Month: October 2017

Fans of classic gaming emulation know that modern emulators can do a lot to sharpen up the standard-definition sprites and polygons made for consoles designed to be played on low-resolution tube TVs. This weekend, though, an update to the RPCS3 emulator showed how much resolution scaling can improve the look of even early HD games.

While the new update technically supports rendering at up to 10K resolutions, the video above shows that upscaling to 4K resolution and adding 16x anisotropic filtering can lead to a huge improvement for games originally made to run at 720p. Upscaling the 11-year-old hardware with three times the resolution doesn't even put too much strain on modern GPUs—the creators say in an explanatory blog post that "anyone with a dedicated graphics card that has Vulkan support can expect identical performance at 4K."

Unlike N64 emulators, which often require handmade high-resolution texture packs to make upscaled games look decent, RPCS3 can often get amazing improvements in sharpness and clarity just by using content that's already in the PS3 software. That's because many PS3 titles stored extremely high-resolution assets on the PS3's Blu-Ray discs, then crushed those textures down for faster processing by the console. The result is that surfaces that looked muddy and jagged on the original hardware can take full advantage of the art as it was originally conceived when upscaled for the emulator.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

For fans of the platform, the official confirmation that Windows on phones isn't under active development any longer—security bugs will be fixed, but new features and new hardware aren't on the cards—isn't a big surprise. This is merely a sad acknowledgement of what we already knew.

Last week, Microsoft also announced that it was getting out of the music business, signaling another small retreat from the consumer space. It's tempting to shrug and dismiss each of these instances, pointing to Microsoft's continued enterprise strength as evidence that the company's position remains strong.

And certainly, sticking to the enterprise space is a thing that Microsoft could do. Become the next IBM: a stable, dull, multibillion dollar business. But IBM probably doesn't want to be IBM right now—it has had five straight years of falling revenue amid declining relevance of its legacy businesses—and Microsoft probably shouldn't want to be the next IBM, either.

Enlarge (credit: Harvard University)

Our burning of fossil fuels is, to an extent, a reversal of a process that happened millions of years ago. At one point, all this carbon was in the air. Over millions of years, life extracted it from the air before dying and getting buried. Geology took over from there, gradually converting the formerly living material into things like coal and oil. Since this process was relatively slow, it presumably didn't result in radical changes to the climate.

But a new study suggests that it came really, really close. Lots of the fossil fuels we currently use derive from the Carboniferous, a 60-million-year-long period where forests flourished across much of the Earth. While not sudden, activity during this time period did pull a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere, and so a researcher decided to look at some of the consequences. The results suggest that the Earth skirted the edge of a global freeze, forming glaciers in the mountains of the tropics.

Burying carbon

The Devonian is the period that predated the Carboniferous, and it's notable for the first appearance of both forests and tetrapods, the four-limbed vertebrates that include us. But forests really started getting going in the Carboniferous, leaving behind massive deposits of coal. At this time, the Earth also underwent an extinction event that saw the collapse of forests and the appearance of widespread glaciers.

NASA

In August, 2010, NASA completed construction of a massive 355-foot tall mobile tower that was to be used to launch its Ares I rocket. It had cost the agency $234 million to build, according to NASA's inspector general. But there was just one problem—President Obama had canceled the Ares I rocket in February of that year.

Later, Congress would swoop in to reinstate NASA's rocket-building program by directing the agency to build the Space Launch System. But because this rocket is larger and more powerful than the Ares I vehicle, the mobile launch platform had to be modified to handle the additional weight and thrust. Initial estimates of this expense were $54 million, but the cost has risen substantially above that.

Enlarge / Quite tidy looking, but powering plenty of futuristic initiatives. (credit: Nvidia)

On Tuesday, Nvidia announced a new version of its automotive-grade compute platforms, Drive PX Pegasus. It's recognition that the computational needs of fully autonomous (also known as level 5) vehicles are going to be demanding. Such vehicles will have to fuse inputs from multiple sensors and sensor-types, then make sense of it all with no fuss to get us from A to B. "The reality is we need more horsepower to get to level 5," said Danny Shapiro, Nvidia's Senior Director of Automotive.

In 2015, Nvidia first announced its Drive PX platform, which is built around a pair of Tegra processors. Drive PX 2 was next, and this unit is what's found in current Tesla electric vehicles as well as Volvo's Drive Me research program. Then came Drive PX Xavier, a low-power unit which is also being used by Bosch to develop a an automotive computer.

Drive PX Pegasus puts its predecessors in the shade. It's built around a pair of Xavier SoCs, plus another pair of discrete, as-yet unnamed GPUs which will do the heavy lifting when it comes to machine learning and computer vision. There are 16 inputs for sensors like lidar, radar, and cameras, and it can connect to controller area networks (CAN), Flexray, and 10Gbit ethernet. And because humans will be trusting their lives to Drive PX Pegasus, it's been designed for ASIL D certification—the most stringent safety level for automotive applications. At 320 trillion operations per seconds, the latest platform should be more than an order of magnitude more capable than Drive PX Xavier.