IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 22/01/2010

OnLive Game Service preview

The concept of playing the latest games without needing a high-end gaming PC or games console is certainly a tantalising one, and it's exactly this which OnLive is offering as the core tenet of its forthcoming service.آ But will it work practically in the real world?آ PC Perspective take a look at how the service is shaping up to try and fathom out whether it really is the future of gaming.

You are seeing OnLive running Burnout: Paradise on my local system using just under 60MB of memory and anywhere from 4-7% of the CPU power.آ My system is running on a Core i7-860 so that is a bit lower than the total system consumption you'll see on slower systems, but that is obviously much lower CPU horsepower than would be required to play these types of games locally.آ This memory consumption and CPU utilization never went much beyond this (I did see 71MB used) after hours of game play or between varying games.آ This is one of the key benefits of the fruition of the cloud-based gaming vision the OnLive team has.

I also did a quick check to see how much bandwidth the OnLive application was using it its current form.آ The short answer: about 1 Mb/s.

Check out their thoughts and experience in full over here.

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NVIDIA responds to AMD's PhysX claims

Ever since the launch of the PhysX API and PPU from AGEIA back in the day, I remember reading stories and accusations about the company's software not making proper use of multi-core CPUs to exaggerate the advantages of using their dedicated hardware.آ Well, those arguments continue to this day, with AMD's Richard Huddy recently making the same claim about CPU-based PhysX being unnecessarily crippled in terms of multi-threaded.آ NVIDIA have now responded to those allegations, and here's what they had to say.

Our PhysX SDK API is designed such that thread control is done explicitly by the application developer, not by the SDK functions themselves.آ One of the best examples is 3DMarkVantage which can use 12 threads while running in software-only PhysX. This can easily be tested by anyone with a multi-core CPU system and a PhysX-capable GeForce GPU. This level of multi-core support and programming methodology has not changed since day one. And to anticipate another ridiculous claim, it would be nonsense to say we “tunedâ€‌ PhysX multi-core support for this case.

As is par for the course, this is yet another completely unsubstantiated accusation made by an employee of one of our competitors. I am writing here to address it directly and call it for what it is, completely false. Nvidia PhysX fully supports multi-core CPUs and multithreaded applications, period. Our developer tools allow developers to design their use of PhysX in PC games to take full advantage of multi-core CPUs and to fully use the multithreaded capabilities.

Tom's Hardware has NVIDIA's response in full.

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