Gizmodo Australia » video cards

Video Cards Featuring SpursEngine (Cell Processor) Coming Soon

Mark Wilson — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:00:00 +0000

We’ve already seen the SpursEngine teased in laptops, but Toshiba is becoming vocal about bringing the SpursEngine—the same technology found in the PlayStation 3 Cell processor—to standalone video cards in 4-core configuration. The first will come from Leadtek later this month for $US286, a 128MB card that can fit into a small form PC, and it will be followed in November by Thomson cards that will start in the high $US300s. SpursEngine cards have built-in MPEG2 and H.264 codecs which equal smooth video playback and the ability to uprez SD content on the fly. And at least Leadtek’s offering sounds like a solid alternative to small media PC packed with integrated graphics. [PCWorld]

CyberLink Uses ATI Card To Transcode Four 1080p Video Files Simultaneously

Jason Chen — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:00:00 +0000

The fashionable thing these days is to take the tremendous processing power of graphics cards and put them to use when you’re not utilising them to render games. CyberLink, for one, has come up with a pretty ingenous method to take an ATI or NVIDIA card (in their case, the demo was on an ATI Radeon 4850 512MB card) and convert four 1080p MPEG-2 movies into MPEG-4. Simultaneously. As long as you’ve got a pretty fast video card, all you need is a copy of CyberLink PowerDirector 7 and you can be doing this too. We hope this is the kind of thing Apple’s going to be putting into Snow Leopard. [TG Daily]

The HIS iClear Card Solves Your Noisy Video Card Problems (I’m Confused)

Sean Fallon — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:50:00 +0000

What is the HIS iClear Card you ask? Here is what the product page has to say:

“the latest solution to video card noise reduction. It has an excellent implement of state-of-the-art design and technology and give you a better gaming experience by reducing the distortion and noise generated from graphic card. It reduces the noise distortion generated from high-end graphic card (from both Radeon and GeForce) or TV tuner card, which provide up to 10% increase performance on Signal-to-Noise Ratio”

So to sum things up, it seems that the iClear doesn’t do a damn thing. As far as anyone can tell, it is simply a slab of plastic that plugs into PCIe x1 socket.

However, according to a review by Alexey Samsonov the device did have a positive effect on signal-to-noise-ratios at certain frequencies when utilised with a low-quality analogue TV tuner card and a video card configuration. But even if that is accurate, it is hardly worth spending around US$80 on (athough Newegg has been bundling them free with certain video cards apparently). Still, if you do decide to experiment with it, I highly recommend picking up Boing Boing Gadgets’ X-Maple pixel-flutter reduction block for PCIe as a companion. [HIS iClear via HTSAP via Boing Boing Gadgets and iClear Review]

A Simple Graph Chooses Your Next Video Card

Mark Wilson — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:40:00 +0000

The Tech Report has assembled a very straightforward bang-for-your-buck video card graph. Plotting performance on Crysis’ high quality setting, you can see the simple facts laid out very clearly—like that the GeForce 9600 GT is probably worth its US$5 pricetag over the Radeon HD 3850. These metrics always vary by game, and Crysis’ highest settings don’t demonstrate these cards at their best (the top performer can’t even break 40 frames per second). But it’s a quick tool to tip the scales on your next purchase. [Tech Report]

Motherboard and Video Card Box Art Make No Sense

Jason Chen — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:30:40 +0000

It’s something we’ve noticed ourselves over the years, but Joel over at Boing Boing Gadgets just did a roundup of some of the most atrocious motherboard and video card box art in existence. Face it, if you were an artist hired to design a box cover for a motherboard, what would you draw? A truck that’s also a snake? A ripoff of Gears of War? Voyager from Star Trek: Voyager with guns? Yes. Head over and see Joel’s examples, followed up by his funny, funny remarks on each one. [Boing Boing Gadgets]