latest
What is Microsoft Designer?
Microsoft's graphic design tool with an AI touch is ready to take on Adobe and Canva
Microsoft officially entered the graphic design space with Microsoft Designer in late 2022. The software giant made Designer free to anyone in mid-2023. Unlike traditional graphic design tools like Canva and Adobe Express, Designer uses generative AI to create stunning designs in no time.
Most of video game history has been an ongoing quest for better graphics and faster processing. Early video games made little effort to endeavor towards life-like verisimilitude because the hardware power to render life-like images didn't exist on a consumer scale. As hardware advanced, so did the ambition of game developers. What was once considered impossible for home gaming is now a fact of life.
Pixel 6 looks to have true flagship-level GPU
The GPU in question is also used in the Exynos Galaxy S21
The Pixel 5 was somewhat of a disappointment in the performance department. At $700, it was $100 cheaper than the Pixel 4, but its performance really seemed more reminiscent of $300-400 mid-range phones than other $700 phones with more upmarket CPUs and GPUs. Thankfully, Google seems to be addressing that shortcoming with the Pixel 6, using a high-end Mali-G78 GPU.
Your Chromebook will be getting a massive gaming performance boost soon
Early benchmarks show speeds that rivals native performance
Read update
Linux for Chromebooks has come a long way since Google introduced it in Chrome OS 69 a couple of years ago. On supported devices, it opened the door to an extensive library of desktop apps for users, like video editing tools and IDEs. GPU acceleration was an important milestone that made graphic intensive Linux app usable on Chrome OS. This is thanks to Virgil 3D, a component that allows the Linux container to tap into the hardware's GPU. In exciting news shared by Luke Short from VMware, Google is working on adding Vulkan passthrough into Virgil to improve app performance.
New Nvidia partnership could hint at Chromebooks with RTX graphics
Reference designs are being made with MediaTek for laptop manufacturers, including Chromebooks
Nvidia hasn't exactly set the world on fire with its Tegra line of Arm-based mobile processors. Outside of its own excellent SHIELD hardware (and notably the Nintendo Switch), it's basically dead. But the company is hoping to breathe new life into its Arm ambitions by doubling down on what it does best: graphics. In a press release, Nvidia announced that it's working with major chip supplier MediaTek to combine Arm-based architecture with its RTX line of graphics cards.
Smartphone graphics have improved quite a bit over the past decade, but they're still a far cry from what dedicated gaming machines are capable of. The idea of a phone with the horsepower of a home game console has always been an exciting prospect, and now Samsung is partnering up with hardware manufacturer AMD to (hopefully) make it happen.
While Samsung's devices in North America have used Snapdragon processors for years, the company also develops its own Exynos processors for international models. But when it comes to graphics, Samsung still uses ARM's 'Mali' GPU family across all its phones and tablets. According to a new job listing on LinkedIn, Samsung wants to develop its own GPUs for a wide range of devices - including phones.
Most Android devices use ARM processors, usually with ARM's 'Mali' display unit to render graphics. Usually every new Mali upgrade is a small incremental improvement over the previous design, but not this time around. ARM has taken the wraps off 'Mali-Cetus,' the company's next-generation display processor.
On paper, Little Briar Rose isn't anything particularly exciting. It's a competent side-scrolling adventure title, a rookie effort from developer Elf Games, that retells the Grimm fairy tale of the same name. But the game's visuals, painstakingly crafted to look like an animated stained glass window on every frame, are downright breathtaking. In a sea of pixelated graphics and safe me-too styles, Little Briar Rose is a breath of fresh air.
Games are a little more complicated to review than apps. Maybe the story and premise are intriguing and engulfing, but the controls are horrible. Or maybe the graphics are gorgeous, but the gameplay is terribly bad. What rating do you give? You might err toward an average rating, but wouldn't it be better if there was an easy way to specify which aspects were good and which were disappointing, for the benefit of the devs as well as other users?
The Vulkan graphics API is a big deal for mobile developers, since its direct GPU access allows for complex graphics to be rendered with a considerably lower hit to the processor, and thus a lower overhead on the hardware and battery life. A few devices like the SHIELD family and Samsung's 7 series already supported Vulkan several months ago, but Nougat now features full support for all updated Android 7.0 devices. Developer Super Evil Megacorp, which turned heads last year with its Vainglory mobile MOBA, now has a beta version that uses the Vulkan API.
Benchmarking applications like 3DMark and PassMark are great for scoring the graphics or computational power of a given device. Nenamark 2 was a popular choice for benchmarking graphics back in the day, and five years after Nenamark 2 launched, Nenamark 3 has arrived. It's not clear why.
Unless you regularly develop video games or other visually-intensive programs, you probably don't know what Vulkan is. That's OK. But if you are in the habit of developing visually complex apps for Android, the news that Google plans to support the Vulkan API is a big deal indeed. And it looks like the company intends to jump into the Vulkan pool with both feet: Google has just hired an entire team of dedicated Vulkan developers and folded them into the Android team.
Some graphical benchmarks are meant to be fairly boring but reliable tests of visual output - the reliable Quadrant benchmark from Aurora Softworks is a good example. Others create an intense graphical test by making a fully-realized 3D environment, essentially a tech demo that's meant to be a digital ruler for the performance of competing components or devices. 3DMark's Android benchmark, with its space battle cutscene, is one of these tests.
NVIDIA has been the first few pebbles of the landslide that is CES for the last few years, and 2015 is no different. To kick off the world's biggest consumer tech show, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang started with mobile. The company announced its successor to the Tegra K1 mobile processor, the Tegra X1. This chip includes an octa-core 64-bit CPU married to a 256-core GPU. And that second chip is the killer: it's based on the same architecture as the latest full-sized NVIDIA desktop graphics cards, Maxwell.
Have you felt the call of video game development? Maybe you've seen some game featured in the news and thought, "That sucks, I can do way better." Well, put your money where your mouth is and prove it. StackSocial is giving customers the opportunity to name their own price and pick up two courses offered by Udemy on the topics of game development and design, or pick up two additional courses by beating the average price.
Hey, did you know that John Woo made an Android game? You will by the time you read the Play Store description for Chillingo's latest title, Bloodstroke. The first screenshot is literally the game's logo and a headshot of the well-known Hong Kong movie director and producer, with his name featured twice. You know, just in case you didn't get the message. Exactly how Woo is involved in Bloodstroke isn't mentioned - is he a designer? Producer? Art director? Did he code the entire thing by hand on the set of Windtalkers? We don't know, and it doesn't matter.
We featured Audio Glow when it launched in November of last year. This ultra-stylish music visualizer takes the basic visual component of classic hi-fi systems and gives it a fresh coat of paint. It's gained quite a following thanks to eye-popping visuals and a huge degree of customization. Today's version 2.0 update adds some interesting options, most notably the new "Glowing Strings" visualization, below.
Ready for some more Android Open Source Project woes? In addition to the Nexus 7 drama over AOSP builds in the last couple of weeks, it looks like there are some issues with the Nexus 10 as well. Don't worry, the Android 4.3 factory image for the N10 is sitting on the Google Developers page, proud and happy, but the binaries and drivers for some individual components on the tablet seem to be missing, most notably the graphics driver. It's available for 4.2.2, but not 4.3. What's up?