nVIDIA working on SRAA

Not to be out done by its rival company, nVIDIA has a new anti-aliasing method in the works aimed towards games with engines that use deferred shading where MSAA won’t work properly. Super-Sampling gives a great solution, sadly the performance penalty is too tall even on todays hardware. So this is where MLAA and nVIDIA’s Subpixel Reconstruction Anti-Aliasing (SRAA) come in the picture, as they do away with jaggies but won’t halt your gaming to a crawl. nVIDIA claims SRAA is better then MLAA in terms of geometry boundaries and has a fixed runtime regardless how complex the scene or the final image is. Mind you processing time still depends on the resolution though.

More will be revealed at the i3D conference held from February the 18th trough the 20th.

Catalyst 11.1 WHQL released

2011’s first WHQL Catalyst suite is now available and comes with numerous fixes related to DVD and HD video playback and to the CCC start up. Release notes also makes one wonder who plays without AA and AF these days, as there are performance improvements (if you can call them that) in F1 2010 and Left 4 Dead 2 with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled, so good for them. This new WHQL release also fixes problems in StarCraft II, Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy Demo, DiRT2 and a couple of CrossFire related issues.

Release Notes
DownloadWinXP 32bit | WinXP 64bit | Vista/Win7 32bit | Vista/Win7 64bit | CAP (Win All)

AMD’s HD 6990 poses for the camera

4Gamer.net posted up a few pictures of AMD’s new dual-GPU card aimed for the enthusiast market. The card will pack two Cayman GPUs with, 32ROPs, 96TMUs, 1536SPs each and 4GB (2GB per GPU) of GDDR5 memory. The card draws power from one 8-pin and one 6-pin connector, so the final GPU clocks will probably be somewhat lower around 775MHz to fit the card in the 300W PCI-SIG power limit.

The cooling system incorporates similar principles to the one found on nVIDIA’s 2nd iteration of the GTX 295, meaning that a blower-style fan sits in the middle of the board providing both GPUs their fair share of airflow… only hick up with this arrangement is of course that half of heat produced get dumped back in your case. Also this card has only one dual-link DVI and four version 1.2 mini-DisplayPorts instead of the “traditional” two DVI, one HDMI, one DisplayPort setup on the back.

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nVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti officially launched

nVIDIA’s new performance-mainstream competitor has launched today with the price tag of 249USD and offers similar performance levels as AMD’s HD 6950 card. It’s also worth mentioning that the Ti (Titanium) moniker makes a return suggesting that there is a somewhat slower GTX 560 version coming down the pipes sooner or later. Anyway specifications and a list of reviews are down below…

GTX 560 Ti:
822/1644/4008MHz (GPU/CUDA Cores/Memory)
32ROP/64TMU/384CC
256bit – 1GB GDDR5
TDP – 170W
MSRP – 249USD

Reviews:

Review roundup – 01/25