Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 11.9 driver:

AMD HD3D support enhancement

- Enables AMD HD3D technology support on DisplayPort panels, such as Samsung 750 and 950 series 3D displays.

Resolved issue highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 11.9 driver:

The following games no longer experience random hangs during game loading:
- Call of Duty – Black Ops
- F1 2010
- Dungeon Siege 3

The following games no longer hang intermittently during gameplay:
- Battlefield - Bad Company 2
- Borderlands
- Dead Rising 2

Ein schönes Weihnachtsfest wünsche ich allen.

Wieder ist ein Jahr fast vorbei und viele Hardware und Spieleneuheiten sind heuer erschienen. Angefangen von einer neuen GeForce GTX und Radeon Familie bis hin zu dem lange erwarteten Call of Duty Black Ops und Meadl of Honor. Letzterer Gameshit ist in den verschiedenen Foren besonders unterschiedlich bewetertet worden. Vor allem soll er viel zu kurz sein und für den Preis viel zu teuer sein.

Ich persöhnlich werde wohl das Game nicht kaufen, oder vielleicht wenn es zu einem Ramschpreis oder mit 75 Prozent Nachlass angeboten wird

Im neuen Jahr soll Crysis 2 erscheinen auf dass ich mich, nach dem ersten Crysis besonders freue. Bei dem die Grafik und Nanosuite einfach spitze waren.

So ist auch ein neues Windows 8 im ammarsch das mehr und mehr in Richtung Spieleplattform gehen wird und unseren geiebten Steam wohl eine Menge Konkurenz machen wird.

Wenn ihr mehr über das kommende Windows 8 erfahren wollt ist hier ein Link zu einem Artikel: http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,805358/Windows-8-soll-den-PC-wieder-zur-groessten-Spieleplattform-erheben/Spiele/News/

World of Warcraft with DirectX 11: Performance-Boost
The performance will significantly increase, as our benchmarks prove. For our tests, we used an AMD Radeon HD 5750 which was able to go up by 15 per cent as regards frames per second. The rendering of some scenes even speeded up by 20 to 60 per cent. The reason for this kind of boost might be the compute shader but we haven't yet been able to gain further information from Blizzard.


World of Warcraft with DirectX 11: Status Quo
Not only the Beta but also any other World of Warcraft now unofficially supports DirectX 11 and improved graphics. The latter doesn't even depend on the API that is used! Blizzard added so called sun shafts that prettified the lighting a little. Furthermore water and lava have been beautified: The water now uses transparency effects, environment reflections, and swell when characters pass through it. Also the lava looks more real since pixel shaders now do the surface rendering. In the course of the new Patch 4.0.1, Blizzard also refurbished the graphics menu which is now more well-arranged than before.

In Order to activate the unofficial DirectX 11 Support, you have to add the parameter "-d3d11" to you WoW-shortcut on your desktop. Now, the game will add the line "SET gxApi "d3d11"" to a file called "config.wtf" ("\World of Warcraft\WTF"). If you are confronted with stability issues, you can switch experimental DirectX 11 off by removing this exact line.

Not easily satisfied with what's printed in architecture briefs or reviewer's guides, PC Games Hardware has been nagging Nvidia with questions about their new Fermi architecture and the just launched Geforce GTX 480 and 470.

What's the official number of transistors? 3 billion was announced, 3.2 made it into the rumor mill and "more than 3 billion" is given in the papers. Well, it turns out, 3 billion is the number of little transistors that's included in each and every GF100-GPU.

Clock Domains: Nvidia states a 700/607 MHz engine clock for 480 and 470 respectively. But what parts of the engine run at this speed? Does this also include ROPs and L2-Cache or do those run in another clock domain? The answer we got was, that the engine clock refers to all key units. Except for the shader core itself, which runs at the so called hot clock (1400 MHz for GTX 480 and 1215 MHz for GTX 470). Also not included is the memory interface, but unfortunately Nvidia did not make it clear, if that's only the controllers or also the attached units like L2-Cache or Octo-ROPs.

Regarding Load/Store units: As we've learnt, there are 16 of them per shader multiprocessor, thus yielding a convenient number of 256 for the whole chip an 240 for a GTX 480. Operating on atomic values, that'd be a perfect fit to double for fetching textures. But as Nvidia told us, that's not the case. Because LD/ST is separate from the texture fetch path. The Load/Store units use a different path, through the L1, then L2, then Framebuffer. Texture units first look in texture cache (there's 12k each), then L2 cache, then FB memory.


Geometry: 700*4 = 648*8? No way! At the presentation of the Geforce part of the architecture at CES, Nvidia stated that Fermi (no Geforce-name was given then!) would have 8x the geometry throughput of GT200. How did they arrive at that number? Wasn't GT200 1 tri/clock, whereas Fermi is 4 tris/clock (both theoretical maxs)? Well, Nvidias Fermi's theoretical peak for tessellated geometry is 4 drawn triangles per clk. They said it's hard to compare exactly to GT200 since GT200 does not support tessellation. Cnsidering GT200's lower clock and lower peak triangle rate (which is only 0.5 drawn triangles per clk and 1 tri per clk is valid only for culled triangles), and serial geometry processing pipeline, 8x was a reasonable estimate of performance difference between the architectures. They added, that 4 drawn triangles per clock would be the theoretical peak and that the actually achieved tessellated triangle rates would depend on many factors including tessellation program, nature of the geometry etc, and that they are not expecting to hit the peak rate. Instead, other sources pointed at 3.2 triangles per clock as reasonable number for real-life peaks.

Starcraft 2: System requirements regarding AMD-CPUs
AMD Thunderbird CPUs with up to 1,2 GHz are generally excluded. Athlon XP with a rating of 2200+ or above will be sufficient. Athlon-64-CPUs with 2,2 GHz or more will also do. Sempron-CPUs will probably cause problems due to their lack of cache. With first-generation Phenoms with "00"-ending (i.e. 9600), the gaming experience might suffer from the TLB-fix and performance drops related with it. The Phenoms with "50"-ending (i.e. 9750) won't cause any trouble, except for the slowest ones. The Athlon-II- and Phenom-II-family exceed the requirements without an exception.

Starcraft 2: System requirements regarding Intel-CPUs
Intel Pentium-III-processors are excluded. Pentium 4 or -D processors should clock at 2,6 GHz or higher. Core-2-processors fulfil the minimum requirements when clocked at least at 1,8 GHz. Blizzard couldn't make any clear statement concerning Celeron processors, since they originate from either the Pentium-4-family or the Core-2-family. i3, i5 and i7-processors exceed minimum requirements with no exception.