TechWatch

GPU History: Hitachi ARTC HD63484

With the advent of large-scale integrated circuits coming into their own in the late 1970s and early 1980s, fueling the PC revolution and several other developments, came a succession of remarkably powerful graphics controllers. NEC ...

Chaos Group demos Project Lavina; realtime ray tracing

Forest animation rendered in realtime with Chaos’ new Lavina technology. The scene has over 300 billion triangles and 80,000 instances running at 24–30 frames per second with no rasterized graphics or reduced level of detail ...

Nvidia’s new RTX board’s test results

The highly anticipated Turing GPU-based Nvidia RTC 2080-series AIBs were announced in late August at Gamecon 2018 and the top of the lines cards were promised for delivery in late September. They came out the ...

Robots to go, courtesy of Ai Build

Ai Build is a company that has managed to combine all the hot-button technologies of manufacturing into one product package—the Ai Build Factory as a Service (FaaS). It’s AI+large scale 3D printing+IoT.  Unveiled at the ...

AI fight breaks: Nvidia vs. the world

Nvidia, with its claim to be the leading AI training engine in the data center, has painted a big bullseye on their back. Nvidia’s outsize marketing strategy means that everyone who has introduced or shown ...

Making things, seeing things

The many ways content is being created is changing and so are the way we see things. This issue of TechWatch, has some stories that are continuing gifts from Siggraph as well as news that ...

Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs: GeForce Now — a game changer

In our recent article, Remote graphics changing the landscape we mentioned Nvidia’s GeForce Now system and told you that through GeForce Now, you can access games you own on say Steam for example. The game ...

Nvidia’s Turing demonstrates extensibility

Nvidia’s introduction of the Turing processor reveals the seemingly endless extensibility of the GPU. We saw the integration of video decoders and then encoders, audio amplifiers and multiple spatial sound features, and the addition of ...

October will be a big ray tracing month

Every year, Futuremark, now part of UL Labs and simply known as “UL,” added new benchmark tests to its iconic 3DMark. Each test was designed for a specific class of hardware or a particular API. ...

AIB pricing epilog

In my recent editorial on future AIB prices in the U.S. due to the tariff war between Trump and China, I forecasted a decline in sales this holiday season and next year if the tariffs ...

AMD brings Threadripper and new Vega boards to IBC for rendering, VFX, and video

At IBC, digitalization is a done deal and 4K becoming the norm; 8K is coming in with new screens, cameras, transmission systems, CODECS, and lenses all built to satisfy increasing demand. UHD is at home ...

Siemens acquires longtime visualization partner Lightwork Design

Siemens has announced the acquisition of Lightwork Design of Sheffield, England. Lightwork began life as an OEM provider of rendering software to many CAD companies including Autodesk, PTC, Siemens, and Dassault at one time or ...