By Cat DiStasio
Converting a disused school bus into a groovy makeshift home on wheels is a pretty common occurrence in many places around the world -- and that trend continues to blossom in some incredibly cool ways. In some areas, housing is so de...
The Thirty Meter Telescope's story has been so full of trials and tribulations, a producer might just find a way to turn it into a soap opera. On Wednesday, the Hawaii Supreme Court has canceled the TMT group's permit, which gives them the right to b...
Today on In Case You Missed It: It's Space Week, and today's celestial story is an earth-bound look at what a colony of humans would have to endure on Mars. People from Hawaii's Space Exploration Analog and Simulation group just finished an eight m...
Graphics cards aren't normally our go-to choices for audio processing, but we may have to make exceptions for AMD's just-unveiled Radeon R9 and R7 lines. The R9 290X (shown above), R9 290 and R7 260X (after the break) will support TrueAudio, a new programmable pipeline that enables advanced audio effects without burdening a PC's main processor or a dedicated sound card. Not that the range will be lacking in visual prowess, of course. While the company isn't revealing full specifications, it claims that the R9 290X flagship will have five teraflops of total computing power versus the four teraflops of the previous generation. The boards will ship sometime in the "near future," with prices ranging from $89 for an entry R7 250 to $299 for the mid-tier R9 280X. AMD isn't divulging the R9 290X's price, but pre-orders for the card will start on October 3rd.
The firm has also revealed a new programming interface, Mantle, that makes the most of the Graphics Core Next architecture found in many of its recent processors and video chipsets. Developers who build the low-level code into their games should get better performance from GCN-based devices without having to re-optimize for each platform -- a title meant for Radeon-equipped PCs should still behave well on a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, for instance. Mantle will debut on Windows through a December update to Battlefield 4, and should spread to other platforms in the months ahead.
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, AMD
Via: AnandTech
Source: AMD