TechWatch

And then there were 21—free ray tracing programs

In the process of preparing our 2019 Ray tracing and Rendering report, we have searched for all the ray tracing programs and suppliers we could find. The report is about geometry-based ray tracing and does ...

Arm TechCon and the 5th wave

Back when I was a young engineer at Inmos (remember them?) I attended a pep talk given by the flamboyant Texan who had the job of running our new wafer fab in Duffryn, South Wales. ...

AMD RX 590 extends Polaris to high-end of midrange and celebrates with three games

To celebrate how great the Polaris GPU has been for AMD they are offering a new shrink version with a fantastic deal — a collection of new games. Since it was first announced in 2015, ...

Autodesk reveals first steps in its alliance with Unity for visualization

Last year Autodesk abandoned its Stingray game engine product.  Part of the reason the company decided to can Stingray, the game engine they developed and created from technology acquired with Bitsquid in 2014, was because ...

Nvidia’s Q3 FY19 results

Nvidia's revenue from most platforms – Datacenter, Professional Visualization, and Automotive, was up. Gaming saw a decline.  The company’s GPU business revenue was $2.77 billion, up 25% from a year earlier and up 4.4% sequentially.  However, ...

Hexagon strengthens its construction solutions portfolio for AEC

Hexagon AB continues its aggressive expansion into new markets with the acquisition of Belgian CAD software developer Bricsys.  Founded in 2002, Bricsys introduced its flagship product BricsCAD as an AutoCAD competitor and that is still ...

Epic’s Unreal Engine update delivers on promises made

Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 4.21, an update that ups the ante on Epic’s newfound religion around wireless and also adds considerable power for collaboration and non-gaming applications, especially CAD.   For game development, ...

AMD takes aim at the data center and pushes its 7 nm advantage

AMD has its own kind of quiet, competent glamor, which means that the company isn’t always appreciated in-between its big announcements or stock market leaps. With its latest announcements, the company has brought the spotlight ...

Inside the new SPECworkstation 3 benchmark

SPECworkstation 3, an all-new version of the benchmark formerly known as SPECwpc, was released on October 31. It is developed and maintained by the SPEC Workstation Performance Characterization (SPECwpc) group, which includes AMD, Dell, Fujitsu, ...

Adobe reports 3Q revenue records; continues drive to diversify

Adobe is a machine and the machine is running smoothly. At least that’s how it looks from the company’s third-quarter report. Adobe continues growing its base of users, which helps the company cinch up its ...

Famous graphics chips: EGA to VGA

This is the third in a series of short articles about graphics chips, controllers, and processors, that changed the course of the computer graphics (CG) industry. When IBM introduced the Intel 8080-based Personal Computer (PC) ...

What can you see? EyeQue can tell you

With the introduction of the Apple iPhone’s Retina display, the industry moved into high-resolution, large, bright, fast refresh displays on a smartphone. That was around 2012. Other companies like Samsung followed the trend and some ...