NVIDIA has just officially launched their GeForce GTX480 (codenamed Fermi) graphics card that supports DirectX 11. NVIDIA claims that gaming performance is “1.5-2x” higher than the GeForce GTX 285 – which is a substantial amount, even by historical GPU upgrade standards. For many games, the GTX 480 is around 10%-20% faster than the AMD 5870. That said, the big difference comes from the GF GTX 480 DX11 tessellation engine that scales much better than AMD’s implementation. NVIDIA gets the absolute one GPU performance crown back, but in terms of value and capability consumption, and for today’s games, the AMD offering is still very relevant, whether not better, depending on your needs. That’s the bottom-line, but whether you really want to look at all the details, I recommend reading the full review on Anandtech or PCPers. It’s probably too geeky for most, but that’s where you’ll find all the small details.

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Orginal post by Mike

An idle mind is the devil’s worksop, but thereupon again sometimes idle minds conjure up wonders like that homemade accelerometer-controlled USB gamepad which houses a PIC18F2550 from Starlino within.

The cipher for the firmware was written in PicBasic Pro and it implements a HID USB device with 2 axes and 4 buttons (only 2 buttons connected in the prototype). The device is detected by Windows XP/Vista as a standard USB gamepad and can be used with many games and applications. I am using a 2 Axes Buffered ±2g Accelerometer from DIMENSION ENGINEERING, it has a built in voltage regulator that allows powering the accelerometer directly from the USB bus (5V).

If you’re interested in making one of your own, head on here.

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Orginal post by Mike