GPU Water Simulation in Games – Is it worth it?

With DirectX 10, the chips of graphics cards (GPUs) started to be able to do other tasks than just displaying graphics. Their big amount of "cores" enabled GPUs to compute different kinds of tasks much faster than a CPU would be able to. Nvidia offered CUDA to do video-encoding, matrix-multiplication or Folding@Home. ATI offered basically the same calling it Stream.Now... Continue Reading

Browser Roundup – Opera, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer tested

There are so many browsers out there, with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera just being the most popular ones. Internet Explorer has been the king of all browsers regarding the market share, but mainly because it was pre-installed on all Windows versions after Windows 95. But over the last months, Internet Explorer's marketshare has decreased  to only slightly... Continue Reading

Assessing Virtual Machine Performance

If you want to try a new operating system, but don't want to put your computer and data to the risk of being corrupted, virtual machines can come in handy. They are small programs simulating to be a completely independent system with CPU, GPU, memory, HDD, DVD drive and so on and can run another operating system parallel to the... Continue Reading

Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #3 VMware Player

In this series, I’m going to focus on comparing different Virtual Machines running Windows and their performance regarding different tasks such as single-threaded CPU-only applications, multi-threaded programs or even games requiring hardware 3D acceleration. This article will show you when and for what to use VMware Player. VMware Player is quite similar to Sun Virtual Box. You can also confi... Continue Reading

Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #2 Sun Virtual Box

In this series, I'm going to focus on comparing different Virtual Machines running Windows and their performance regarding different tasks such as single-threaded CPU-only applications, multi-threaded programs or even games requiring hardware 3D acceleration.This article will show you when and for what to use Sun VirtualBox.For these tests, I used a quite uncommon configuration: I ran a vi... Continue Reading

Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #1 Microsoft Virtual PC

In this series, I'm going to focus on comparing different Virtual Machines running Windows and their performance regarding different tasks such as single-threaded CPU-only applications, multi-threaded programs or even games requiring hardware 3D acceleration.This article will show you when and for what to use Microsoft Virtual PC and the XP mode that comes with Windows 7.The first thing to... Continue Reading

Opera 10.50b claims to be fastest browser on Earth

Opera claims on its own website that its latest beta  version, Opera 10.50b, is the fastest browser the world has seen so far. This statement is based on test results from different browser benchmarks published on the official Opera blog.As Google Chrome has been the fastest browser for a while and the alpha version of Opera 10.50 caught up quite... Continue Reading

Google Chrome 5 comes with automatic page translation

The latest version of Google Chrome, build 5.0.317.2, brings a new feature to improve the browsing experience when visiting foreign websites. It includes an automatic page translation tool which detects the page language and, if it differs from your browser language, offers to translate it to your language using Google Translate.When Chrome offers you to translate a site, a blue... Continue Reading