Posts Tagged ‘about’
nVidia Power Pack Brings New Drivers and Physics to Gamers
This week, nVidia released their first ever “Power Pack,” one of many planned to be released. This power pack comes with new drivers for the nVidia Geforce 8-series or newer, bringing nVidia PhysX to gamers around the world. Astute gamers will notice that Ageia is not developing PhysX anymore; this is because nVidia bought the company in February and began integrating the technology into their video cards. PhysX brings some really awesome features to gamers, such as:
- Explosions that cause dust and collateral debris
- Characters with complex, jointed geometries for more life-like motion and interaction
- Realistic weather effects, with forces such as tornadoes directly modifying the world
- Cloth that drapes and tears naturally
- Dense smoke & fog that billow around objects in motion
The Force Within Power Pack itself comes with a slew of games and programs to make use of the PhysX technology. From the Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX mod to Folding@Home, the pack will hopefully continue to be a showcase of ground-breaking games, mods, and programs. You can stay up-to-date on future nVidia news at The Pxl Lab.
Scour – The Social Networking Search Engine With A Bonus
Out of the top 5 most visited websites in the world, three of them are search engines. All of them show results for the same keyword differently though, based on different techniques to show you what they think is the most relevant to your search. But what if you could see the results from those three websites in one place? Scour is the answer. Scour takes the results from the search engines and displays them when you search, giving you the “perfect” search. What separates Scour from other sites like Dogpile are the social networking aspects of it. Scour lets users rate and comment websites, and the ratings are factored into future searches. Scour also gives users points for searching, rating, and commenting. After reaching a certain amount of points (like 6,500), you can get $25 bucks in cash sent to you via Paypal or a prepaid Visa card.
The great thing about Scour is how you can earn money for searching exactly like you used to with Google, and the results are better too. Scour makes money by sponsored links like Google does, but instead of keeping all the money to themselves, they want to say thanks to their loyal users with a little cash present.
For Firefox users: If you would like to make Scour your default search engine in the URL bar, type in “about:config”, search for “keyword” in the filter bar, then change the “keyword.URL” value to “http://scour.com/search/web/” without the quotes. Have fun with Scour!
DirectX June 2008 Update Released
Note: There is a newer version of DirectX available.
Microsoft released a new version of DirectX yesterday, the newest release since March 2008. DirectX, for those of you who don’t know, is what developers use to help power games on Windows-based computers, and DirectX 10.1, which is the latest version on the market, allows things in-game like motion blur, god rays, and other sweet effects. If you are currently having any problems with your games, upgrading to the latest version of DirectX is always a good way to try and fix it.