There are three new stages in the standard graphics pipeline: the Hull Shader, Tessellator, and Domain Shader. In addition, changes have been made to the pixel shader to enable compute shaders (for general purpose applications). In addition to the new pipeline stages, DirectX is being tweaked to fully support multithreading. So DirectX 11 DLLs will spawn threads as appropriate on multicore and SMT-enabled CPUs.

Another key new feature are several new texture compression formats, which enable better image quality, and will support high dynamic range. A host of lesser features are also being implemented; most don't require new hardware. They include upping the resource limit to 2GB, increasing texture limits to 16K and support for double-precision floating point (this last one is optional, and is aimed at compute shaders).

Now let's drill down on some of the features.

Dean Takahashi, one of the most respected tech journos around, spent years putting together this mind-blowing expose that reveals the truly epic scale of the problems that lead to millions of dead Xbox 360s. It really is one of the most stunning flustercucks in gaming history. According to his account, Microsoft willfully ignored deep, systemic problems in the console's production that reached from chipmakers—initially, only 16 out of every 100 of its IBM-made processors worked—to production lines, where just before launch, an unbelievable 68 percent of consoles made were clunkers.

...

Most of the problems pointed to as the cause of the epidemic of Red Rings of Death showed up way before launch, naturally.

The quest to discover whether an amateur was up to the task presented the US Army with the profoundly bizarre challenge of trying to find people with exactly the right lack of qualifications, recalls Bob Selden, who eventually became the other half of the two-man project. (Another early participant, David Pipkorn, soon left.) Both men had physics PhDs - the hypothetical Nth country would have access to those, it was assumed - but they had no nuclear expertise, let alone access to secret research.

"It's a very strange story," says Selden, then a lowly 28-year-old soldier drafted into the army and wondering how to put his talents to use, when he received a message that Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb and the grumpy commanding figure in the US atomic programme, wanted to see him. "I went to DC and we spent an evening together. But he began to question me in great detail about the physics of making a nuclear weapon, and I didn't know anything. As the evening wore on, I knew less and less. I went away very, very discouraged. Two days later a call comes through: they want you to come to Livermore."

Don LaFontaine, a voiceover artist known to many as "King of Voiceovers," died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 68.

A 25-year veteran of the industry, LaFontaine was the preeminent voice of movie trailers, and also voiced popular shows like Entertainment Tonight, the Insider and hundreds of spots for radio and television. His other work included commercials for McDonalds, Budweiser and voiceover work for all the major television networks. According to reports, he worked on nearly 5,000 films – and was the in-show announcer for the Screen Actors Guild and Academy Awards.

Electronic Arts has announced that they're now giving away the original Command & Conquer: Red Alert as a free download in celebration of the 13th anniversary of the series (and a reminder that Red Alert 3 is totally coming out soon).

While the game is free, the actual process of playing it isn't without a little complication. You can head over to EA's official page to download both the Allies and Soviets discs (each disc contained the single-player campaign for its respective faction), but the files are actual ISO images of the CDs themselves. That means that in order to play them, you'll either need to burn the ISO images onto a blank disc, or use a Virtual CD program to load them. The game will run on Windows XP/98/Me/95, but it's not "officially" compatible with Windows Vista (although there are certainly ways around that, so don't let that stop you, Vista users.).

Writer, photographer, and baking expert Robyn Johnson, from Matador Nights, has put together an spectacular image collection of some of the coolest installations in the history of Burning Man, where technology, robotics, pyrotechnics, and architecture are put together to form often beautiful, sometimes repugnant, but always fascinating surreal landscapes.

This Chuck Norris box art could be so bad-ass that it actually off-sets the fact that Chuck Norris Bring On the Pain is coming to a cell phone. Oh, did I mention that the chief bad guys are Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-il? That's right you better go out and buy a replacement phone now, because this one is going to KILL your current phone.

According to Gameloft, the game has Norris taking on a rogue Soviet army in an attempt to save POWs from Cambodia. Next he has to save America from invasion. That's right, it makes no sense, but that's how Norris rolls. Gameloft calls the game a "hilarious dive into the life of the legend - martial arts action, denimclad justice, and going commando!" And by hilarious I'm sure Gameloft means kick-ass... unless they want Norris to snap their company over his knee.

We've seen a number of wireless power systems come and go, but for all the hype-filled bombast and occasional working demo, the tech just hasn't gone anywhere -- but even with that background, Intel's demo of a wireless power system that can broadcast 60 watts of power up to three feet at IDF with 75 percent efficiency has us giddy with excitement. The system works using essentially the same magnetic induction principle as all the others, but Intel's seems the furthest along, and the company hopes to one day be able to charge laptops with it. Yeah, we'll take three.

Sure Samsung had 240Hz (and wavier hair) first, but with its TVs stuck in development until 2011, Sony's back with another first / best of the night in the W1 series display, packing four times the speed of previous LCD HDTVs, and double that of the new 120Hz your best friend just picked up. Allegedly smoother than Billy Dee Williams cracking open a Colt 45 in Cloud City, the KDL-46W1 and KDL-40W1 bring 1080p with a 3,000:1 contrast ratio, BRAVIA Engine 2 image processing, 24p support and an assortment of hookups from modem to HDMI. Stop by your nearest Japanese electronics shop November 10 to get a peep at these and their slim, sexy sister, but bring ¥400,000 ($3,652 U.S.) for the 46-inch or ¥290,0000 ($2,648 U.S.) for the 40-inch -- you could try showing up without it, but why take chances?

I used to be a Christian. Born of atheist parents, I stumbled upon this on my own. But there was a day my faith disintegrated: it was when I realized that the exact same sensation of God's love that I felt at Christian gatherings was absolutely indistinguishable from the adrenaline rush and sense of cultural belonging that I felt at a rock concert.

Guitar Praise, then, might send more souls to the boiling feces rape pits of hell than it saves... at least if any of them connect the dots like I did. A Guitar Hero knock-off for Christians, it costs $99.95 with one guitar and plugs into any Mac or PC.

Playing Full Throttle is like tasting a rich bowl of roadhouse chili filled to the rim with biker gangs, chick mechanics (covered in engine grease too), and truckers with badass tattoos. An action packed, comical (albeit short), animated graphical adventure set in the backdrop of an apocalyptic future, Full Throttle touches on the subculture of motorcycle gangs and their steel horses. It is also a story about Ben, a renegade biker who lives and dies by his own rules. Ben’s voice (played by the late Roy Conrad) is every bit as gravelly as the Old Mine Road where he does battle. In this alternate world, cars hover, transport trucks are armored, and desolate towns like Melonweed are sinking fast into the sand. It is a land with many strange locales and even stranger inhabitants.

Released by LucasArts with much fanfare, Full Throttle was an instant hit among critics. Over time, the game grew to become a cult classic and developed a huge fan base. Yet, behind the success of Full Throttle was a detracted story of developer heartbreak. Since the game’s initial release, LucasArts had twice attempted to develop a sequel for the game, but both ended as abruptly as they began. Very little was known about these sequels behind the scenes, except for their names—Full Throttle: Payback and Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels.

This is the story about the rise and fall of Full Throttle.

Nintendo doesn't exactly advertise it, but the remotes for the Wii gaming console—including the balance board that comes with Wii Fit—have Bluetooth capabilities. That means you can connect your Wii peripherals to your computer to operate the media center hooked up to your TV, play emulated games with a Nunchuk, Classic Controller, or even a Balance Board, and pretty much have them do anything you can do with a keyboard. Let's walk through linking up your Wii peripherals and putting them in control of your Mac, PC, or Linux box.

To give you an idea of what you can do with a Wii/PC hook-up, here's a look at one neat example: Controlling Windows Media Center from a distance, without having to shell out for a separate remote control.

Even though Nvidia’s Nvision tradeshow did not achieve its goal of 10,000 visitors, more than a thousand gathered at the Center for Performing Arts to witness the ending of the event. The duo behind the popular Mythbusters showed the results of six months of work, demonstrating the difference between a CPU and a GPU, following the conventional wisdom of parallel computing.

Dubbed Smiley and Mona Lisa, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman presented two robots that represented the difference between a CPU and a GPU. Smiley was given a task to draw a smiley using conventional CPU techniques, doing one thing at a time. Smiley was a relatively simple robot, while Mona Lisa consisted out of "1100 massively parallel barrel processors", dwarfing the 240 shaders offered by a GeForce GTX 280 chip.

Since micro-stuttering is an issue for some people I thought it would be interesting to see if there's a way to solve it. Personally I'm not bothered by it and haven't actually been able to even see it, but I can prove it's happening with Fraps on my 3870x2. So I spent a couple of hours to implement a simple waiting mechanism to feed the GPUs at a more balanced rate. For best stability you want the second GPU to start working only once the first GPU is in mid-frame (assuming 2 GPUs).

Now, since I'm not able to see the micro-stuttering in the first place I can't really say if it's any smoother in practice, but at least the Fraps graph looks good.

What I did was first to create a GPU limited test case using my InteriorMapping demo and slowing it down a bit by adding work to the shader until it ran at about 120fps. Micro-stuttering happens when you get GPU limited since you're feeding commands to the GPU faster than it can accept them. The more GPU limited you are the worse the problem is because the GPUs will start working on their frames shortly after each other and then after crunching through the frames both finish almost at the same time too, which makes one frame appear for 1ms and the next 15ms instead of both 8ms, as shown in the graph.

I've had serious discussions in the past about whether nor not video games constitute an art form. I hold very strongly that they do--the act of playing a game can be as engrossing as the best novel, and the act of creating a game can be much more involved than the creation of a film. The video game industry has suprassed the film industry in monetary terms, and seems now to equal to television and cinema in regards to pop-cultural awareness.

There are, of course, detractors.

They're wrong.

Anyway, I've had this phrase in my head all year--"The year is 2008"--from the opening cinematic of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. The game came out in 2001, and it struck me at the time that it's rare for a piece of art to predict so near a future.

We like to look at early science fiction and laugh: Bradbury's Martian Chronicles had us living on foreign planets by the 1990s, and of course Orwell envisioned the thought police and big brother by 1984. Here it is, coming up on a decade into the new millenium, and there are no flying cars, teleporters, or laser guns.

So I've been waiting seven years to see how ironic Ghost Recon would be. It's always struck me as a bit brazen to put a very specific timeline on a piece of art that takes place in the future, especially the near future, when people will be able to have immediate perspective on how wrong it is.

But it's not.

We spoke to Raj Suman, Euro product marketing director at distributor Avnet, to get confirmation of approximate street pricing and for his take. "This is a strong price move, indicating AMD's commitment to the channel, especially smaller system integrators," said Suman. "The market is soft right now but this has repositioned AMD well. The main battleground between AMD and Intel is the $135-$180 band."

There's said to be two chips in the pipeline, the FX-80 at 4Ghz and the FX-82 at 4.4GHz. The FX-80 at stock out performs a 5.0GHz Kentsfield. The Deneb core apparently has a multiplier of up to 25x!

Though sales of the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable are strong, there are many who use the devices exclusively for homebrew applications. While some of these homebrew devices or homebrew-enabling schemes are looked upon less than favorably by the big manufacturers, such as the infamous R4 flash cart for the DS, there are some companies who see the value in releasing devices capable of homebrew software. Enter the Wiz, a new open-source handheld gaming unit from GamePark Holdings.

Homebrew and open-source applications often offer utility unrivaled by the more mainstream units, and that's something GPH is hoping to take advantage of with this new handheld. The Linux-powered device (running its own GP2X distribution) sports an Arm9 533MHz processor with a 3D accelerator, 64MB of RAM, 1GB of built-in NAND flash memory, an external SD card slot, and a single USB 2.0 connection. The display is a 2.8" OLED touch screen panel with a resolution of 320 by 240 (QVGA). The unit is powered by a 2000mAh Lithium-Ion battery that nets an advertised five hours of play time.

Official commercial games, launching alongside the unit, are a strong focal point. While previous devices in the line have been host to for-pay games, the Wiz will debut with a full suite of official games from third-party developers. Launch titles Asura Cross Wired, a fighting game, and Her Knights, a side-scrolling action game, will come alongside the release of the handheld and future titles that are slated for release through 2009, including puzzlers, rhythm games, shooters, and even RPGs.

If you want to combine a pair of GeForce graphics cards with a new Core i7 processor from Intel later this year, you're in luck. Just after the grand finale for its Nvision conference, Nvidia gathered reporters to inform them of a somewhat surprising and apparently very recent decision: the firm plans to enable its SLI multi-GPU scheme to work with Intel's X58 chipset–without the need for an nForce 200 PCI Express bridge chip on the motherboard.

The fate of SLI support on the X58 chipset–intended for Core i7 processors, which are code-named "Nehalem"–has been a question mark for some time now. Nvidia has said that it won't be making chipsets that work with the Core i7's QuickPath Interconnect (QPI), and it had instead proposed that motherboard makers use its nForce 200 chip on their boards. The presence of that bit of Nvidia hardware would then make the mobo kosher for SLI support. However, the company said today that it realized such a silicon solution would limit SLI to a small number of very high end motherboards, effectively roping off SLI from the mainstream of the enthusiast PC market. Rather than be forced into that situation, Nvidia has elected to allow SLI on the X58 chipset–under certain circumstances.

Ever wondered what your holiday snaps would look like if Hitler decided to hang them on the walls of a secret Nazi base?

No? Oh, well you are going to find out anyway.

Thanks to a talented Javascript hacker who wanted to learn how the Flickr API worked, you can now view your Flickr photo albums through the eyes of B.J. Blazkowicz from the original Wolfenstein 3D.

Statisticians have used a lower limit for 100-meter times of about 9.45 seconds, according to Tabata and other researchers. The exponential curve seen above -- which is drawn from an equation calculated to fit the world record data -- had been quite successful at predicting the steady progress of faster and faster 100-meter times. But Bolt's recent string of world records was clearly not an expected event: The model didn't predict a 9.69 until almost 2030.

Mathematicians like Noubary don't use the body's physiology to assess human physical limits. They were merely working with data that suggested that human speed increases were decelerating and would eventually stop completely. Indeed, in some events, like the long jump, the pace of record-setting has slowed nearly to a stop. That record has only been broken twice since 1968.

But it could just be that mathematicians have been modeling the pace of progress wrong all along.