Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies.

UNIGINE Corp. released today an improved version (3.0) of its renown Heaven DX11 Benchmark based on its proprietary UNIGINE engine. Great looking as ever and containing many technical improvements, it now runs on Mac and supports for variety of new hardware, including extended support for multi-monitor configurations.

"It's very inspiring that more and more hardware testing professionals as well as tech enthusiasts find Heaven Benchmark useful. Our technology platform is constantly growing and we can bring Heaven Benchmark to new platforms and new hardware", said Denis Shergin, CEO of UNIGINE Corp.

Features

• Support of DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL
• Comprehensive use of tessellation technology
• Advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion)
• Volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm
• Simulation of changing light conditions
• Dynamic sky with light scattering
• Interactive experience with fly/walk-through modes
• Hardware Tessellation

The distinguishing feature of the benchmark is hardware tessellation, a scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces, so that games gain drastically detailed and more elaborated look almost free of charge in terms of performance.

There are three tessellation modes available in this version of the benchmark:

Moderate Mode
This mode is targeted to provide reasonable performance on a wide range of DX11 hardware.

Normal Mode
Default mode available in the benchmark shows optimal quality-to-performance ratio. That's the way to achieve prominent visual difference with hardware tessellation technology.

Extreme Mode
It is designed to meet the perspectives of the next series of DX11-capable hardware pushing up the tessellation level to the extreme in the next 1-2 years.

System Requirements

Graphics card: ATI Radeon HD 2xxx and higher or NVIDIA GeForce 7xxx and higher.

Tessellation feature REQUIRES both video card with DirectX 11 support and MS Windows Vista / 7!

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CPU-Z is a diagnostic tool that provides information on your CPU, including: processor name and vendor, core stepping and process, processor package, internal and external clocks, clock multiplier, partial overclock detection, processor features, supported instructions sets, L1 and L2 cache information, location, size, speed, and technology.

CPU-Z is a freeware that gathers information on some of the main devices of your system.

CPU

* Name and number.
* Core stepping and process.
* Package.
* Core voltage.
* Internal and external clocks, clock multiplier.
* Supported instructions sets.
* Cache information.
 

Mainboard

* Vendor, model and revision.
* BIOS model and date.
* Chipset (northbridge and southbridge) and sensor.
* Graphic interface.

Memory

* Frequency and timings.
* Module(s) specification using SPD (Serial Presence Detect) : vendor, serial number, timings table.

System

* Windows and DirectX version.

Download CPU-Z.

We also updated the HWMonitor 1.19 download which got updated to 1.19 recently as well. Download that software here.

NVIDIA BIOS Editor (known as NiBiTor), got updated to version 6.04 by its developer. NiBiTor is a lightweight NVIDIA GeForce/Quadro BIOS file manipulation utility that lets to fine-tune your GeForce or Quadro graphics card at the BIOS-level. Version 6.04 packs updated GPU support, some minor fixes and a redesign to support as well unknown devices in some limited way. New GPUs supported by this version are:

Changes in this Version

• Added GeForce GTX 560
• Added Quadro FX1800
• Added Quadro 4000
• Added Quadro 5000

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Today we release an updated Beta revision of Afterburner, this application successfully secured the leading position on graphics card utilities. We're happy to see MSI Afterburner is leading the overclock applications. MSI Afterburner 2.2.0 Beta 14 is ready

This beta supports the voltage control of HD 7X50 card, if you get the card, you may try to play it.

Changes list includes:

• Fixed sub-zero temperatures reading on certain custom design MSI graphics cards with LM96163 and NCT7718W dedicated thermal sensors.
• Added workaround for bug in AMD drivers causing unofficial overclocking to be reset to defaults after adjusting PowerPlay settings. Now unofficial overclocking settings are being forcibly reapplied after applying new PowerPlay settings.
• Hardware abstraction layer (HAL) architecture has been improved to provide compatibility with future NVIDIA graphics cards series.
• Now multi-GPU overclocking and fan control settings synchronization is performed at HAL level instead of display driver wrapper level to improve HAL architecture extendibility and provide compatibility with future NVIDIA graphics cards series.
• Shared control memory format has been upgraded to v2.0. New format provides power limit adjustment support and forward compatibility with future NVIDIA graphics cards series.
• Now it is possible to override group names for values displayed in the On-Screen Display or in Logitech keyboard LCD display.
• MSI On-Screen Display server has been upgraded to v4.3.3. New version gives the following improvements:
  o Fixed issue causing gamma correction to be applied twice under certain conditions and causing video to appear too bright when capturing video with gamma correction option enabled.
  o Output video dimensions are no longer being forcibly cropped to be multiples of 16. Now cropping is optional and can be enabled via GUI
  o Dedicated 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4 frame downsampling routines have been replaced with unified arbitrary downsampling routine. Now MSI Afterburner provides arbitrary frame downsampling functionality and allows selecting 360p, 480p, 720p, 900p, 1080p frame sizes for both 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios. Please take a note that arbitrary frame sizes list is user extendable so you may add your own custom frame sizes if necessary via the configuration file.
  o Improved tabbed text formatting provides better compatibility with custom group names.

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The Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility revision 9.3.0.1019 has been out a couple of weeks already actually, but most of us definitely missed out on it.

The Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility installs the Windows* INF files. The INF files inform the operating system how to properly configure the chipset for specific functionality, such as USB and core PCI.

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These are the Catalyst profiles for multi-GPU support.

This release of ATI Catalyst delivers support for the latest ATI CrossFireX profiles in a separate executable file ensuring users have access to the absolute latest set of profiles installed on their PC.

Latest profiles added :

• Star Wars: The old republic : Improves CrossFire performance and resolves flickering seen on Map
• Unigine Tropics
  

SiSoftware Sandra remote analysis, benchmarking and diagnostic features for PCs, servers, PDAs, smart-phones and networks.

Change-log:

• GP (GPU/APU) Benchmarks: optimisations for APUs, both current AMD and future Intel when using complex kernels that overwhelm them. APU mode can run different kernels on CPU & GPU part, selecting the best for each device.
• Dedicated high-performance GPUs will still execute the "heavier" kernels which allow better compute core utilisation but are too large for APUs.
• File System Benchmark: reduced run-time and test file size while maintaining score quality (i.e. similar margin of error). You can test slow drives even on systems with large disk caches (i.e. large memory)
• Ranker: is finally operational after over 1 month outage due to server transfer gone wrong; most benchmark results have been restored. With 41 benchmarks and over 200,000 scores in popular benchmarks the total number or scores is somewhat large.
• Cache/Memory Latencies Benchmark: here is a public article detailing our methodology on measuring cache/memory latencies, why, what and how is measured, and how our results relate to manufacturer results.

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Kalypso Media and bitComposer Games have released a playable demo for Jagged Alliance: Back in Action, the latest installment in the series developed exclusively for PC. The demo includes one tutorial mission, the Orta Laboratory level which takes place about 2/3 of the way through the game and challenges players to demonstrate their advanced tactical planning skills through the 'Plan & Go' system.

The demo also offers a pre-assembled team of veteran mercenaries, armed to the teeth and ready for action. Jagged Alliance: Back in Action will be launched on February 10th, 2012.

Guru3D and MSI have been working hard on AfterBurner, today we release an updated Beta  revision of Afterburner, this application successfully secured the leading position on graphics card utilities.

Today we released an updated Beta revision of Afterburner, this application successfully secured the leading position on graphics card utilities. We're happy to see MSI Afterburner is leading the overclock applications. MSI Afterburner 2.2.0 Beta 12 is ready

Changes list includes:

• Memory clock limit has been extended to 180% on AMD RADEON 79x0 graphics cards in unofficial overclocking mode
• Added low-level clock frequencies monitoring for AMD RADEON 79x0 graphics cards
• Added PowerTune adjustment slider for AMD HD 6xxx and 7xxx series graphics cards
• Improved overclocking profiles format provides compatibility with future graphics cards. Please take a note that existing overclocking profiles (startup overclocking profile and profile slots) will be ignored and must be recreated in new version
• MSI On-Screen Display server has been upgraded to v4.3.2. New version gives the following improvements:
• Added gamma corrected video capture support
• Framerate limit ratio for video capture in no longer controlled via the server's profiles. Now it can be adjusted directly into MSI Afterburner's video capture properties
• Added Direct3D9Ex support (DOTA 2 and Darkness 2 demo)
• Improved desktop windows notification mechanism eliminates unwanted beeps occurring on some systems during the server startup / shutdown
• Output video dimensions are now cropped to be multiple of 16 to improve compatibility with some third party MJPG decoders
• Improved OpenGL On-Screen Display coordinates calculation for framebuffer coordinate space mode
• Now "Enable compatibility with modified Direct3D runtime libraries" option is compatible with Direct3D9 game engines using double FPU precision (MassEffect series)

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Mozilla released 10.0 version of the Firefox browser for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. This release includes several fixes, brings a hidden forward button (which appears when the user navigates back), Full Screen APIs, and features support for WebGL Anti-Aliasing, CSS3 3D-Transforms, and for the < bdi > element for bi-directional text isolation.

To download Firefox 10.0 (for any of three platforms mentioned above) visit this page.

After a year from the release, LuxMark v2.0 has been released.

LuxMark v2.0 includes SLG2 as rendering engine with Metropolis Light Transport, Multiple Importance Sampling, Image reconstruction done on the GPU, support for multiple OpenCL platforms (i.e. Nvidia users can use Intel or AMD CPU device) and many more new features.

The new features rise the complexity of the benchmark of nearly one order of magnitude and it should be able to put some serious stress on the new generation of GPUs. The capability to submit results to a centralise WEB database looks like the most interesting new feature of LuxMark v2.0.

Features

* Open source
* 100% OpenCL
* Cross platform (Linux, MacOS, Windows, etc.)
* Complex/real world code used as GPU computing benchmark
* Support for OpenCL GPUs-only, OpenCL CPUs+GPUs, OpenCL CPUs-only and native CPU-only benchmarking
* Support for Interactive mode
* Easy to run
* Multiple scenes usable as benchmarks

New in LuxMark v2.0:

* Totally new rendering engine based on SLG2 with Metropolis Light Transport, Multiple Importance Sampling, Image reconstruction done on the GPU, ecc;
* Multi-platform OpenCL support;
* 2 new benchmark scenes, for a total of 3 benchmarks with a raising complexity (~200,000, ~500,000, ~2,000,000 triangles);
* Run the benchmark only on the OpenCL devices you selected on the device panel;
* Added the possibility to submit the scored result to a centralised result database

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The Leo demo showcases a real-time, DirectX 11 based lighting pipeline that is designed to allow for rendering scenes made of arbitrarily complex materials (including transparencies), multiple lighting models, and minimal restrictions on the number of lights that can be used -- all while supporting hardware MSAA and efficient memory usage.

Specifically, this demo uses DirectCompute to cull and manage lights in a scene. The end result is a per-pixel or per-tile list of lights that forward-render based shaders use for lighting each pixel. This technique also allows for adding one bounce global illumination effects by spawning virtual point light sources where light strikes a surface.

 Finally, the lighting in this demo is physically based in that it is fully HDR and the material and reflection models take advantage of the ALU power of the AMD Radeon HD 7900 GPU to calculate physically accurate light and surface interactions (multiple BRDF equations, realistic use of index of refraction, absorption based on wavelength for metals, etc).

Download here

An indictment unsealed today by the Department of Justice claims that MegaUpload has caused the entertainment industries more than $500 million in lost revenue and generated $175 million in criminal proceeds.

Two corporations  Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited  were indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on January 5th, 2012, and charged with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement.

Today, the authorities executed in excess of 20 search warrants in the United States and eight other countries.

Data centers in the Netherlands, Canada and Washington housing MegaUpload's equipment were raided. In an apparent reference to the latter location, a source has just informed TorrentFreak that the FBI are currently detaining everyone at the ISP Cogent Communications' headquarters in Washington DC, in connection with a Mega-related search warrant.

In addition to MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom who was arrested today in New Zealand, another six alleged members of the Mega conspiracy were charged in the indictment:

• Finn Batato, 38, Mega's chief marketing officer and a citizen and resident of Germany
• Julius Bencko, 35, Mega's graphic designer from Slovakia
• Sven Echternach, 39,Mega's German head of business development
• Mathias Ortmann, 40, the German CTO, co-founder and director of Mega
• Andrus Nomm, 32, programmer and head of the development from Estonia
• Bram van der Kolk, 29, a Dutch citizen who oversaw programming and network issues.

HWiNFO32 v3.92 and HWiNFO64 v3.92 available. HWiNFO is a professional hardware information and diagnostic tools supporting latest components, industry technologies and standards. Both tools are targeted to recognize and extract the most possible amount of information about computer's hardware which makes them suitable for users searching for driver updates, computer manufactures, system integrators and technical experts too.

Changes:

• Added recognition of Intel Knights Corner.
• Added support of SMSC SCH5327 sensor monitoring.
• General sensor monitoring improvement (performance, reliability).
• Added preserving of graph positions.
• Improved IPMI support.
• Added reporting of Firmware Version Information (BIOS, OROM, Reference Code) under SMBIOS/DMI if supported by BIOS.
• Enhanced support of AMD Southern Islands and London series (clock, config, sensors).
• Added button to reset min/max values in sensors.
• Added support of Nuvoton NCT6779D LPC/HW monitor.

We've have been working hard on AfterBurner, today we release an updated Beta  revision of Afterburner, this application successfully secured the leading position on graphics card utilities.

Today we release an updated Beta revision of Afterburner, this application successfully secured the leading position on graphics card utilities. We're happy to see MSI Afterburner is leading the overclock applications. MSI Afterburner 2.2.0 Beta 11 is ready

Changes list includes:

• Added memory voltage control for reference design AMD RADEON 7970 graphics cards with CHL8228 voltage regulators
• Now MSI Afterburner displays target VID instead of real voltage sensor reading on "GPU voltage" graph on graphics cards equipped with CHL8228 voltage regulators. These changes are implemented to avoid confusing the beginners and prevent the hysteria about voltage drop on AMD RADEON 7970 series graphic cards spreading across different discussion forums. Experienced users, understanding the difference between target and real voltages, may still unlock the previous real voltage monitoring mode via editing the hardware profiles
• Core and memory clock limits have been extended to 180% on AMD RADEON 7970 graphics cards in unofficial overclocking mode
• Now MSI Afterburner's startup daemon routine precaches VRM I2C registers state at the first Windows startup. Precached VRM state is being used to detect default voltage instead of hardcoding default voltages into the database. Please take a note that you may forcibly perform precaching later with command line switch or disable the precaching at all via configuration file if necessary and force MSI Afterburner to use the previous hardcoded database based default voltage detection
• MSI On-Screen Display server has been upgraded to version 4.3.1. New version gives you the following improvements:
  o Added workaround for AMD OpenGL driver context switching issues causing abnormally low framerate in ID Software Rage when OSD is enabled
  o Added workaround for AMD OpenGL driver PBO issues causing the driver to crash or perform abnormally slow during videocapture

Download

The nVIDIA Inspector Tool is basically an nVIDIA only GPU-Z utility but with a decent OverClocking feature and you can set your clocks and fan speeds. Orbmu2k has released this program, which seems to NVIDIA graphics cards and offers information on tools for GPU and memory clock speed, GPU operating voltage and fan speed increase.

This is a quite simple user interface with an application that will rely entirely NVIDIA drivers, so there is reason to be downloaded from NVIDIA's website WHQL-certified driver. The program offers roughly the same information as the GPU-Z program, but with a few extra spice box.

New Version 1.9.5.9: (Hotfix)

• fixed function 'ChangeWindowMessageFilter' not available on XP
• fixed frame rate limiter is already included since 280.26+ drivers

Version 1.9.5.8:

• improved profile combo handling to fix searching while dropdown is open will not change selected profile
• added image upload feature to driver profile settings toolbar
• holding CTRL while launch Monitoring from mainapp will start Monitoring standalone
  [you can close inspector in this case without closing monitoring but they wont share sensor readings anymore]
• for profile settings you can drop a shortcut to the game EXE now and it will open the assigned profile

Download

Guru3D and MSI have been working hard on AfterBurner, today we release an updated  Beta  revision of Afterburner, this application successfully secured the leading position on graphics card utilities.

Today we release an updated Beta revision of Afterburner, this application successfully secured the leading position on graphics card utilities. We're happy to see MSI Afterburner is leading the overclock applications. MSI Afterburner 2.2.0 Beta 10 is ready

Changes list includes:

• Added AMD Tahiti graphics processors family support
• Added core voltage control for reference design AMD RADEON 7970 graphics cards with CHL8228 voltage regulators
• MSI On-Screen Display server has been upgraded to version 4.3.0. New version gives you the following improvements:
  • Added new profile settings allowing to limit the framerate independently during gaming and during videocapture. Limiting the framerate during gaming can help to reduce the power consumption as well as it can improve gaming experience due to removing unwanted microstutteing effect caused by framerate fluctuations. Limiting the framerate during videocapture can improve resulting video smoothness
  • Added Vector 3D On-Screen Display rendering mode support for OpenGL applications
  • Added Raster 3D On-Screen Display rendering mode support for multithreaded OpenGL applications (e.g. ID Software's Rage)
  • Added workaround for AMD Direct3D driver issues causing OSD to be invisible in Direct3D8 and Direct3D9 applications when using Raster 3D On-Screen Display rendering mode
• Now unofficial overclocking can be enabled without typing in the EULA into the configuration file. In this case the EULA is displayed and you're forced to accept it during MSI Afterburner startup
  5. Added power user oriented command line switches allowing to extend Overdrive clock limits on AMD graphics cards attached to Windows desktop

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Version 290.53 Highlights

This section provides highlights of version 290.53 of the NVIDIA Release 290 Driver for
Windows Vista/Windows 7.

• What
  

Mozilla's Firefox version number inflation drive continues as it plays catch up with Google Chrome 13 and Internet Explorer 9. Released today, Firefox 9 packs small number of new features, improved font rendering, along with the usual load of security and bug fixes.

JavaScript processing has been updated massively.

What

Michael over at TPU released version 0.5.7 of GPU-Z. GPU-Z is a lightweight utility designed to give you all information about your video card and GPU.

Version 0.5.7

• Added support for AMD Radeon HD 7970, HD 7350
• Fixed "APIC counter broken" message on AMD Fusion Graphics
• Fixed PCIe 3.0 showing up as 2.0
• Fixed fillrate calculation on Fermi architecture
• Fixed ROP count on GT 420, GT 520, HD 5450, HD 6450
• Fixed random values showing as default clocks on some NVIDIA cards
• Fixed random value showing as shader clock on NVIDIA cards without shader clock
• Added / corrected release dates for HD 3650, FirePro V4800 and V3800
• Added process size, die size, transistor count for Radeon E6760
• Added transistor count for FirePro V4900
• Improved detection for HD 5570, HD 6450A, HD 6470M

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