Windows 7 Direct3D 11 Features

Windows 7 Direct3D 11 Features - A taste of DirectX 11 is already available for download. As of November 2008, Microsoft is delivering the first taste of DirectX 11 for Windows 7 for download. A release aimed at developers, The November 2008 DirectX Software Development Kit, brings to the table the successor of Direct3D 10.1, namely Direct3D 11. In the SDK package, the Redmond company is offering a technical preview of Direct3D 11, but also the adjacent components and tools. Backwards compatible, content developed for Direct3D 11 hardware will also be compatible with earlier products supporting Direct3D 10 and 10.1 (in Vista SP1). Via the Windows 7 Developer Guide, Microsoft provides an insight into the new features made available by Direct3D 11.

“Geometry and high-order surfaces can now be tessellated to support scalable, dynamic content in patch and subdivision surface representations. To make good use of the parallel processing power available from multiple CPU cores, multithreading increases the number of potential rendering calls per frame by distributing the application, runtime, and driver calls across multiple cores. In addition, resource creation and management has been optimized for multithreaded use, enabling more efficient dynamic texture management for streaming,” Microsoft revealed.

According to the Redmond company, version 11 is designed to deliver an evolution of the functionality of the Direct3D 10 pipeline for Windows 7. In this regard, Microsoft has positioned Windows 7 to take advantage of the next generation of GPUs and multi-core processors when it comes down to the way the operating system will handle games and 3D applications. The software giant has indicated that Direct3D 11 in Windows 7 will support: Tessellation; Compute Shaders; Multithreaded Rendering; Dynamic Shader Linkage; Windows Advanced Rasterizer (WARP); Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 11 on Direct3D 9 Hardware (D3D10 Level 9); Runtime Binaries; D3DX11; Completely Updated HLSL and Direct3D Compiler; D3D11 Reference Rasterizer and D3D11 SDK Layers.

“New general-purpose compute shaders have been created for Direct3D 11. Unlike existing shaders, these are extensions to the programmable pipeline that enable your application to do more work completely on the GPU, independent of the CPU. DrawAuto, which was introduced in Direct3D 10, has been extended to interact with a compute shader. Several improvements have been made to the high-level shading language (HLSL), such as a limited form of dynamic linkage in shaders to improve specialization complexity, and object-oriented programming constructs like classes and interfaces,” the company added.

The November 2008 DirectX Software Development Kit is available for download here.
The November 2008 DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer can be downloaded via this link.
DirectX End-User Runtimes (November 2008) is up for grabs here.
Source: http://akupunyasitus.blogspot.com/

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Crysis: Warhead - Play as Psycho in this expansion of the first game

Warhead, the sequel to the critically acclaimed first person shooter Crysis, delivers a parallel side story to the first game. Based on a very tweaked and optimized version of the CryEngine 2, it delivers the same stunning beauty from the first game without the absurdly high system requirements. It offers a pretty entertaining gaming experience and some interesting surprises which I won't spoil for you. The vehicles and enemies will keep you hooked on the game, but the stereotype missions will bore you.

Story
As I said, the game is based on a parallel side story to the first one. You play as the British Sergeant Psycho Sykes who, after parting with the first game's main character, Nomad, follows the North Korean General Lee and his mysterious cargo. Presumed to be a nuclear warhead, hence the title of the game, Psycho is tasked with tracking down and apprehending the cargo for the United States. On his pursuit of the general, he saves his old friend, Sean O'Neill, who in return acts like a guardian angel through most of the game helping Psycho out with his VTOL aerial craft. On his journey, he takes part in a lot of cliché missions and reaches a harbor where the cargo is shipped to a submarine. After climbing aboard, he is knocked out and awakens being tortured by the general, but in a different environment, as all of the things are frozen by the same aliens from the first game.

After chasing the general with the help of a hovercraft, one of the most exciting aspects of the game, he joins up with another team of marines. After defeating one of the large exo-suit aliens, he travels through the elaborate mine system of the mountain. Combined with the lack of a functioning map and the claustrophobic environment, it really is a recipe for the player to get lost, as I did.

After escaping the mining system, he is tasked with escorting a train the cargo is on through the jungle riddled with North Korean soldiers and later on, aliens. After another encounter with the general, he has to invade a Korean airstrip filled with hostile soldiers and vehicles. Against all odds, he defeats all of the humans but is faced with the arrival of an upgraded exo-suit type alien.

Quite an intro for Psycho

The Nano Suit is always good

Concept
The concept of the game is pretty simple, although Nomad, the lead character in the first game had the most important job, help rescue the American scientists and then defeat the aliens, Psycho's job is also very important. But you can't really help the fact that it is the lesser story of the happenings from the island. It isn't as grand as Nomad's adventure, or as exciting as his. The missions are all pretty cliché, with escorts or defensive missions making up for quite a decent part of the game. I have to admit that the fights with the big aliens are pretty entertaining, but they don't really make up for all the downsides of the game.

It is definitely good for all the Crysis fans who want another nano suit dressed adventure battling North Koreans and aliens, but for the average shooter player, it isn't much to look at. All of the boring missions really take the fun out of a pretty smart and entertaining shooter (in the end). As I discussed with my colleagues here at Softpedia, it's like Crytek wanted to make two games using the same universe. One filled with innovation and a compelling story, which is Crysis, and the other molded after classic shooter clichés, with the stereotype missions and characters, which is Warhead.

Gameplay
In terms of actual gameplay the title, aside from various small modifications, is pretty much the same as in the first game, which in actual playing terms isn't that bad. The same nano suit is present with its familiar controls and very useful options. In terms of the weapons available, very few innovations were made, like the pulse rifle. In terms of equipment, the anti vehicle mines or claymores are noticeable new items, with a special EMP grenade designed to disrupt the power of nano suits also making an appearance.

Concerning vehicles, you will be experimenting with quite a few new ones. From regular military jeeps to armored personnel carriers (equipped with big guns) or tanks, you will definitely have an alternative to just walking around the island. Noticeable vehicles in this version are the hovercraft, on which you will be engaging the general on the frozen sea, or a train, which you will be tasked with guarding.

Another nice feature is the fact that, at some point in the game, you will be helped by other people, be it O'Neill, with his VTOL or other nano suit teams from the Special Forces. Considering that the amount of enemies is quite large, this is really a good thing. A downside is the fact that the actual game lasts only about eight hours.

General Lee

The bigger they are, the harder they fall

Visual and Audio
In terms of the graphics aspects, you can't ask for anything else. Once again, the CryEngine 2 proves its power, recreating a gorgeous tropical island, and its frozen counterpart extremely well with the minutest details in place. The surroundings are very beautiful and can sometimes really distract you from the mission. The special effects, like explosions, are marvelously well done, I myself trying to blow stuff up just to watch the effects which portray it so well. As a special feature, the part of the game where the island is frozen is very realistically rendered, with the likes of North Korean soldiers frozen in a wide variety of positions.

The audio part of the game is also well done. The sounds associated to the vehicles are very realistic, with the engines sounding very different as the vehicle is taking damage. The sounds of the jungle are also very well done. Although its peace is almost always disturbed by the gun fire and battles going on there.

Multiplayer
The multiplayer aspect of the game, entitled Crysis Wars, is a very interesting part. Although it came on a separate disk, it was incorporated in the Crysis: Warhead pack. Aside from the Instant Action and Power Struggle modes, the new mode entitled Team Action is very entertaining. The wide range of maps offers a very good experience, without the player being (too) bored.

Conclusion
All in all, it's a pretty decent game. All shooter fans will have a reasonable experience, although, at times, a bit annoying. Crysis fans are sure to enjoy this title, bringing their favorite universe back to life in this new adventure. Psycho is a more enjoyable character than the enigmatic Nomad from the first game. If you enjoy shooters and want to wear the nano suit again, then you definitely should buy it.



















Source: softpedia.com

The Windows 7 Operating Systems – Better Together

Ever since Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 RTM/SP1, Microsoft's Windows client and server operating systems have been virtually joined at the hip. As a future product development strategy, the two platforms will evolve together, an aspect valid not only for Vista SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2, but also for the forthcoming Windows 7 operating systems. Microsoft confirmed at the Windows hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles this week that Windows 7 and Windows Server 7 (Windows Server 2008 R2) would advance in lockstep. During his keynote address, Bill Laing, Corporate Vice President, Windows Server and Solutions Division, exemplified several instances in which Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 would work better together.

Not only is Microsoft developing Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 in tandem, but the company is also attempting to convince customers that the two operating systems must be used as a pair. “Because Windows Server 2008 R2 is being developed in tandem with the Windows 7 code, Windows Server 2008 R2 has several features that are designed to work better with computers running Windows 7,” Laing explained.

Just as Windows 7 hit M3 stage, Windows Server 2008 is also at Milestone 3, with Microsoft providing a taste of both platforms to testers. Windows 7 pre-Beta Build 6801 was delivered to both WinHEC 2008 and PDC 2008 participants, with the pre-Beta bits of Windows Server 2008 R2 M3 having been made available at the WinHEC event. Microsoft has already offered Windows Vista SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2 to Technology Adoption Program (TAP) customers for evaluation.

Laing indicated a few examples of technologies which make Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 play nice together, including Branch Cache. “Any time a document is retrieved by a client in a company’s branch office, Branch Cache keeps a copy in the branch, so if another client in the same office wants to retrieve that document, it can be served up locally instead of across the WAN. The result is a significant reduction in bandwidth use between corporate offices and branch sites, and a huge potential cost saving because most organizations pay for bandwidth by the byte. It also gives branch offices a degree of autonomy in case the link to headquarters is severed for any reason,” Laing said.

In addition to Branch Cache, Laing also praised the impact that the future iteration Hyper-v is bound to deliver. In this context, Microsoft plans to offer Live Migration support with Hyper-V, as a continuation of its efforts to democratize virtualization. But there are additional features that have made Microsoft present Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 as an item.

“Remote Desktop Services (RDS), the new name for Terminal Services, is another example. We expanded RDS in Windows Server 2008 R2 so that you can run the desktop or applications in the datacenter while your users can be anywhere,” Laing stated. “Another feature, DirectAccess, allows remote Windows users to securely connect to their work environment as if they were on the corporate LAN, and also lets IT administrators fully manage remote PCs securely, as if they were on-premises, but without using a VPN.”
By: By Marius Oiaga

Sapphire Adds New GeForce 9400GT Cards

Although NVIDIA's new low-profile GeForce 9400 graphics card has been officially announced for quite some time now, one of its add-in-board partners decided to keep its customers waiting for a while. However, the company has officially launched its version of the new GeForce graphics card earlier today, offering four new models, based on the same GPU.

As we mentioned in our previous articles, NVIDIA's new GeForce 9400 card has been designed to accommodate the graphics requirements of entry-level users who don't spend their entire budget on just one video card. In addition, the GeForce 9400 GT features several NVIDIA technologies and supports Microsoft's DirectX 10 API. Furthermore, this is also one of the few NVIDIA cards that have been developed using a 55nm process technology, which AMD has been adopting for quite some time now.

Back to Sapphire's latest GeForce cards, the four new models have been designed to deliver a maximum of 1GB of DDR2 memory. However, two of them will be equipped with only 512MB DDR2 memory on a 128-bit memory interface. There is another way you can differentiate the four models from one another, as the two 1GB DDR2-enabled cards are equipped with a passive cooling solution. All four of them are based on PCI-Express 2.0 interface and have the same clock settings as the reference model, with 550MHz for the GPU and 800MHz for the memory.

In addition to the new GeForce 9400GT models, Sparkle can also offer four GDDR3-equipped cards, all of which have only 512MB of memory. In total, Sparkle has 12 graphics cards, based on the same 9400GT GPU. So we could say that if you are an entry-level user and you are searching for a new low-profile graphics card, you should find what you are searching for in Sapphire's product lineup.

Source: news.softpedia.com

NVIDIA Unveils New Quadro FX GPUs for Professional Workstation Graphics

With NVIDIA having lost the number one spot in the high-performance consumer graphics card market, the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker is now concentrating its efforts on its professional business segment, with the Quadro lineup of graphic processors. The green company has just introduced two new products, specifically designed to meet the requirements of workstation desktop platforms, the Quadro FX 470, the first integrated professional motherboard GPU, and the Quadro FX 370 Low Profile (FX 370 LP), an entry-level graphics card part of NVIDIA's Quadro family of GPUs, designed for small form factor systems.

"In today's competitive global marketplace, engineers, traders, designers and power office users demand more functionality and reliability from their desktop computing solutions," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Services, NVIDIA. "The Quadro FX 470 and the Quadro FX 370 LP are precisely tested, certified and designed to maximize productivity and deliver the cost-effective, professional-quality solution these users require on a daily basis."

Both products released by NVIDIA have been featured with a 128-bit precision graphics pipeline, 32-bit floating point precision, filtering and blending, advanced color compression and early z-culling for improved bandwidth and rendering efficiency, and full-scene antialiasing. Also, the company's latest Quadro products include features such as Unified GPU Architecture, CUDA and Shader Model 4.0 Support, I/O scalability and performance, and NVIDIA's nView advanced display software.

The new Quadro FX motherboard GPU comes to support Intel's latest processors, including Pentium D, Pentium 4, Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo, Celeron D and Celeron. It provides 1 dual-link DVI, while the 4 memory DIMMs can support a maximum of 4GB of memory. The Quadro FX 370 Low Profile graphics card is featured with a total memory of 256MB, 8 CUDA Parallel processor cores and 8 GB/s.

Coming with a manufacturer's suggested retail price of US$149, the new low-profile Quadro FX 370 GPU appears to be the best high-performance graphics solution for low-cost professional workstation solutions. The Quadro 470 GPU motherboard has been set to come at an MSRP of US$700.

Source: news.softpedia.com

.NET Framework 4.0 and Dublin

At the end of September 2008, Microsoft unveiled that the next versions of Visual Studio and .NET Framework would span across not only the client and server operating systems but also across services and devices. Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 are expected to drop either in late 2009 or by the first half of 2010, even though Microsoft failed to confirm a delivery deadline. As far as the next iteration of its runtime environment is concerned, Microsoft is cooking .NET Framework 4.0 while planning a synchronization with the evolution of Windows Server, namely Windows Server Dublin.

“Updates to the next versions of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) are focused on reducing complexity for developers by providing better support for Web 2.0 technologies like REST, POX and ATOM, and increasing performance and scalability in the process. In fact, early tests show these improvements to WCF and WF are, at a minimum, enabling 10X the perf and scalability - and to think we’re still fine tuning here! Second, 'Dublin' makes it easier to deploy, manage and scale these next-generation applications,” explained Steven Martin, Director, CSD Product Management Microsoft.

Windows Server "Dublin" is a collection of enhanced capabilities added to the Windows server platform which will expand to also take Internet Information Services (IIS) to the next level. The end purpose of the improvements planned for the Windows Application Server is to permit developers to handle composite applications in a much simpler way than they can today. Microsoft is in fact looking to streamline processes including installation and management as well as the scalability of composite solutions.

“We will deliver a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, and 'Dublin' technologies at the Professional Developers Conference in October 2008; this will allow us to begin receiving broader feedback from customers and partners. We are committed to driving and prioritizing our development efforts based upon customer and partner feedback; the feedback from this CTP and other customer programs will help inform us as to the exact timing of our beta and RTM,” Microsoft indicated via the Dublin NET 4 Overview whitepaper.

.NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is available for download here.

Source: news.softpedia.com

Call of Duty: World At War Xbox 360 Beta Is Now Open

Call of Duty: World at War is definitely shaping up to be a great title. Although the developer of the game, Treyarch, was severely disapproved when it announced that it would have the shooter franchise back to World War II, after the huge success of the latest title which took place in contemporary times, CoD 4: Modern Warfare, the game does look pretty good.

We have already posted our impressions of the PC multiplayer beta stage, and now it seems that the team at Treyarch decided to make the Xbox 360 version of the beta stage open to everyone. Everyone who has an Xbox Live Gold membership, of course, but Silver subscribers might get the chance to play it after a few days. Before this, a special token was required to download the multiplayer client and join in on the battles of CoD., token which you received if you were a registered user on the official CoD website.

“The Xbox 360 Multiplayer Beta went public this morning on Xbox Live Marketplace. Now all your friends and neighbors can join in the online mayhem and see how deadly you've become during your time fighting during the exclusive Beta period,” read the official announcement on the CoD website.

This is definitely great news for the people who wanted to see if the game was worth buying this very busy holiday season. One of the key features for the previous title was the very well built multiplayer mode and the fact that it was very balanced, offering players a great experience. This new title promises to bring an even greater online experience, mainly because it will feature more modes of play and that the factions involved will be very individualized.

For those of you who don't know, CoD: World at War is the fifth title in the franchise, and the first one not to be developed by Infinity Ward, the creators of the series. Its action will follow the events in the Pacific Ocean during the Second World War and the battles in Berlin. It promises to give players a unique look on the battles of WWII and hopes that it will clear the name for all war based shooters which have really been saturating the market for a while now.

Considering the multiplayer mode and the fact that Treyarch tried really hard to offer an even more motivating single player story, this game looks very promising in the eyes of gamers.

Source: news.softpedia.com