Apple iPhone developers demand surges 500%

Apple's initial reluctance to provide an SDK for iPhone development was surely a mistake. Most people knew that from the beginning, but at least for Apple's sake hindsight is proving that releasing the SDK has had a positive impact on the platform. According to some sources, the SDK has increased demand for iPhone developers significantly, upwards of 500% in the past few months alone.

The largest increase in demand for iPhone developers came shortly after the Apple App Store opened, which no doubt drew both 3rd party companies and independent developers in. What's even more interesting is what some people see this leading up to, which includes accreditation for development. Could we see in the near future a "Certified iPhone Developer" program come out?

With a massive increase in developers, they also expect to see an increase in conflicts over intellectual property. This could easily happen between different developers, or between the developers and Apple. Apple has already proven they are willing to squelch any application they don't approve of on the App Store, which has included programs they feel "mimic" existing ones that they develop. Regardless, iPhone development has seen a huge surge, which is nothing but good news for the iPhone.

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Full-length films coming to YouTube?

When it comes to video websites YouTube undeniably leads the pack in terms of traffic, but it has struggled to find a workable advertising scheme to bring in revenue. Furthermore, its dominance could be compromised in the long run, with the rise of Hulu and others offering premium TV and movie content. Thus, is not surprising to hear that its parent company, Google, has been talking to movie studios about bringing full-length feature films on board.

The company recently signed a deal with CBS to begin showing full TV episodes and has also added a bunch of features to make longer viewing more comfortable, such as a widescreen viewing option and a “lights-off” feature. But the site’s inferior video quality and spotty audio still leave much to be desired. There’s no word yet on which studio is looking to add its movies to the site, but sources claim the new content should arrive in the next 30 to 90 days if all goes well.

Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/32386-fulllength-films-coming-to-youtube.html

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Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro

Creative has been a leader in the PC audio market for as long as I can remember. In fact, the first Sound Blaster card hit the market almost 20 years ago, which can be considered an eternity in "computer years".

During this time, Creative has launched about a dozen major soundcards, with their latest outgoing product being the Sound Blaster X-Fi series, which replaced the popular Audigy line a few years ago.

The X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro that we are testing today is Creative's latest offering in the series, making use of a slightly modified chip called EMU20K2 that adds native PCI Express support among a number of improvements and fixes over the previous generation of cards.

Aimed at audio enthusiasts and especially gamers, Creative offers two versions of the X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro. The one we are testing that could be considered the lite version of the package that includes mainly the soundcard, while a more expensive version adds a 5 ¼” I/O drive similar to the ones Creative has offered in the past. Other than the added module, a remote control, and the extra $50, the two products are identical.

Opening the box doesn't reveal a whole lot. The bundle of this $130 soundcard is scarce and consists of just a quick start guide, the drivers disc, and the card itself.

As mentioned above, one of the first things you will notice about the X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty is that it uses a PCI Express x1 interface. If you don’t have a x1 slot on your motherboard or don't have access to one (due to an oversized video card cooler, for example) you can always install the card in a larger slot, be it x8 or x16.

Hardware installation went without issues as expected. I chose to install the X-Fi Titanium in a PCI Express x1 slot as I had one readily available. Software installation, on the other hand, was a bit more involved. Be prepared for this process to take a long time and require a few restarts. Also worth nothing, I experienced a blue screen of death (a.k.a. BSOD) during my initial install and had to start all over again.

This only happened once, after which I was able to successfully install the card's drivers and software. At this point it was made obvious to us that Creative has not made striding efforts to improve a nagging software installation that dates back to the days of the SB Live.

Creative includes an impressive software bundle with the X-Fi Titanium composed of lots of in-house utilities plus PowerDVD. For brevity, I will briefly cover the more relevant software and point out key features along the way in the next page.

Source: http://www.techspot.com/review/115-creative-xfi-titanium-fatal1ty/

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Force3D Radeon HD 4870 Black Edition review

It's been a busy year for the PC graphics world with both AMD and Nvidia going back and forth releasing new architectures, then improving them further to finally having to rearrange their line-up to match each other prices.

A perfect example is that of the Radeon HD 4870 which made its debut on late June with a retail price of $299, at the time significantly cheaper than the competition's GeForce GTX 260. Not too long afterwards we published our direct comparison of the GeForce GTX 260/280 and the Radeon HD 4800 series, where it became clear that the Radeon had the performance edge over the GTX 260 in spite of the lower price.

Nvidia was forced to heavily reduce the GeForce GTX 260 price to the Radeon's level, only to release an enhanced version that effectively replaced the original weeks later. The new GeForce GTX 260 which goes by the same name, now features 216 SPUs rather than the original 192.

However, these newer GeForce GTX 260 cards cost upwards of $310, meaning that the performance boost comes at an added cost. With many Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards currently priced as low as $270, the new GeForce GTX 260 is not necessarily more appealing than the original. In concluding our Radeon HD 4870 vs. GeForce GTX 260 comparison, in which the Radeon came out on top, there was but one small problem and that was heat generation.

Despite of using less power when under load, the Radeon HD 4870 runs considerably hotter than the GeForce GTX 260 using the stock cooler which is shared by a majority of outgoing cards no matter what the manufacturer. While the 80C+ load temperatures were a little concerning, it was the 70C+ idle temps that had us really worried. This means that even when sitting at the Windows desktop the Radeon HD 4870 is cranking out more than 70 degrees of heat, much of which escapes into the case.

This was also problem when we reviewed the Visiontek Radeon HD 4870, which used the AMD reference cooler. Using special software (Catalyst drivers support it now also) to increase the fan speed allowed for lower temperatures, but a noticeable increase in operating volumes came as a byproduct. Therefore we believed the best Radeon HD 4870 solution would be one that dropped the barely sufficient reference cooler for something more elaborate.

And finally we have a Radeon HD 4870 card that has done just that, the new Force3D Radeon HD 4870 Black Edition. Force3D has improved this special edition Radeon by overclocking the core and memory, albeit a small overclock, and replaced the reference cooler with one of the best VGA air coolers money can buy, the Arctic-Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo.

We can expect the Force3D Radeon HD 4870 Black Edition to be slightly faster than the original, but most importantly it's also going to be significantly cooler. Before we check out the performance numbers, let’s take a closer look at this impressive looking graphics card.

Source: http://www.techspot.com/review/120-force3d-radeon-4870/

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Company of Heroes videocard performance

Recently a new real-time strategy game set in the Second World War was released, titled "Company of Heroes" this new RTS features full cinematic detail, and in doing so, it requires quite a lot of processing power.

With all the visual enhancements enabled, Company of Heroes looks stunning, easily making one of the best looking RTS games of all time. However, as a result you can expect many computers to struggle playing this game with all the eye candy turned on. This can be quite disappointing for some because as good as the gameplay and fun factor is in CoH, having visual settings set at their maximum really does this game justice.

Therefore, before purchasing this game or even considering a hardware upgrade, it will be important to know first if your computer will run it, and second how good it will actually look while at it. There is indeed a massive difference between low and high quality settings in Company of Heroes, suggesting older systems will still be able to run this title, which is always good news. However like I said, this game looks fantastic and playing it with low visual quality settings is almost criminal... a graphics card upgrade may be in order for some fanatics!

If you are wondering what's under the hood of CoH (besides the Havok 3 Physics Engine), here's an excerpt from Wikipedia's entry for the game:

Company of Heroes is the first game to make use of Relic's next generation engine, known as the "Essence Engine". This engine was designed and coded from scratch by Relic in order to make use of all next-generation graphical effects, including High Dynamic Range lighting, dynamic lighting & shadows, advanced shader effects and normal mapping. As producer John Johnson puts it "We will have every advanced graphical effect you'd expect from a game like Half-Life 2, and more."

For our testing purposes we have put together an average gaming platform. Rather than going with a much newer and expensive Intel Core 2 or AMD Athlon X2 processor, we chose an Athlon 64, as we believe it better represents the average gamer rig at the present time.

That said, if your particular graphics card does well on our Athlon64 3800+ system, then it is a given that it will run just as well on a Core 2 Duo, for example. The system has also been fitted with 1GB of memory rather than 2GBs. Since most gamers still get by with 1GB of memory, we felt it would make more sense.

We tested using three different in-game quality configurations (see next page for complete details) at three different resolutions (1024, 1280 and 1600). We have also put up a set of comparative screenshots depicting in-game graphics quality.

In total 14 graphics cards were tested from both ATI and Nvidia.

Source: http://www.techspot.com/article/20-company-of-heroes-3d-performance/

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Far Cry 2 performance in-depth

If like us you are a fan of first-person shooters, then there is a good chance you have spent the better part of this year anticipating the arrival of Far Cry 2. Last week marked the release date for this awaited sequel, and so we immediately jumped in and bought our copy. However, rather than play the single player mission from start to finish and then go into some multiplayer action, we have been hard at work for bringing you this article.

As usual our in-depth performance review takes various ATI and Nvidia graphics cards and compares them in this new first-person shooter title. Having recently completed a similar article with Crytek's Crysis Warhead, we have been keen to see if Far Cry 2 is just as demanding.



You may recall the original version of Far Cry was developed by Crytek using the CryENGINE, while it was actually published by Ubisoft. For Far Cry 2, Ubisoft's Montreal studios took over the development of the game using their own Dunia engine. This game engine has been designed for use with the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 platforms which resulted in last week's multi-platform release. The word Dunia means "world", "earth" or "living" in the Persian Language. As current players of Far Cry 2 will discover, Dunia offers a number of impressive features like destructible environments, dynamic weather, dynamic fire propagation, full day/night cycles, and many others.

Furthermore, the Dunia engine can take advantage of DirectX 10 when running on Windows Vista, but is also capable of running on DirectX 9 platforms. Now, unlike the engine used for Crysis games, Dunia is said to be less hardware demanding which could only come as great news for PC gamers. If you look back at our recent Crysis Warhead performance article you will see that this game requires a tremendous amount of GPU power to deliver playable performance.



Clearly only those with the most advanced gaming rigs are going to be able to enjoy Crysis Warhead in all its visual glory as we found that even a top of the line GeForce GTX 280 could struggle when pushed far enough. Far Cry 2, on the other hand, has been publicized to work perfectly on today's mid-range graphics cards in spite of the impressive eye candy.

As we move on, we will find out exactly how Far Cry 2 performs using a range of previous and current generation graphics cards. The quality presets tested include Ultra High, Very High, and High, which will be tested at 1280x1024, 1680x1050, and 1920x1200 resolutions. The built-in Far Cry 2 benchmark tool has been used to test the various graphics cards, so you will be able to accurately compare your systems performance to ours.

Source: http://www.techspot.com/review/123-farcry2-performance/

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Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB and Western Digital Caviar SE16 400GB Hard Drives review

Processors are incredibly fast, RAM is rocketing its way through our games, and videocards pack more punch than ever. With all these screamingly fast system components available, often the hard drive is neglected. It’s a commonly known fact that despite of several improvements in the past years, hard drives are still the biggest performance bottleneck in desktop systems today. That is why having a fast, large hard drive should be a priority for all computer users.

A large, dense and fast hard drive can become the key difference between a system that is sleek and responsive, and one that is aggravatingly slow. Even the fastest hard drives available cannot saturate the ATA bus, making striping an increasingly popular solution. While the relative physical size of drives has remained the same, storage capacity, spindle speed, interface and buffer size continues to be improved, and therefore the performance of the hard drives continues to go up.

Today we take a look at two of the largest desktop drives on the market from two of the most popular hard drive vendors. From Western Digital, we received the Caviar SE 4000KD which is a 400GB 4-platter SATA-II behemoth, and from Seagate, the Barracuda 7200.9 500GB 4-platter SATA-II drive.

This match is most interesting because of how similar the drives are. Comparatively, a Hitachi 500GB SATA uses a 5-platter design, and other WD drives use a 3-platter design, which can skew performance. In this case, both drives feature 4 platters, with the Seagate drive having a higher density per platter.

The Seagate drive also sports Native Command Queuing, a SCSI/SATA feature that helps the disk access data more efficiently in some cases. The Western Digital drive lacks this, though the level of performance gain NCQ offers to the desktop is arguable, with some even saying it can hinder performance in cases. For straight comparisons, NCQ will be disabled on the Seagate drive, which will give us a better picture of comparative performance.

Although I use Linux as my primary operating system, performance variations between Operating Systems are not commonly encountered; assuming drivers are functioning properly, of course. Unlike videocards, hard drive performance is not as affected as much by differences in drivers, allowing you to get a good grasp of how a drive will behave in any particular system. Since modern hard drives cannot saturate the bandwidth they have available to them in standalone configurations, it is safe to assume that performance will not be impacted based upon the operating system you are using.

Source: http://www.techspot.com/reviews/hardware/seagate500gb_wd400gb_hd/

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