The Khronos Group today announced the immediate release of the OpenGL 4.1 specification, bringing the very latest graphics functionality to the most advanced and widely adopted cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics API (application programming interface). OpenGL 4.1 is the sixth update to OpenGL specification in two years, continuing the rapid evolution of this royalty-free specification. This new version continues to maintain full backwards compatibility to enable developers to begin using new features whenever they choose, while portably accessing state-of-the-art GPU functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms.

The OpenGL 4.1 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.10 update to the OpenGL Shading language and is accompanied by a number of extensions introducing cutting-edge functionality to the OpenGL standard. The full specification is available for immediate download here.

Following the launch of the ATI FirePro V8800, the industry's most powerful professional graphics card ever created, AMD today introduced new additions to its next-generation ATI FirePro family -- ATI FirePro V7800, ATI FirePro V5800, ATI FirePro V4800, and ATI FirePro V3800 -- offering professionals in the digital content creation (DCC) and Computer Aided Design (CAD) industries advanced performance and features at every price point. AMD also announced the ATI FirePro 2460 Multi-View, a low profile, quad display graphics solution designed for financial institutions. These latest ATI FirePro solutions are expected to be available from HP, CDW, Newegg, Tiger Direct and other online retailers.

"AMD's new ATI FirePro workstation graphics cards are the world's first workstation class graphics cards to support up to four monitors on a single card -- enabling increased productivity for professional graphics users," said Janet Matsuda, senior director, Professional Graphics, AMD. "Our new ATI FirePro family delivers new value at every price point."

NVIDIA's CUDA GPU compute API could be making its way to practically every PC, with an NVIDIA GPU in place, or not. A chinese freelance developer has coded a means to get CUDA work as a middleware on OpenCL. This move lets CUDA work on ATI Radeon GPUs that support OpenCL, as well as x86 CPUs, since OpenCL specs allow the API to run on CPUs for development purposes. The implications of these are many:

• Letting CUDA-accelerated software such as Badaboom make use of ATI GPUs
• Letting PhysX run on ATI GPUs as PhysX middleware uses CUDA for GPU acceleration
• Possibly better scaling of PhysX on multi-core CPUs (over OpenCL), as the regular PhysX CPU acceleration is infamous for bad multi-core scaling in performance

The software works as a translation layer, exchanging calls between CUDA and OpenCL or the CPU if OpenCL is not available. It comes in the form of a loader application that injects itself into the executing process. To get PhysX to run, one needs to install older versions of PhysX System Software (version 8.09.04 WHQL being the latest) from its standalone installer (installs PhysX libraries without looking for NVIDIA GPUs).

DOWNLOAD: CUDA Emulator Loader

AMD today announced that, along with partners Pixelux Entertainment and Bullet Physics, it has added significant support to the Open Physics ecosystem by providing game developers with access to the newest version of the Pixelux Digital Molecular Matter (DMM), a breakthrough in physics simulation. In addition, to enabling a superior development experience and helping to reduce time to market, Pixelux has tightly integrated its technology, DMM, with Bullet Physics, allowing developers to integrate physics simulation into game titles that run on both OpenCL- and DirectCompute-capable platforms. And both DMM and Bullet work with Trinigy's Vision Engine to create and visualize physics offerings in-game.

"Establishing an open and affordable physics development environment is an important accomplishment for both game developers and gamers, signaling a move away from exclusionary or proprietary approaches," said Eric Demers, chief technology officer, AMD Graphics Division. "Not only does the integration of Bullet Physics into partner middleware help drive broader adoption of physics in games, it ensures that when those games are released, all gamers, regardless of the hardware in their PC, can benefit from the more realistic experience enabled by those effects."

ZOTAC International, the world's largest channel manufacturer, today redefines the mini-PC experience with a new generation of eco friendly small form factor platform powered by next-generation NVIDIA ION technology - the new ZOTAC ZBOX HD-ID11 mini-PC. The new ZOTAC ZBOX HD-ID11 mini-PC supercharges the eco friendly computing experience with premium graphics processing, complete high definition playback capabilities and a premium Windows 7 experience with Aero user interface.

Premium graphics processing power forms the heart of the ZOTAC ZBOX HD-ID11 mini-PC with a new Next-Generation NVIDIA ION graphics processor with 16 unified shaders and 512MB of DDR3 graphics memory complete with NVIDIA CUDA and NVIDIA PureVideo HD technologies for a superior eco friendly computing experience that goes well beyond simple web browsing.

Club 3D B.V. today introduces the Radeon HD 5830 graphics cards as the most affordable addition to award winning Radeon HD 5800 series. The Club 3D Radeon HD 5830 fills the gap between HD 5850 and HD 5770 graphics cards to fulfill the demand for HD 5800 series features at a lower price point.

Club 3D Radeon HD 5830 graphics card features DVI, HDMI and Display Port output to support ATI Eyefinity Technology for an incredibly immersive HD gaming and computing experience and a maximized field of view with up to three displays. Perform tasks on your PC faster with ATI Stream technology and accelerated everyday applications. Step now into the world of DirectX 11 gaming and play the first available games, with unrivalled visual quality, astonishing realism and ultra-fast frame rates to dominate the competition.

AMD today announced availability of the production release of its second-generation ATI Stream SDK, its second-generation ATI Stream SDK, the first production SDK for both AMD GPUs and x86 CPUs. This release of ATI Stream SDK v2.0 supports a wide range of ATI graphics processors, including the new ATI Radeon HD 5970, the world's fastest graphics card generating five teraflops of compute power. Enabling compute intensive codes to leverage all of the system's resources, the ATI Stream SDK v2.0 helps developers deliver a better application experience.

This release of AMD's ATI Stream SDK v2.0 provides developers, ISVs and OEMs with a production development environment that allows them to more easily accelerate applications. By enabling developers to utilize combined CPU and GPU computing power, ATI Stream technology helps developers to leverage heterogeneous architectures to improve the computing experience.

Just over a day after releasing it in the beta form, NVIDIA released the WHQL-signed version of its GeForce 195.62 driver package. The package provides drivers and related software for GeForce GPUs and the ION chipset. Usually, a WHQL-signed driver that trails a beta release has a different version number and includes some minor changes. With this release however, there are no changes whatsoever, except of course the WHQL certification. As a quick recap, this is what is new with GeForce 195.62:

• Added GPU-acceleration for smoother online HD videos with the new Adobe Flash 10.1 beta.
• Added support for OpenCL 1.0 (Open Computing Language) for all GeForce 8-series and later GPUs.
• Added support for CUDA Toolkit 3.0 features and performance enhancements
• Added SLI and multi-GPU support for many top new gaming titles including Borderlands, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, FIFA Soccer 10, and more
• Includes numerous bug fixes

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 195.62 WHQL Windows 7/Vista 64-bit | Windows 7/Vista 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows XP 32-bit

AMD today announced the flagship installment in the award-winning line of graphics cards, the ATI Radeon HD 5970, the fastest card ever created. The new ultra high-end model joins a growing list of the world's first and only graphics cards to fully support Microsoft DirectX 11 technology and ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology.

Designed to support the most demanding PC games at ultra-high resolutions and image quality settings, the ATI Radeon HD 5970 has unlocked overclocking potential, granting access to every bit of power the card has to offer through ATI Overdrive technology. Now shipping from retailers and available in the channel, the ATI Radeon HD 5970 also launches today in new Alienware Area-51, Area-51 ALX and Aurora desktop PCs.

EVGA announced the EVGA GT 240 series. Upgrade today to the EVGA GT 240 and experience picture-perfect photos, vibrant videos and great games like Borderlands, WoW, Sims 3 and Darkest of Days. GPU Accelerated Flash means flawless HD videos on websites like YouTube and Hulu with the new GPU-accelerated Adobe Flash 10.1, and of course crystal-clear BluRay in 1080p with True-Fidelity 7.1 Surround Sound are 100% supported.

Experience NVIDIA PhysX technology on Batman: Arkham Asylum, Darkest of Days, and other GPU PhysX titles with speeds 2x faster than the competition. Enjoy 40% faster HD gaming on other popular titles like Borderlands and Darkest of Days. Leverage 96 processor cores to run the latest GPU-accelerated applications like MotionDSP vReveal, Cyberlink MediaShow with Face tagging, and many more at speeds up to 50% faster than prior generation.

S3 Graphics　announced the latest addition to its power-efficient embedded graphics processor family, with the unveiling of the OpenCL 1.0 capable Chrome 5400E GPGPU processor. The S3 Graphics 5400E will be unveiled at the Electronic Manufacturer Exposition (eMEX), October 22nd - 25th, in Suzhou, China at the Suzhou International Expo Center, Hall 4A, Booth No. 4K08.

OpenCL is an open, cross-platform standard used to harness the power of a GPUs internal shaders to accelerate parallel computations in applications ranging from scientific, medical, and other high performance computing (HPC) markets. The native OpenCL engine in the 5400E GPU enables our partners to go beyond graphics and video, and penetrate these diverse HPC markets.

AMD released its fourth beta of the ATI Stream SDK version 2.0, that provides the first complete OpenCL development platform. The release is certified to be fully compliant with OpenCL 1.0 by, the Khronos Group. A wide range of AMD GPUs as well as any x86 multi-core CPU supporting SSE3 instruction set are supported. For more information on this release, and to download, visit this page.

An interesting discovery by TechConnect Magazine shows that in these OpenCL drivers, are identifiers for a yet to be announced "Radeon HD 5900 Series", with the device IDs 689C and 689D, both marked under "Evergreen", like other members of the Evergreen family, such as Radeon HD 5700 and Radeon HD 5800 series. The most plausible explanation for "Radeon HD 5900 Series" could be that it is the name of the graphics cards based on the Hemlock GPU architecture, which pairs two Cypress GPUs onto one board. The driver also gives away device IDs, if not product names of GPUs based on the upcoming entry-level Redwood and Cedar GPUs.

NVIDIA Corp. today introduced its next generation CUDA GPU architecture, codenamed "Fermi". An entirely new ground-up design, the "Fermi" architecture is the foundation for the world's first computational graphics processing units (GPUs), delivering breakthroughs in both graphics and GPU computing.

"NVIDIA and the Fermi team have taken a giant step towards making GPUs attractive for a broader class of programs," said Dave Patterson, director Parallel Computing Research Laboratory, U.C. Berkeley and co-author of Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. "I believe history will record Fermi as a significant milestone."

AMD and Pixelux Entertainment announced a joint development agreement that is part of the AMD effort to greatly expand the use of real-time physics with graphics through the open source Bullet Physics engine. By encouraging development of physics middleware built around OpenCL and Bullet Physics, AMD and Pixelux offer a route toward physics simulation that spans game consoles, PCs and other hardware platforms. The latest graphics technologies, like the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of GPUs, offer incredible visual fidelity and high performance physics simulation by taking the next step in realistically animating how rendered game objects move, deform and break.

"Proprietary physics solutions divide consumers and ISVs, while stifling true innovation; our competitors even develop code that they themselves admit will not work on hardware other than theirs," said Eric Demers, chief technology officer for graphics at AMD. "By working with Pixelux and others to enable open support of physics on OpenCL and DirectX 11 capable devices we are taking the exact opposite approach."

In the tussle between its own CUDA GPGPU standard and the OpenCL, NVIDIA is making the right moves by offering its first drivers for OpenCL GPGPU acceleration. The drivers are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Any CUDA-capable NVIDIA GPU will be able to use these. The drivers can be downloaded from here, which provide compliance with OpenCL 1.0.

NVIDIA has also released the OpenCL Visual Profiler software that helps developers improve their code by recognizing possible bottlenecks and room for improvements. At a higher level, it profiles actual hardware signals, kernel efficiency, and instruction issue rate; memory latencies; auto-analysis to point of serialization problems, among other things. More information on this can be found here.

As top computer gamers are demanding only the very best hardware, all manufacturers in the industry are constantly striving for the efficiency and performance to fulfill these needs. In order to adequately cater to these ever increasing performance demands, now MSI, leading graphics cards and mainboard manufacturer has joined forces with the renowned graphics chip manufacturer AMD and today officially launch the next generation MSI R5800 series graphics cards. The 40 nm GPU supports DirectX 11 and a variety of AMD-exclusive audiovisual and performance enhancing technologies, creating an entirely new series of performance oriented craftsmanship.

The brand new MSI R5870/R5850 series uses more advanced 40nm GPU to implement decisively more transistors within the same amount of space and thereby reaching a new level of performance. In addition the modern 40nm process reduces power consumption and brings about a more efficient overall electrical utilization. By using the advantages of this innovative 40nm process technology, the next generation MSI R5870/R5850 series offers outstanding performance of a new kind.

AMD today launched the most powerful processor ever created, found in its next-generation graphics cards, the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series graphics cards, and the world's first and only to fully support Microsoft DirectX 11, the new gaming and compute standard shipping shortly with Microsoft Windows 7 operating system. Boasting up to 2.72 TeraFLOPS of compute power, the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series effectively doubles the value consumers can expect of their graphics purchases, delivering twice the performance-per-dollar of previous generations of graphics products. AMD will initially release two cards: the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and the ATI Radeon HD 5850, each with 1GB GDDR5 memory. With the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cards, PC users can expand their computing experience with ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology, accelerate their computing experience with ATI Stream technology, and dominate the competition with superior gaming performance and full support of Microsoft DirectX 11, making it a "must-have" consumer purchase just in time for Microsoft Windows 7 operating system.

"With the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cars driven by the most powerful processor on the planet, AMD is changing the game, both in terms of performance and the experience," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Products Group, AMD. "As the first to market with full DirectX 11 support, an unmatched experience made possible with ATI Eyefinity technology, and ATI Stream technology harnessing open standards designed to help make Windows 7 that much better, I can say with confidence that AMD is the undisputed leader in graphics once more."

"DirectX 11 by itself is not going be the defining reason to buy a new GPU. It will be one of the reasons." This coming from the same company that a few years ago said that there was every reason to opt for a DirectX 10 compliant graphics card, to complete the Windows Vista experience, at a time when it was the first and only company to be out with compliant hardware. In the wake of rival AMD's ambitious Evergreen family of DirectX 11 compliant graphics cards being released, NVIDIA made it a point to tell the press that the development shouldn't really change anything in the industry.

Speaking at the Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference, NVIDIA's VP of investor relations said "DirectX 11 by itself is not going be the defining reason to buy a new GPU. It will be one of the reasons. This is why Microsoft is in work with the industry to allow more freedom and more creativity in how you build content, which is always good, and the new features in DirectX 11 are going to allow people to do that. But that no longer is the only reason, we believe, consumers would want to invest in a GPU."

In a release to its AIB partners, AMD listed out the key features of its high performance GPU in the Evergreen family, codenamed "Cypress". While not getting into the GPU specifications, it lists out the key technologies the GPUs support. It comes as no surprise that AMD will name Cypress-XT and Cypress-Pro as Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850, a model number scheme that's been running for the past two generations. While product launches, tentatively on September 22, and (p)reviews keep us busy in September, retail availability can be expected only in October, just in time for that of Windows 7.

• 1GB GDDR5 memory
• ATI Eyefinity technology with support for up to three displays
• ATI Stream technology
• Designed for DirectCompute 5.0 and OpenCL
• Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)
• Compliant with DirectX 11 and earlier revisions,supports OpenGL 3.1
• ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
• ATI Avivo HD video and display technology
• Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay technology
• 2x DL-DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI
• PCI Express 2.0 interface

NVIDIA Corporation, the inventor of the GPU, today announced the release of its OpenCL driver and software development kit (SDK) to developers participating in its OpenCL Early Access Program. NVIDIA is providing this release to solicit early feedback in advance of a beta release which will be made available to all GPU Computing Registered Developers in the coming months.

"The OpenCL standard was developed on NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA was the first company to demonstrate OpenCL code running on a GPU," said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of technology and content at NVIDIA. "Being the first to release an OpenCL driver to developers cements NVIDIA's leadership in GPU Computing and is another key milestone in our ongoing strategy to make the GPU the soul of the modern PC."

The CUDA architecture continues to blaze a trail as the leading platform for developing and running GPU Computing applications, with support for C, OpenCL, DirectX Compute, Fortran and other languages and APIs. The latest CUDA 2.2 Beta contains a host of significant new features, including:

Hardware debugger for the GPU
Linux developers can now use a debugger on CUDA-enabled GPUs that offers both the familiar interface of the popular open-source GDB debugger and the ability to debug kernels as they execute on the GPU. The GPU-side debugger has all the features that developers expect from GDB, including the ability to have breakpoints, watch variables, inspect state, etc., as well as additional functions for CUDA-specific features.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. and Havok, the premier provider of interactive software for physics simulation and content development, are presenting new, optimized executions of Havok's physics middleware on AMD platforms at the 2009 Game Developers Conference. The demonstrations include the first OpenCL supported execution of Havok Cloth.

Havok offers a complete modular suite of products that help visual and interactive content developers create more realistic games and cinematic special effects. As the latest software developer to take advantage of ATI Stream technology to leverage multi-core architectures and accelerate execution of highly parallel functions, like real-time cloth simulation, Havok will enable game developers to offer improved performance and interactivity across a broad range of OpenCL capable PCs. AMD has recently introduced optimized platform technologies, such as "Dragon" desktop platform technology, which balance performance between the CPU and GPU with ATI Stream technology to deliver outstanding value.

Sapphire, the single largest add-in board partner for AMD, announced its FireStream 9270 GPGPU accelerator. Devices of this class exploit the general purpose computing capabilities of graphics processors, back them with a software architecture, and a programming environment to make for a dedicated number-crunching machine that holds rated computational power much higher than that of CPUs. Product lines in this class includes the AMD FireStream, that finds competition in NVIDIA's Tesla.

The appearance of the FireStream 9270 suggests it has been derived from the ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics accelerator, albeit different clock speeds, different drivers, four times the amount of memory, and connections. The core features 800 stream cores that churn out peak computational power of 1.2 TFLOPs (single precision floating-point) and 240 GFLOPs (double precision floating-point). The floating point format is in adherence to IEEE standards. It features 2 GB of GDDR5 memory running at 850 MHz, with a peak bandwidth of 108.8 GB/s. The FireStream 9270 is backed by AMD's Stream 1.3 SDK that can be currently downloaded for free. It supports OpenCL in Microsoft Windows and Linux environments. The accelerator will be released by Sapphire towards the end of February, at a price of $1499. Additionally, AMD is teaming up with server-builder Aprius to release a 4U rack chassis system that holds as many as eight FireStream 9270 accelerators that churn out a theoretical max computational power of 9.6 TFLOPs.

In an interview with Godfrey Cheng, Director of Technical Marketing in AMD's Graphics Products Group, Bit-Tech.net has quoted him saying that standards such as PhysX would die due to their proprietary and closed nature. Says Mr. Cheng:

"There is no plan for closed and proprietary standards like PhysX," said Cheng. "As we have emphasised with our support for OpenCL and DX11, closed and proprietary standards will die."

Bit-Tech.net interviewed the AMD person to get the company's take on EA and 2K's decision to adopt NVIDIA PhysX across all of their worldwide studios, earlier this week. Interestingly, when asked about how the major publishers such as EA adopting PhysX across all of their studios would impact the propagation of the API, Cheng responded with saying that monetary incentives provided to publishing houses alone won't help a great deal in propagating the API, and that the product (PhysX) must be competitive, and that AMD viewed Havoc and its physics simulation technologies as leaders. "Games developers share this view. We will also invest in technologies and partnerships beyond Havok that enhances gameplay." he added. PhysX is a proprietary physics simulation API created by Ageia technologies, which was acquired and developed by NVIDIA. You can read the full Bit-Tech.net interview with Godfrey Cheng here.

AMD today announced its intent to rapidly adopt the OpenCL 1.0 programming standard and integrate a compliant compiler and runtime into the free ATI Stream Software Development Kit (SDK).

OpenCL 1.0 was ratified today by the The Khronos Group, an independent standards body with company-members throughout the computing industry. The OpenCL programming standard and associated technologies are aimed at better enabling developers to write vender-neutral applications that can execute on either the CPU or GPU within a system. This allows developers to easily take advantage of whichever processor is best suited for the task at hand.