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MICROSOFT’S GRAPHIC group is very close to finally releasing the long awaited next generation DirectX. You can forget the name DirectX as Microsoft has decided to call this one WGF (Windows Graphic Foundation). The interface will, for the first time, reunite Direct Draw part that was mainly used for drawing 2D windows and Direct 3D part of DirectX used to draw 3D scene.

WGF will unite them into one item. It is intended to change things by allowing graphics subsystems to be served with as much performance as you will need.

Windows always had rather good looking graphical user interfaces and that’s not going to change. But Microsoft also wants to give 2D elements some special features and effects to snazz things up.

Why is it important to have the WGF 1.0 specification? If you are a hardware vendor such are Nvidia or ATI or even S3 and XGI you need this final specification to allow your engineers to experiment with hardware designs in order to bring WGF 1.0 compliant hardware when things are good and ready.

As for the next generation of cards such as NV50 and R520, if the vendors feel like it they could theoretically make them WGF compliant. I am certain that at least one of those chips won’t be WGF compliant as it does not make any sense. Longhorn is two years away.

WGF will bring Shader Model 4.0 to life.

News Source : Inquirer

Apparently, and according to sources at Microsoft, Longhorn has been the much-mentioned codename for the next-generation Windows technology, a Microsoft mole came to us at the weekend with some news of high-level branding discussions that appear to have yielded a name for the new Windows. It could all just be the rankest of speculation, however.

Microsoft Windows e-XPedition.

Expedition, geddit? Apparently, marketing suits are happy that the name evokes ideas of the ‘e-home’ as well as the familiar ‘XP’ and Media Centre ‘Edition’, elements of which are all found in Longhorn. It also echoes the ‘Where do you want to go today?’ slogan, which has become a Microsoft catchphrase.

We couldn’t get any confirmation of the name from anyone within Microsoft, so you can treat this one as a rumour for now. We are, however, expecting an announcement pretty soon - possibly at WinHEC, to counteract the negative buzz of not actually showing a Beta version of the OS there.

Will man land on Mars before Longhorn ships? We think we should be told.

Read the source at The Inquirer: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21365

Fido over at The Inquirer reports HALF LIFE 2 is finally with us and we’ve had sight of some benchmarks of ATI products with the long-awaited game.

We reproduce these below. The slides cover a number of different configurations used to play the game, and are pretty much self-explanatory.

You will recall that ATI and Valve cooperated on an introduction of Half Life 2 which came to a sticky end after some ratbag stole the code and spoiled the launch plans last year…

Full Story Here

Version 0.99 currently available

MICROSOFT’S GRAPHIC group is very close to finally releasing the long awaited next generation DirectX. You can forget the name DirectX as Microsoft has decided to call this one WGF (Windows Graphic Foundation). The interface will, for the first time, reunite Direct Draw part that was mainly used for drawing 2D windows and Direct 3D part of DirectX used to draw 3D scene.

WGF will unite them into one item. It is intended to change things by allowing graphics subsystems to be served with as much performance as you will need.

Windows always had rather good looking graphical user interfaces and that’s not going to change. But Microsoft also wants to give 2D elements some special features and effects to snazz things up.

Why is it important to have the WGF 1.0 specification? If you are a hardware vendor such are Nvidia or ATI or even S3 and XGI you need this final specification to allow your engineers to experiment with hardware designs in order to bring WGF 1.0 compliant hardware when things are good and ready.

As for the next generation of cards such as NV50 and R520, if the vendors feel like it they could theoretically make them WGF compliant. I am certain that at least one of those chips won’t be WGF compliant as it does not make any sense. Longhorn is two years away.

WGF will bring Shader Model 4.0 to life.

News Source : Inquirer

Review A better Lindows than Linux?

I READ PLENTY about Lindows… the articles, the hype, the Microsoft trademark lawsuit , the “lindows bashing” some of it by some debian/mandrake/insert-another-linux-distro-here crowd of fanatics. But I never tested the product. So here is my attempt to discover if Lindows fulfils its promise of “Linux made easy”. Having used SCO’s Linux in the past, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend SuSE 8.2 to the “power users” out there [Since I used SCO I recommend SuSE, get it? :)], but would you recommend Linux to your computer-illiterate aunt, father, mother, secretary, or lover, the kind of people who stare blank at the question: “what operating system are you running?” ??

View : Details from Inquirer

A BUG IN INTERNET EXPLORER will send data to MSN and Alexa, a firm claimed earlier this month.

The bug, identified by Secunia, claims that a so-called known featuer in IE, will continue to trasmit data to both msn.com and alexa.com, even after the “Show Related Links” option is switched off.

Secunia claims the bug means that a URL, which could include user names, passwords or whatever happens to be in the Window pane, is sent in plain text to msn.com and alexa.com.

It applies to both IE 6 on W2K and Windows XP with all service packs and hot fixes, claims Secunia, which describes the condition as “moderately critical”.

The solution is to filter traffic so Mr MSN and Mrs Alexa don’t get sent your data.

The note is HERE

View : Is Alexa Spying On You?

News Source : Inquirer

AN ARTICLE earlier today where we questioned by AMD switched hyperthreading off when it compared a Pentium 4 to its newly fledged 3200 Athlon XP has been answered by the firm.

And the answer is somewhat surprising.

Damon Muzny, a representative for the product review department of AMD Public Relations, said that the Pentium 4 performed better with hyperthreading switched off than when it was turned on. That’s with the Canterwood motherboard.

He said: “That’s why we have our benchmarks normalised to an HT disabled platform”.

He said that AMD had chosen the best platform and configuration it had available to test the Pentium 4 against its 3200 processors at the time of its benchmark audit.

He added: “Past benchmarks have shown that on many industry standard benchmarks, AMD processors typically outperform Intel processors with HyperThreading enabled by even a higher percentage. AMD will share those additional new benchmarks using the AMD Athlon XP processor 3200 when they are available”.

And, he continued: “On May 8 we were able to begin benchmark testing against Intel’s 3.0GHz P4 on Canterwood. Against this new platform, the AMD Athlon processor 3200 performs an average of 6 percent better than the Intel offering with HyperThreading turned off. So like I mentioned, AMD processors typically outperform Intel processors with HyperThreading enabled by even a higher percentage in the benchmark suite we test with”.

An Intel UK representative told the INQUIRER: “HT Technology provides an immediate benefit to threaded applications and in many multitasking scenarios, where the end user is running two or more existing applications at the same time. Thus enables a better user experience. You can find benchmarks and multi-tasking scenarios here.

News Source : Inquirer

here’s a selection of some of the reviews and what the folksters think. There’s a longer list at AMD ZONE , which is likely to be updated as the day goes on.

HEXUS reckons a 200MHz front side bus can’t hurt. here. There’s a picture of a brown semiconductor, also known as the “brains of a computer”.

TOM’S HARDWARE has a controversial conclusion about the 3200 and describes it as a “spineless paper tiger”. It thinks the 3200 is “much too aggressive” and it should be an XP2800 . Here.

FIRING SQUAD says AMD’s odyssey for the performance crown has been a little more treacherous than Her Indoors, but welcomes the introduction of the 3200 and the 400MHz bus, Here.

TECH REPORT says there’s not much new to report about the 2.2GHz chip apart from the fact that it runs on a 400MHz front side bus. But it reckons that the release is timely. There’s a picture of a brown semiconductor which appears to resemble the brains of a computer. Here.

LOST CIRCUITS contrasts the real brown brains of a computer with the hypothetical 3200 brains of a computer it previewed a month or two ago. That review is Here.

BIT-TECH reckons that AMD’s finally released the processor that the 3000 should have been, denies the site’s too pro-Intel, and puts it through its paces. There’s a picture of a brown chip which appears to be the brains of a computer, Here.

News source : Inquirer

A JAPANESE JOURNALIST said that an investigation he’s conducted shows that using SSE2 multimedia extensions with the AMD Opteron makes the microprocessor slow to a crawl.Takeo Noguchi. at ASCII Plus Magazine, analysed the Opteron 242 as a microprocessor for a single chip machine, and said that a 1.6GHz chip, according to AMD< slightly outperform a Xeon/Pentium 4 running at 2.8GHz.

He told the INQUIRER that he measured the execution time to encode DV-format AVI files to MPEG, WMV, Divx and Xvid. He found that for encoding DivX and Xvid, Opteron 242’s performance is roughly equivalent to a Pentium 4-2.8GHz, which matches the expectation from SPEC int/fp results.

But, he added, using well known JapaneseMPEG 2 encoding software TMPGenc ((http://www.pegasys-inc.com/), the Opteron’s performance is a staggering 30% lower than a Pentium 4-2.8GHz.

He said: “At first I supposed it was because TMPGEnc is thoroughly optimised for the Pentium 4″.

But he checked the results from SiSoftware Sandra 2003, and found to his surprise that its multimedia integer performance is much lower than the Athlon XP, the architectural cousin of the Opteron.

His results are as follows:

Sandra Multimedia Int

Opteron 242 (1.6GHz) 6300

Pentium 4-2.8GHz 11148

Athlon XP-2600 11614

But it’s not all bad news for the Opteron. He said that well known Japanese archiving software GCA (http://www.emit.jp/gca/gca.html) compresses WAV files a staggering 50% faster than P4-2.8GHz, equivalent to a Pentium 4.4GHz chip, if such a beast existed.

Source : Inquirer

SERVICE PACKS normally fix things, at least in theory. But changes to Windows XP’s memory management system in XP Service Pack 1 can have the opposite effect. Thankfully there is a patch. The problem comes about because of the way that the memory management system deals with memory allocation. If a program allocates and deallocates large blocks of memory too often that will cause Windows XP SP1 to snarl up.

However, although there is a fix, you shouldn’t apply it unless you’re definitely having this problem. Microsoft is so sure about you not installing the patch unless it’s absolutely necessary that it hasn’t even made the patch available on its site. You have to phone the company up and hope that it agrees that you need the patch.

View : Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 815411

Source : Inquirer