If you've been to your local movie theater lately you've probably noticed a resurgence in 3D films with the biggest blockbuster so far being Pixar's "Up" and the band U2 even releasing a concert film entirely in 3D with many more on the way. Some television shows and even sports games have even been broadcast in 3D. Luckily the technology has come a long way in the years since it last fadeda way and things are looking better than ever. This may not make for better content necessarily, but there is definitely a new major push from film and television studios to market this and get 3D in their products.

When 3D glasses were popular video game technology was brand new and nothing more than a few pixels running across the screen. Obviously games have come light years since then with games such as Crysis offering photorealistic quality graphics and massive immersive 3D worlds. Nvidia, the other major player in the graphics world, seeks to also ride this new 3D wave with their Nvidia 3D Vision technology this time bringing gamers into the current 3D craze.

I'm definitely one to keep up with the latest tech, it may not be always what's powering my system or what I use at home, but technology news I follow daily and obviously write about. Yet somehow Nvidia's GeForce 3D Vision went under my radar likely due to many new AMD products being launched at the same time such as Phenom II, Socket AM3 motherboards, and new graphics cards from ATI. I also hadn't read of it in any recent reviews and to be fair to my self, we haven't received as much Nvidia hardware for review lately as AMD. It's fair to say then that I had no bias or expectations for Nvidia 3D Vision coming into a meeting recently at QuakeCon and was a little surprised to see the 3D glasses they were showing off which I had heard of but hadn't seen anyone use as of yet.

We kicked things off with a game that has received rave reviews lately, Eidos's Batman: Arkham Asylum, which currently has over 90% score on average. The game is a third-person action-stealth game developed by Rocksteady out for consoles now and the PC in two more weeks and looks to be one of surprise hits of the year.

As soon as the game loaded the first thing I noticed was how Batman's cape trails him perfectly when he runs and leaps out from the screen at you. The cowl and the flowing cape are some of the iconic symbols of Batman and here they're done excellently. Batman also has a variety of gadgets at his disposable to take out fiends and the in-game heads-up display is perfectly removed from the rest of the scene to give depth. It is obvious this game has been tweaked heavily and is an excellent showcase for Nvidia's technology. During some moments you do come out of the 3D experience from the pre-rendered cinematics but for the most part the 3D is incredibly immersive and exciting. I remember moving back a bit as a bolt flied towards the screen as Batman removed a grate to sneak around Arkham. That seems like a minor detail or not very exciting but in action it is very, very cool.

As exciting as it was to watch, Arkham Asylum was only demoed to me and I didn't get any hands-on time to try it out in 3D. When I picked up Resident Evil 5 on my own things really got fun. I had played the demo previously on the XBox 360 and this was the same section that I played with Nvidia 3D Vision on the PC. I definitely had fun with the game, though I'm more a first-person shooter fan, it didn't quite pull me in to try the full game on the XBox. This same section of the game played with 3D was right away much more intense. These glasses definitely work and can make a very good game that much more exciting when playing. Not only did zombies pop out the screen but my character had definite space and everything had an extra level of definition to it that you just can't get watching a 2D screen. And since Resident Evil 5 uses a lot of in-game cinematics they also looked fantastic. It might be hard to believe but I think immersive is the key word for this technology when it works, it really gives you a much better feeling for what's going on in the game world. Unfortunately I can't recall many specific  graphics details from my experience but I can say it worked and was a blast to play. At no time did I experience headaches or nausea seen with other 3D systems. Resident Evil 5 is launched for the PC also a few weeks from now and seems to be a very good port.

This won't be an article going in depth on how the glasses work as I only had about 30-45 minutes with them but let me give you a quick overview on what you need for Nvidia's 3D Vision to work. First, there are actually two Nvidia solutions and the one I got to check out was the higher-end Nvidia GeForce 3D Vision but Nvidia also offers Nvidia 3D Vision Discover which requires your regular 3D glasses that are basically free at this point, a recent GeForce graphics card, and Windows Vista or Windows 7. You can read more about that here at Nvidia's site.

The Nvidia GeForce 3D Vision kicks things up a little bit with the first requirement being a monitor which supports 120Hz refresh rates to draw to images for each eye onscreen, a GeForce graphics card and a fairly powerful one as you will lose speed using this, Windows Vista or Windows 7, and the Nvidia 3D Vision kit from Nvidia which goes for about $200 online. This comes with high-end stereoscopic glasses with wireless IR technology built in, separate nose pieces for the goggles, a bag and cloth to clean the glasses, transmitter for the glasses which hooks up to your computer, various cables and converters, and stereoscopic photo viewer and for movies.

Obviously $200 isn't something to sneeze at but by its self it isn't that bad. Unfortunately, the price of some of these LCD monitors at 120Hz is considerably more than those which run at 60Hz. You can pick up a 22" Viewsonic which runs at 1680x1050 resolution with 1,000:1 contrast ratio and the 120Hz spec for $299. A comparable 22" Viewsonic is $179 at 60Hz. Samsung also offers a monitor with similar specs, the 2233RZ at a similar price. None of these are 1080p monitors which you should know if you're looking for a monitor that supports full HD though 1680x1050 is still a decent resolution and higher than 720p, those looking to buy a system like this probably are gamers who also want 1080p support. There are some other solutions including high-end HDTVs and projectors, Nvidia has the full list here as well as system requirements.

The other problem is that although hundreds of titles are supported, it seem as if some other websites impressions of the glasses who had more time to write a full review show that when it works great it is spectacular and makes gaming better but many times it doesn't work well or requires you to turn off graphic settings. There also appears to be a performance hit from Tech Report's findings.

Overall, I have to say my first impression of Nvidia's GeForce 3D Vision I came away very impressed. The technology worked great, at least on the games I played, and definitely added to the fun and the immersiveness. This could be one of the most important gaming peripherals to be released as I'd say when it does work it really helps push you into the game world such as with the Wiimote and much more than the rumble packs that showed up first over a dozen years ago and are now ubiquitous. The problem is, it appears, is though my hands-on time was fun that on many titles there are still problems with 3D and it's still early in the technology's days. I'm sure these bugs can be worked out and it's to Nvidia's benefit to do so as to not create a stigma around the technology. The other major problem is of course cost factor which if you only need to buy the glasses once, $200 isn't cheap but it might be worth it to some. The requirement of a special monitor and the price and lack of choice though do hurt today.

All of that said though, I'm not doom and gloom about this. The technology is fresh but already tremendously impressive when working and though it may not happen soon, it's likely that 120Hz output on monitors will start to become more and more standard as films are also released in 3D on Blu-Ray for the home market. I'd also be shocked if one or more of the next-generation consoles doesn't support some 3D technology, though new consoles probably won't be released for 3-4 years. How soon and how cheap 120Hz monitors will get no one can say at this point but it is imperative for 3D to become successful. I think this is much more exciting than PhysX my self, having seen that and tried 3D this is easily the more fun and rewarding technology. ATI and AMD, if they aren't already, should definitely be working on some solution of their own to 3D as it may not matter now but better to be up to speed rather than being caught without it if the technology does start to catch on. Those looking to pick this up though will probably be Nvidia fans and those with some extra cash, for everyone else it probably isn't quite ready for prime time and it may burn too much a hole in one's pocket book. But if you can afford it and don't mind all games not working perfectly, this looks to be a very, very fun development. Congrats to Nvidia for pushing some new technology in the PC world.

You can pick up both the glasses and monitor for $551 from  TheNerds.net

As with all of Sony's processors, the Cell processor for the PS3 was widely hyped by Sony prior to the release of the PS3. The processor was to be co-developed by Toshiba, IBM, and Sony and expected to be seen in many more applications than just simply Sony's PlayStation 3. This has happened eventually with the Cell processor showing up in various servers and now the Cell processor is being used in additional hardware. Today we'll be taking a look at a video transcoding card from Leadtek which uses the Cell processor, the WinFast PxVC1100.

As mentioned Sony has used the Cell processor primarily for the PS3, IBM has built servers off of the Cell processor, and the third party here, Toshiba, is using it for multimedia uses for consumer devices. This card is a MPEG-2/H.264 transcoding card powered by Toshiba's high-performance stream processor SpursEngine based off a high performance Cell processor with four Synergistic Processing Element cores with emphasis on high performance floating point performance in a multimedia capacity.

What does this all means in laymen's terms? Fast, very fast and also low power consumption. Toshiba states that with a slower Pentium IV processor you can see up to 8x as fast transcoding and with a high-end quad core 4x.

For this card to work though it does require that the app support the SpursEngine and luckily Leadtek includes quite a few plug-ins with the card. They also include the full version of TMPGEnc 4.0 Express which is some of the best transcoding software on the market. It supports MPEG2, MPEG4, AVI, DIVX, QuickTime, H.264, DVD-Video, Blu-Ray, and also we found others such as x264 as long as the codecs for those other containers are installed. It also includes an editor for working with videos and support for Nvidia's CUDA. It'll be the main component of our testing as you'll see later on.

Two other plug-ins are also included, one for Adobe Premiere Elements 7 (this software is not included with the card) which also speeds up encoding and transcoding, and another for Corel DVD Movie Factory 5 which allows for upconversion of material to 1080p. This is called Super Resolution.

Leadtek states that other apps are being worked on for this card by Toshiba and others with Spurs Engine support such as upscaling YouTube videos, video indexing, and Gesture Interface Remote Control. Additionally, an SD is up on Leadkte's site with development tools and tutorials to give programmers a jump start with the SpursEngine if they'd like to add support in their app. http://www.leadtek.com/spursengine/

The card its self is very, very small enough to be low profile. It uses a PCI-E bus but requires more power from a floppy power connector. That said the overall draw is very low, Leadtek claims less than 35W. If you don't have one handy they include a molex-to-floppy 4-pin power adapter in addition to a low profile bracket and the previously mentioned software and plug-ins.

Here is a feature list from Leadtek.

Four Cell Engines
Execute sophisticated video scaling algorithms to enhance video quality
Execute other kinds of video algorithms such as image recognition
Reduce the computation loading of a CPU processor. Alternatively, a lower performance CPU can be used.
Programmable through SDK, allowing creative usage of this product, and fast development of new applications


Full-HD MPEG-2 encoder and decoder
(Full-HD is 1920x1080 or 1080p)
Faster than real time video scaling between the same MPEG-2 formats, eg. from SD to HD or vice versa
Fast trans-coding from MPEG-2 to H.264 or vice versa
Reduce the computation loading of a CPU processor. Alternatively, a lower performance CPU can be used.
Ideal for video editing and authoring Blu-ray Disc content


Full-HD H.264 encoder and decoder
Faster than real time video scaling between the same H.264 formats, eg. from SD to HD or vice versa
Fast trans-coding from H.264 to MPEG-2 or vice versa
Reduce the computation loading of a CPU processor. Alternatively, a lower performance CPU can be used.
Ideal for video editing and authoring Blu-ray Disc content


PCI Express bus (edge connector)
High performance industry standard bus in all newer PC and MAC
PxVC1100 can be used under Windows, MAC-OS and Linux.


Fastest video transcoding process — Real-time H.264 <-> MPEG-2 , SD <-> HD video transcoding.
Super Resolution - Video quality enhanced —picture resolution up-scaling for HD video, Super resolution makes the video looks more clear and sharper, like the blue-ray quality
Best Application — Pegasys TMPGEnc4.0 XPress accepts the most comment video format with friendly user interface. 
Green Product — less than 35W, low power consumption will not be the burden of your system, and save energy.
Less CPU loading — to free your system by 50% less CPU usage. New tech revolution make you can do other job in the transcoding time forever

1 slot FANsink(Adaptive cooling FAN)
Power on : 40%
Main chip 85’C : 80%
Main chip 90’C : 100% (32dB)
Sensor fail or main Chip 96°C : Shut Down

Our test system was Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit with ATI Catalyst 9.6 drivers and GeForce 186.18. TMPGEnc Express 4.0 was the software used for all transcoding.

 

As you can see with the Leadtek card encoding the full episode of Family Guy finishes almost 1/3 faster than the CPU alone and here Nvidia's CUDA seems to do nothingi TMPGEnc Express.

For this we took a 1080i transport stream of a capture of Jessica Biel's appearance on Letterman and transcoded it into 720p H.264. The Leadtek card finishes more than 3x faster than the CPU or Nvidia's CUDA.

Leadtek also included a 1080p WMV from HDClub and here we see the Leadtek speed ahead of the competition almost 4x faster than the competition.

Obviously another critical component these days is power consumption and here the Leadtek WinFast PxVC1100 also excels. While it is higher at idle than just the CPU alone at 121W, 14W above the CPU by its self. However at load it is only 7 watts higher with the CPU and Leadtek card working together to transcode videos. These numbers are taking with the 4770 we had in our normal mid-range system, the GTX 260 raises power consumption quite a bit across the board.

Here is our CPU usage % while transcoding an episode of Family Guy, as you can see there's still plenty of CPU power free with our Phenom II X3 720BE for other tasks such as web surfing and listening to music without slowing things down.

And here is the same episode of Family Guy transcoding without the SpursEngine and the Leadtek card as you can see it is almost 100% full and obviously running other apps such as a web browser will slow down your transcode significantly. We think this is key, not only is the Leadtek WinFast PxVC1100 faster than other solutions, it also uses less power and frees up your CPU.

As mentioned earlier software for Corel DVD Factory 5 is also included which allows you to run what Leadtek calls Super Resolution on MPEG-2 videos and DVDs. We saw some refinement in these images with less noise and grain but overall we don't think this is the major reason for buying this card but the transcoding abilities.

For a period there every six to eight months or so we'd see a new GPU and leaps of performance gained from the cards that had just come out but over the past few years this seems to have slowed down and for better of worse since ATI released the Radeon 4870 last June there haven't been too many major jumps ahead of that card except of course the 4870X2 and not much from Nvidia as well. Mid-range has seen tremendous improvement, however, offering phenomenal value in the sub-$100 market but above it things have slowed down. Recently AMD did at last follow the 4870 up with the Radeon 4890 which we looked at launch and now with some time since then we're seeing 1GHz variants of the 4890 and non-reference cards. Today we'll be looking at one of these non-reference design cards with the Sapphire Radeon 4890 Vapor-X.

If you're not up to date on the 4890, as the name might implies it basically shares the same basic specs as the Radeon 4870 except 1GB of GDDR5 is standard as opposed to 512MB of GDDR5 on some 4870 cards and the memory and core speeds have increased as well as some improved power management.

Sapphire's Vapor-X line has been around now for some time and is Sapphire's custom heatsink and fan combination. It runs quieter than the standard heatsink and also should allow for better overclocking. Our model came pre-overclocked with a core of 875MHz (25Mhz more than normal) and 1GB of GDDR5 running at 1050Mhz (75MHz above the standard clock). It also is a very slick design and on Sapphire's blue PCB as opposed to ATI red. It is a very aesthetically pleasing card and a lot of that also has quite a bit of function such as the ramsinks covering all the memory modules.

Sapphire have also decked out the video output ports of the card with every type on the market: DVI, VGA, HDMI, and even DisplayPort, which hasn't quite caught on yet with monitors. Sapphire also includes a DVI-to-HDMI cable rather than the standard dongle with other ATI cards which is a nice bonus.

The box is quite cool, no pun intended, and should stand out among the typical CGI characters on most video card boxes and all of the features of the 4890 series are shown off in the specs on the box.

The bundle is fairly standard other than the previously mentioned DVI-to-HDMI cable with a driver CD, two PCI-E to molex power adapters, Cyberlink DVD software, and as a bonus they also include 3DMark Vantage. Game bundles have come in and out of favor over the years and these days the trend is to not include a game unless you get it as a combo with hardware.

We've been over the standard features of the Radeon 4000 series time and time again but we'll go over them again very quickly: 2nd-gen 55nm production process, UVD2 for H.264 decoding, the only card with DX 10.1 support, and 7.1 uncompressed audio over HDMI.

Time is a little tight right now as other articles are cooking so we'll jump right into Sapphire's techincal specs and what you want: benchmarks.

Here are the specs from Sapphire.

1. Award winning Vapor-X Cooler with heatpipe, silent and powerful
2. Sapphire patent pending Black Diamond Choke
3. 4 display outputs: DP+HDMI+DL-DVI+VGA
4. Full solid capacitor design
5. Microsoft DX10.1 support
6. PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
7. Dynamic geometry acceleration
8. Game physics processing capability
9. 1GB/256-bit GDDR5 memory interface
10. Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x1080
11. On chip HDCP support
12. ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance. (Use up to four discrete
cards with an AMD 790FX based motherboard)
13. ATI Avivo HD Support
ATI Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD) for Blu-ray™ and HD Video.
Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)
DVD Upscaling
Dynamic Contrast
Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound support
14. Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay™ technology
15. ATI Stream technology

Of  all the games we tested Crysis seemed to show the biggest gains, perhaps due to using more memory bandwidth than the others despite the lower resolution Crysis: Warhead is full of detail.

Left 4 Dead continues to be a very popular multiplayer game thanks to Valve's touch but we don't see much gain here from the extra 75MHz memory clockspeed despite maxing out AA and AF settings.

UT3 is a highly popular engine but may not stress memory bandwidth. As we see not a huge gain over the standard 4890.

World in Conflict shows similar results to the other games we tested.

3DMark 2006 is an older synthetic benchmark but we don't want to move to Vantage with the heavily weighed PhysX optimizations for Nvidia. We see a similar pattern to our other numbers.

Power consumption was measured from the wall socket directly from the computer. Idle was taken after 5 minutes into the Windows desktop and Load was tested emphasizing gaming performance and the video card in Crysis' GPU demo. Cool 'n Quiet was enabled.

There's no peace treaty in the graphics card wars as Nvidia has had problems topping ATI and now ATI has released their biggest bang for the buck video card since the Radeon 4850 last summer in the Radeon HD 4770. Today we have one of these cards to look at from Sapphire which we'll put through it's paces.

The heatsink is a little different from the one the media received, not quite as large covering the entire graphics card and a somewhat 2001, futuristic modeling to the heatsink and fan combination. Given how cool the 4770 ran it did seem overkill a bit and likely the 4770's we received were more engineering samples and not quite final hardware.

The Sapphire card we're loooking at isn't overclocked and doesn't deviate too far from the standard spec. In case you're not up to speed on the Radeon HD 4770's specs the card features 640 stream processors, which is similar to the Radeon HD 4830 but has 512MB of GDDR5 like the Radeon 4870 and Radeon 4890. We'll see how this performs later on in benchmarks.

Additionally the card is built on a new 40nm process as opposed to the 55nm graphics card process all cards use today. It is the first card to use the 40nm process and is actually lower than even any processors on the market right now. It is the first card though so likely we won't see all the benefits until the next-generation of this process.

Other than that, most of the major features of the Radeon 4000 series are here, UVD2 for H.264 decoding, DX 10.1, PCI-Express 2.0 support, DVD upscaling, HDMI with 7.1 audio, and advanced PowerPlay management.

Sapphire includes everything you need to get started in their bundle including component video output cables, DVI-to-VGA adapter, HDMI-to-DVI adapter, molex 6-pin PCI-E power adapter, as well as Cyberlink PowerDVD and DVD Suite and a Crossfire connector.

Here's a comparison to other ATI cards on the market.

We don't see a major change with the 4770 in Crossfire with Crysis' being more CPU bound but we do see some amazing number out of the Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 almost matching the 4850.

At 1680x1050 Crossfire basically does nothing and the 4770 again comes in just under the 4850. At 1920x1200 it is on top barely ahead of the 4850 and finally at 2560x1600 it leads the pack at 67.8. Sapphire's 4770 however is more than playable at 44.5 fps and faster than the overclocked 9800 GT.

Crossfire sees more of a gain in Unreal Tournament 3, easily cleaning up here. The 4770 suffers more here from lack of stream processors and doesn't gain much from the extra memory bandwidth until you hit 2560x1600.

Left4Dead shows a pretty nice gain in Crossfire and again the Sapphire 4770 does a great job fully playable up to the highest resolution possible today, 2560x1600. Crossfire does gain you though an extra 17fps.

3DMark is synthetic so I wouldn't put much into it but Futuremark's benchmarks are quite popular. The 4770 seems to follow a similar pattern as to the game tests coming in under the 4850.

Power consumption was measured from the wall socket directly from the computer. Idle was taken after 5 minutes into the Windows desktop and Load was tested emphasizing gaming performance and the video card in Crysis' GPU demo.