What is the reality of the virtual or mixed reality market? There are now four (that we know of) VR daily newsletters, and they seem to have an unlimited source of material to write about. Regardless of what you may think about VR, there are tens of thousands of people in the world who are investing their dollars, Won, Euros, … Read more
Customizing visualization for enterprise CAD customers The CAD industry is nothing like the games industry or entertainment content creation in general. Yeah, pretty obvious. Just as obvious, there are great synergies between the fields and benefits to be gained by incorporating capabilities from the different fields into new apps. And maybe that explains why there is a stubborn persistence in … Read more
It’s all Ethereum to me Last week, as we all know, AMD strutted its stuff for a few days of talks and meetings to promote its new architecture. At those meetings, the company also pledged to protect the market for their first love, gamers. The company introduced gaming packs with the boards at special prices. They promised to restrict supplies … Read more
In a brave switch from convention Dell rolled out the first update on the Alienware Area 51 machine, a real beauty of a gaming machine, with an AMD Threadripper CPU. Dell and AMD announced an exclusive, sort of, for Threadrippers through 2017. It was a cozy deal for AMD for a while, but not really a long while. Dell is … Read more
A new SoC that can game at HDR 4K 60Hz If you get in line around the 15 of November, you might be able to get a new Scorpio Xbox when it goes on sale the 17th. If you bought big-screen 4K monitor and have been longing to play games on it in its natural resolution and not scaled up, … Read more
The HP Omen line is for committed gamers, and we are tempted to ask, is there any other kind? HP segments the gamer community into three categories: mainstream, performance, and enthusiast and they line up about how you’d expect, mostly male and mostly young. The large mainstream gamer group, tends to be younger, more cost conscious. They buy OEM machines … Read more
A powerful portable powerhouse Mobile workstations will never replace a monster powerful desktop with dual processors and dual or Quad AIBs, and a 1200W power supply to keep all that stuff humming. But if you don’t need, or can afford a monster system like that, then you have some very exciting choices in mobile workstations. We’ve looked at several here … Read more
AltspaceVR, a hang-out like Second Life, announced that it has run out of money and will be closing its doors. The company posted an open letter blog to announce the closing as of August 3, 7PM PDT. The company said they had been working on a second round of funding but that it fell through. However, since the company’s official … Read more
We celebrate Dell at Siggraph Jeff Clarke graduated from University of Texas at San Antonio in 1986 as a young engineer, bummed around for a while and finally convinced Michael Dell to hire him—he never left and this is Clarke’s 30th anniversary at Dell, few have been there longer. In 1996, Clarke was listening to his customers tell him they’d … Read more
Over in the Google side of the world, the acquisition of Thinkbox by Amazon has been consummated in the announcement of Thinkbox’s Deadline running on AWS. As Randall Newton reports in GfxSpeak, animation and design studio Tendril worked with the creators of Starz’s American Gods TV series. The Toronto based studios signed on to create a nearly five-minute animated sequence, … Read more
Siggraph 2017: machines, people and tools get smarter The flash points for Siggraph this year, were the flash points for last year: rendering, cloud-based workflows, workstations, VR/AR, AI, engines, and tools. What’s different is that the technology has taken leaps forward and even more fascinating new applications are emerging. The cloud in pictures For five years we have used our … Read more
At Siggraph, Nvidia showcased its software for AI, machine learning, robot programming etc., and it reminded attendees that it has had NVLink, a highspeed link for semiconductors since 2014. However, AMD and Nvidia are reaching partity with staggered product introductions but Nvidia is putting most of its energy into AI and HPC related workloads. As ever, Nvidia excels at building … Read more
