Torvalds blasts Nvidia over Linux support, gives them the middle finger during speech

Linus Torvalds, the driving force behind the Linux kernel, used a recent question and answer session hosted at the end of a speech at the Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship in Otaniemi, Finland to air his thoughts on Nvidia and its lack of Linux GPU driver support, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination.

While taking questions from the audience, around the 48-minute mark in the video below, a woman explained the problems she had getting her laptop's Nvidia Optimus GPU to correctly work under Linux.  "I was expecting that Nvidia would kind of chip in and do something [but] they said flat out 'no' they're not doing any support."

Asked what his thoughts on the matter were, Torvalds responded: "Nvidia has been one of the worst trouble spots we've had with hardware manufacturers. And that's really sad because Nvidia tries to sell a lot of chips into the Android market. And Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with."

However, Torvalds -- who has a history of speaking his mind -- didn't stop at that. "So, Nvidia, f*** you," he stated whilst gesturing with his middle finger to the camera, much to the applause of the audience. "I think it's really sad when you sell hardware and use Linux and you are being really difficult about it. Don't get me wrong I'm not saying that other companies are perfect either."

His point is in reference to Nvidia's Tegra line, which runs on the Linux-based Android OS. Nvidia announced back in March that it would begin open-source support for Linux, but Torvalds' comments on Thursday would suggest things have improved little despite the public commitment to changing the situation.

Prior to this, the company had been so unwilling to provide assistance that the Linux community reverse-engineering its GPU drivers to provide an open source alternative that was less buggy for users of the OS.

Intel adding TRIM support for SSDs in RAID 0 with RST 11.5

Windows 7 and Intel's RST (Rapid Storage Technology) have supported TRIM for quite a while, but this support has always excluded solid-state drives in RAID configurations. Fortunately for owners of multiple SSDs who want to put all their precious GBs to use that may change soon, as the TRIM feature will reportedly be enabled for RAID 0 setups in an upcoming RST 11.5 driver release.

Currently the only way for TRIM to function on an SSD is to operate in AHCI mode. Last year users were led to believe that the Intel RST 9.6 drivers would add TRIM support in RAID volumes, but Intel later clarified that it was only for SSDs acting as single drives in AHCI mode alongside a separate array attached to the same Intel storage controller -- but not if the SSD was part of a RAID volume.

The benefits of TRIM are obvious because the write performance of an SSD significantly degrades with time or as the drive fills out without a feature to properly handle garbage collection overhead. This means that SSDs in high-performance RAID 0 arrays could eventually see the increased read/write speeds neglected.

Intel RST 11.5 is not expected to arrive until sometime in Q2 2012 with support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 systems. For a more detailed explanation on TRIM, take a look at AnandTech's SSD Anthology article.

Intel: Ivy Bridge GPU to support 4K resolutions

Intel quietly announced at IDF this past week that Ivy Bridge will support 4K video resolutions using the integrated GPU. Intel broke the news in one of their side technical sessions at the conference, according to VR Zone.

4K resolution means that the GPU (and supporting monitor) can run a video stream at up to 4096 x 4096 pixels (known as 4Kx4K), a feat that Intel claims Ivy Bridge can do with ease thanks to their Multi-Format Codec Engine called MFX.

We already knew that the GPU in Ivy Bridge would be fast, up to 60 percent faster than Sandy Bridge in some scenarios, but being able to run 4K video is pretty significant. And if that weren’t enough, chipzilla says that their next-generation platform can run multiple 4K videos simultaneously.  

YouTube announced support for 4K video resolution in July 2010 and we have used this sample video run in “Original” mode as an informal measuring stick in several of our notebook reviews. The video is extremely taxing on the GPU and CPU of modern computers and you will need a fast Internet connection, lest you want to waste half your day buffering the video.

Anandtech points out that current Sandy Bridge GPUs only support resolutions of up to 2560 x 1600 and a bump up to 4Kx4K has over four times the number of pixels. Furthermore, displays that support resolutions over 2560 x 1600 are extremely rare and expensive and the bandwidth needed to push 4Kx4K video isn’t feasible at a refresh rate of 60Hz.

Source : http://www.techspot.com/

Crysis 2 DirectX 11 support and advanced graphics setting PC update coming

A german website is reporting that a patch for the PC version of Crysis 2 will be released tomorrow (Monday) which will enable DirectX 11 support for the game aswell as bring an additional graphics setting menu known as “Advanced Graphics menu” to the game.

This news has been, apparently, confirmed by Crytek themselves, according to the website’s sources.

Crysis 2 released for PC a few days ago, however, much to the dismay of gamers worldwide, the game only supported DirectX 9 at launch, with Crytek promising that DirectX 11 support would be implemented in the game via a future patch. This was heavily frowned upon by fans of the series, especially because Crytek advertised the game as coming with DirectX 11 support for PC.

This is good news for gamers as they’ll finally be able to test out their mean gaming rigs against Crytek’s latest graphical beast, with both DirectX 11 support and additional “advanced” graphics options promised to be made available via a patch tomorrow.

EA or Crytek hasn’t either issued a official press release regarding this news, however this German website is known to be accurate when it comes to reporting news such as this.

We’ll keep our readers updated when we get a response from EA on whether this patch will be released tomorrow or not.

Crysis 2 is out now for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

Asus AM3 motherboards get beta BIOS, Bulldozer support

Asus has been quick to announce they are the first manufacturer to offer beta BIOS updates for current AM3 motherboards, receiving instant support for AMD's upcoming Bulldozer processors.

Although AMD's processor refresh is still a few months away, we have come to learn many interesting details about the 32nm CPUs in recent weeks. It's been unofficially confirmed that the company will abandon its Sempron, Athlon and Phenom branding in favor of the FX and A-Series nomenclature, spanning offerings in all price ranges, packing Radeon graphics and sporting up to eight cores on the higher-end models.

Asus AM3 motherboards that get Bulldozer support after a BIOS update are as follows: Crosshair IV Extreme, Crosshair IV Formula, M4A89TD PRO/USB3, M4A89TD PRO, M4A89GTD PRO/USB3, M4A89GTD PRO.

Note that all products above are based on the AMD 890FX + SB850 chipset combination, hinting that similarly equipped motherboards from other manufacturers might follow suit ahead of Bulldozer's release. Interestingly though, this contradicts what AMD claimed last August when they stated that Bulldozer would require the new AM3+ socket.

Going with AMD's desktop platform in 2010 was a risky bet, although as demonstrated in our analysis, on the lower price brackets they did possess a compelling set of products. Today your bet could be paying off as Intel owners wanting to upgrade to Sandy Bridge are forced to switch motherboards once again, while AMD (either willingly or forcefully) is about to give a breath of fresh air to its existing AM3 platform.