Now more and more developers are using these possibilities to enhance the visual quality of games, e.g. for physics calculation with Nvidia’s PhysX framework or possibly in the future with the open-source alternative OpenPhysics. But GPU acceleration can also greatly enhance the quality of water in games. The game Just Cause 2 offers support for GPU Water Simulation and shows quite impressively the differences between “normal” and “GPU” water.

Video Comparison:

Screenshot Comparison:

Let’s start with some screenshots for comparison (click on the image for full resolution):

As you can see, the visual quality improves quite a lot. But how does this GPU acceleration affect the performance?

Benchmarking System:

• Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 955 (3.2GHz)
• Mainboard: Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P
• Memory: 2×2GB A-Data DDR3-1333 (CL 7-7-7-24 2T)
• Graphics: Gainward Nvidia GTX 260 (680/1400/1150MHz)
• Hard Disk: Samsung Spinpoint F3 1000GB (7200RPM, 32MB cache)
• Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
• Ingame Settings: 1920×1080, advanced settings as follows:

Performance Assessment

In order to measure the performance loss for enabling GPU Water Simulation in Just Cause 2, I took three common situations and measured the framerates for an interval of time:

Falling: Airlift to Bandar Arang Batu Besar (24676/27047), straight fall into death
Flying: Flight from Kem Udara Wau Pantas (22217/23304) to Pelantar Gas Panau Seladan (29886/24713) for 30 seconds, high above the water
Base Jump: Jump from highest skyscraper in Panau City – Docks District (1116/13726) in northern direction until death

The following diagram shows the actual testing results:

The framerates dropped quite significantly on my system (details above), on average the GPU Water Simulation lowered the FPS by 40%. When flying high above the water the game was still running fast enough, but especially in the city with an average of 19 FPS and a minimum FPS of 16, the game became unplayable.

Conclusion

GPU Water Simulation really improves the visual quality of games, but also needs a lot of computing power and thus lowers the performance significantly. On my system the game Just Cause 2 was not playable with GPU Water Simulation enabled in scenes with much action or geometry. Thus it takes a really powerful computer in order to be able to enjoy the great quality of GPU-accelerated water.

Source files of benchmarks: JustCause2_GPU_Water.rar

Related posts:

1. Enable Anti-Aliasing in Risen (nVidia cards)
2. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #3 VMware Player
3. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #2 Sun Virtual Box

There are three major virtual machines out there: VMware Player, Sun VirtualBox and Microsoft VirtualPC. I took a look at all of them and compared their strengths and weaknesses. If you want to read the full review, have a look at the posts below:

Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #1 Microsoft Virtual PC

Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #2 Sun Virtual Box

Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #3 VMware Player

I will also write a short summary of each VM in this post, but for now the detailed reviews should be enough.

Related posts:

1. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #3 VMware Player
2. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #2 Sun Virtual Box
3. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #1 Microsoft Virtual PC

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 configure almost everything, from CPU count over memory to graphics acceleration. VMware Player can’t assign more cores than the computer actually has to the VM, but features better hardware graphics acceleration and up to 256MB of video memory. This also enables Windows 7 to run Aero and the glass effects smoothly.

I installed Windows 7 64-bit in the VM and compared the performance to my native Windows 7 64-bit. Like in VirtualBox, hardware acceleration is supported, but not required. The installation is even easier than in VirtualBox: Tell VMware Player which OS you plan to install, and it automatically suggests hardware configuration and manages the installation process by clicking the right buttons. After installation, it will install the VMware tools that include 3D driver support and other programs that make using the VM more comfortable.

A nice function that both VirtualBox and VMware Player support is the option to assign devices either to the host OS or the virtual one. This enables the user to connect two mice and keyboards and assign them to host and virtual OS. Now the virtual OS can be moved to a second screen and both users can use the computer simultaneously.

Performance:

Settings:

CPU count: 2

RAM: 1500MB

GPU acceleration: yes, 256MB, DirectX 9

First of all, the Windows 7 System Rating shows that both CPU and GPU performance in the VM are quite good, only the memory is a bit too slow:

To test how strong the VM really is, I ran SuperPI and got these results: It took the VM 0.773 seconds longer to complete the calculation, which equals a performance loss of 3.3%. This is a quite good result, similar to Microsoft Virtual PC, but not as good as VirtualBox.

Since the graphics acceleration really seems to work here, I tried some games to prove it. Older games such asCall of Duty, Couter-Strike 1.6 and Civilization were running nicely, Warcraft 3 had some texturing problems, and quite new games like Call of Duty 5 – World at War didn’t really run (I got around 4 FPS).

All in all, VMware Player is quite good in all fields: CPU performance, GPU performance and ease of use (installation and VMware tools). Moreover, working with it felt smoother than in VirtualBox or Virtual PC, but that may be due to Aero. This means one can work with VMware Player and even play older games. Regarding the possibility to connect keyboard and mouse to the VM and moving it to a second screen basically enables you to create a second, virtual computer that allows another user to work, play or watch movies on the same hardware at the same time.

Related posts:

1. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #2 Sun Virtual Box
2. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance
3. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #1 Microsoft Virtual PC

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 virtual Windows 7 on my native Windows 7. Most users probably won’t do this, but there is a reason why I chose this OS configuration: Sun VirtualBox allows you to use more CPU cores than you actually have.

The OS installation with Virtual Box is quite easy, just insert your install DVD into the real drive, create a new VM with the hardware configuration you like and tell VirtualBox which OS you’re planning to install. Then allocate your DVD to the VM and start the installation. Worked greatly with Linux, Windows XP and Windows 7 and VirtualBox automatically installed its tools to enable automatic mouse grabbing and this kind of stuff.

In contrast to Microsoft Virtual PC, VirtualBox comes with GPU acceleration, but only allows you to use up to 128MB of video memory. Moreover, the drivers are still beta, so the performance is not as good as you would like it to be.

Performance:

For this test, I didn’t choose settings that any serious user would try, but decided to test the option of using 8 cores.

Settings:

CPU count: 8

RAM: 2048MB

GPU acceleration: yes, 128MB video memory

I searched for a benchmarking program that can use any number of threads and found wPrime. Since it can be scaled to 4 or 8 cores, it was capable of running on both my real quad-core and on the virtual octo-core and still using all the cores.

The virtual octo-core was 0.303 seconds slower, which equals 1.9% performance loss. This is quite surprising when you consider that four of the cores are just simulated and the real OS and processor have to split up the work somehow. These results are even better than the ones I got from Microsoft Virtual PC where the performance loss was about 3.9%.

Hardware graphics acceleration should be there, but don’t expect too much. The drivers are still beta, the video memory is just 128MB and the graphics performance of VMs has never been close to the CPU performance. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the DirectX acceleration to work, neither on Windows 7 64-bit nor on Windows XP 32-bit. That’s a pity because the only VM supporting graphics acceleration is VMware Player then.

All in all, VirtualBox is a really nice tool due to its possiblities of configuration such as using 8 cores, its easy installation and the CPU performance. There is no such feature as direct integration into the host OS as with Virtual PC, but nobody would expect such a feature, and the graphics power isn’t that awesome either, but still better than other VMs supplying just a standard VGA adapter without hardware acceleration or DirectX support.

Related posts:

1. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #3 VMware Player
2. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance
3. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #1 Microsoft Virtual PC

WARNING: Please do not use this method for illegal activity such as hacking passwords without the other user’s consent!

1. Your Windows passwords are stored in the Windows registry. In order to reset them, you need access to  this registry without running Windows. Luckily, there is a tool called “Offline NT Password & Registry Editor” which contains a small Linux kernel and drivers for your hard drives. Download the tool from this server or the official website.
2. Extract the RAR archive. Now you need to create a bootable device in order to run the tool:
   Using a CD: Just burn the ISO file to any empty CD and proceed.
   Using a USB memory stick:
   Format the memory stick in FAT32 format (rightclick it and choose “Format”) and enable “Quick Format”. WARNING: When formatting, all data in the memory stick will be lost!
   
   Open the ISO file with WinRAR (or any similar program) and extract all files onto the memory stick.
   Start the console (Press WINDOWS + R and type cmd, press ENTER), enter the drive letter of your memory stick (e.g. L: ), then enter “SYSLINUX.EXE -ma L:” (replace L: with your drive letter). This will set the boot record for your memory stick, enabling your computer to use it as boot device.
   
3. Now plug in the USB memory stick or insert the CD into the drive of the password-locked computer and switch it on.
4. When the BIOS image is showing up, make sure you enter the “Boot Menu”, usually by pressing F12.
   
5. A window should pop up asking you to choose the device to boot from. Select CD or USB HDD.
   
6. After a few seconds, this screen will show up. Just press enter to boot normally.
   
7. Now a lot of text will appear on your screen while the system is loading drivers for your hardware. Just wait until it comes to a stop and waits for your input. Now the tool is asking on which partition your Windows registry files are located. Usually, this would be  the first partition, but since there is a small (100MB) backup drive in Windows 7, you should take the next one, enter the number below and press enter.
   
8. Next, it asks for the path to your registry files on the drive. These are usually fine, just press enter to continue. When the files are located, you can choose what to do. Enter 1 and hit return for “Password reset”.
   
9. Then you have to select “Edit user data and passwords” by entering 1 again and pressing Enter
   
10. Enter your account name from the list and press Enter
    
11. On the next screen, enter 1 to “Clear (blank) user password”. You may also select 4 to “Unlock and enable user account” if you have entered the password too often and it is locked. If that’s all you wanted to do, enter ! and press return to quit.
    
12. Enter q again to leave the next menu and write the files by typing “y” in Step 4.
    
13. Now your password has been reset, just restart your computer normally and you should be able to log in to Windows again!

If there are any questions, please comment!

Related posts:

1. Recovering any Windows XP password (hack it)
2. Install Windows 7 on any netbook (Asus Eee PC 900)!
3. Shrink Windows 7 to fit on Asus Eee PC 4GB SDD or any netbook

1. Get the latest drivers for your mainboard from www.gigabyte.com.tw
2. Extract the 7-zip archive to some folder, e.g. C:\bios_flash\
   
3. Plug in your USB memory stick and format it using the FAT32 file system (enable Quick Format).WARNING: When formatting, all data on the memory stick will be lost!
   
4. Go to the directory with the extracted BIOS update files and locate the actual BIOS data file, called something like M79XTUD4.F7, where the .F7 stands for version 7 and the stuff before for my mainboard model. Copy this file onto the freshly formatted memory stick
5. Restart your computer. When you see the BIOS image, press END to enter Q-Flash mode
   
6. A blue box will show up asking you what to do. First of all, backup your original BIOS to your USB thumbdrive. Select “Save BIOS to Drive”, then your USB memory stick and type in a name for your backup. Once you press enter, it will start backing up your data which may take up to 5 minues.
   
7. Once you are done backing up, return to the previous menu and select “Update BIOS from Drive” and locate the BIOS file you downloaded. Press enter to start flashing. WARNING: Do not switch off your computer while flashing your BIOS. This may permanently corrupt your mainboard!
8. When the flashing is finished, restart your computer, enter BIOS setup (press DEL when seeing the mainboard image) and “Load Optimized Defaults”.
   
9. After loading the default settings, “Save and Exit Setup”. Your computer should start normally with the latest BIOS  version, hopefully solving the problems you encountered before!
10. If you did any adjustments to the BIOS before (enabling Virtualization, memory  timings, CPU clock, etc.) you will have to set it again.

If you have problems following this guide, please comment! You can take good pictures of your computer screen using the Xshot! camera stabilizer!

Related posts:

1. Hack and Reset any Windows 7 user password
2. Install Windows 7 on any netbook (Asus Eee PC 900)!
3. Test ChromeOS on your computer

Warning: Jailbreaking your iPod/iPhone will void your warranty. Downloading cracked applications is illegal and may have legal consequences. It is not my intention to motivate people to do illegal things, everything you do will be on your own risk!

Notice: This will only work with the latest generation of iPods/iPhones with Firmware 3.1.2 or higher! The blackra1n jailbreak will probably not work with the MC models (iPod  touch 3G with 8GB).

1. Jailbreak your iPod/iPhone

Before you will be able to install applications other than the ones from iTunes Store, you must jailbreak your iPod. Please consider the warning above before jailbreaking your iPod.

The easiest jailbreak for the 3.1.2 firmware is blackra1n. This tutorial will only focus on blackra1n.

Warning: blackra1n is a so-called “tethered jailbreak”, meaning that everytime you reboot your iPod (e.g. due to empty battery or after switching it completely off) you will have to run blackra1n again. Running blackra1n again won’t install or uninstall any applications but just enable the iPod to start again.

1. Download blackra1n either from the official website or from this server.
2. Make sure you have installed at least firmware version 3.1.2 in iTunes.
   
3. Close iTunes but keep the iPod connected to your computer via USB.
4. Open the downloaded blackra1n.exe file and click the “make it ra1n” button
   
5. Your iPod will go into recovery mode now and reboot. You should see this on your computer:
   
   
   And this image on your iPod:
   
6. Now wait for the iPod to reboot, shouldn’t take longer than a few seconds. Once done, launch the “blackra1n” application that appeared and install  Cydia and Rock.
   

2. Enable the installation of cracked application

1. Open Rock, the application you just installed with blackra1n.
2. Go to Manage -> Manage Sources -> Edit -> Add and enter http://cydia.hackulo.us to enable downloads from hackulo.us, then click Add Source
   
3. Go to Search, search for AppSync and install “AppSync for OS 3.1″
   
4. That’s it,  your iPod is now able to install cracked applications.
   For the case that cracked apps won’t work, try installing AppSync again with Cydia instead of Rock.

3. Download and install cracked applications

1. The biggest cracked application repository out there is Appulo.us, so you should try getting your desired application there first. The website is quite slow and sometimes offline, so be patient.
2. If Appulo.us doesn’t find the application you want or is offline, you may use downloadipa.info, apps.su or search torrents and rapidshare for “<app name> ipa” (ipa is the extension of cracked apps).
3. If the downloaded app came in a zip file (which is the case with most apps downloaded from Appulo.us), rename it to .ipa
4. Double-click your ipa files to add them to iTunes
5. Sync the iTunes applications with your iPod
6. Launch the application on your iPod!

I hope this tutorial was helpful. If you encounter any errors, please comment to tell me about it!

Related posts:

1. Install Windows 7 on any netbook (Asus Eee PC 900)!
2. iMovio iKIT: Micro-Netbook as small as an iPod
3. Currency Exchange Rates API

1. Download and install nHancer

nHancer is an Advanced Control Panel and Profile Editor for nVidia graphics cards, enabling you to optimize the display of games and customizing driver settings. This will allow you to force the nVidia driver to activate Anti-Aliasing, no matter what the game wants. Download and install the latest version of nHancer from the official website or from the local server.

2. Rename the Risen executable to Vanguard

Go to the binary folder of your Risen installation, probably C:\Program Files (x86)\Deep Silver\Risen\bin and rename Risen.exe to Vanguard.exe. This will force the nVidia driver to apply Anti-Aliasing settings usually applied for the game Vanguard which are also working for Risen.

3. Enable Anti-Aliasing settings with nHancer

Now launch nHancer and let it search for all profiles if this is the first time you start the application. Once the list in on the left side is populated, search for Vanguard and select the according profile. Once you selected it, tick “Anti-Aliasing” in the “Enhancements” tab on the right side and select the Anti-Aliasing mode you prefer. You will probably have to do some experimenting to find the right setting for your hardware, but I suggest to use “Multisampling” and then the 8x or 16x setting.

My GTX 260 can easily run Multisampling 8x and 16x without big performance losses, but using Supersampling or Combined 16x will kill the performance to around 2-3 FPS. Try various options for your graphics card and select the one which looks best without losing too many FPS.

Then make sure “Anti-Aliasing compability” is checked under the “Compability” tab and “Vanguard” is selected in the drop-down menu below.

4. Launch Risen and have fun with smoother edges and less aliasing

Now you can just launch Vanguard.exe (your Desktop shortcut may not be working any more) and enjoy the better graphics! I took some comparison screenshots for you to see which Anti-Aliasing setting has which effect and how big the performance losses are. Graphics settings:

Resolution: 1920×1080
Details: Everything “High”,  Depth of Field deactivated (looks ugly),
Config tweaks:  ViewRange set to 16000

1. Anti-Aliasing off, 55 FPS
   
2. Multisampling 8x, 35 FPS
   
3. Combined 16xS, 3 FPS
   

As you can see, there is not much difference in the image quality between Multisampling 8x and Combined 16xS, but the performance differences are huge. I recommend to use Multisampling and not Supersampling or Combined.

Related posts:

1. GPU Water Simulation in Games – Is it worth it?
2. Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #2 Sun Virtual Box
3. Create HUGE Crysis Screenshots up to 450 Megapixels!

If you find any links still pointing to the old .de-domain, please notify me so I can change it. Thank you!

Related posts:

1. Peacekeeper Browser Benchmark – Safari clearly performing best!
2. New “intelligent” search engine Wolfram|Alpha launched
3. Watch YouTube videos up-side down!

Why would you need a browser benchmark? The better a browser performs on your system, the faster websites are shown and can interactively been used. This is especially needed when browsing Web 2.0 websites, and on low-end PCs such as netbooks the difference can really be a barrier. I experienced this using my favourite browser Firefox 3.0 on my Asus Eee PC 900: When typing and address into the address bar, the “intelligent search” feature needs so much computing power that the whole browser is stuck. Also using GMail or Facebook doesn’t make fun when you have to wait for a second before you can click, scroll, type, etc… That’s why I switched to Google Chrome. Jukka Mäkinen, Head of PC Products and Services at Futuremark, said:

“People have more choice now in how they experience the internet than ever before. But they may not realize that performance between browsers can vary dramatically, especially on lower-end PCs. With Peacekeeper, it’s simple to compare different browsers and see which one offers the best performance on your PC.”

Benchmark your browser now using Peacekeeper!

I compared all the major browsers on my computer (Pentium 4 3.2GHz with Hyper-Threading, onboard S3 graphics) and got quite interesting results:

[poll id="6"]

As expected, Internet Explorer is performing the worst, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. An interesting fact is that the old IE 6 is running slightly faster than IE 7.

To my surprise, Firefox is second to last. I  never thought that Firefox would be the fastest browser on earth, but didn’t expect it to be so slow compered to Chrome and Safari. But using the future versions of Firefox (version 3.1 beta and 3.6 alpha), there is a drastic increase in performance. Enough reason to see forward to the release of these versions!

The test clearly shows Chrome’s superiority over Firefox in means of performance, as I already experienced on my netbook.

But I never expected Safari to be that fast, especially since it is designed to run on Mac and not on Windows. Perhaps I should consider using it on my computers from now on, if it has the features I need (saving tabs, plugins like Ad-Block Plus, …).

I also tried to benchmark Konqueror, the default browser on Linux systems using KDE, but Konqueror refused to start the test (I was using version 5.1 of Knoppix on Live CD).

More about how Peacekeeper works:
http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/faq.action

More about Futuremark:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuremark

Related posts:

1. Browser Roundup – Opera, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer tested
2. Opera 10.50b claims to be fastest browser on Earth
3. New version of Opera catching up with Chrome’s performance?