IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 24/03/2010

Metro 2033: Benchmarks with DirectX 11 and GPU Physx

Metro 2033 is the latest game to sport support for DirectX 11, as well as making use of GPU-accelerated PhysX - But how does it perform on the latest hardware? PC Games Hardware takes a look.

If you are running Metro 2033 on a DirectX 11 graphics card you get two additional video options: Tessellation and Depth of Field. The latter one is also active in DirectX 10 but the DX11 version is rendered by Direct Compute. In Metro 2033 not only NPCs but also weapons in your hands and certain objects like chairs are tessellated. But the developers did exaggerate a little bit: Like it has been the case in Stalker: Call of Pripyat, the tessellated objects look pumped up. But without a direct comparison you can’t really see the difference anyway. Except the two additional options the DirectX 11 mode offers the same graphics as the DirectX 10 mode and even the performance is on the same level.

You can read all of their findings over here.

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Nintendo to release 3DS by March 2011

We all know that Nintendo loves their gaming innovations, from the original Nintendo DS through to the Wii and its motion controller. But what's next for the Japanese video gaming giant? How about a handheld console that offers up 3D gaming without the need for additional glasses?

Nintendo Co., Ltd.(Minami-ward of Kyoto-city, President Satoru Iwata) will launch “Nintendo 3DS”(temp) during the fiscal year ending March 2011, on which games can be enjoyed with 3D effects without the need for any special glasses.

“Nintendo 3DS”(temp) is going to be the new portable game machine to succeed “Nintendo DS series”, whose cumulative consolidated sales from Nintendo amounted to 125million units as of the end of December 2009, and will include backward compatibility so that the software for Nintendo DS series, including the ones for Nintendo DSi, can also be enjoyed.

We are planning to announce additional details at E3 show, which is scheduled to be held from June 15, 2010 at Los Angeles in the U.S.

Check out the full announcement over at VG247, while you can see a brief YouTube video of the Nintendo 3DS in action below.

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 benchmarks leaked

With the launch of NVIDIA's first DirectX 11 GPUs only days away, it was almost inevitable that we'd see at least a few early benchmarks leak out onto the web, and so it's proved, courtesy of the people at Arab Hardware...

NVIDIA's own benchmarks have to be taken with a pinch of salt, but the first of what appears to be real-world benchmarks have now arrived to back up NVIDIA's claims. Surfacing at Arabic technology site arabhardware.net, the brief benchmarks pit NVIDIA's latest against an ATI Radeon HD 5870 across four benchmarks; DiRT 2 in DirectX 11 and Far Cry 2 in three resolutions.

We can't comment on the authenticity of the results, but the figures reinforce the belief that NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480 will become the fastest single-GPU graphics card on offer.

HEXUS has a very small handful of the benchmarks in question.

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Initial batch of GeForce GTX 400 series GPUs to have fewer cores than expected

When you mix together a manufacturing process which has been suffering in terms of yield from the very start with a humongous and ambitious GPU core, you're almost certainly asking for trouble, and it appears that just the kind of trouble you might expect has bitten NVIDIA in the run-up to their GeForce GTX 400 series launch.

Nvidia's initial batch of GeForce GTX 480/470-based graphics cards will have fewer cores than the originally expected 512 due to low 40nm yield at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), according to sources from graphics card makers.

Since TSMC's 40nm yield currently is still lower than 50%, Nvidia will block some of the graphics cores with problems on the card. As a result, the GeForce GTX 480 will only have 480 cores and GTX 470 only 448, the sources noted.

DigiTimes has more on this story.

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