IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 19/06/2010

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 CrossFire performance fix for Catalyst 10.6 on the way

If you're using a CrossFire configuration together with AMD's latest Catalyst 10.6 driver in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, then you might well be suffering from performance issues since said driver update. While this can't exactly be considered good news, the better news is that AMD are aware of the problem and will be releasing an application profile update as soon as possible to fix it.

Terry Makedon told us this “Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We have reproduced the performance drop and will be issuing a Catalyst Application Profile (CAP) update later today to get our performance back up to previous levels. An optimization was accidentally disabled which caused us to unnecessarily stall the driver resulting in stuttering and poor performance.”

Kit Guru has the news.

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NVIDIA's GF104 core exposed?

Now that NVIDIA's GF100 derived products are on the market, our attention has to turned to what the GPU giant can offer the DirectX 11 graphics market at lower price points. Of interest to many is the company's GF104, while holds high hopes for offering an excellent price to performance ratio, and Chinese site Expreview claim to have snagged a shot of this particular GPU's die.

From the photo, shape of GF104 core is really rectangle, die size maybe arrives at about 60% of GF100. Its number is “GF104-30xx-A1”, and what will prove this to be Project Sample, its the identification “Sample” in core.

The previously information reveals, GTX460 basing on will have 336 CPU/4 units GPC/192 GB/s Memory Bandwidth/768MB MVA; Core/Shader/Memory frequency respectively be 675/1350/1800MHz, its performance stay close to GTX 465, the spotlight is that its TDP drops to 150w.

Check out the alleged GF104 die shot here.

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Fallout Online web site launched

It might still be mired in legal proceedings between Interplay and Bethesda, but the appearance of an official web site for the Fallout Online MMO can only be heralded as a good sign of progress for this title, even if it's still slated for a 2012 release.

If you fancy taking a look, or indeed signing up for beta testing of the game when it begins, then head on over to the aforementioned Fallout Online web site.

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Welcome to Valhalla: Inside the 250GB Xbox 360 Slim

One of the bigger announcements to come from Microsoft's E3 presentation was the launch of their new-look Xbox 360 Slim. But what's hidden away inside that slightly more diminutive chassis? Anandtech have put their toolkit to good use to dismantle their unit so you don't have to.

With the new Xbox 360 (codenamed Valhalla), at least two, possibly all three of the die are combined and placed on a single package.

Bringing it all onto (presumably) a single die makes cooling much simpler as now there’s only one heatsink and one fan for all of the major heat generating components in the unit. This level of integration is made possible only by the not-so-magic of Moore’s Law. At 40nm it shouldn’t be a problem to bring all of those components onto a single reasonably sized die, which in turn reduces Microsoft’s manufacturing costs. It’s not totally clear whether Microsoft is building these chips on a 40nm, 45nm or 55nm node. The 40nm approach would make the most sense but TSMC is very capacity constrained at this point so it would be a slow ramp before all Xboxes got the Valhalla treatment.

Check out the article in full over here.

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