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Published: 14 December 2014

NVIDIA has a rich history of developing in house tech demos to showcase each new major GPU they develop. Although they are not the only company to do so, ATI later AMD and MATROX did suit, NVIDIA's demos are the most memorable to enthusiasts and industry insiders.

Over the past decade we have had NALU the mermaid (remember her? years before the whole AMD TressFX/NVIDIA hairworks friendly competition), the elves Dawn and Dusk, a rocket powered sled and others.

For Maxwell, which NVIDIA claims is the most advanced GPU ever made, the firm felt they had to go one better over these previous 'trivial' demos which were mainly aimed at the 'male gamer market'. This time around,NVIDIA simulated and replicated the Apollo 11 moon landing using Unreal Engine 4, complete with authentic star field, textures, lighting and NASA radio chatter.

Lighting is the key term here, as one of the main purposes of the Apollo 11 demo is to showcase the new Voxel based lighting structure that GTX 980 and GTX 970 can use in supported games to support global illumination. For these hardware the VGLI solution is efficient, fast and as proven by the tech demo, accurate to the source material. And what source material is lighting heavy and well suited for a lighting tech demo? the controversial 'faked' moon landings.

Although NVIDIA demonstrated Apollo 11 tech demo at their global GAME24 launch and gamer event as well as regional editors days for the tech media, users and media could not try the demo for themselves, until now as NVIDIA has finally provided the demo for download.

We used Shadowplay to capture the demo, running on a rig powered with a i7-4790K CPU, MSI Z97 Gaming 7 motherboard and single reference NVIDIA GTX 980 graphics card to capture the demo, complete with performance statistics provided by MSI afterburner software. The demo really needs 2 cards to work optimally and is locked at 1080p. 4K users are out of luck, and no it does not work on other GPUs due to a hardware check.

Our 60 FPS video below shows the entire demo, complete with GPU utilization, frame rate and temperature overlay

Apollo 11 Lunar Landing for GTX 980/970 only can be downloaded here, as well as other NVIDIA tech demos.

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Published: 31 October 2014

No two cables are the same, mechanically or electrically. What is undeniable with copper cables is the requirement of higher specification cable assemblies to meet higher bandwidth requirements. Anyone who thinks otherwise is grossly misinformed. This is the case with many types of cables whether they be coaxial cables for RF signals, twisted pair copper for data or telephony transmission.

2014 signaled the arrival of HDMI 2.0 for consumers with displays from Panasonic and Graphics cards from NVIDIA, but what about cables?

Thanks to an opportunity from Monster Cable, we were able to compare the bandwidth handling capability of several HDMI cables ranging in price using professional equipment, testing whether these cables can handle the minimum 18 Gigabit/s data rate required to support formats under HDMI 2.0.

The cheapest and cheap cables we tested failed at 18 Gigabit/s, meaning if used with HDMI 2.0 devices and very high resolution, colour depth and refresh supported under HDMI 2.0, pixelation,jitter and other issues are possible.

Read on to see a video of the HDMI cable Eye Pattern and Bit Error Rate tests as well as Q&A with Monster Cable.

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Published: 31 March 2014

Seagate is relatively unknown for Network Attached Storage and have tried to add their own twist via unique features for their consumer and business oriented models.  However, like competing devices, NAS are heavily reliant on hardware specifications to perform as advertised. We review Seagate's 16 TB model for Business and explain why processing power and fast interfaces like USB 3.0 matter for a storage device

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Published: 17 March 2014

The choice of AMD or NVIDIA graphics is constantly becoming a difficult choice for enthusiasts thanks to an almost level playing field as a result of strong competition between AMD and NVIDIA.

Both brands ave their pros and cons but offer a very similar experience. Choice has become a more personal one, often of brand loyalty than technical.

Add in board partners are constantly releasing custom design graphics cards which squeeze every bit of performance and cooling for both brands equally.

HAWK - MSI's second highest model line (there is Gaming, Hawk and Lightning) offers strong overclocking and tweaking without being too intimidating to the enthusiast who isn't into modding or custom cooling. Their latest version is no exception.

In our fly-off, we were quite impressed with the speed and handling of both the AMD Radeon R9 270X and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 based MSI HAWK cards.

Out of the two cards, neither was the outright winner. The winner, however is the consumer. Read on to find out why.

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