Rightware, the provider of world's most widely adopted benchmarking software for mobile phones, tablets and other embedded devices, today announced that it is developing Basemark Halti, an OpenGL ES 3.0 / Halti benchmark product slated for launch in 2012. The benchmark continues the popular Basemark product line's graphic products, formerly known as 3DMarkMobile, and will set the new global standard for OpenGL ES 3.0/Halti gaming and graphics performance measurement. Basemark Halti will provide a solid performance benchmarking tool to semiconductor companies, device manufacturers, operators, and various other players in the embedded ecosystem across different vertical markets.

Rightware's objective is to offer industry standard benchmark products that help its customers to identify graphics performance bottlenecks in all phases of development. For this purpose, Rightware has established the Benchmark Development Program (BDP) consisting of renowned and highly respected companies. See more from here.

An increasing number of people within the industry have access to Intel Ivy Bridge engineering samples. Some of them are generous enough to share performance details with the public. One such kind soul posted 3DMark, Fritz Chess, and Cinebench test results. An Intel Core i7-3770 sample was the test candidate, this chip has all components and features available to Ivy Bridge LGA1155 enabled, including HyperThreading, a faster uncore, and the full 8 MB L3 cache. The chip was put through 3DMark 06 (to test its CPU and iGPU performance), Cinebench 11.5 (both single-thread and multi-threaded), and Fritz Chess Benchmark (again, both single and multiple threads).More screenshots follow.

Previous preliminary reports have suggested that the forthcoming Ivy Bridge CPUs will have single threaded performance on par with the existing Sandy Bridge CPUs and will mainly deliver improvements to power consumption and integrated graphics - nothing for PC enthusiasts to get excited about. However, in leaked documents sent to partners, Intel have now revealed official performance figures for IB and they look rather good. They've produced a raft of benchmarks, which reveal improvements such as 56% in ArcSoft Media Expresso, 25% in Excel 2010 and a 199% gain in the 3D Mark Vantage GPU benchmark. Unfortunately, they haven't released any benchmarks based on high performance 3D games, but it's probably safe to say that they will be similarly improved. Now, on to the benchmarks, which compare their new 3.4 GHz i7-3770 (4 cores + HT) with the current 3.4 GHz i7-2600, also with 4 cores + HT:

Just a handful of days ahead of Sandy Bridge-E's launch, a Chinese tech website, www.inpai.com.cn (Google translation) has done what Chinese tech websites do best and that's leak benchmarks and slides, Intel's NDA be damned. They pit the current i7-2600K quad core CPU against the upcoming i7-3960X hexa core CPU and compare them in several ways. The take home message appears to be that gaming performance on BF3 & Crysis 2 is identical, while the i7-3960X uses considerably more power, as one might expect from an extra two cores. The only advantage appears to come from the x264 & Cinebench tests. If these benchmarks prove accurate, then gamers might as well stick with the current generation Sandy Bridge CPUs, especially as they will drop in price, before being end of life'd. While this is all rather disappointing, it's best to take leaked benchmarks like this with a (big) grain of salt and wait for the usual gang of reputable websites to publish their reviews on launch day, November 14th. Softpedia reckons that these results are the real deal, however. There's more benchmarks and pictures after the jump.

Unigine released the latest version of Unigine Heaven, one of the industry's first DirectX 11 compliant 3D graphics benchmark applications. Version 2.5 of the software expands its feature set a little, the product is also branched into two variants: a free "basic edition" that gives most of the product's functionality to consumers, overclockers, and gamers; and a paid "professional edition", that gives data-logging and specific-functionality to aid professionals such as analysts, and reviewers, priced at US $495. The professional variant is also backed by technical support.

As far as new features go, Heaven 2.5 introduced support for new DirectX 11 features such as indirect occlusion (SSDO) to simulate real-time global illumination, improved hardware support, improved quality of ambient occlusion, and a number of stability improvements that help maintain long sessions of benchmarking. It also added a new help file, and a snappier installer. The professional edition includes command line automation support, data-logging in CSV format, stress-testing, a commercial use license, and technical support. The professional edition can be purchased from here.DOWNLOAD: Unigine Heaven 2.5 Basic Edition

Futuremark announced today that 3DMark 11, the latest version of the industry standard benchmark for real-time 3D graphics, will be released on November 30. 3DMark 11 Advanced Edition priced at $19.95 can be pre-ordered today from http://www.3dmark.com/. Futuremark has updated the 3DMark website to highlight the exclusive features in the Advanced Edition and has released a new pre-order preview trailer showing graphical improvements in the Deep Sea and High Temple scenes. A selection of new before and after screenshots demonstrate tessellation, volumetric lighting and other effects created with DirectX 11.

The new 3DMark 11 Pre-order Preview trailer shows off a number of improvements from the previously released work-in-progress tech demo videos. The Deep Sea scene now includes particle effects in the water as submersibles explore the sea bed and discover a sunken World War II submarine. In the High Temple scene the foliage is now animated and there are changes in the lighting conditions as the sun sets on the mysterious temple.

Futuremark, the company behind some of the most popular PC performance benchmark applications, which also maintains a score validation and record-keeping system, the ORB, announced that it's working on important changes to its site design as well as the ORB database itself. A side-product (which in disguise is the news of actual importance here), is that Futuremark's next-generation ORB will not support "legacy" benchmark applications from the company, namely 3DMark 2001 SE, 3DMark03, 3DMark05, PCMark 2002 or PCMark04, thereby marking a complete retirement of those applications.

Back in their day, those applications put hardware through their minutes' joyride through hell, but now their practical application is reduced. Retiring ORB support means that while you can still run the benchmark, you can't submit your score online or validate it. That effectively eliminates these applications from professional-level overclocking competitions.

NVIDIA today released GeForce 260.89 driver suite. The software provides WHQL-signed drivers for all GeForce 6-series onwards, and ION platform GPUs. It also provides 3D Vision software, GPU-integrated audio device driver (version 1.1.9.0), and PhysX system software (version 9.10.0514). As with almost every new release, GeForce 260.89 WHQL packs a host of performance enhancements, official support for new GPUs (it's GeForce GT 430, this time), and a host of bug-fixes. What's different this time around is that the performance enhancements are specific to two GPUs, GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 460. SLI profiles are added for new game titles.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 260.89 WHQL for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

A detailed list of changes follows.

Other World Computing (OWC), a leading zero emissions Mac and PC technology company, announced today a new 40GB model to its award-winning OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD line as the most affordable high performance SandForce Processor based Solid State Drive on the market. Designed and made in the U.S. from imported parts, the new OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 40GB SSD's special introductory pricing of $99.99 makes it the lowest priced SSD on the market to offer three key high performance features:

• Industry leading sustained Read AND Write speeds over 260MB/s (with peak speeds up to 285MB/s).
• Best in class error correction (ECC) and SandForce RAISE redundancy with 7% over provisioning.
• SandForce DuraClass technology with ultra-efficient Block Management & Wear Leveling for long term durability.

Unigine launched version 2.1 of its Heaven cross-platform, cross-API 3D Graphics benchmark. The popular free benchmark application uses the builds on Unigine Heaven 2.0, with two major changes. To begin with, it supports OpenGL 4.0, a 3D graphics API that is technologically comparable to DirectX 11. Heaven 2.1 uses all of the latest features of GL 4.0, including hardware tessellation support. The second major change is the support for stereoscopic 3D, including support for several stereo 3D viewing modes such as Analygraph, separate images, 3D Vision, and iZ3D. Several other stability fixes were also introduced.DOWNLOAD: Unigine Heaven 2.1

Futuremark, the developer of the world's most popular benchmarking software, today announced 3DMark 11, the latest version of their industry standard benchmark for real-time 3D graphics. Designed to measure the performance of DirectX 11 gaming PCs, 3DMark 11 uses a native DirectX 11 engine created in-house. To accompany the announcement Futuremark has released a trailer and screenshots taken from a 3DMark 11 tech demo called "Deep Sea".

Deep Sea is a demonstration of DirectX 11 technologies created using an early development build of the 3DMark 11 engine. The Deep Sea trailer features submersibles exploring the sea floor. Volumetric lighting illuminates the seabed with tessellation used to add rich detail to the rock, coral and manmade structures. Post processing delivers depth of field and other lens effects. The music is an original composition.

AMD released the ATI Catalyst 10.3 WHQL driver suite. Catalyst provides drivers and related system software for ATI Radeon, ATI FirePro, graphics processors, AMD 7-series and 8-series integrated graphics, AMD chipset system software, and drivers for ATI multimedia products. Version 10.3, like 10.2 promises to bring a series of significant additions to the feature-set, along with a long list of application-specific performance improvements.

Catalyst 10.3 introduces a set of additions to the ATI Eyefinity technology, such as display bezel compensation, per-display colour adjustments, multiple Eyefinity groups (which allows multiple Eyefinity display heads over available graphics cards and displays), and improvements to the display configuration switching. ATI hardware now supports stereoscopic 3D display over third-party middleware from the likes of iZ3D, DDD, etc., for output of stereoscopic L/R images at 120 Hz (60 Hz per eye). A number of bugs were also fixed. For more details refer to the Release Notes document.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 10.3 for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

Game-specific performance increment figures follow.

Barely a week ahead of NVIDIA's launch of DirectX 11 compliant graphics cards, Unigine released version 2 of its Heaven benchmark. Unigine Heaven is a multi API 3D performance benchmark which supports DirectX 9, 10, 11, and OpenGL, but is popular for its DirectX 11 mode which demonstrates the API's hardware tessellation capabilities using tessellation-intensive scenes. Version 2 expands on the original with even more geometry-heavy tests, even more objects, more dynamic lights, and physics-driven flags, along with the original's complete use of hardware tessellation features, advanced screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO), dynamic sky and daytime lighting, and interactive modes. The new version also lets you set the degree of tessellation using "extreme" and "moderate" modes. The application is available free of charge.DOWNLOAD: Unigine Heaven 2.0

Fast, stable and lightweight, the solid state disk (SSD) has successfully replaced conventional mechanical hard drives to become the product with the most potential in 2010. After the great market success of the Xtreem-G1 SSD last year, Team Group Inc has launched technological cooperation with the US-based SSD pioneer Sandforce to introduce the faster and more reliable Xtreem-S1 SSD tailored for power users and will display it for the first time at CeBIT 2010.

In addition to continuing the absolute silence, light weight, low power consumption and shock resistance of the Xtreem-G1 SSD, the Xtreem-S1 SSD is equipped with the Sandforce processor, the fastest SSD solution in the industry, to fully exploit the extremes of the cost and performance MLC chip and thereby enhance the read/write speed of the Xtreem-S1 SSD. Besides delivering a reading speed of 270MB/sec and a writing speed of 260MB/s, which is 10 times faster than ordinary IDE hard drives (taking 1 second to accomplish tasks that used to be done in 10 seconds), the Xtreem-S1 SSD is 2 times faster than ordinary SSDs, making it the world's fastest SSD! Also, it supports SMART and the US AES-128 encryption specifications to provide real-time SSD health diagnostics and safeguard important data for users.

Nearly a year since its first release, the creators of FurMark have released a new version of their Physx based FluidMark, which like Furmark can be used as either a stress test or benchmarking tool. FluidMark is designed to run in hardware mode for all CUDA ready NVIDIA cards, which includes the 8, 9 and 200 series of graphics cards. For all others the program runs in software mode, which can be forced even if your system has one of the above mentioned cards. The creators say in software mode, the tool "is an excellent CPU benchmark." The latest graphics drivers and Physx version 9.09.0428 is recommended to be installed prior to running this. For more information and to download go here

FluidMark 1.1.0 changelog:

• New: simple color point rendering mode (press the R key in stability test).
• New: use the code base than FurMark.
• New: command line parameter (/no_sph) to disable SPH fluid simulation method.
• Change: compiled with NVIDIA PhysX SDK 2.8.1.
• Bugfix: minors bugs fixed

ASUS, the world's leading producer of motherboards, today put world record-breaking power into the hands of AMD Phenom II users with the launch of the ROG (Republic of Gamers) Crosshair III Formula. Based on the AMD Socket AM3 platform, the Crosshair III Formula harnesses its full complement of ROG-exclusive features and technologies to unleash the full overclocking potential of Phenom II processors-enabling budget-conscious enthusiasts and gamers to enjoy extreme levels of performance at an affordable mid-price point.

Futuremark Corporation today unveiled Peacekeeper, a free online benchmarking tool for measuring and comparing the performance of common internet browsers. Competition between browsers has never been as hotly contested, nor have internet users had as many choices as they do now. The big five: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, see regular releases of new and innovative features and each camp's fans keep many a forum and blog busy. So far, words have been the only shots fired in the long-running browser wars. Now, with Peacekeeper web users finally have an easy to use, impartial tool for measuring and comparing the performance of different web browsers. Peacekeeper is a new online benchmark from Futuremark that realistically simulates the load placed on the browser by common JavaScript functions as used by popular, modern websites. For users who prioritize speed and performance, Peacekeeper helps answer the question of which browser is best for them.

Futuremark Corporation is celebrating the tenth anniversary of its 3DMark benchmark suite with a video contest for gamers and overclockers everywhere. Fans of the popular benchmarking program are invited to show the "Life of a Benchmarker" in an original video with great prizes awarded to the best entries.
"We're launching this contest as a thank you to all our fans who have helped 3DMark become the number one PC gaming benchmark," said Dr. Jukka Mдkinen, VP and General Manager at Futuremark.

Yes, the title says it right. I just saw a YouTube video taken from Micron' headquarters, where the company's Joe Jeddeloh demonstrates the rough power of solid state technology. During the footage he demonstrates a prototype of comething called Washington solid state drive mounted on a PCI-E card that delivers read speeds of over 1GB/sec. Now we all know that these drives won't come in a month time, but they show how good the SSD technology really is. Maybe, this experiment also gives a hint how desperately we need a new SATA standard, current SATA 3Gbps drives no matter conventional or SSD can output only 300MB/s in theory. Back to the video, there two SSD PCI-E cards are running on a 2GHz eight-core Xeon system. Benchmarks of this configuration show output of 200,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second). Although, you can't actually read these numbers because of the video's low resolution, Jeddeloh says that one PCI-E drive can read at around 800MB/sec, while a pair of cards can read at 1GB/sec. Micron claims that there's nothing special about the flash memory the drives use, in fact these are ordinary SLC (single level cell) drives. They're only "managed correctly." At the end of the video, Jeddeloh also shows a single 8x PCI-E card that features two SSDs on a single board, that he claims also offer "at least" 1GB/sec of bandwidth. Micron plans "wide availability of the product in 2010, but that its going to be targeted at enterprise customers first." For now this is only a quick look in the future. Watch the video over at Micron's Advanced Storage Blog.

As the computer enthusiast community gears up for Nehalem November, with reports suggesting a series of product launches for both Intel's Core i7 processors and compatible motherboards, Industry observer PC Online.cn have already published an in-depth review of the Core i7 940 2.93 GHz processor. The processor is based on the Bloomfield core, and essentially the Nehalem architecture that has been making news for over an year now. PC Online went right to the heart of the matter, evaluating the 192-bit wide (tri-channel) memory interface, and the advantage of HyperThreading on four physical cores. In the tests, the 2.93 GHz Bloomfield chip was pitted against a Core 2 Extreme QX9770 operating at both its reference speed of 3.20 GHz, and underclocked to 2.93 GHz, so a clock to clock comparison could be brought about.

The evaluation found that the performance increments tri-channel offers over dual-channel memory, in real world applications and games, are just about insignificant. Super Pi Mod 1.4 shows only a fractional lead for tri-channel over dual-channel, and the trend continued with Everest Memory Benchmark. On the brighter side, the integrated memory controller does offer improvements over the previous generation setup, with the northbridge handling memory. Even in games such as Call of Duty 4 and Crysis, tri-channel memory did not shine.

Crytek has worked closely with NVIDIA in the development of the Crysis franchise, and it is a known fact that the original title was optimised for GeForce hardware. The original title, however, was criticised for being too demanding with hardware requirements, which may have contributed to the luke-warm sales of the game. With Crysis Warhead however, Crytek promises to have improved the game engine to work better with today's hardware. PC Games Hardware (PCGH) put the new game to test, not with the prime objective to review it, but to review its performance with today's hardware. There are positives that can be drawn from the findings of the review. The first being, that the game performs to the potential of installed hardware, be it GeForce or Radeon. There were very minor deviations of the hardware's performances from synthetic tests that show their capabilities. For example, Radeon HD 4870 performed neck and neck with GeForce GTX 260 in the "gamer mode", with the former achieving a higher minimum frame-rate. This was also seen with the game's "enthusiast mode" albeit the GeForce chipping away with a higher average frame-rate. The trend continued with the rest of today's GPUs, which indeed is a positive sign.

NVIDIA is dressing up a new version of the GeForce GTX 260 GPU as reported earlier, with a revision that carries 216 shader units (against 192 for the original GTX 260). Chinese website Bear Eyes has pictured the new GPU. Other than the increased shader count, that should provide a significant boost to the shader compute power, other GPU parameters such as clock speeds remain the same. The core features 72 texturing units and 28 ROPs. The core is technically called G200-103-A2 (the older core was G200-100-A2). The card reviewed by Bear Eyes was made by Inno3D, called GeForce GTX 260 Gold. This shows that the GTX 260 brand name is here to stay.

Now that the PhysX engine is a lot closer to every NVIDIA owner, new benchmarks designed to test these physics capabilities are unavoidable. First among many are the developers at oZone3D, releasing their first version of FluidMark, a physics benchmark based on NVIDIA's PhysX engine that measures the physics processing capabilities of CPUs, Ageia cards and OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card like NVIDIA GeForce 5/6/7/8/9/GTX200 (and higher), AMD/ATI Radeon 9600+, 1k/2k/3k/4k (and higher) or a S3 Graphics Chrome 400 series with the latest graphics drivers. This benchmark performs a fluid simulation by imitating the renderering of lava. Real physics parameters such as viscosity are used. SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) algorithm is enabled to increase the realism of the simulation. To test the FluidMark v1.0.0 please click here.

It is already known that Futuremark is currently working hard on the next version in the popular 3DMark series. Codenamed 3DMark Next, the upcoming version will bring DirectX 10 support, will require Windows Vista and will be released by the end of the year. But the 3DMark story won't be put on pause as Futuremark has one more 3DMark up its sleeve. As stated by Nick Renqvist in a recent blog post, the development of both next generation PC benchmarks is going great and although there is no release date suggested, we might very well see one new 3DMark released this fall and one around mid-2008.

IBM today simultaneously launched what it claims is the fastest processor in the world and an ultra-powerful new computer server that leverages the chip's many breakthroughs in energy conservation and virtualization technology. IBM's new POWER6 chip is a 64 bit, dual-core processor with 790 million transistors running at up to 4.7GHz and 8MB of on chip L2 cache. At 4.7GHz, the dual-core POWER6 processor doubles the speed of the previous generation POWER5 while using nearly the same amount of electricity to run and cool it. This means customers can use the new processor to either increase their performance by 100 percent or cut their power consumption virtually in half. Also announced today is the IBM's new 2- to 16-core server which offers three times the performance per core of the HP Superdome machine. The new server is also the first ever to hold all four major benchmark speed records for business and technical performance.