Thursday, April 8, 2010

IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 08/04/2010


Elite Bastards
Sapphire launches Mini Projector 101

Here's something a little different from the usual array of graphics boards and the like to come from the Sapphire stable - A miniature projector, which is compatible not only with PCs and notebooks but also the iPhone and iPod, allowing you to project your display onto whatever you desire.

The SAPPHIRE Mini Projector 101 is a pocket sized projector that packs an image punch way above its tiny weight. Taking graphics input from any PC or laptop, video from any digital camera or media source, or connecting directly with an adapter to iPod and iPhone, the Mini Projector can cast an image from 7 inches across up to 65 inches across on a suitable surface.

Share those pictures with mates - without them squinting at a tiny screen on your ‘phone! Stream those YouTube videos onto your wall! Watch those TV programs you missed, anywhere! Show business colleagues your visual ideas for a campaign without the need for a media equipped meeting room! The possibilities are endless …

Based on the latest super bright multi-chip LED technology, the lamp in the SAPPHIRE Mini Projector is good for 20,000 hours – no worries about changing bulbs then! And you don’t need to sit in the dark, either, the SAPPHIRE Mini Projector lamp is rated at 14 lumens – giving good image quality at 640 x 480 resolution in normal or slightly subdued room lighting. Battery life is good too – over 2 hours on a single charge, good enough for all those holiday photos or a whole movie – or you can run direct from the adapter/charger.

You can read the full press release, and also see a picture of how the Mini Projector 101 looks, right here.

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Metro 2033 - DirectX 11 gameplay performance and image quality

While it isn't the greatest game ever by all accounts, Metro 2033 nonetheless remains an interesting early adopter of DirectX 11 functionality within its game engine and graphical effects. So, how does it look and perform using both AMD and NVIDIA's DirectX 11 hardware?

4A Games used their own 4A Engine to power Metro 2033. Early reports from the internet rumor mills indicated that the 4A Engine was a derivative of GSC Game World’s X-Ray engine, which powers the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of games. This rumor was apparently supported by the fact that 4A Games was founded by former GSC employees. However, those rumors have been rejected by 4A Games .

The 4A Engine is a multiplatform engine supporting Microsoft Windows, the Microsoft Xbox 360, and the Sony PlayStation 3. On Windows, it supports DirectX 9, 10, and 11. It also supports NVIDIA’s PhysX and 3D Vision technologies.

Read the full analysis at [H]ard|OCP, who also have a brief follow-up article regarding some rendering issues noted within the title.

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Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Release Candidate available for download

GPU acceleration of Flash-based video continues to roll towards a final, official release, with version 10.1 of Adobe's Flash Player hitting the release candidate stage, complete with plenty of bug fixes and other enhancements.

If you want to grab this version to give it a try, then you can do so from the Adobe Labs web site - Make sure you check out the release notes and uninstall any previous versions of Flash first though!

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Developers discuss the future of PC gaming at PAX

The future of PC gaming (and perhaps even whether it has one) is a commonly recurring theme in our forum amongst other places, but what happens when you get some major developers around the table to discuss the matter? The result took place at the recent PAX East event, bringing forth some interesting (if not entirely unexpected) points of view.

John Abercrombie: "Publishers are honestly making 10% to 15% of their revenue from PC gaming...I love PC gaming...I don't think it's going away, but it's not ...I don't think it's growing in the way of triple-A games. Consoles are the way to go [there], because that's where the money is. You can buy a piece of hardware, and it's good for five years now versus having to upgrade your PC every two years."

Read all of the thoughts expressed in full at Shack News.

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Western Digital VelociRaptor VR200M hard drive reviews

In these days of ever-faster SSDs, is there still room in the consumer market for high performance mechanical hard disk drives? Western Digital believes so, and thus today sees the launch of their latest Velociraptor branded VR200M parts. Is it a monster or a dinosaur? Check out the full list of review coverage below.

- Anandtech
- Hot Hardware
- PC Perspective
- The Tech Report
- Tom's Hardware

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AMD Radeon HD 5850 and 5870 prices to drop slightly?

We've been hoping for a little while now that the launch of NVIDIA's first GF100-based, GeForce GTX 400 series boards might see AMD respond with some price cuts to their own high-end boards - While such a move isn't definitely on the cards, it appears as though it is at least being considered if the latest rumours are to be believed.

Some ATI partners are expected to lower the prices of Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 series but this action is not something that will happen overnight.

We have learned that key people at AMD are still waiting to see how many Fermi cards will be available and they will only react if Nvidia manages to have really great sales with its Geforce 400 series.

Some partners might slightly adjust their 5800 series pricing, and get the prices slightly down, but this action won’t be supported by AMD. The partners will simply cut down their own share of profit.

Fudzilla has the story.

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AMD Eyefinity demonstrated using curved displays

For all of the impressive positives to come from AMD's Eyefinity multi-monitor technology, big and annoying bezels and the lack of any kind of real "wrap-around" for multiple monitors serve to reduce the effect of such a configuration. With that in mind, you might want to take a look at these rather nifty (and doubtless expensive) setups which look to overcome those deficiencies somewhat.

You can see more and read all about it at PC Perspective.

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Apple reveals iPhone OS 4 preview date

If you've been wondering what's next for Apple's iPhone (and doubtless iPad) Operating System, all will be revealed on April 8th...

Looking to extend its lock on tech industry publicity for a few more days, Apple said it would unveil its new iPhone 4 operating system less than a week after it launched its groundbreaking iPad tablet-style computing device.

An invitation Apple sent to journalists this week features a silhouetted image of the numeral 4 and promises "a sneak peek into the future of iPhone OS" on April 8.

Apple did not provide any details about the platform's functionality, but many users hope it will give users the ability to work with more than one application at once. The iPad has drawn barbs from critics because it suffers from the same limitation.

Information Week has the details in full.

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