The PSP 3000: Just a few tiny changes from last year’s version.

(Credit: Sony via Joystiq)

Sony officially unveiled the PSP 3000 Wednesday at the Leipzig Games Convention in Germany, confirming rumors that had popped up online in recent weeks. But before you get excited (or–if you just bought a PSP–exasperated), note that this appears to be an even more subtle upgrade than the slimmed-down PSP 2000 that debuted in September 2007. The main changes, according to Sony:

• An antireflective screen, “which enables users to see the screen more clearly in well-lit places, even when used outdoors.” [Update (08/21/2008): According to Engadget Japan (as translated by sister site PSPfanboy), the screen improvements don't stop at the antireflective screen. Sony has apparently also doubled the response time, improved the contrast ratio, and bumped up the color gamut.]
• A built-in microphone, which will allow users to use voice features in certain games and use the PSP’s built-in Skype functionality without the need for a mic-enabled headset.
• The addition of 480i output for gameplay when the PSP is connected to a TV screen via a composite or S-Video cable. (The previous model only allowed playback at 480p, effectively restricting the usefulness of the feature to newer HDTVs with component video inputs.)

The PSP 3000 is expected to hit stores worldwide (Japan, Asia, North America, and Europe) in October, with some markets getting up to three colors: black, pearl white, and silver. Pricing and bundles weren’t disclosed, but we’re guessing Sony will stick with the tried and true $169 barebones/$199 bundle price points that have helped propel the handheld’s strong sales.

Source: Cnet

NVIDIA Corporation released beta drivers for the new OpenGL 3.0 cross-platform, 3D graphics standard.
The new drivers implement the OpenGL 3.0 API and the GLSL 1.30 shading language for both Windows XP and Windows Vista on selected GeForce and Quadro boards.
With these drivers any developer can now explore the capabilities of the new OpenGL 3.0 specification.

The OpenGL specification provides software developers a broad set of programmable 3D and 2D graphics rendering, visualization, and hardware acceleration functions, allowing a program to run on a wide variety of hardware platforms. An open, vendor-neutral standard, OpenGL is the industry’s most widely used and supported programming interface and is available on major computer platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

OpenGL is controlled by the Khronos Group and the new 3.0 version introduces dozens of new features to increase the functionality, flexibility, and performance of the open, cross-platform standard for 3D graphics acceleration. The new functionality includes: vertex array objects, enhanced vertex buffer objects, 32-bit floating-point textures, render and depth buffers, new texture compression schemes, sRGB frame buffers, and an upgraded shading language.
NVIDIA will be releasing production drivers for OpenGL 3.0 as a part of its regular driver development program.
More information and the drivers are available free on the NVIDIA site.

Nvidia has released a range of new software it is classifying under the name of “Power Pack“. The applications contained within this pack show off the use of GeForce 8 series cards for tasks other than gaming as well as introducing PhysX support.

The first Power Pack contains the following:

• GeForce driver version 177.83
• Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX mod
• Badaboom media converter Beta version
• Warmonger full game
• Folding@Home
• Sneak peak demo of Nurien
• Sneak Peak demo of Metal Knight Zero
• The Great Kulu technology demo
• Fluids technology demo

Be prepared for a long wait if you decide to grab all the applications with a download size of over 2.7GB. Thankfully you can choose which applications you want to download.

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It’s not a direct response to AMD unveiling the HD Radeon 4850 X2 and 4870 X2 yesterday, but NVIDIA also came to play at SIGGRAPH, and it’s got lots of new GPU-as-CPU toys for us this morning — and what’s more, they’re free. Like we’d been hearing, GeForce 8, 9, and 200-series cards are all getting PhysX support as of today via a free GeForce Power Pack that contains a free full copy of Warmonger, three PhysX-enabled Unreal Tournament 3 maps, demos of Metal Knight Zero and the Nurien UT3-based social networking service, and a couple tech demos. The Power Pack also includes some new CUDA apps to play with, including a new Folding@Home client (ahem) and a trial version of the Badaboom video transcoder. That’s a lot of new toys, so get downloading and let us know what you think!

Read - PhysX GeForce Power Pack apps
Read - CUDA GeForce Power Pack apps

It’s arriving a month later than anticipated, but at least it’s arriving (we hope). According to a first look at PhysX on NVIDIA’s GeForce cards, The Tech Report is reporting (ahem) that the graphical outfit will dish out new drivers that add PhysX support on August 12th. The new software will allow owners of GeForce 8, GeForce 9 and GeForce GTX 200-series cards to use PhysX acceleration without shelling out any additional coinage, which means that you all will surely be giving it a shot just for kicks, right? Keep next Tuesday clear — you and Unreal Tournament 3 have a date, like it or not.

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Even after Nvidia downplayed their original report that GeForce 8400-8700 cards were failing in large numbers due to overheating, Dell has issued a BIOS update for all of its machines running the affected GPUs anyway. The update tweaks the fan settings to “regulate temperature fluctuations” to keep the maybe-faulty-maybe-not chips cooler. So who do we believe here?

Granted, it’s not hard for Dell to roll out a BIOS update that bumps cooling fan RPMs, so it makes sense that they would cover their ass in this way. Although more fan means more noise and less battery life, so the update is not without its costs. Either way, Dell is taking the issue seriously, which makes it seem like the the problem is a little more serious than what Nvidia is saying.

The update is for the following systems: Inspiron 1420, Latitude D630, Latitude D630c, Vostro Notebook 1310, Vostro Notebook 1400, Vostro Notebook 1510, Vostro Notebook 1710, XPS M1330, and XPS M1530

Source: Gizmodo

Intel’s Larrabee architecture for visual computing is slated for 2009 release; The Radeon HD 4800 series graphic card, the world’s first fuelled by a teraflop processor, was launched in India recently, by AMD (Anand Parthasarathy); The GeForce graphical unit powered by nVidia’s GTX280 chips.

In the pecking order of personal computer chips, co-processors were children of a lesser breed. Remember the heydays, two decades ago, of the Intel 80386 central processing unit? Customers who wanted to quicken the number-crunching capabilities of their PCs invested in an additional maths co-processor, the 80387, to accelerate what were known as floating point operations, by performing them directly on the hardware. As the main processor became more powerful, such add-ons became unnecessary.

Then came a new era in computing, fuelled by the gaming fever of the world’s young and restless customers, who looked to the PC not for productivity but picture power: fast action and mind-blowing graphics. No general-purpose processor was able to deliver the realistic gaming that such users demanded…. and so was born the new niche of graphics cards, fuelled by a new class of Graphical processing units of GPUs, optimised for the superior speeds demanded by PC and video games.

nVidia, Asus, Creative…. new brands emerged that created a separate hardware category, running on chips that, in many cases, outperformed general-purpose processors, mega flop for megaflop. Indeed, the Cell processor created by IBM for this burgeoning market was so good at what it did that scientists were quietly slipping it into mission-critical and military systems.

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While Sony did not unveil any new hardware at the company’s E3 press conference, new photos are beginning to show up around the Net that lead us to believe they’re hard at work on an updated version of the PSP.

Kotaku reports that forums members from PSPChina BBS have captured the rumored PSP-3000, identified by its PlayStation logo button that would replace the “home” button currently on the original and slim PSP models. The “new” PSP also features an onboard microphone located to the right of the volume controls.

If the rumors are true, adding onboard microphone and a new shiny home button is a joke for 2000 user like me.  Upgrading 1000 to 2000 is great because they made it smaller and the doubled the RAM resulting to a fast loading but upgrading from 2000 to 3000 because it has a built-in microphone and new home button is really a waste of money. I hope they add a better screen, higher CPU, doubled RAM, add another analog or better battery life.

]]> http://coldviper.com/2008/07/26/photos-of-rumored-psp-3000-surface/feed/ http://coldviper.com/2008/07/25/bfg-delivers-overclocked-geforce-9800-gtx/ http://coldviper.com/2008/07/25/bfg-delivers-overclocked-geforce-9800-gtx/#comments Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:38:13 +0000 Coldviper http://coldviper.com/2008/08/21/psp-3000-another-minor-psp-upgrade/ BFG Technologies, a supplier of advanced nVidia-based 3D graphics cards, power supplies and other PC enthusiast products, has announced the nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ OC 512MB PCI Express 2.0 graphics card.

Backed by free 24/7/365 tech support and lifetime warranty, the graphics card is overclocked out of the box and pushes the limit in ultra realistic game play with nVidia PhysX technology, offering extreme HD gaming with 3-Way SLI.

The 9800 GTX+ OC provides optimal power management with HybridPower technology. Packing more performance than the standard 9800 GTX, this graphics card promises a first-class entertainment experience.

Based on nVidia’s reference design, the new OC-branded card has 128 Stream Processors set at a frequency of 1890MHz and a GPU clocked at 780MHz, both up from the 1836MHz and 738MHz found on stock models. The GeForce 9800 GTX+ OC also has DirectX 10 support, a PCI-Express 2.0 x16 interface and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 2250MHz (2200MHz stock). It costs a sweet 167€.

Source: Biosmagazine