OCZ Storage Solutions - a Toshiba Group Company and leading provider of high-performance solid state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced its partnership with AMD to showcase the power of high performance technology at the Game Developer Conference (GDC) March 17-21 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. AMD's demo systems will feature best-in-class Vector 150 Series solid state drives demonstrating how developers can enhance productivity and efficiency in their work.

"We are excited to partner with AMD for the upcoming Game Developers Conference to support the fast growing interactive game development industry," said Alex Mei, CMO for OCZ Storage Solutions. "OCZ is dedicated to delivering premium solid state storage solutions that are not only a useful tool for developers, but also meet the unique demands of enthusiasts and gamers on all levels."

Microsoft will present its first paper on DirectX 12, its next-generation multimedia API, at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), on the 20th of March, 2013. The event could include presentations by NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm. It's not clear at this point if Microsoft will release developer tools and resources on that day, or simply outline the API to spur interest. If anything, it should gently nudge today's GPU manufacturers to make their future GPU designs ready for the API. There are currently no GPU families that we know of, which support DirectX 12. AMD's current Graphics CoreNext 2.0 GPUs, such as the Radeon R9 290X, support DirectX 11.2, while NVIDIA's "Maxwell" GPUs, such as the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, feature an identical API feature-level support to their "Kepler" predecessors.

Today at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) AMD (NYSE: AMD) unveiled its leadership strategy for the worldwide gaming market. AMD's Unified Gaming Strategy comprehensively addresses how AMD will drive the gaming market across consoles, cloud platforms, tablets and PCs. By working with the world's leading hardware and game developers, and by continuing to be a leader in the market by providing the most innovative graphics technologies, AMD is effectively positioned to drive the next revolution in gaming.

Gaming Evolved, launched three years ago at GDC, is at the core of the AMD Unified Gaming Strategy, and has been the driving force behind the revolutionary "Never Settle" gaming bundles and a major factor behind the adoption of powerful AMD engines in the latest next-generation gaming consoles. Building on this momentum, AMD today introduced AMD Radeon Sky Graphics, the cornerstone of AMD's industry-leading cloud gaming platform.

One year after its debut, Epic Games' Samaritan Tech Demo is back at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) and it's there to tease the power of NVIDIA's Kepler 28 nm GPU. At last year's GDC Samaritan, which is based on Unreal Engine 3, was running in real-time on three GeForce GTX 580 cards set in SLI. This year Epic is showing off the demo running on a single NVIDIA Kepler graphics card.

Here are some key bits of information concerning the upcoming GeForce GTX 680, a performance single-GPU graphics card based on the 28 nm GK104 GPU by NVIDIA. The information, at face value, is credible, because we're hearing that a large contingent of the media that finds interest in the GPU industry, is attending the Game Developers Conference, where it could interact with NVIDIA, on the sidelines. The source, however, is citing people it spoke to at CeBIT.

First, and most interesting: with some models of the GeForce 600, NVIDIA will introduce a load-based clock speed-boost feature (think: Intel Turbo Boost), which steps up clock speeds of the graphics card when subjected to heavy loads. If there's a particularly stressing 3D scene for the GPU to render, it overclocks itself, and sees the scene through. This ensures higher minimum and average frame-rates.

Epic Games, Inc. announces its participation in the Game Developers Conference (GDC) to be held March 5-9, 2012 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Epic will host press sessions and meet with developers and partners of its award-winning Unreal Engine technology in Business Suite 800, West Hall, at GDC 2012. In addition, Epic Games Design Director Cliff Bleszinski is set to host the Game Developer Choice Awards, and a dozen senior members of Epic's staff are scheduled to speak at the conference.

The Khronos group, at the Game Developers Conference, announced the OpenGL 4.0 API specifications. OpenGL 4.0 is set to rival DirectX 11 in being able to make use of hardware tessellation offered by this generation's GPUs, drawing of data generated by OpenGL, OpenCL, or other external APIs without any intervention from the CPU, support for 64-bit Double Precision Floating Point shader operations, and a number of performance improvements. OpenGL is a multi-platform API that can run on operating environments such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS, certain gaming consoles, as well as a low-resource API for mobile devices. A list of main feature changes in OpenGL 4.0 are as follows:

• Two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU
• Per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions for increased rendering quality and anti-aliasing flexibility
• Drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention
• Shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility;
• Separation of texture state and texture data through the addition of a new object type called sampler objects
• 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality
• Performance improvements, including instanced geometry shaders, instanced arrays, and a new timer query

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. and Havok, the premier provider of interactive software for physics simulation and content development, are presenting new, optimized executions of Havok's physics middleware on AMD platforms at the 2009 Game Developers Conference. The demonstrations include the first OpenCL supported execution of Havok Cloth.

Havok offers a complete modular suite of products that help visual and interactive content developers create more realistic games and cinematic special effects. As the latest software developer to take advantage of ATI Stream technology to leverage multi-core architectures and accelerate execution of highly parallel functions, like real-time cloth simulation, Havok will enable game developers to offer improved performance and interactivity across a broad range of OpenCL capable PCs. AMD has recently introduced optimized platform technologies, such as "Dragon" desktop platform technology, which balance performance between the CPU and GPU with ATI Stream technology to deliver outstanding value.

Intel Corporation today announced the release of Intel Graphics Performance Analyzers (GPA), a suite of software tools created in support of the Visual Adrenaline developer program.
Offered worldwide, GPA enables PC game developers to analyze and optimize game performance on Intel Integrated Graphics. The Visual Adrenaline program, launched at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco in August 2008, provides tools, resources and information for game developers, artists and animators.

GPU-accelerated physics is turning out to be the one part of specifications AMD is yearning for. One of NVIDIA's most profitable acquisitions in recent times, has been that of Ageia technologies, and its PhysX middleware API. NVIDIA went on to port the API to its proprietary CUDA GPGPU architecture, and is now using it as a significant PR-tool apart from a feature that is genuinely grabbing game developers' attention. In response to this move, AMD's initial reaction was to build strategic technology alliance with the main competitor of PhysX: Havok, despite its acquisition by Intel.

In the upcoming Game Developers Conference (GDC) event, AMD may materialize its plans to bring a GPU-accelerated version of Havok, which has till now been CPU-accelerated. The API has featured in several popular game titles such as Half Life 2, Max Payne II, and some other Valve Source-based titles. ATI's Terry Makedon, in his Twitter-feed has revealed that AMD would put forth its "ATI GPU Physics strategy." He also added that the company would present a tech-demonstration of Havok technology working in conjunction with ATI hardware. The physics API is expected to utilize OpenCL and AMD Stream.

Crytek has announced that CryENGINE 3 is ready and will be on display from March 25th to March 27th at this year's Game Developers Conference or GDC Expo in San Francisco. In contrast to the previous engine, CryENGINE 3 will support all major upcoming platforms as well as current platforms including the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, MMO, and PC's DX9/DX10. Carl Jones, director of business development, refused to give more information. He was very brief in his statement:

CryENGINE 3 is a revolutionary change from our previous PC-only engines - and we're applying a similar revolution to the service we provide to developers using the software to create extraordinary games. CryENGINE 3 will set the benchmark for complete game engine solutions in performance, and services to game engine licensees and their players. We've been preparing a long time for CryENGINE on consoles and we're confident that Crytek will again amaze developers at GDC.

Be prepared for additional info at the end of the month.

It would seem as though despite $1 billion of R&D against such an event, a Microsoft Xbox 360 failed in front of a live audience. The infamous Red Ring of Death (RRoD) popped up in the middle of a Microsoft XNA demo. Microsoft XNA, when it works, is a very powerful and easy to use tool that can be used to develop video games. If you follow the source link, you can catch a video of the prominently displayed Xbox 360. The Game Developers Conference is currently happening in San Francisco. Hopefully, Microsoft can get a new Xbox 360 to show off Microsoft XNA. Until then, Microsoft is not going to enjoy the ridicule of several thousand developers, and many times more gamers.