MODDING: blogs

Remember the mysterious “new” dual-GPU from EVGA/Nvidia? It is here, and there are no surprises. It is a combination of GTX 275 as the “GPU” and a GTS 250 as the PhysX Processor, “PPU”. 

More next page. 

Last week on October 22, Unigine Corp. announced the release of the World's first true DirectX 11 benchmark “Heaven” that is based on its proprietary Unigine engine. This is fairly big news as we can finally get to see how DirectX 11 will look and run on the latest DirectX 11 graphics cards from AMD. Read on to see how the Radeon HD 5870, 5850, 5770 and 5750 do on this tough DX11 benchmark!

With the announcement that Nokia are closing the N-Gage service, Ewan has been looking back at the troubled gaming strategy from Finland, from its launch in 2003 to today’s ticket to Dignitas in an Obituary for the Nokia N-Gage (2003-2009). We’ll pass on any messages of condolence to Finland you may wish to leave.

As expected, the global phone market has continued to contract, year on year, in the current economic climate, according to BusinessWire and Strategy Analytics, whose data table is reproduced below, though Q3 did show a shorter term rise. There’s no breakdown in smartphone numbers as yet, though these are due any day now. Highlight stats from this data are that Nokia’s overall market share is down a smidgen, while Samsung’s is on the rise. It’s still worth noting that Nokia out sold the next three manufacturers in the table though, combined. 

In a low key announcement, via the N-Gage blog, comes the news that Nokia plans to shutter its N-Gage gaming service. Nokia say they will ‘no longer publish new games for the N-Gage platform’; instead games will be provided via its Ovi Store service. Current N-Gage games can be purchased until September 2010 and the N-Gage website and Arena service (online elements) will be available throughout 2010.

With the Nokia N97 v20 firmware now out for a couple of days and fixing the underlying Sync system issues, I’d been on refresh on Nokia’s Mac software site every few hours. It seems that the N97 has now been added to the compatibility list for iSync and that you can now do full iCal and Address Book syncing to the Apple Mac. Go download! I’ll be testing this out thoroughly over the next few days…

The Lenovo ThinkPad T400s has been raving with a lot of good feedbacks ever since it was launched a couple of months ago. We managed to get one in our test lab (but unfortunately its not the multi-touch version) to see how good it is to fit the busy road warriors.

NVIDIA has released a new driver this morning on their beta download site that adds OpenCL 1.0 support for all GeForce 8-series and later GPUs. These drivers are dated October 27, 2009 and feature improved SLI and multi-GPU support for several recent popular titles as well as over 200 various bug fixes. The drivers also add support for CUDA Toolkit 3.0, which will be made available to developers sometime down the road. You can find the list of changes below. Be sure to download these drivers if you want the latest and greatest available!

New in Version 195.39

• Adds support for OpenCL 1.0 (Open Computing Language) for all GeForce 8-series and later GPUs.
• Adds support for CUDA Toolkit 3.0 features and performance enhancements. See CUDA Zone for more details.
• Adds SLI and multi-GPU support for Borderlands, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, G-Force, FIFA Soccer 2010, League of Legends: Clash of Fates, NHL 2009, Order of War, Pro Evolution Soccer 2010, Race On, Star Trek: D-A-C. Improved SLI and multi-GPU support for Champions: Online and Dragon Age: Origins.
• Includes over 200 bug fixes. Refer to the release notes on the documentation tab for information about the key bug fixes in this release.
• Users without US English operating systems can select their language and download the International driver here.

NVIDIA has released a new driver this morning on their beta download site that adds OpenCL 1.0 support for all GeForce 8-series and later GPUs. These drivers are dated October 27, 2009 and feature improved SLI and multi-GPU support for several recent popular titles as well as over 200 various bug fixes. The drivers also add support for CUDA Toolkit 3.0, which will be made available to developers sometime down the road. You can find the list of changes below. Be sure to download these drivers if you want the latest and greatest available!

New in Version 195.39

• Adds support for OpenCL 1.0 (Open Computing Language) for all GeForce 8-series and later GPUs.
• Adds support for CUDA Toolkit 3.0 features and performance enhancements. See CUDA Zone for more details.
• Adds SLI and multi-GPU support for Borderlands, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, G-Force, FIFA Soccer 2010, League of Legends: Clash of Fates, NHL 2009, Order of War, Pro Evolution Soccer 2010, Race On, Star Trek: D-A-C. Improved SLI and multi-GPU support for Champions: Online and Dragon Age: Origins.
• Includes over 200 bug fixes. Refer to the release notes on the documentation tab for information about the key bug fixes in this release.
• Users without US English operating systems can select their language and download the International driver here.

ASUS P7P55D Deluxe, EVO Motherboards @ iXBT Labs and other reviews from around the web can be found by visiting our forums!

“If you have to choose between these two models, it's really easy. Deluxe has a tad better power supply system and a formally better audio codec. But EVO offers eSATA on the rear panel. You have to agree that the boards are very similar. The key difference is TurboV Remote that is not available for EVO.”