Nvidia has announced that it is in cahoots with various partners, including Alienware, Asus, Dell, Microsoft and Toshiba, in order to bring 3D PCs to the world. Speaking at the Computex expo in Taipei, Nvidia also welcomed Asus chief Jerry Shen to the stage to announce three new 3D capable PCs.

“Asus has a strong track record of pioneering new categories of PCs, as we did with the netbook,” said Shen.“Now Asus is very bullish on developing the 3D PC category by shipping notebooks, desktops and an all-in-one PC equipped with Nvidia 3D Vision. We believe that all entertainment-based PCs will become 3D capable within a few years.”

Nvidia is saying that a 3D PC must include a pair of 3D active-shutter glasses, like its 3D Vision kit, a 120Hz 3D-capable display and a discrete graphics processor, like its GeForce GPU, that is capable of delivering high definition imagery to the 3D display.

Nvidia states that a 3D PC will let you play 3D games, view and modify 3D photos, look at the web in 3D and watch 3D Blu-rays.

Asus boss Jerry Shen announced three machines that would be joining Nvidia’s 3D revolution. First up is the Asus G51Jx-EE, a laptop that relies on Nvidia’s 3D Vision active shutter glasses. Next is the Eee Top ET2400 which is a desktop with USB 3.0 support and a 23.6-inch LCD monitor. Lastly, the CD5390 tower was described as the “world’s most powerful gaming solution,” complete with a GeForce GTX 480 GPU and compatibility with three different 3D LCD displays.

There’s no official news on these machines and when we might be seeing them in the shops as of yet (thanks to Engadget for the details). We’ll be bringing you the full specs as soon as we get word from our Asus contacts.

3D is beginning to take hold in a big way. The cinema is experiencing a massive 3D boom as a result of huge titles like Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, home cinema is also getting in on the act with 3D Blu-rays and TV sets and gaming is about to undergo some serious 3D enhancements. It seems only fair that PCs come along for the ride too.

Link to article: Nvidia gets serious for 3D PCs

A set of company slides leaked to the press reveals that NVIDIA is claiming the upper hand in tessellation performance. With this achievement, NVIDIA is looking to encourage leaps in geometric detail, probably in future games that make use of tessellation. NVIDIA’s confidence comes from the way its GF100 GPU is designed (further explained here). Each GF100 GPU physically has 16 Polymorph Engines, one per streaming multiprocessor (SM) which helps in distributed, parallel geometry processing. Each Polymorph Engine has its own tessellation unit. With 15 SMs enabled on the GeForce GTX 480 and 14 on the GeForce GTX 470, there are that many independent tessellation units.

NVIDIA demonstrated its claims in the presentation using the Unigine Heaven, where the GeForce GTX 480 was pitted against a Radeon HD 5870. In many scenes where tessellation is lower, the GPUs performed neck-and-neck, with the GTX 480 performing better more often. But in scenes with heavy tessellation (particularly the “dragon” scene, where a highly detailed model of a dragon needs to be rendered with densely tessellated meshes, the GTX 480 clocks nearly a 100% performance increment over the HD 5870. NVIDIA has been confident about the tessellation performance back since January, when it detailed the GF100 architecture. The GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards will be unveiled on the 26th of March.

Link to article: NVIDIA Claims Upper Hand in Tessellation Performance

WITH ANOTHER LAUNCH of the Nvidia GT300 Fermi GF100 GTX480 upon us, it is time for an update on the status of that wayward part. Production parts have been coming back from TSMC for several weeks now, and the outlook for them is grim.

We first got word that production A3 GF100s were back in Santa Clara near the end of January. When enough of them rolled off the line to characterize the silicon, we hear there were no parties in Santa Clara. For those not interested in the ‘why’ side of things, the short answer is that the top bin as it stands now is about 600MHz for the half hot clock, and 1200MHz for the hot clock, and the initial top part will have 448 shaders. On top of that, the fab wafer yields are still in single digit percentages.

That said, the situation is far more nuanced than those three numbers suggest, and the atrocious yields are even after the chip has been downclocked and defective units fused off. To make matters even worse, the problems that caused these low yields are likely unfixable without a complete re-layout. Lets look at these problems one at a time.

Click here to read the rest of the article at semiaccurate.com

Link to article: nVidias Fermi GTX480 deemed “broken and unfixable” pre-launch