IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 24/02/2010

Unreal Engine 4 "Still a long way off"

It probably isn't so much big news as a statement of the obvious to say that the release of a new iteration of Epic's Unreal Engine is still quite a long way off, but just how far away are we talking?

Rein told Kotaku that work is still underway on Unreal Engine 4, but that the release of the tech is "still a long ways off." How long off? "Unreal Engine 4 is designed for the day we get massively multi-core processors," he said, declining to say how many processors are needed to be defined as "massively-multi." The Xbox 360 and PlayStation three, which each have a few to several cores don't count. And, he said, the next generation of consoles may not qualify either.

Kotaku has a little more from Epic's Mark Rein.

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Intel to dramatically boost capacities of Solid State Drives by year end

While SSDs are very tempting in a number of ways, many have doubtless been put off by the relatively small capacities of most units.آ However, it appears that Intel will be looking to remedy this towards the end of the year, as they're set to release units as large as 600GB into the mainstream market (although at a cost, no doubt).

Intel will also update its family of mainstream and consumer family of solid-state drives in the fourth quarter of the year. The code-name Postville Refresh solid-state drives will all be based on the MLC flash made using 20nm-class process technology at IM Flash fabs. The X25-M SSDs for desktops and mainstream notebooks will be available in 160GB, 300GB and 600GB capacities, the X18-M drives for thin-and-light notebooks will offer 160GB and 300GB of storage space, whereas the value X25-V will provide 80GB ofآ free capacity.

Prices of the forthcoming solid-state drives are unknown and it remains to be seen whether increased amount of storage space will actually increase popularity of SSDs on the mainstream market. By the end of the year 300GB and 600GB capacities will be much lower than mainstream hard disk drives will be able to offer, still, both models will offer plenty of space for operating system as well as software that should benefit from quick load time.

X-Bit Labs has the full story.

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ATI "Cypress" gaming performance analysis

We all know that AMD's Radeon HD 5800 series, "Cypress" codenamed parts have a lot to offer in terms of gaming performance, but how is that achieved technically speaking and where are the architecture's bottlenecks?آ This sounds like a question for Beyond 3D, and of course they don't fail to deliver.

We lost track of where the DX11 argument ended up online, but it definitely pays dividends in the scenarios we're looking at. We were careful to ensure that both GPUs pushed out the same pixels (well, as much as possible considering differing APIs and shaders), which is to say we didn't enable any of the extra DX11 features which were available in Stalker or Unigine (we'll tessellate and harden our shadows upon contact later immediately, patience please!). This is also the reason for which Dirt 2 is missing, in spite of it being DX11 as well: it's almost impossible to get equal conditions between the two pathways there.

When allowed to leverage its DX11 advantage, Cypress actually manages to reach the vaunted performance doubling goal that was supposedly established for it during the development cycle...at least when AA is disabled. This is encouraging in the perspective of future DX11 titles, and how they'll treat owners of DX11 hardware. On the other hand, Unigine shows that this is not a free lunch: without developers actually opting for using performance enhancing features/practices, a simple API change won't do much as the guys behind Unigine opted for image quality enhancements exclusively - which nicely brings us into the closing bit of the pure performance enumeration, which is the DX11+"eye-candy" scenario.

You can read their full analysis right here.

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