How Things Are Around Here

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: June 26, 2008 - 10:10 AM People say that one image is worth more than one thousand words. I think it is the case with this picture of what is below my main bench. click to enlarge Plus what is inside my closet.  Yep, I have around 30 hardware parts for reviewing here... This means it would take 1 month reviewing one part per day and asking the manufacturers to stop sending me stuff. Who said running a reviewing website was an easy job? Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (2) top

The new GeForce 9800 GTX+ and PhysX

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: June 19, 2008 - 10:25 AM I really don’t know about you, but sometimes I get the impression that nVidia likes to launch one new video card per week. Even for us sometimes it is hard to keep track of all new releases. The new GTX 200 was launched only three days ago and today nVidia launched a “new” card, GeForce 9800 GTX+ (an overclocked 9800 GTX), lowering the price of GeForce 9800 GTX to make it a competitor to the new Radeon HD 4850. Fortunately nVidia provided a handy table comparing which products from AMD competes to which products from nVidia after this price drop and the addition of GTX+, see below. click to enlarge But today nVidia also made an important announcement, which is finally the support of PhysX in the GPU. PhysX is a physics engine, which allows games to be more realistic by calculating how objects interact. For example, if you shot an object, what will happen to the object? Will the object move? Will the bullet make a hole on the object? Will the bullet bounce back? Will the object be destroyed? These calculations are traditionally done by the system CPU. The new 177.39 driver allows GeForce 9800 GTX, GTX 280  and GTX 260 to move these calculations to the GPU, thus improving performance. nVidia is promising for July a new driver that will allow PhysX for the entire nVidia product line. There are several games supporting PhysX on the market, Unreal Tournment 3 is one of them. 3DMark Vantage also supports PhysX, but it isn’t a real game. Forthcoming games supporting PhysX includes Mstar, Mirrors Edge, Empire: Total War, Backbreaker and Pwnage. The only problem for me with this amount of new releases in such a short period of time is trying to put together reviews, especially when nVidia launches a new driver version a day, forcing us to retest all video cards everytime a new major driver is released. For instance, with this new driver supporting PhysX released, all our data we had already collected for 9800 GTX and GTX 200 is worthless and even our GTX 280 review published only 3 days ago may be considered "flawed" by criterious readers because of a new driver released today supporting PhysX. This really sucks. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (2) top

Our New Methodology for High-End VGA Reviews

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: June 10, 2008 - 1:16 PM Deciding what methodology to use when reviewing hardware parts like video cards, processors and motherboards is always hard. No matter what methodology we decide to use there will always be users complaining that we should used this or that hardware part, that we should have included this or that program or game, and so on. There are several technical reasons involved on how we pick the components and programs to do our benchmarking; this selection is not random and also isn’t based on “we used these components because these are the components we have here at our lab”. In fact every time we decide to update our testing procedures we spend a lot of money buying new parts and programs. Since we are going to start reviewing high-end video cards again – finally! – we decided to explain all the reasons behind the components we picked. The main goal with a VGA benchmarking is to test the maximum performance it can deliver. If we install a high-end video card on a low-end or mainstream system, the system may limit the maximum performance the video card can deliver because the CPU, the memories and/or the hard disk drive may be limiting the performance (this happens because if the video card is faster than the other components it will have to wait for data that is coming from outside, thus reducing its performance; we want a system where data is available as soon as the video card requires them). Also since high-end video cards are expensive, we believe a user that buys a high-end card will install it on a high-end PC. Even though there are probably users that install high-end video cards on low-end PCs, it doesn’t make sense to review a high-end video card on a low-end system because the system would be limiting the video card performance, as explained. So we tried to build the most high-end system we could, i.e. the fastest CPU, the fastest memories and the fastest hard disk drive we could buy. We know that our system isn’t a typical PC, but at least we know for sure that no part from our system is limiting the maximum performance the video card can deliver. Below we are listing all components from the hardware setup we will use for reviewing high-end video cards, with a brief explanation on why we picked each component and how much each one costs. CPU: Core 2 Extreme QX9770 (3.2 GHz, 1,600 MHz FSB, 12 MB L2 memory cache). As explained we wanted the fastest CPU around to make sure that the CPU wouldn’t be limiting the video card’s performance. This baby costs USD 1,470. Memories: Crucial Ballistix PC3-16000 2 GB kit (BL2KIT12864BE2009). We wanted the fastest memories around and these DDR3 memories from Crucial run at 2,000 MHz with 9-9-9-28 timings are are compatible with nVidia’s EPP standard. The biggest problem is the price, USD 500, which prevented us from having a system with 4 GB instead of “only” 2 GB. Motherboard: EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI. We picked this motherboard because it is compatible with our CPU, it is based on PCI Express 2.0 and it can make our memories to run at 2,000 MHz with no fancy configuration. It costs USD 350. Hard disk drive: Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS (300 GB, SATA-300, 10,000 rpm, 16 MB cache). We wanted a high performance drive and a 10,000 rpm seemed the way to go. It costs USD 300. Video monitor: Samsung SyncMaster 305T (LCD, 30”, 2560x1600). We wanted a video monitor that could reach a resolution of 2560x1600 and this was our best choice. We could have bought a cheaper CRT solution, but we wanted a monitor that wouldn’t take a lot of space on your bench. It costs USD 1,230. Notice that we didn’t buy this monitor because of its screen size (30”) but because of its maximum resolution. Notice that there are bigger monitors around that are cheaper, but they have a lower resolution. Power supply: OCZ EliteXStream 1,000 W. We know that 1,000 W is overkill, but we wanted to make sure that we wouldn’t have any kind of power shortage. It costs USD 250. So we are talking about a USD 4,100 system. We are glad that except for the video monitor and for the hard disk drive all other parts we got from the manufacturers that are proudly sponsoring Hardware Secrets. Even with these donations we still had to invest USD 1,530 (plus shipping) for you to get the best possible high-end VGA reviews. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (2) top

Far Cry 2 Gameplay Demo, Technical demo, Screenshots and Fact Sheet

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: May 28, 2008 - 4:53 PM Last week during nVidia Editor’s Day Spring 2008 Ubisoft made a gameplay presentation of Far Cry 2. I happened to be there and record the whole presentation, basically the folks from Ubisoft playing the game and showing what’s new – you can watch it below. Funny enough they said that this was the first public presentation of this game, but we could find a few other videos with gameplay presentations of Far Cry 2 on YouTube (but since these other videos were all shot in 2007 we believe our demo was performed with a more updated version of the game). They also provided to the folks present a fact sheet, two high-res screenshots and a technical video presentation, all of which I also included here. Enjoy! Obs: since YouTube has now a 10-minute limit per video I had to split the video into two parts. Far Cry 2 gameplay Demo, presented during nVidia Editor's Day Spring 2008 (May 22nd, 2008) Far Cry 2 technical Demo, showing the new technical features used in the game Screenshots click to enlarge click to enlarge Fact Sheet: click here to download Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

The Future – According to nVidia

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: May 25, 2008 - 1:05 PM Last week nVidia held their Spring 2008 Editor’s day, where they presented their forthcoming series of graphics processing units, which will be released next month. While we can’t talk about this new chip series yet due to the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), we can talk about some ideas that nVidia is seeing as “the future of computing” – basically more GPGPU usage (i.e. the use of the graphics chip to process regular programs) and the co-existence of “competing” technologies like ray tracing and rasterization. click to enlarge Figure 1: The future of computing, according to nVidia. During the whole Editor’s Day nVidia repeated ad nauseum how marvelous GPGPU is, showing several examples of applications where performance increased monstrously by the use of this technique. For those who don’t know the concept, the idea is to make the video card GPU to process regular programs instead of using the CPU. What is allowing this to be possible is nVidia’s CUDA compiler, which is capable of compiling any program written in C to be run on any nVidia GPU from series 8 on. We’ve already wrote an article explaining more about this technology. Is nVidia saying that in the future GPUs will replace CPUs? No exactly. The computer will still need a CPU, but the way nVidia is seeing it the role of the CPU will dramatically decrease in the future. In fact, this is already happening. Thru their “nTeresting” newsletters nVidia has been hammering Intel in the past month, claiming that contrary to what Intel wants you to believe CPU’s aren’t playing an important role on gaming performance anymore and the savvy user should buy a cheaper CPU and spend the saved money on a better video card for a better gaming performance. With GPU performance increasing and more and more tasks that were previously performed on the CPU being transferred to the GPU, this idea makes sense. With GPGPU this idea will also be valid for regular applications, as soon as mainstream products start to use the GPU for processing, boosting the application performance. During the event Adobe declared that they will start using GPGPU on their forthcoming products, in particular the next version of Photoshop to be released around September, and this could represent the first step towards that direction. Even though from the presentations it is clear that GPGPU can really boost performance on specific applications, the future is always unclear and the performance increase brought by GPGPU for the average user will only depend on software developers upgrading their programs to support it. It is always important to remind that programs compiled to use GPU’s from nVidia for processing won’t run on ATI’s. Of course final products can detect which video card you have installed on your system and load the CUDA-compiled code – which will provide the performance increase – if you have an nVidia video card. As for the rasterization vs. ray tracing battle, nVidia is seeing the co-existence of both technologies in the future, as ray tracing is in fact a better technology for some applications, but worse for others. They used as an example the film industry, which use both technologies on movies depending on what needs to be rendered. Nowadays ray tracing isn’t used by games. So by this talk we may expect future GPUs and games to support ray tracing? Maybe, but this probably won’t happen before 2010. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (2) top

Are Intel chipsets really capable of running DirectX 10 games?

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: May 1, 2008 - 10:52 AM That is the question nVidia is asking around. They just sent us some information about DirectX 10 support on Intel chipsets with integrated video. The conclusion is simple: DirectX 10 support isn't relevant as on-board video doesn't have enough performance to run today's games anyway! See below the full e-mail we've got from nVidia. If you are interested in learning more about integrated (a.k.a. on-board) video from Intel it is an interesting read. --- Received from nVidia May 1st, 2008 --- Intel integrated claims DirectX 10...try it out... Intel promised to have a DirectX 10 driver by yesterday, so keep your eyes peeled. Last week a new Intel motherboard came out and along with it Intel claimed that their GMA X3500 was DX10 capable. "The DG35EC Classic series board is built with integrated graphics based on GMA X3500 integrated graphics. It includes HD video playback for movie clips and media streams without the need for an add-in video card and is the first to have integrated Microsoft DirectX 10 capability with OpenGL 2.0 support." Even though you can see Intel claiming DirectX 10 support as far back as June 2006 for their 965 chipset (NOTE: wouldn't that make those motherboards the first ones to support DirectX 10?) they still have not released the long, long, long delayed driver, only offering a driver with no DirectX 10 support on their website. The good news for anyone who may have mistakenly believed they could actually use DirectX10 on all the Intel products they claim it for is that a driver leaked on the web. Since Intel states it is DirectX 10 capable, we decided to try it out on the available DirectX 10 titles that are shipping today, as a preview to the official release of their driver: Call of Juarez @ 1280 x 1024, no AA/AF -- 1.8 fps Crysis @ 1280 x 1024, no AA/AF -- 4.4 fps World in Conflict @ 1280 x 1024, no AA/AF -- 5 fps BioShock @ 1280 x 1024, no AA/AF -- 3.7 fps Company of Heroes @ 1280 x 1024, no AA/AF -- 3.6 fps 5 fps or less on the DirectX 10 titles available today at the meager setting of 1280 x 1024 with no AA/AF. Sounds fun. GMA X3500 does not seem very "capable" to me, in fact it seems downright incapable of being used with actual DirectX 10 applications. Now consider that DirectX 10 titles will only get more stressful on the graphic subsystem as the API matures and game developers continue to add more impressive visuals. Saying GMA 3500 is DirectX 10 capable is kind of like saying Styrofoam is "nutrition capable". I guess Intel's definition of capable is a lot different than our definition... a lot. Intel DirectX 10, FTL. System info: ASUS P5E-VM HDMI Intel G35 chipset 7.14.10.1451 video driver Intel Core2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2337.6 MHz (7.0 x 333.9 MHz) - Conroe 2x1024 MBytes (2048 MBytes) Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 32-bit Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

New Layout on Hardware Secrets

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: April 24, 2008 - 6:14 PM Hi folks! Today I changed Hardware Secrets layout a little bit, adding an icon to represent each article, on each section and on the main page. Since the number of articles grew a lot in the past months, I think this will facilitate finding articles on our website. Also, in order to the category pages not be very long, I also added a navigation system, i.e. if the category has too many articles, it will be broken down into several pages. Please let me know what you think about this modification. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (2) top

Huntkey Green Star 450 W Re-tested!

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: March 24, 2008 - 4:07 PM As I promised I bought another Huntkey Green Star 450 W power supply to redo the 450 W load test using another load pattern. The result? Absolutely the same. Huntkey Green Star 450 W is in fact a 360 W power supply that explodes if you try to pull 450 W from it. This time we taped the test in order to prove our claims. Click here to read the updated review, including the video. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

BFG 800 W Power Supply Review Updated

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: March 18, 2008 - 4:54 PM BFG has released a new "Limited Edition" version of their 800 W power supply correcting the video card power cables issues, which were too short, adding two longer video card power cables. So this new version has a total of four video power cables instead of "just" two. Because of the release of this new version, we updated the text from our review. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Gold-Plated DeLorean and Batmobile

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: February 10, 2008 - 8:15 PM K.I.T.T., DeLorean, Batmobile and Mach 5 (from Speed Racer cartoons) are emblematic cars for nerds  above 30 years old like me. And this weekend I was able to see in person a 24-karat gold-plated De Lorean and the original Batmobile from the Pow! Smack! Wham! 1960’s Batman TV series. These two classic cars are just two of the over 200 cars exposed in the National Automobile Museum in Reno, NV. The amount of interesting cars there is amazing, and you should visit this museum during your next skiing/snowboarding trip to Tahoe – it is within walking distance from the main street (Virginia Street), where the main casinos are located. The 1981 24-karat gold-plated De Loren was one of the two manufactured to promote American Express Gold card. click to enlarge click to enlarge click to enlarge click to enlarge click to enlarge The Batmobile is an all-time icon, making success even with kids from the Pokémon generation: buttons, buttons and more buttons! For me what is really worth dying for is the radar (a.k.a. “Detect-a-scope”) on the dash board on the passenger’s side. click to enlarge click to enlarge click to enlarge The museum is great, but it would be far better if they had K.I.T.T. on display (click here for my coverage on K.I.T.T.)! Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top