AMD's Turn To Do Flashy Graphics

Hot on the heels of Intel's real time ray tracing efforts yesterday, AMD has come out with their "Cinema 2.0" cinema quality real-time rendering and marketing blarg. It looks pretty sweet (although that metal beasty looks kinda like a certain "dog" from Half-Life 2) but seriously, get the marketing guys down out of the clouds. Check out the depressingly compressed video over at Engadget and make up your own mind.

The big difference between this demo and Intel's is that it's running on (almost) freely available hardware. That is, "a single PC loaded with a pair of (future) consumer-grade AMD RV770 graphics cards, Phenom X4 9850 processor, and 790FX chipset."

nVidia GTX 280 and GTX 260 Video Cards Released

Some good news today from Engadget, you can finally run Crysis on high quality at your LCD monitor's native res. The article mentions that the new card is 50% faster than the 9800 GX2 but don't get too excited. The GTX 280 which packs 1GB of video RAM will kick your nads hard with its $649 USD (~$690 AUD) price tag and the lesser GTX 260 with its 896MB of video RAM will "only" set you back $399 USD (~$425 AUD). Good to see they've started yet another naming/numbering standard to confuse the average consumer even more.

Edit: Engadget have posted a new article with links to Custom PC who have reviewed and pulled apart the GTX 280.

Intel Does Real-Time Ray Tracing of ET: Quake Wars

TG Daily reports that Intel is showing off real-time ray tracing on a 16-core system (4 x quad core processors) using ET: Quake Wars running at 720p outputting between 14 and 29 frames per second. That may not sound too impressive but this thing is doing real-time reflections and refraction,

among other things, unlike current games which fake their way around these things. It's just a shame that the images are photos of a monitor.