We came across the B.S.B.B. MKII while wandering aimlessly around GDC. Cordoned off, alone in the exhibit area, a man sat in the control center barking orders, or receiving them, we’re not complexly sure in an industrial cockpit complete with blinking lights, colored switches, fire alarms, and a landline phone for emergencies. The B.S.B.B. MK II traveled from its permanent … Read more
Chaos Group has announced their new cloud-rendering service, which, they say, differs from competitive services with straightforward pricing that charges only for the rendering time and does not have surprise fees such as additional charges for uploading files. The company describes Chaos Cloud rendering as a single button click. As with most rendering services, customers buy packages of credit. Their … Read more
When Jim Pappas first spoke to me about USB, which was almost based on Philips I2C, his ambitions for it was a universal peripheral interconnect. That was 23 years ago. Last week, when he introduced CXL, he told me it (CXL) could evolve as USB did. “I never could have imagined it would expand and be used for everything as … Read more
Nvidia shook up the CG community last Fall at Siggraph when the company introduced its RTX Turing-based AIBs that are capable of real-time ray tracing (RTRT). Microsoft brought out a special API for it, DXR, and several ISVs committed to it (see article this issue, Ray tracing is a journey ). All of that was and still is, exciting. I … Read more
As most of you know I love ray tracing, even just wrote a book about it (comes out Siggraph time). So, I was thrilled when at last year’s Siggraph Nvidia showed their Turing architecture and promised real-time ray tracing for all. I wasn’t the only one thrilled as enthusiasts and developers bought out all Nvidia had to sell. Then the … Read more
The initial Compute Express Link (CXL) specification was developed by Intel and is being donated to a new consortium. Nine companies (so far) have signed up to support the new interface. Alibaba, Cisco, Dell/EMC, Facebook, Google, HPE, Huawei, and Microsoft. “Much like our roles with Universal Serial Bus (USB) and PCI Express—and we look forward to working with the CXL … Read more
Driving to stay at least in step, if not ahead of the virtual, mixed, augmented, and yet to be named and marketed realities, the Khronos OpenXR working group has released their working API which covers various OS, and presumably all devices. OpenXR—solving the VR–AR fragmentation if not confusion. (Source: Khronos) OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides … Read more
Business Advantage (BA) has been measuring the CAD market since 1992. The company conducts surveys worldwide on a custom basis. The group also conducts a regular trends survey to help them keep an eye on the interests of CAD users and promote their services. BA’s trend surveys have also proved to be a valuable weathervane about CAD users real requirements … Read more
Graebert introduced its latest CAD engine at the end of 2018 and new products based on it are rolling out now in 2019. The highlights of the new version include the company's Trinity strategy to make mobile and cloud versions available to users as well. Graebert sells its own products as Ares Commander and it offers its APIs to … Read more
The game engine giants, Unreal and Unity are gathering in capabilities to make their platforms more powerful and attractive for users. Epic, having grown fat on Fortnite, has made several significant purchases for its Unreal Engine over the last 12 months or so. The company kicked off 2018 with the acquisition of Cloudgine, a powerful tool to boost the capabilities … Read more
Is there a game, aside from Monopoly that is, that celebrates the cutthroat nature of capitalism pitting competitors against each other in a fight to bankruptcy and turning allies against each other? Probably. The game is being played out in full force by Unity Technologies and Epic as both companies fight to build their technology portfolios to enable them to … Read more
The year is 1995, the world was full of promise, opposing political parties were civil to each other and a new idea called virtual reality was being introduced for PCs and other devices. The internet bubble hadn’t popped yet, the 2000 bug hadn’t been thought of yet, and Annie Lennox sang about No More I love You’s, while Van Halen … Read more
