AMD's new API - Codenamed: Mantle. It Supposedly Makes Everything Obsolete.

Mantle and Graphics Core Next: Simplifying Cross-Platform Game Development
The award-winning Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture in the AMD Radeon R9 and R7 Series graphics cards continues to serve as a driving force behind the Unified Gaming Strategy, AMD's approach to providing a consistent gaming experience on the PC, in the living room or over the cloud -- all powered by AMD Radeon graphics found in AMD graphics cards and accelerated processing units (APUs). The four pillars of the Unified Gaming Strategy -- console, cloud, content and client -- come together with the introduction of Mantle.

With Mantle, games like DICE's "Battlefield 4" will be empowered with the ability to speak the native language of the Graphics Core Next architecture, presenting a deeper level of hardware optimization no other graphics card manufacturer can match. Mantle also assists game developers in bringing games to life on multiple platforms by leveraging the commonalities between GCN-powered PCs and consoles for a simple game development process.
With the introduction of Mantle, AMD solidifies its position as the leading provider of fast and efficient game development platforms. Mantle will be detailed further at the AMD Developer Summit, APU13, taking place Nov. 11-13 in San Jose, Calif.

Source: http://www.techpowerup.com/191453/amd-gpu14-event-detailed-announces-radeon-r9-290x.html

AMD claims Mantle enables nine times more draw calls per second than other APIs, which is a huge increase in performance.

Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/54134-amd-launches-mantle-api-to-optimize-pc-gpu-performance.html

SteamBox / Steam Machine / SteamOS

Valve is finally doing what we have all been hoping.  Skynet... err... I mean a new console / open PC format / and an operating system.

SteamOS will be based off of Linux.  Many many fascinating details behind Valve strategy can be found at the source.

Source: http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamMachines/

AMD Radeon R9 290X

AMD announced the new Radeon R9 290X, its next-generation flagship graphics card. Based on the second-generation Graphics CoreNext micro-architecture, the card is designed to outperform everything NVIDIA has at the moment, including a hypothetical GK110-based graphics card with 2,880 CUDA cores. It's based on the new "Hawaii" silicon, with four independent tessellation units, close to 2,800 stream processors, and 4 GB of memory. The card supports DirectX 11.2, and could offer an inherent performance advantage over NVIDIA's GPUs at games such as "Battlefield 4". Battlefield 4 will also be included in an exclusive preorder bundle. The card will be competitively priced against NVIDIA's offerings. We're awaiting more details.

AMD announced the R9 series for enthusiasts and gamers ; R7 for price-conscious buyers
AMD lists out a new product stack
R7 250 and R7 260 under $150, R9 270X under $200, R9 280X $299, and R9 290X
R9 290X Battlefield 4 Edition
"Three pillars of the R9 series: GCN 2.0, 4K, TrueAudio, etc
- DirectX 11.2 and improved energy efficiency
- >5 TFLOP/s compute power
- >300 GB/s memory bandwidth
- >4 billion trig/sec
- >6 billion transistors

Source: http://www.techpowerup.com/191453/amd-gpu14-event-detailed-announces-radeon-r9-290x.html

STEAM/Valve Announce Family Sharing Plan!

September 11, 2013 – Steam Family Sharing, a new service feature that allows close friends and family members to share their libraries of Steam games, is coming to Steam, a leading platform for the delivery and management of PC, Mac, and Linux games and software. The feature will become available next week, in limited beta on Steam.

A bit of good news on a sad day!

Source: http://store.steampowered.com/news/11436/

AMD Catalyst 13.10 Beta Driver Released (Supports Windows 8.1)

Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst 13.10 Beta Driver for Windows:

AMD Catalyst 13.10 Beta includes all of the features/fixes found in AMD Catalyst 13.8 Beta2

PCI-E bus speed is no longer set to x1 on the secondary GPU when running in CrossFire configurations

Rome Total War 2: Updated AMD CrossFire™ profile

• improves CrossFire scaling up to 20% (at 2560x1600 with extreme settings)
• resolves corruption issues seen while playing the game

Saints Row 4: Updated AMD CrossFire profile

• improves CrossFire scaling up to 20% (at 2560x1600 with ultra settings)

Metro Last Light: Updated AMD CrossFire profile

• improves CrossFire scaling up to 10% (at 2560x1600 with ultra settings)

Includes a number of frame pacing improvements for the following titles:

• Tomb Raider
• Metro Last Light
• Sniper Elite
• World of Warcraft
• Max Payne 3
• Hitman Absolution

Source: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst13-10WINBetaDriver.aspx

Xbox One CPU Speed Boosted

A few sources have discovered that Microsoft has boosted the Xbox One's CPU by 150 MHz, making it now 1.75GHz.  This in addition to the GPU boosted earlier last month from 800 MHz to 853 MHz.  While this is good for consumers, every little bit helps, but from a professional stand point I see one of two things:
1.) They were rushed in planning the console.
2.) There is a noticeable discrepancy in performance compared to the rival (PS4) and this is an attempt to bridge the gap.

In all likelihood, it could be both, there unrealistic and unwanted policies being changed is a sign of disconnect with the community or potentially haphazard ideas thrown together hastily.  One thing is for sure, we don't know the actual speeds of the PS4's hardware, but from the start in the GPU is approximately 50% more powerful at rendering than the Xbox One.  Realistically we will see this show up at 10~30% boost in frame rates at equal settings, possibly more as developers get more and more used to the hardware in question.

Source: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/09/04/xbox-one-is-now-in-full-production-with-an-improved-cpu

PS4 looks to be using Virtual Reality!

Sony is said to announce official VR plans at the Tokyo Games Show 2013.   Not only is it being rumored to be based off of Oculus Rift tech, but they already have a prototype of DriveClub working with it.

Very nice on the heals of the Xbox One supposedly trumping the PS4 by supporting 8 controllers, meaning 8 simultaneous players.  I personally don't care but I guess some party goers will enjoy 8 players on the same screen.

Source: http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/165609-sonys-next-xbox-killing-move-developing-a-ps4-virtual-reality-headset

Hynix has had a major fire!

Prepare for major price increases on OEMs and RAM.

Hynix said the fire raged for more than an hour. After an initial assessment, the world's No. 2 maker of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips said it found no "material" damage to fabrication gear in its clean room at the plant, which produces around 12 to 15 percent of global computer memory chips.

Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/04/china-hynix-suspension-idUSL4N0H03CJ20130904





Source: http://www.chiphell.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=850052

Xbox One - Q&A about Features

Will digitally downloaded games be able to be pre-loaded before release, so that they're simply unlocked and ready to go at 12:01am on the day of release? 

MARC WHITTEN, CHIEF XBOX ONE PLATFORM ARCHITECT: Not at launch, but you’ll see us do this and much more over the life of the program.

If I sign in to Xbox Live on my Xbox One, will I also be able to sign in on the same account on my 360 at the same time? Say someone is using the Xbox One in the living room and I'm playing my 360 in my bedroom. Will I be able to use the same account? 

WHITTEN: Yes this works! You’ll be able to be signed on with the same gamertag on both an Xbox 360 and an Xbox One console at the same time. However, like today, you can only be signed into one Xbox 360 and one Xbox One at a time.

Given that Rep (Reputation) will now factor into Xbox One's online matchmaking (whereas it didn't before on the Xbox 360), will everyone's Rep be reset to provide an initial playing field? Since there are new rules, shouldn't everyone be able to demonstrate themselves as good players right from the start? Or will players be penalized for past mistakes? In other words, will previous account infractions carry over to Xbox One?

WHITTEN: We will not carry over any of the 360 reputation scores into the new Xbox One reputation system. The majority of members will start fresh at the “Good” player level.

We will be working with the Xbox Live enforcement team that has identified a small subset of members that have recently had enforcement actions taken against them and set those members reputation to an initial “Needs Works” level. This will give those members a chance to prove they can participate on Live fairly, and are not automatically placed in the “Avoid Me” classification where things like SmartMatch filtering will affect them.

Will Xbox One work as a Windows Media Center Extender? For those that use a PC with TV tuner to record and watch TV, we use the 360 as an extender to stream this content to TVs. Will this continue with Xbox One?

WHITTEN: Xbox One isn’t a native Media Center Extender. We’ll continue to work to enable more ways for everyone to get the television they want over the life of the program.

Much much more at the source.  Some of these are puzzling.

Source: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/05/ask-microsoft-anything-about-xbox-one

Xbox One Launching November 22nd (after PS4)

This is it: the battle for the next generation console market is on.Microsoft has finally revealed the launch date for its Xbox One machine – it will hit retail in 13 major territories including North America and the UK on 22 November.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/04/xbox-one-launch-22-november

Xbox One is launch in the US before PS4 but is actually beating Sony to the UK by arriving 7 days early.

HDMI 2.0 Officially Announced, Supposedly Supports 4K @ 60FPS

With a bandwidth capacity of up to 18Gbps, it has enough room to carry 3,840 x 2,160 resolution video at up to 60fps. It also has support for up to 32 audio channels, "dynamic auto lipsync" and additional CEC extensions. The connector itself is unchanged, which is good for backwards compatibility but may disappoint anyone hoping for something sturdier

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/04/hdmi-2-0-official-4k-60fps-32-channel-audio/

Maximum Clock Rate: 600 MHz (was 340)
Maximum TMDS Throughput Per Channel: 6 Gbit/s (including overhead) / Was 3.4
Maximum total TMDS throughput: 18 Gbit/s (including overhead 8b/10b) / Was 10.2
Maximum actual Throughput: 14.4 Gbit/s (overhead removed) / was 8.16
Maximum audio: 36.86 Mbit/s / same
Maximum Color Depth: 48bit per pixel, / same

8b/10b overhead is from encoding the signal and ECC. Seems like a very steep overhead to me.

Good news though, it does support 2560x1600 @ 109 FPS, perhaps slightly less.

I am also not quite convinced of 60 FPS. @ 32bpp, it is only 54 FPS. 24bpp is 72 FPS.

One interesting thing while going through the Engadget comments was running into this gentleman:

@BuyudunBebegim 18 Gbps is apparently enough to fit 4K 120Hz.
4K 120Hz, using 4:2:2 chroma, is only 15.9 Gbps, though reduced blanking intervals would add at least 0.5 Gbps to the total. There's no technical reason why 4K 120Hz can't be achieved over HDMI 2.0, as long as you're willing to accept 4:2:2 chroma instead of 4:4:4 chroma. People are already successfully doing 1080p@120Hz over HDMI 1.3a (A few new models of HDTV's can accept true 120Hz now; no interpolation -- there's a list on the Net now.) and the HDMI clockrate isn't even being overclocked at all. 

There's currently an initiative in a HardForum thread (SEIKI 4K thread, begining around approximately page 15) to come up with a 120Hz modification of an existing 4K panel, with some thousand-dollar pledges. We've discovered the panel is 120Hz capable, but the TCON is not; and we are trying to figure out if electronics parts on the market exists to bypass the TCON limitation... It would take probably several LVDS channels to pull this off, though. Some people are quite determined to see 4K 120Hz happen. We were looking at DisplayPort channels as the method, but HDMI 2.0 could actually make this easier.
Mark Rejhon  (Owner of Blur Busters) 

http://www.blurbusters.com/4k-120hz-possible-over-hdmi2/#respond

I was quick to chime in though the problems with overhead:

You are forgetting about 8b/10b overhead for ECC and encoding. You start with a maximum throughput of 14.4Gbit/s, unless you find a way to bypass ECC. As the imagesize gets larger, the more than likely ECC has to be used and it is proportional in bandwidth to the bandwidth of the transmission. 

Or in other words, the more bandwidth you add, the more you need in encoding/ECC.

You could in theory with 4.2.2 get about 105 FPS, going off of your 15.9 Gbit/s

I wasn't quite sure where he got the 15.9 Gbit/s but the ratio of bandwidths of 15.9/14.4 in determining the lower frame rate supported being about (120 / (15.9/14.4)).  I then rounded down about 4 FPS.