5 amazing things your 3D card can do

Graphics card technology never ceases to amaze us. ATI's new card, the Radeon HD 4770, is now on sale for under £100 and able to sustain over 60fps in Call of Duty 4. But given what we've discovered, a good framerate in a demanding game is the least surprising thing a modern graphics card like this can do.

[ChickeyCantor]

Always found it weird the GPU was left out for such things.
pretty cool =)

[EXCLUSIVEGAMER]

i use mine to vaporize vaporizables.

;)

[Mr Remington]

I wouldn't really classify this as news.
But, I guess some people don't know this.

[PinkUni]

why dont they come up with new kinds of 3d rendering for mathematics or something

like physics based stuff

this is how a building would collapse with this much pressure

this is how light flows through the earth

like interesting math stuff, but rendered in 3d

[Kakkoii]

Umm, they do have that lol. What do you think PhysX is for? Not physics?

And that's also what Folding@Home is for, it does physics calculations to advance understandings of medicine and other things.

[PinkUni]

interesting O_O

[dirthurts]

Can already do physics. Especially NVidia, which is now including physics processing with their chips.
ATI is working with Havok for the same.

[ChickeyCantor]

if im not mistaken, it was either nvidia or ati that makes use of this language that is meant for physics...the name is almost like OpenGL, but i the last letters are different.

Cam't really remember what its called,

[Kakkoii]

OpenCL. And it's not a physics framework, it's just an open standard computing language for GPU's. Which would allow for physics programming on a GPU using (Open Computer Language).

[EXCLUSIVEGAMER]

@kakkoii

[RockmanII7]

Curses. the smart pe-pols get al of the bubles. <--- bad attempt to be funny

[Traveler]

The next generation of processors might not even revolve around traditional CPU architectures and instead might be highly programmable GPUs more or less.

Anyway, even affordable graphics cards can give you performance above and beyond what you can get on the consoles. The myth that you need some expensive gaming rig to run modern games is just that, a myth. It's easy to build a gaming PC for around $400 or $500 dollars that will outperform the consoles on multiplatform titles. And of course, you can use that same PC for lots of other things as well.

[evrfighter]

CPGPU's I think is what you're referring to. At the moment Nvidia, ATI, and Intel have all developed their own versions of it. But at the moment I believe the tech is extremely similar to the cell. This is the reason imo they havn't tried mass hyping it as they all know they need to refine it first otherwise we'd have lots of developers complaining that it takes twice the work and thousands of lines more code to take full advantage

sound familiar?

[f789790]

Of course a 4770 could do that.

[jden28]

I find it interesting that this article mentions that folding @home is one of the programmes that greatly benefit form gpu programming, able to get 5-12 times the normal through put of a conventional cpu.

what I find even more interesting is that it was never adapted to run on the x360, considering that it has an advanced gpu and that there are 30 million out there, greatly exceeding the 23 million ps3's in use.

Is it a conpiracy to make the ps3 appear more powerful than it is?

Everybody knows the ps3's cpu the cell is about 2x as powerful as the x360 xenon cpu, and everybody knows the nvidia gpu in the ps3 is it's weakness,( it's why the cell has to assist in doing so much graphical stuff). We also know that the xeon gpu in the x360 is it's strong point and highly advanced, including it's hardware powered tessellation, while it's cpu though not weak is only moderately powered or average by todays standards.

So I'm asking you guys/girls what do you think?
Do you think that if folding @home was adapted for x360's gpu would it out perform the cell cpu in the ps3?

Advanced cpu vs. advanced gpu who wins?

[Kakkoii]

The 360's GPU is hardly highly advanced. It's pretty much an ATI x1900 series GPU. The x1*** series GPU's don't have programmable shaders. It wasn't until the next series that stuff like this became possible. The HD**** series. That is why the Xbox 360 can't accelerate Folding@Home with it's GPU. Because it requires a GPU with programmable shaders. Thus you can only use ATI HD2000/Nvidia Geforce 8800 and up series cards for it.

(On a side note, the reason it's GPU had support for tessellation is not because it's some advanced GPU, but because ATI has had tessellation support for quite some time. Developers just never bothered to program for it. But now that it's coming built into DirectX11, there will be much more incentive since it will work on Nvidia and ATI.)

Now about the PS3's cell being 2x as powerful. That's a load of shiat. The 360 uses almost the same cell processor. The PS3 merely has more of them than the 360.

Also, to put into contrast the 360's GPU power.. It has 48 shaders, while the current high end cards from ATI (HD 4850/70/90) have 800 shaders, that's 20 times more. The generation before that (HD 3870) had 320. Before that the HD 2000 series was about the same, with the top having 320 also. And then before that was the x1000 series, with the top having 48 shaders, of which is what the 360 uses.