from a relative perspective.

Video Performance

The five different locations are shown on the diagram above and we rated the video performance of each unit with an A though F rating. An A rating means there were no discernable artifacts on the TV compared to the PC display. A score of B indicated less than 5% of the screen had artifacts; C indicates 5% - 10%, D 10% - 20%, and an F was given if there was either unacceptable quality or a complete loss of signal. I felt that a C rating was acceptable, and that the flickering pixels were often difficult to detect unless you approached within a few feet of the TV. Surprisingly the systems performed almost the same at 720p and 1080p; though apparently 1080p and 1080i have different performance envelopes for the Brite Views, which we did not test. One should also note that the wall behind the entertainment center in the diagram is a thick outer wall of the house.

Performance notes: the BV-2322 received an asterisk because although video was flawless at the number 5 location, it had a hard time establishing the link at that location. It required a “pullback” which means that we went to the number 4 location, established the link, and then pulled back to the number five location. The good news is that the HDMI cord does not have to be plugged in to establish the link, and most people have extension cords and can easily replicate this technique. The HP did the best job of establishing long-range links. The BV-1222, while outperforming the HP at location 4 completely lost the connection a short distance beyond that point.

Computing Performance

Computing performance is defined as basically everything except video games. Web, office apps, photos, etc. We found that the performance of the keyboard (a Logitech Revue keyboard) actually outperformed the video range. The keyboard has a fantastic form factor and the mini touch pad made navigation easy. However the Revue keyboard is designed to work with Logitech’s Google TV system and does not have any right mouse click functionality at this time that we could find. This could change easily if Logitech were to allow a right click with a function button depressed. The good news is that Logitech makes many other keyboards and so do other companies. We used the game controller for the occasional right click we needed. So as far as computing performance using the keyboard we tested, the Logitech performed flawlessly at all ranges.

Just to reiterate—the model is the user sits on the sofa facing the TV, with a wireless keyboard and/or game controller. In a remote location is a PC with a wireless HDMI transmitter and a KBM receiver.

Gaming performance

Gaming performance was very satisfying but very much restricted by the range of the controller and the type of gaming. It is not optimal for First Person Shooters with the Logitech F710. However I must note that dedicated PC gamers would use a desktop mouse, keyboard setup, and the superior resolution of a PC display for their core gaming. The beauty of this system for gaming lies in more relaxed and casual “lean back” gaming.

I chose to test “Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf” and I was able to play it accurately and enjoyably at all but position 5 using 1280x1024 game resolution. Another wonderful use for this system could be family room casual gaming like Monopoly or other board games available on the PC. The response was basically instantaneous, however we found that sometimes sustained input (which is never needed in golf) hit “interference” zones where control input seemed to have a mind of its own for a short spell. One last note is that this setup is begging for a QWERTY game controller.

We thought we found one with the Veho Mimi but unfortunately the drivers for the game portion of the device are almost vaporware and aside from the buttons, the analog sticks are not customizable. Our emails and inquiries to Veho went completely unanswered. Logitech please make one!

Conclusions

We can wholeheartedly recommend these systems for anyone who wants to transmit video. As for computing and gaming, we think this is a self-selecting population. People who want to do this are likely to be power users who will be more comfortable with the intricacies of antenna placement and system setup.

Once these systems are dialed in however, the ability to do computing from the couch is pure bliss. All three units have different price performance characteristics. The lossless clarity of the Brite Views were fantastic when in range but the HP performed more reliably in establishing and holding a connection at longer range. Of course this performance is tied to the configuration of the home and the receiver placement. Results will certainly vary but if you fall within the right parameters you are in for a real treat.