Category Archives: Graphics Hardware

Ray Tracing is here! (and why it won’t matter for a while)

Nvidia brings first Ray-Tracing capable video card to market. Nvidia announced their Turing-based video cards, including the Professional Quadro RTX 8000, RTX 6000 and RTX 5000 GPUs at Siggraph and their consumer level cards the GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080 … Continue reading

Posted in Augmented Reality, Graphics Hardware, Virtual Reality, VR/AR/XR | Leave a comment

Musings on “Retina Display” quality for Virtual Reality

tl,dr: How much resolution do VR HMDs need to approach that of a “Retina Display”? Using the current optics setup, about 10x more than they do now. Roughly 22,000 Ă— 10,060 pixels per display. I work for Framestore’s Virtual Reality … Continue reading

Posted in Augmented Reality, GearVR, Graphics Hardware, Virtual Reality | Leave a comment

From out of Virtual Left Field – Magic Leap arrives!

There’s a new player in town that’s bound to shake things up in the VR/AR community. Magic Leap has pretty much come out of nowhere and has thudded to earth with the subtly of an asteroid strike. Even if you … Continue reading

Posted in Augmented Reality, Graphics Hardware, Virtual Reality | Leave a comment

Android 5.0 “Lollipop” debuts the OpenGL-ES 3.1 API

Android 5.0 – Lollipop  – Arrives. And it’s got lot’s of developer goodies in it. ART Runtime Google has replaced “Dalvik” (the Java-esqe runtime, which was a Just-In-Time compiling virtual machine) with ART – the new “Ahead-Of-Time RunTime” compiling virtual … Continue reading

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OpenGL-ES 3.0 Proliferation

The Android dashboard provides some useful information about the Android environment in the wild. One interesting thing is they provide values for the supported OpenGL-ES versions. Since OpenGL-ES 3.0 started showing up after KitKat was released, its numbers have been … Continue reading

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Kick-ass graphics and Larrabee!

Back in 2008 I took a job with Intel. Intel was starting to ramp up its Larrabee effort and was looking to hire some knowledgeable graphics engineers who could also talk to game developers about *other* things like threading, performance, … Continue reading

Posted in Graphics, Graphics Hardware, PC Graphics | Leave a comment

Is Intel just getting back into the graphics business, or are they going to change it?

It’s no great secret that Intel has been eyeing the discreet graphics market. Intel typically owns about 30-40% of the desktop graphics market, but that’s strictly integrated (and hence – usually considered underpowered) graphics. ATI and Nvidia own most of … Continue reading

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NVIDIA Releases Developer Tools

At the GDC, graphics chip maker NVIDIA announced they are releasing a bunch of updated and new tools. The tool upgrades are: FX Composer 2, PerfHUD 5, ShaderPerf 2. They are also releasing a new GPU-accelerated texture tool, plus a … Continue reading

Posted in DirectX, Graphics API, Graphics Hardware, OpenGL, PC Graphics | Leave a comment