From the create of ATI's Toy Shop demo, comes the AMD Radeon HD 7900 real time demo, 'Leo':

The Leo demo showcases a real-time, DirectX® 11 based lighting pipeline that is designed to allow for rendering scenes made of arbitrarily complex materials (including transparencies), multiple lighting models, and minimal restrictions on the number of lights that can be used -- all while supporting hardware MSAA and efficient memory usage.

Specifically, this demo uses DirectCompute to cull and manage lights in a scene. The end result is a per-pixel or per-tile list of lights that forward-render based shaders use for lighting each pixel. This technique also allows for adding one bounce global illumination effects by spawning virtual point light sources where light strikes a surface. Finally, the lighting in this demo is physically based in that it is fully HDR and the material and reflection models take advantage of the ALU power of the AMD Radeon HD 7900 GPU to calculate physically accurate light and surface interactions (multiple BRDF equations, realistic use of index of refraction, absorption based on wavelength for metals, etc).

Download it, and movie, from AMD Developer Central [registration required].

Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.1 driver:
AMD HD3D technology support enhancement

• Enables support for AMD HD3D technology in conjunction with AMD CrossFireX configurations
• Delivers a new Stereo 3D mode over HDMI 1.4a connections - 1080p at 30Hz is now enabled on supported displays.

AMD Catalyst Control Center / Vision Engine Control Center enhancements – Application Profiles

AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver enables users to create per application profiles to individually control 3D and CrossFireX settings for Direct3D applications

Please be sure to select the “Restore Factory Defaults” option under the Catalyst Control Center Preferences menu before using the new application profiles feature – this ensures there are no compatibility issues between previous drivers and the new AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver with regards to application profiles.

AMD Catalyst Control Center / Vision Engine Control Center enhancements – Video UI improvements

AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver includes user interface enhancements to simply adjustment of video color and video quality controls

Grab the new drivers here.

The AMD Catalyst™ 12.2 Preview includes all of the features found in AMD Catalyst™ 12.1, plus additional fixes that are not included in the AMD Catalyst 12.1 release. Details can be found in the AMD Catalyst 12.2 Preview release notes: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...easenotes.aspx
Grab the AMD Catalyst 12.2 Preview here: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...iewdriver.aspx

Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.2 driver:

AMD Eyefinity 2.1 technology enhancements

• Additional resolution support: Users can now choose from a larger set of resolutions when running AMD Eyefinity
• Dynamic Configuration Changes: Switching between different display configurations will occur automatically when physically plugging/un-plugging displays
• HydraVision enhancements: The Windows Task bar can now be moved and resized based on users preference
• Profile Manager improvements: Increased support for Display Groups (including 5x1) and Extended configurations within the Profile Manager

Please note that AMD Radeon HD 7900 users should keep using the 8.921.2 RC11 driver found here (the 12.2 preview does not supported the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series): http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...C11Driver.aspx

Read the full news release here of today's AMD Financial news release, highlights below:

For the year ended December 31, 2011, AMD reported revenue of $6.57 billion, net income of $491 million, or $0.66 per share, and operating income of $368 million. Full year non-GAAP net income was $374 million, or $0.50 per share, and non-GAAP operating income was $524 million.

"AMD shipped more than 30 million APU's in 2011, resulting in record annual notebook revenue," said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. "The unmatched combination of computing and graphics capabilities in our low-power 'Brazos' platform has made it our fastest ramping platform ever, paving the way for continued growth in key segments and geographies. Our server business has re-gained momentum, delivering two consecutive quarters of strong sequential growth.

"We continued optimizing our financial model in 2011, consistently delivering operating income and creating the foundation for sustained success. We begin 2012 clear on our priorities and opportunities. We are building an AMD that consistently delivers on its commitments."

• The AMD Opteron 6200 Series Processors were honored with the Analysts' Choice Award for Best Server Processor by the Linley Group and "Technology of the Year" from InfoWorld.
• AMD Opteron processor adoption in the HPC market continued, as the National Science Foundation announced a new supercomputer at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will be powered by approximately 50,000 AMD Opteron 6200 series processors
• Worldwide demand for AMD APUs continued to increase throughout the fourth quarter. AMD shipped more than 30 million APUs in 2011, including a record number of mobile processors found in notebooks from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI Samsung, Sony and Toshiba.
• GPU ASP increased sequentially and year-over-year.
• Graphics segment revenue decreased five percent sequentially and 10 percent year-over-year. The sequential decrease was driven primarily by a decline in mobile graphics processor unit (GPU) shipments, partially offset by a seasonal increase in game console revenue. The year-over-year decrease was primarily driven by decreased desktop and Add-in Board (AIB) graphics revenue.
• AMD is the industry leader in leading-edge graphics technology, having shipped more than 100 million DirectX(R) 11 graphics engines across its GPUs and APUs that enable superior visual experiences.

It appears the 30M APU's sold had an effect on discrete mobility GPU sales, as they were no longer needed. No availability of the new AMD Radeon HD 7000 series appears to have dented Q4 desktop discrete sales, too.

Imagination Technologies is not resting on its laurels after becoming a leader in the handheld and tablet business. The company is preparing its return to the world of discrete GPU cards, this time around with a GPGPU product.

Read more: http://vr-zone.com/articles/revenge-...#ixzz1kOTN0IK4

Cooler Master's GeminII range offer top down cooling designs, with the S524 the newest edition. Compatible with 120mm and 140mm fans it can offer an upgrade for your processor cooling - and your whole system.

Cooler Master GeminII S524 CPU Cooler Review

I considered writing a full Weekly Update but then I realized most of you would be more interested in this development instead anyway:


On Friday the 19th we finally cracked the 1 billion mark. Thank you to everyone who helped us get here! Since I couldn't be content with just a picture and a few words, here some rough numbers to give you an idea of where we've been and the path that lies ahead:

• In the approximately 11 years and a few days that Team Rage3d has existed we have averaged about 250,000 points per day.
• At our current points per day of 1.2 million, it will take us about 2.3 years to add another billion points to our total.
• At the moment Team Rage3D is ranked at #29; at our current rate of 1.2PPD it would take us about 25 years to reach the 12 billion points that the #1 team, folding@evga, is at right now.

Stop by the Distributed Computing Sub-Forum to talk about this and other Folding@home related topics. Fold On!

Legitreviews has some nice coverage of AMD's blind truth test the company conducted at this weekends FX GamExperience with [H]ardOCP, in Texas.

ach test station had a ballot that allowed the testers to check the system that gave them a better gaming experience. AMD had roughly 140 people take the challenge during the single day event.
AMD Pepsi Challenge Ballot

The first test that the gamers were issued was down on a pair of $500 gaming machines. System A was powered by an Intel Core i3-2105 ' Sandy Bridge' processor with Intel HD Graphics 3000 and an ASRock H61 motherboard. System B was powered by an AMD A8-3850 'Llano' APU with Radeon HD 6550D on an ASRock A55 motherboard. All of the rest of the components were identical. The obvious goal of this test was to look at similarly priced systems and to see if there was a noticeable difference in gaming performance due to the integrated graphics.

The next challenge given to gamers was two high-end systems that were both running AMD Radeon HD 7970 'Tahati' DirectX 11 graphics cards running an Eyefinity display setup. The Intel system was powered by an Intel Core-i7 2700K 'Sandy Bridge' processor with an ASRock P67 Fatal1ty motherboard and 8GB of AMD DDR3 performance memory. The AMD system was powered by the FX-8150 'Bulldozer' processor an ASRock 990FX Fatal1ty and the same 8GB of AMD DDR3 performance memory. The key to this demo was focused on processor performance and not graphics performance. The Intel Core i7-2700K retails for $369.99 and the AMD FX-8150 retails for $269.99, so the question here was if gamers could tell a difference between the systems.

The blind tests compared two systems for gamers to try out and determine which ran better, worse, or no different. The results? The A6 APU is better than a Core i3, and the FX processor is better than the Core i7.

Read the legitreviews.com write up here.

The Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO is a mid-priced tower cooler for budget minded enthusiasts looking for a solid performing and good looking replacement for their stock cooler. Using Intel's X58 Core i7 platform as a heat load, we test it in single and dual fan configuration.

Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU Cooler Review

Good news, everyone!

We have just released an updated AMD Catalyst driver for the AMD Radeon HD 7900 family for Windows 7 64-bit: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...C11Driver.aspx

Throughout 2012, AMD Catalyst will be a play key role in the life of the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series; it will deliver continuous performance enhancements and new feature support for the new architecture found in the AMD Radeon HD 7900 family. The AMD software development team has already identified a number of opportunities to improve the already amazing AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series. The first set of enhancements can be found in the 8.921.2 RC 11 driver for the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series:

Feature highlights of the 8.921.2 RC11 AMD Radeon HD 7900 driver

Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing Preview support for DirectX 10 and Direct X 11 applications

• AMD Radeon™ HD 7900 users can now enable Super Sample Anti-Aliasing and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing through the AMD Catalyst Control Center for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications.
  
• Applications must support in game Anti-Aliasing for the feature to work (Forced on Anti-Aliasing through the Catalyst Control Center is not supported for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications)

Performance highlights of the 8.921.2 RC11 AMD Radeon HD 7900 driver

• 8% (up to) performance improvement in Aliens vs. Predator
  
• 15% (up to) performance improvement in Battleforge with Anti-Aliasing enabled
  
• 3% (up to) performance improvement in BattleField 3
  
• 3% (up to) performance improvement in Crysis 2
  
• 6% (up to) performance improvement in Crysis Warhead
  
• 10% (up to) performance improvement in F1 2010
  
• 5% (up to) performance improvement in Unigine with Anti-Aliasing enabled
  
• 250% (up to) performance improvement in TessMark (OpenGL) when set to “insane” levels

Resolved issue highlights of the 8.921.2 RC11 Radeon HD 7900 driver

• Folding@Home: intermittent stability issues have been resolved for the OpenCL version of Folding@Home
• Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 no longer experiences minor flickering with Tri CrossFireX configurations
• Dragon Age 2 no longer experiences minor flickering with Tri CrossFireX configurations
• StarCraft 2 no longer encounters issues when quitting campaign with Tri and Quad CrossFireX configurations
• BattleForge stability has been improved with Tri CrossFireX configurations
• Improved stability when enabling / disabling CrossFireX and installing the AMD graphics driver on AMD CrossFire configurations

The New driver is for AMD Radeon 7900 series and Windows 7 64-bit, and is available here - http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...C11Driver.aspx

Famous for his 'hot, slow, late, unmanufacturable' characterization of NVIDIA's Fermi (fastest single GPU card in 2010, 2011), Charlie Demerjian has interested news about NVIDIA's 28nm products, using a new architecture codenamed Kepler:

The short story is that Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) will win this round on just about every metric, some more than others.

Read the full story at Semiaccurate.com

Unless, of course, this is a trick by S|A to catch people reporting news broken by S|A without crediting, by changing key details (like 'will win' should be 'will lose').

Since its introduction to the public in June 2011 at the AMD Fusion11 Developer Summit, the AMD Fusion System Architecture (FSA) has received widespread support and interest from our business partners and technology industry leaders. FSA was the blueprint for AMD’s overarching design for utilizing CPU and GPU processor cores as a unified processing engine, which we are making into an open platform standard. This architecture enables many benefits, including high application performance and low power consumption.

Our software partners are already taking advantage of the power and performance advantage of APU and GPU acceleration, with more than 200 accelerated applications shipped to date. The combination of industry standards like OpenCL and C++ AMP, alongside FSA, is ushering in the era of heterogeneous computing.

Together with these software partners, we have built a heterogeneous compute ecosystem that is built on industry standards. As such, we believe it’s only fitting that the name of this evolving architecture and platform be representative of the entire, technical community that is leading the way in this very important area of technology and programing development.

FSA will now be known as Heterogeneous Systems Architecture or HSA. The HSA platform will continue to be rooted in industry standards and will include some of the best innovations that the technology community has to offer.

Manju Hegde and I will be hosting a breakout session on HSA at AMD’s Financial Analyst Day on February 2nd 2012, which will be webcast live here. More information on the latest advances in HSA design will be released at a future date.

Also, if you haven’t already made plans to attend the AMD Fusion12 Developer Summit in June 2012 in Bellevue, Washington, I encourage you to save the date. Leaders from the technology and programming development communities will converge at the summit to discuss Heterogeneous Computing and the next-generation user experiences that are enabled by this platform.

Source - AMD

Today, from 12am - 12pm EST (GMT -5), Rage3D.com was offline, adding our voice in the fight against censorship.

While we are now back online, this fight is far from over. We ask each of you to contact your representative, and voice your opposition to SOPA & PIPA.

For more information, please visit Wikipedia.

Courtesy of Hardware.FR and a crappy translation by babelfish, we can infer that AMD's newest bad boy in town is only going to get badder as time goes by:

AMD specifies us capacity to go up more easily in frequency with Pitcairn since TSMC polished its manufactoring process gradually so as to reduce the leakage currents compared to what was noted on the first batches of GPU Tahiti.

AMD states to us about it that if it has a broad margin of overclocking it is not by chance but due to the thermal envelope of 250W which limited the room for maneuver for the frequencies of reference. We would thus not be astonished to see AMD proposing an evolution of Radeon HD 7970 with higher frequencies from here a few months, benefitting from the improvements related to the production to complicate the life of Kepler!

Higher clocks for special edition Tahiti 'XTX'?

Source - Hardware.FR

An new AMD blog details the scheduler updates that OS'es have published to support more optimized threading when running on AMD's new Bulldozer archtecture products, including Windows 7:

Let’s take a first look at Windows®. Currently, the CPU scheduling techniques used by Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 are not optimized for the module architecture of the AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 Series processors. This means that certain multi-threaded workloads will not be optimally distributed between cores, which can result in decreased system performance.

Microsoft has just posted a hotfix for Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 documented in KB2645595 that enlightens the OS kernel to the AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 Series topology so that the kernel can do a better job of scheduling threads to the processor cores. This patch leverages work that AMD and Microsoft have done cooperatively for future versions of the Windows kernel, and can be applied as desired by users running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Below you’ll find links to the patches:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2646060

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2645594

What are the performance gains that can be expected from this patch? It depends. Workloads that are moderately threaded have the potential for uplift. This could include virtualization, database, or transactional environments that are “bursty” – a mixture of light and heavy transactions, or legacy applications that are by nature not very threaded. The more heavily threaded the application, the less the likely the uplift. We recommend that interested users apply the patch to a test system and see how their workload responds.

One of the updates is now available through Microsoft Update and will be automatically deliver, presuming you're not a dirty, dirty pirate. Dirty. The other is a hotfix available by request, which disables core parking. This update increases performance of lightly threaded applications at the expense of power saving - disabling core parking.

Core parking is performed by Bulldozer architecture CPU's to reduce power by running threads in as few modules as possible. For lightly threaded applications, this can reduce performance as non-common tasks are running the same module which can introduce latency as shared elements are contested. By disabling core parking, threads are assigned to empty modules to get the full benefit of the CPU resources, but at the expense of power saving - previously unused modules are now used, and won't go into C6 sleep to save heat and power.

Read the full AMD blog here for more information and the download links.

Check out these two great videos from HotHardware, with their coverage of CES 2012 and AMD's new Trinity APU featuring enhanced Bulldozer cores (Piledriver), and an APU tablet running Android 4.0:


Note the AMD APU not only running an actual DirectX 11 title in real time, interactive with people on the floor in the booth, but concurrently performing a video transcode. Oh, and playing a video, two - so three HD screens.