Microsoft promised to release a DRM tool that would 'allow you to better consolidate your licenses for downloaded content to a single Xbox and allow you the freedom to be able to play your content both online and offline.' In other words, this is for the sad saps whose Xbox 360 red-ringed, only to have it returned with Xbox Live Arcade titles that required you to be signed into Live to play. Now instead of jumping through a series of customer-service related hoops, this new tool - available immediately at Xbox.com - will allow you to quickly manage that content. 

If you're looking for some more info on how the DRM tool works, check out this Q&A with Microsoft's Marc Whitten, general manager of Xbox Live. Also Major Nelson is hosting a walk through video on using the tool.

Watcher.

NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ review

Just when you think it cant get any busier in the graphics card arena Murphy's law always kicks in. It's not often that so many new graphics cards are released in just one week. NVIDIA surely pushed it's limits there. To address the Radeon HD 4850 they unleashed the GeForce 9800 GTX+

The actually competes with AMD's latest extremely well. Definitely worth a read!

URL to article:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-9800-gtx-512mb-plus-review/

Besides, production of quad-core Q9550 and Q9650 will be cancelled in Q1'2009. As for quad-core Yorkfield processors, Intel will keep them until, at least, the end of 2009.

Intel also changed plans regarding dual-core Atom 330 processors. Previously, the company planned to launch their mass production in July. But, according to the source, the deficit of single-core Atom 230 CPUs forced the company to postpone it to September.

Time to tidy up the frontpage a little bit with all these new articles being released.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260
NVIDIA GTX 280's little brother inspected

Roughly a week ago NVIDIA launched their GeForce GTX 200 series of products. Guru3D already published three separate articles on the GeForce GTX 280, but we figured it's about time to have a look at the little brother of the 280, the GeForce GTX 260. A product that is priced much more aggressively than it's bigger brother at 399 USD.

Obviously we'll have a chat about the differences between the GTX 260 and 280, strip her nekked and show you some photo's, but then it's time for the real deal. Gaming testing performance with the latest gaming titles, some overclocking .. and our verdict.

Article URL:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-260-review/

XFX GeForce 9800 GTX Black Edition

Last week when AMD unleashed a some nice fury (you might even say a can of whoopass)  in the graphics card market NVIDIA just had to respond .. before we knew it a GeForce 9800 GTX+ SKU was born.

What people seem to forget though is that there are even faster than GTX+ products on the market, now priced very competitive as well. The card we review is the XFX GeForce 9800GTX Black Edition. The fun thing is, it has even faster than GTX+ clocks and will be priced at an amazing 239-249 USD. What we'll do today is have a look at that Radeon HD 4850 performance and compare it with the default GeForce 9800 GTX and then the XFX GeForce 9800 GTX Black Edition.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/xfx-geforce-9800-gtx-black-edition-review-test/

AMD  Radeon HD 4850 Crossfire review

With the Force3D Radeon HD 4850 and PowerColor Radeon HD 4850.

A pretty hectic day today as AMD moved forward the launch of the Radeon HD 4850 (initially to be released next week). Today Guru of 3D will review both the PowerColor and Force3D graphics cards in a full fetched review. As the tests will show, this little 199 USD gem will pack an awful lot of performance.

Not only will we put it though the benchmark paces, Guru3D will also have a look at Crossfire performance among these two cards combined. The results are pretty surprising.

You can read the 20 page article right here:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-ati-radeon-hd-4850-review-force-3d--powercolor/

BFG GeForce GTX 280 OC edition review

Today a review on BFG's GeForce GTX 280 1024MB OC edition. It had to go something like this; the minute BFG finished designing this product they got all giddily and figured .. ooh we gotta send Guru3D one. Sure thing, hey bring it on.

So a couple of days ago, prior to the actual GTX 200 series product launch, we received that OC model from BFG. BFG figured, hey for the same launch price we can introduce a slightly overclocked version, fire off a life-time warranty at it and slap an OC label on there.

Read the full review here:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/bfg-geforce-gtx-280-oc-edition-review/

GeForce GTX 280 Dual and Triple SLI

Today ladies and gentlemen we'll not spend 650,- USD on a graphics card .. no kind Sir, we'll put down 1300 USD on the table and see what two of these cards can achieve performance wise. Expensive ? Yeah, Stupid ? yeah, ... Guru? Yeah ... kick'ass man.

And just for the sake of it, let's spend 2 grand on GPUs to see what that can bring us. We live and breathe for this stuff. So sure, we'll do a threesome with tree-way SLI as well.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-280-sli-triple-review-test/

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 review

Today Guru3D brings you a review and test on the GeForce GTX 280. NVIDIA launches this new flagship along with the GeForce GTX 260. In this review you can read all you need to know about them. And yes, the rumor was right; 1.4 Billion transistors slapped onto a piece of silicon. Crazy, but oh so much fun. We finally found a product that can play Crysis at a decent resolution with high-image quality settings.

Be sure to check out the review, which you can find right here:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-280-review-test/

Software that uses the HD4800 series of GPUs to encode video files.

ATI

Download: ATI Avivo Xcode pack for HD4800 series

More driver NVIDIA download galore today, this is GeForce ForceWare 177.40. Pretty much the same as .39 yet this driver seems to have support for any GeForce graphics card starting at series 6 and 7.

This driver set is commonly distributed on many websites and it is receiving pretty good feedback.Bare in mind this to be considered a beta driver, use it at your own risk. NVIDIA does not officially support them. There are several discussion open on these drivers in the Guru3D NVIDIA driver forums, check them here.

Download:
  GeForce ForceWare 177.40 Vista (64-bit)
  GeForce ForceWare 177.40 XP (32-bit)
  GeForce ForceWare 177.40 Vista (32-bit)

NVIDIA issued new GeForce ForceWare 177.39 drivers for XP and Vista, including PhysX and CUDA support. This driver supports the 9800 GTX+, GTX 200 series graphics cardsand AMD 780a/750a mainboard.

• Adds support for GeForce 9800 GTX GPUs.
• Adds support for NVIDIA PhysX Technology for GPU PhysX hardware acceleration on GeForce 9800 GTX, GeForce GTX 280, and GeForce GTX 260 GPUs. The GeForce v177.39 driver package includes NVIDIA PhysX System Software v8.06.12. The Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX Mod Pack can be downloaded here.
• Supports single GPU and NVIDIA SLI
  
  Download: GeForce ForceWare 177.39
  

Playing garbled acoustic messages backwards could take wireless broadband communication beneath the waves, boosting the speed of data transfers to submarines, undersea robots and data collection devices by up to three times.

Wireless communication in the ocean is difficult because water molecules absorb radio waves very efficiently, an effect exploited by microwave ovens.

Acoustic signals travel better, but also degrade quickly due to echoes, ambient noise, swirling currents and, again, water absorbing the signals.

But a technique called acoustic time reversal can change that. The trick cleans up underwater sound signals, extending their range and capacity.

William Kuperman and colleagues at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, US, and researchers from the NATO Undersea Research Centre in La Spezia, Italy, have been testing the technique in the Mediterranean.

Reconstructed signal
Time reversal exploits the way undersea acoustic signals typically arrive clouded by echoes that travel at different speeds. For example, a "ping" may arrive as three separate sounds

'Time reversal' allows wireless broadband under the sea

The world's first moving building, a 80-storey tower with revolving floors giving an shifting shape, will be built in Dubai, its architect says.

The Dynamic Tower design is made up of 80 pre-fabricated apartments which will spin independently of one another.

"It's the first building that rotates, moves, and changes shape," said architect David Fisher, who is Italian, at a news conference in New York.

"This building never looks the same, not once in a lifetime," he added.

The 420-metre (1,378-foot) building's apartments would spin a full 360 degrees, at voice command, around a central column by means of 79 giant power-generating wind turbines located between each floor.

The slender building would be energy self-sufficient as the turbines would produce enough electricity to power the entire building and even feed extra power back into the grid, said the Italian architect at the unveiling of the project in New York.

The apartments, which will take between one and three hours to make a complete rotation, will cost from $3.7m to $36m.

There are also plans to build a similar, 70-storey skyscraper in Moscow.

"I call these buildings designed by time, shaped by life," said the Florence-based architect. "These buildings will open our vision all around, to a new life."

The skyscraper will cost an estimated $700m to build and should be up and running in Dubai in 2010.

BFG announced today the BFG GeForce

BFG announces GTX 280 OC2 and OCX

FurMark is a small OpenGL benchmark focused on fur rendering. The rendering algorithm is highly multipass (100 passes) and each pass (or layer) uses a GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) vertex / pixel shader to make the hairs finer and finer. To increase the fur realism, two dynamic lights are used for self shadowing. The benchmark offers several options allowing the user to tweak the rendering: fullscreen / windowed mode, MSAA selection, window size, duration. The benchmark also includes a GPU Burner mode (stability test).

This benchmark requires an OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 5/6/7/8 (and higher), AMD/ATI Radeon 9600 (and higher) or a S3 Graphics Chrome 400 series with the latest graphics drivers.

The startup interface allows you to tweak the benchmark features such as:

• Benchmark mode or stability test mode (for overclockers)
• Fullscreen or windowed for each type of run mode
• Window size selection (standard or custom)
• MSAA samples selection
• Benchmarking parameters: time based or frames based
• Contest Mode

Download - Click here

Jon Peddie has a funny parody about NVIDIA and Charlie Demerjian from The Inquirer. This is well, real fun to read:

Rumor has it there was an attempt at rapprochement. Long annoyed with The Inquirer

Funny story about NVIDIA and The Inquirer

Hey Guys,

Just a quick heads up on the fact that our Radeon HD 4870 review has been delayed.

Let me tell you a bit what is going on. AMD initially prevented 4850 & 4870 boards from being send out by it's board-partners to the press as AMD wanted to have full control over the launch. Last week at a press-briefing, AMD indeed handed out 4850 samples to the press, yet did not have 4870 samples available. These boards will definitely be available in very low volume at launch.

We where informed that these would be send out by AMD soon. Now originally today the 4850 should have been released and the 4870 at the 3rd of next month. Yet last week AMD's partners already had the 4850 board in store and on sale. Therefore AMD decided to lift the embargo, move forward the 4850 launch (which we reviewed for you) and then also move forward the 4870 launch, yet that one to be released today.

The board partners again where not allowed to ship out 4870 samples to the press, while they have them. Therefore last Monday AMD send out a 4870 board to Guru3D, yet .. it's missing somewhere in the mystic shipping mages. AMD can't even provide as much as a tracking number.

That's enough nonsense for a week AMD, I've arranged samples through board-partners which should arrive soon after which we'll have our review ready, yet I refuse this article to be another quickie / fast written review so with the 4870 we'll go in depth and wide.

More soon. Until then, check out our Radeon Series 4000 (4850) review.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260
NVIDIA GTX 280's little brother inspected

Roughly a week ago NVIDIA launched their GeForce GTX 200 series of products. Guru3D already published three separate articles on the GeForce GTX 280, but we figured it's about time to have a look at the little brother of the 280, the GeForce GTX 260. A product that is priced much more aggressively than it's bigger brother at 399 USD.

Obviously we'll have a chat about the differences between the GTX 260 and 280, strip her nekked and show you some photo's, but then it's time for the real deal. Gaming testing performance with the latest gaming titles, some overclocking .. and our verdict.

Article URL:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-260-review/

The UK videogames industry is suffering because UK university courses aren

UK game-development degrees not good enough

This game is looks like its going to be a truly immersive piece of work. These new trailers are like a short 'the making of' scenario. This is part 2. Pretty good...