The Smidgen

John McCain, presidential candidate and self professed technology curmudgeon, who admitted during his presidential campaign to having little or no knowledge or interest in modern technologies like email or the Internet, seems to suddenly be very interested in it’s ‘freedom‘.

His new bill, the ‘Internet Freedom Act’ sets out to stop the FCC from going forward with any sort of Net Neutrality regulations after the FCC has unanimously voted to go ahead with talks to formalize net neutrality guidelines.  In the bill the FCC “shall not propose, promulgate, or issue any regulations regarding the Internet or IP-enabled services.”  Now I have to echo Tony Bradley of PC World’s statement here and ask, isn’t that what the FCC is supposed to do?

Now McCain certainly knows nothing about the internet but he does know about removing regulations in the thought that the free market will police themselves, just like AT&T did when they blocked VoIP services or Comcast did when they throttled peer-to-peer networking on the down-low, both of which only retracted after threat of FCC net neutrality rules.  Go team “Honest and Fair”!

You know guys, if there is a legitimate reason to block net neutrality guidelines you have 120 days to gather your data and present your case in the debate the FCC has just voted to have.  No guidelines have actually been set yet so perhaps waving around legislation like a torch to scare off ‘the beast’ is a bit premature.  Remember, 120 days, and since you’re probably not good at math that’s about four months to prepare to defend the internet’s ‘freedom’.  Which I supposed would be the ‘god’ given freedom to rape and pillage, right?

As promised, it’s here, the new Radeon HD 5870 from AMD.  In case you forgot this card is basically double everything you had in the RV790 chips (Radeon HD 4890) running in the same power envelope with lower idle power consumption.  Not bad eh?  It’s built using TSMC’s 40nm process allowing those 2.15b transistors to keep the power levels down (188W load and a very low 27W idle).  The 5870 with 1GB is also priced slightly lower than previously reported at $379, however, NewEgg is already sold right out of them.

So how does it perform you ask (naturally)?  Well AnandTech (as well as several other sites) has an extensive and lengthy review if you want all the details, including a lot of specifications and hardware diagrams, but I’ll summarize the juicy performance parts here.

For Crysis: Warhead AMD’s new card comes in just under the GTX 295 in pretty much every test.  AMD’s goal was to beat the 295 and they are really close but not quite there with Crysis.  Of course this new card is about $100 cheaper than the cheapest 295 out there and up to and over $300 cheaper than others, so take that as you will.  For Far Cry 2 the 5870 in fact does beat the 295 by just a little bit, though oddly it loses to it’s other multi-GPU competitor, the 4870×2, go figure.  As for the single GPU match up the 5870 beats the GTX 285 by 40%.  World of Warcraft?  Well it’s notoriously CPU dependent but nevertheless the 5870 beats pretty much everything out there except for an SLI configuration of GTX 285’s.  The story is pretty much the same across the board with the 5870 and the GTX 295 swapping wins here and there by small margins and the 5870 beating any other single GPU solution out there.

So what do we have then?  Well as a single GPU solution the 5870 is by far the fastest around and considering the 285’s price points are currently in the $300 range it makes the 5870 a far better purchase due to it’s slightly future proof DirectX 11 hardware.  In the single cards space however (meaning one card but possibly more than one GPU), the 5870 and the GTX 295 are close with the 295 being slightly faster.  Again you must consider a $100 price premium for a ~10% performace gain.  In the multi-card space two 5870’s in CrossFire mode is once again the clear winner.

So what games will take advantage of the 5000 series DirectX 11 prowess?  First is EA’s Battleforge; out just in time for the release of the 5000 series (a day early in fact) it is the first game to have DX11 support, though limited.  S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, went gold in Russia earlier in the week and should have an English version on the way.  While we don’t know the specifics of it’s DX11 content, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are typically very tough of GPU’s so it should be an interesting test when released.  Dirt2 will be the first “full featured” DX11 title supporting tessellation, shadow filtering and other dx11 features and is due out December 11th for PC.  Aliens Vs Predator from Rebellion Games will be the most impressive DX11 game but it’s not due out till Q1 next year at the earliest.

So there you have it kiddies, AMD is first out of the gate with DX11 hardware and Nvidia is left to play catch-up for the first time since DirectX 9.0.  This could be a bad thing for Nvidia as game developers looking to incorporate DirectX 11 into their titles currently have only one choice of hardware, meaning the games will be tweaked to work with AMD’s DX11 implementations over Nvidia’s, something that happened in reverse with DX10.  The stage is set for the next battle royale, just waiting on Nvidia to show up to the party now.

Like the idea of running a gaming rig with multiple GPU’s a-crankin’ but don’t want to be tied down to one chipset or graphics card manufacturer?  Well Lucid’s gotcha covered.  Enter the Hydra 200 real time distributed processing engine.

When first announced over a year ago many people, myself included, expected nothing.  A chip that would distribute the graphics process to any GPU regardless of manufacturer and without proprietary cables and connectors, without performance sacrifices?  Ok, sure.  Well here we are about a year later and the Hydra 200 is about to make us eat our words.

The Hydra 200 chip is a small (18-23mm) chip that uses 6W of power and can be placed on a motherboard or expansion card to handle the distribution of the graphics processing requirements to the cards you have installed.  Since it’s a separate chip, it doesn’t care what card that might be.  AMD and Nvidia’s SLI concoctions require you to have a specific chipset and then use a special connector to get multiple cards to work in conjunction.  Both graphics card manufacturers then use software in the form of drivers to distribute the graphics workload among the GPU’s.  With Lucid’s chip the software is on the silicone and handles the processing before it gets to the cards so all the cards need to think about is pumping out the results of the work it gets.

I’m still not completely sold on it using “100%” of the performance of every card attached but it is intriguing.  The Hydra is Vista and Windows 7 compatible and supports DirectX’s 9c and 10.1 as well as being DirectX 11 ready.  MSI appears to be the first one out of the gate using a Hydra 200 chip on their “Big Bang” motherboards due out on October 29th.  Hopefully we’ll get some performance benchmarks soon after that.

Both AMD and Nvidia are gearing up to release new DirectX 11 capable cards in just a few weeks and it seems like AMD has come out swinging.  Their new RV870 core powered cards, to be called the Radeon HD 58xx series (no surprises there), effectively doubles the processing power over last generations Rv770 with a full 1600 stream processors.  It remains to be seen (and tested) if this will also double the actual power of the cards or not.  When I find that out I’ll be sure to keep you all informed.

The 5870’s will have an 825mhz core and come in two varieties, 1GB of RAM or 2GB, and retail (supposedly) for $399 and $449 respectively.  The more mainstream and slower 5850 will also have 1GB of memory and sell for $299.  Some additional tech specs can be found at Fudzilla, though keep in mind these are not officially released specs.

Now double the power of the 48xx series is quite a bit of oomph and frankly, there isn’t really a game out there right now that needs it.  So what do you do with all that extra pizazz?  Multi-head setups of course.  AMD calls it Eyefinity and it’s all about the resolution.  One new Radeon HD 5870 card will actually support 6 monitors producing a single resolution of 7680-by-3200.  The best part, however, is that this is done through AMD’s drivers and is transparent to Windows, meaning the OS (and therefore the games) will see all six monitors as one and won’t have to worry themselves with how to display the image across them, AMD takes care of that.  Have a crapload of cash and nothing to do with it?  Why not slap four 5870’s in a single system and run 24 monitors from the same, single machine for a mind numbing resolution of 30,720-by-12,800. It’s been done already and I’ll take 8.

Samsung has stated that they will support Eyefinity with a series of small bezel monitors so when you’re tying six of their monitors together it will appear slightly more seamless.  Good for them.  Well kids, that’s what you have to look forward to in just a few more weeks.  When I get word of Nvidia’s plans I’ll be sure to let you know.

Scientists at UMass Amherst and UC Berkeley have developed a new way to align nanoscale block copolymers using commercially available sapphire crystals.  Got that?  No?  Well let me see if I can break it down a bit.

Block copolymers, which are two or more chemically dissimilar polymer chains linked together, have this habit of organizing themselves into an equidistant pattern when spread out on a thin film, a pattern that computers, and especially data storage get all hot and bothered for.  The problem is, things get sloppy when the area of copolymers gets larger, making it impractical.

The sapphires come in to play because when heated to 1300 to 1500 degrees Celsius for 24 hours they reorganize their surfaces to a highly ordered pattern of sawtooth ridges and guess what, the copolymers love it.  These ridges give the copolymers a guide to follow allowing for larger areas of extremely small (I said nanoscale remember) and extremely organized patterns.

Great, now we know that but what does it all mean?  It means that with features as small as 3 nanometers you can store 10 terabits of data per square inch.  So something about the size of a quarter can hold about 125 gigabytes of data.  Now go cram that in your camera.

Now that's an LCD

Logitech may have gone completely insane.  Announced for a release in May is the G19 keyboard, an upgrade to the popular G15, the first keyboard to contain an LCD screen on it.  For the most part it has a lot of the same features as the G15, the macro keys and all of that, with the addition of the fully customizable backlight color available on the G13 gamepad and G9 mouse.  There is also a windows button disable switch meaning if you’re in a full screen game you can turn off the windows button so as to avoid accidentally pressing it and minimizing your screen.

Oh and one more thing … it has a friggen 320X240 pixel, color LCD screen.  Yeah, you read that right, the LCD has been upgraded to the size of a cell phone screen and, with the included app, can play youtube video on it … on the friggen keyboard!  Check this review out for the full details if you’re interested but be forewarned, all that coolness will cost you a double-benny … which is a term I just made up for $200.